Darenn Keller is, in some ways, the modern games industry personified. As a young French game designer, he landed a "dream" job at Ubisoft working on the Assassin's Creed series, getting his fingerprints on Assassin's Creed Valhalla and Mirage as well as a few games in the Ghost Recon series. There was just one problem: "It wasn't what I'd imagined and I started feeling miserable," Keller said in the Reddit post that first alerted me to his story.
So, as Keller tells me in an interview, he went indie. He left with "about two years of savings and no real plan," and spent those years making a cute survival city builder called Dawnfolk, which has nearly 600 reviews on Steam with a coveted "Overwhelmingly Positive" score. "It didn't go viral, but it sold 26,000 copies and still pays my rent," he said in his post. With another year of support and some Switch port work, Dawnfolk is still ticking along, at least well enough for Keller to pursue another indie game. And, importantly, he's happy with the work.
