Hello again

For the past 3 years we’ve seen a lot of news from both AAA and indie studios that mostly revolved around shutting down or people losing their jobs. It’s been an incredibly demotivating experience seeing people we know either leave the industry or stop working on games. We’ve been incredibly lucky not to end up on that pile.

In this blog post I’m going to go over what happened to us, how we’ve survived and what steps we plan to take in 2025 to make sure that we continue as a studio.

Who We Are

So, first let’s talk about what kind of studio we are and what we care about.

Under the Stairs is a small indie game dev studio started in 2017 with the goal of making weird games that have systemic core mechanics with a roguelike flavor and a unique 2D art style.

As a small team of 6 people, we care a lot about a positive work environment, in today’s industry it’s very difficult to break through so we try and facilitate a culture of creativity and fun to make up for the fact that there’s tremendous uncertainty in what we do. And what we do is create video games. And since video games should be fun it stands to reason that making them should be fun as well.

Games are a unique, multifaceted art form, and passion should matter more than raw sales figures. After working in many fields, I chose lasting creativity over short-term profit. That’s why we avoid fads, loot boxes, NFTs, and free-to-play models.

We value not dreading going to work every morning or worrying about the amount of content we’ve put out and instead focus on the art of making games. We respect people’s free time outside of work and want to empower them and give them the freedom to make creative decisions about their contribution to the games we make.

Over the years we’ve mostly focused on the traditional route of publishing a game, we’ve made pitch decks and gameplay videos and mostly talked to publishers, but very rarely did we decide to go public instead.

We’ve also done a lot of different things, board games, graphic design, web design and music and we all play very different types of games but our love for weird experiences ties us all together.

What Happened

When we started working on our first game, we had no idea of doing it in an outward fashion, once we had a solid demo, we showcased it at various local events, but we never built up a social media following. This proved to be a big and costly mistake.

In 2022 we launched Eyes in the Dark together with Gearbox Publishing, it was our first game and because of the realities of living in Croatia, it took way longer than expected to secure funding and get to a point where a publisher can support and release the title. Sadly, the sales of the game did not do much to help support the studio, and it was only through the goodwill of the people at Gearbox that we were able to keep going for a while longer. 

Shortly after the game came out, our friends over at Gearbox underwent a sale to Take2 and the entire publishing division was shut down. What followed was 6 months of effort to get the rights to our game back. When it finally happened, we were at the end of our runway and were left with a game that we wanted to update, port to consoles but no budget to keep going and no revenue to support it. Sadly, we also lost a few key people. With very few options left we doubled down on both the game and any other alternative ways to survive. We did a bunch of contract jobs, small grants and side projects that allowed us to keep the lights on a little longer.

Still, it wasn’t enough and in 2024 we were on the verge of closing, but we applied for a large grant and about a month before we were about to shut down, we received the grant and that saved the studio. We never gave up on the next game and kept pushing in all directions to survive and it paid off. 

The biggest takeaway of all of this for us was to never ever neglect a long-term effort to build a community and to use a much larger portion of our budget for fostering a relationship with fans.

What’s next

The great news is that the grant has allowed us to continue and all the problems we faced resulted in us making a lot of positive changes in how we make games. The most exciting part of it is that we now have 3 games in the pipeline (yes 3!) because of these changes. Over the course of this year, we will talk more in detail about them. We are going to try something different and want to build our own community for everything we do and to give you all more agency into our day-to-day decisions on the games we make.

We’ll also show it all and not just the finished product, we want you to see how the sausage is made and to show you both the messy prototypes and the ones that ended up on the chopping block.

We’ve also decided to reduce the scope and size of our games, quite frankly we don’t want to work on something for 3+ years without anyone seeing it or getting a chance to play it. And if for some reason it turns out that you are all passionate about something we’ve made and want to see grow then that’s what we’ll double down on.

We want to change and be more outwardly facing, to speak to people who like the same games as we do and to talk about what we’re working on, how we’re working on it and what daily problems we face and how we try and solve them. We’d love you to be part of this journey! Join us on our Discord and help shape our next games from the ground up.