Leaving LA, dodging a cult, and finding my people in pixels
Leaving LA, dodging a cult, and finding my people in pixels
I didn't exactly expect this one to open with "biggest mistake of my life," but here we are. Some stories start with a clean pivot. This one starts with a hard exit, a converted bus, and the kind of soul inventory you do when your checking account is flirting with the last hundred dollars. I've had my share of messy chapters, but hearing Brandon trace his road out of LA, through a spiritual maze, and into Game Boy homebrew hit me right in the indie dev cortex. It reminded me that reinvention rarely looks heroic in the moment. It's just doing the next useful thing with shaky hands and one bar of signal.
We started with the heavy stuff: why he left LA, how a very public, very prayer‑soaked organization pulled him in when life felt stuck. He talked about growing up with faith as the default operating system, then waking up in his thirties and slowly taking back authorship. Leaving meant losing a network and a job, and a version of himself he'd outgrown. It also meant buying a bus, crisscrossing the country, getting fired mid‑loop, and landing in Virginia by accident. Not exactly a five‑year plan, but it became one.
From there we moved into the craft. Brandon learned to make games the same way a lot of us do: quietly, after hours, while the people around you would probably tell you to knock it off. HTML5 experiments led to pixel art gigs, then to Salt & Pixle, where he could focus on art direction and design without living in assembly. That unlocked a niche that's somehow both tiny and enormous: Game Boy Color. Constraints turned into flavor. Enemies on staggered ticks. Slowdowns that read like impact. Level design that respects 90s hardware and still feels fresh.
Third, ownership beats reach. An e-mail list is not sexy. It's also the difference between yelling into a mall versus writing to a friend. When you can talk to players directly, you can build patience for the messy middle. You can share why a build slipped. You can offer first looks. You can recruit your first hundred true fans and let them be your QA, your cheer squad, and your early customers. That pays compounding interest.
Fourth, transparency is a moat. Every creative field gets hit with scams, failed Kickstarters, and broken promises. That's not a reason to hide. It's a reason to narrate. If you communicate like a professional, you get treated like one. Tell people what you're doing, what it costs, and what blocked you. They'll forgive delays they understand. They won't forgive silence.
Finally, the psychology piece matters more than we admit. People join movements for belonging, not bullet points. Games are communities with software attached. The flip side of that is our job as indie founders isn't just code and art. It's making rooms where people feel seen. The loudest feedback often comes from folks who don't represent your real players. The quiet middle is full of support you'll never hear unless you send the first hello.
Concluding thoughts Indie dev isn't a lottery. It's a series of honest trades. You swap reach for relationship, speed for intention, comfort for control. If you're in a spot where everything feels upside down, consider Brandon's route. Turn down the noise. Pick the low‑glamour actions that build compounding trust. Make the next useful thing, even if your internet keeps dropping on the back roads. Especially then.
Episode Info
Then we got on to the indie economy. The comment that set it off was a classic drive‑by: “No Steam?” That’s the expectation machine doing what it does. Brandon’s take is simple and sharp. If you make Steam the center, you’re renting your audience from a storefront. Their customers are not automatically your community. Algorithms reward sales velocity more than conversation. Refunds are frictionless. Visibility is volatile. You can get a spike, but you don’t get an address book. Meanwhile, itch and direct preorders gave him what platforms don’t: emails, context, and permission to show the sausage being made.
That permission mattered. He set up a preorder for Annihilator and did the unsexy thing: he over‑communicated. Delays, tariffs, wrong‑address PCBs, the whole circus. People didn’t bail. They leaned in. The replies weren’t YouTube‑grade snark. They were real humans saying keep going, I’m excited, send more. It’s wild how rare that still feels in games.
What stood out / lessons learned
Distribution is strategy, not default. A store can be useful, but it's not a moat. If your launch plan depends on an algorithm noticing you, you don't have a launch plan. Think in choke points. What has to be true for this channel to actually help? If the answer includes "go viral" you need a second answer.
