Billy Basso was glued to his computer. It was launch day for the Chicago developer’s debut solo game, a surreal Metroidvania called Animal Well, and he couldn’t stop reading reviews online and watching people play the game. He’d pulled off the impossible: breaking through a turbulent industry to create a hit game that would grow to be a critical and commercial success. He just didn’t realize how big of one it would be quite yet.
Most successful video games are made by teams of people that vary in size from a half dozen to somewhere in the hundreds. Basso had made Animal Well entirely on his own, start to finish. Music, art, story—it was all his, dictated by the singular goal to finish the game.
He thought it would take six months. It took seven years. “My entire life has completely changed since the game has come out,” Basso, 36, says.
This year, Animal Well is up for five awards at the Game Developers Choice Awards, including prizes for Best Design, Best Audio, and Best Debut. The awards are being handed out this week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where Basso is also a featured speaker. At a talk on Monday detailing the nitty gritty of how he made the game, from coding to describing the game’s lighting, Basso held court in front of a rapt audience packed to the brim. Attendees laughed and “ooh’d” his presentation. While describing some of his more homebrew methods of development, one developer in the audience whispered “this guy is the GOAT.” After his talk, a circle of fans surrounded Basso to offer praise and ask questions.
Basso had arrived. It just took some time to get there.
Basso meets with his fellow developers after his talk on Monday afternoon.
Photograph: Darrell Jackson
Basso wasn’t a new developer when he started Animal Well. He’d worked at large companies before, including a stint at NetherRealm working on mobile versions of Mortal Kombat. He was working at a medical startup that created mobile games for doctors—”as weird and niche as you might expect”—and tinkered with his own projects at night. He’d spent a decade of his career with “the desire to make something that I would actually be a fan of.”
For four years, Basso worked on a primitive version of Animal Well in his free time, supporting himself with his day job. “It was very clearly a self-indulgent side project for myself,” he told me in an interview. But as the game grew more sophisticated, and Basso invested more time into it, he started to think of it differently. “It gradually started to seem more like something I could actually release, that I could maybe make a living off of,” he says.
Basso gathered his confidence and plotted an exit from his day job. His family didn’t quite understand his ambitions. “My dad didn’t want me to quit my job to work on it,” Basso says. “They were worried that I should keep a full-time job.”
Animal Well fans peppered Basso with questions.
Photograph: Darrell Jackson
They also listened attentively.
Photograph: Darrell Jackson
Then, in 2021, a turning point: Basso got in touch with Dan Adelman, an industry vet known on the business development side, for help. “I was kind of an introverted person that doesn’t feel very comfortable posting things online and marketing the game,” Basso says. Adelman is well known for running Nintendo of America’s indie program and championing small developers. “Luckily enough, he was into the project,” Basso says. “He wanted to start working together and then, from that point forward, I felt like I just became a much luckier person.”
Basso and Adelman began applying to events like Day of the Devs, an indie showcase, to let people see the game. Their efforts paid off, with Bigmode—the publisher run by YouTuber videogamedunkey—signing Animal Well. “A little less than a year after working with Dan, I had saved up enough money and had a road map to finishing the game,” Basso says. He quit his job to focus on Animal Well full-time. “It ended up still being about three years until it was done,” he says.
Over the many years of Animal Well’s development, friends urged him to release what he had when interest seemed to be high. “I knew where the quality bar was for myself and what people expect out of a game,” Basso says. He didn’t like the idea of “cashing out” on what he felt wasn’t a complete project, despite the long years that had gone into it. “It was hard to explain how much work actually goes into releasing a polished game,” Basso says. “You can’t just kind of put pencils down at any point and click the release button on Steam.” How his game debuted mattered. If people like it, “they’ll trust you in the future to buy one of another game.”
During his GDC talk, Basso walked through the years of development that went into Animal Well.
Photograph: Darrell Jackson
His bet had paid off. With Animal Well’s success, Basso says he’s now able to “make whatever arbitrary thing I want and not really have to worry about whether it will sell well or not.” All that matters, he says, is “I find it fun.” In the game industry of 2025—where funding has been scarce, even studios with popular projects close down, and devs are being laid off en masse—that kind of freedom is a rarity. “There’s so much pressure to chase trends and put AI in your game,” Basso says. “Or, if you’re trying to raise money, you kind of have to pander to a different crowd of investors that are totally out of touch.”
Basso is already working on his next project in earnest—a 2D sidescroller that will share some elements of Animal Well—though he’s only about six months into it. He says that while it won’t be a direct sequel, “I think it’s something people who enjoyed Animal Well will also enjoy. It will have its own identity.”
It’s too early to share much else about the game, to Basso’s relief. “I’m back in the good, pure phase where I just get to make something on my own, without sharing it with anybody. I guess I’ll relish that for the next few years.” Still, Basso says he finds it flattering when people ask about his next game, which he says will likely be even more ambitious.
“Animal Well took seven years,” he says. “I don’t think this next project will take nearly as long. Hopefully.”
