Droves of long-awaited, retro-styled indies released in 2018: Timespinner, Death’s Gambit, Chasm and Iconoclasts were arguably the most anticipated, and all were subject to years of close scrutiny by fans. These titles stick to a genre format that has existed for over 30 years—the Metroidvania—and none do much to challenge or surprise players, motivated as they are by nostalgia and reverence for the classics.

Nostalgia feels like a real impediment in the modern evolution of 2D adventure games—there’s no reason why the genre can’t continue to evolve. For people who only play 2D platformers (I’m sure there are plenty, and I respect them), Steam probably has several lifetimes' worth of entertainment in its inventory just for them. This year really felt like a turning point for the indie platformer, though: after Hollow Knight and Celeste, things have changed. It's harder than ever to just tread water when it comes to platformers. You have to make something special.

But if there’s a game I’ve played this year, nay this decade, which immaculately re-constructs not so much the visual style but the spirit of the '90s, then it’s probably Iconoclasts. This isn’t a radical game, it’s a formally conservative one. But it’s goddamned beautiful, and the fact that it was created by a single person—Joakim Sandberg—lends it an intimacy and urgency that’s lacking from so many other titles that just dutifully tick the boxes.

I, uh, don’t really know what the game’s about. The story is intensely convoluted and that’s because it’s written by one person. I love that it’s intensely convoluted, even while I couldn’t be bothered to parse it. I know that Robin is the protagonist: she’s a mechanic, and one of her main problem-solving tools is a wrench. This plays into the game’s light physics-based puzzle play: her wrench can be used as a grappling hook, a weapon, and—wait for it—a tool for turning bolts. For whatever reason, Robin comes to blows with the powerful ruling organisation “One Concern”, and the game mostly follows her efforts to escape or thwart it.

Many have pointed out that the Iconoclasts has an absurdly convoluted plot, but if you’re like me and play 2D platformers for the pleasure of inhabiting their worlds and jumping between platforms, a moment spent gazing at Sandberg’s lushly detailed pixel-art will make any other concern redundant. This is, without a doubt, the most lavish 2D sidescroller I’ve ever seen, and every effort has been made to imbue it with charm and personality. The opening world—blue skies, green fields, comforting tunes—is strewn with cubes and triangles representing stone, foliage and grass. But just over there lay the remains of a brick wall, and further afield are metallic-looking pillars supporting hieroglyph-ed piping. What kind of world have we entered here? Why do all these disparate elements look so coherent, so painterly? 

Later, Sandberg creates familiar-feeling hi-tech factory settings, but does so with water and foliage and a slightly jarring purple-themed aesthetic. What’s interesting about the world of Iconoclasts is that from moment-to-moment the environments feel familiar, but upon close observation they’re quite weird, slightly askew, bizarrely unwilling to settle on either “fantasy” or “sci-fi” (games must, you know!). 

It’s a fun game, too, albeit with glaring imperfections—it was made by one guy, after all. There’s one particular boss battle against an invisible character that will probably go down as one of my least favourite gaming moments in 2018. I know it sounds like I’m making excuses for this game that I dearly love, but even this big pain in the arse boss is charming. Overall, Iconoclasts feels like a huge unwieldy work of passion by an artist just kinda figuring it out as they go. In an age when shortcomings in games are often interpreted as conspiratorial, "lazy", possibly sinister, I like that Iconoclasts very occasionally just sucks in an old-fashioned game sort of way: sometimes its ideas just aren't fun.

Iconoclasts came out in the same week as Celeste, and the latter game was definitely both a critical darling and a fan favourite. But it also felt too honed, its themes felt too didactic. Iconoclasts is the kind of game I want to play most: big, personal, hubristic, ambitious, inscrutable, and with lots of heart. It was eight years in development, and that shows in both its strengths and weaknesses.

Release day for an indie developer sounds like it’d be a celebration. Years of work have finally reached a successful conclusion. They can sit back, relax, and wait for the adulation and money to roll in. But it's not really like that. “I heard a lot of people speculate what this would feel like and I was never really sure what would happen when we finally hit launch,” says Simon Stafsnes Andersen, head of Owlboy maker D-Pad Studio. “The reality was ... conflicting.”

The truth is that launch is not an end. It’s the start of something else, and with that fresh start come many struggles that are born in the intensity of game development. This is true for almost all modern game developers, but it's especially dramatic for indies who have spent half a decade or more quietly working on their dream project. After you've put all of yourself into a game, what comes next?

Life before launch

“The final push was probably some of the most emotionally draining and turbulent months of the entire nine-year development cycle,” Andersen says of the final few months working on Owlboy. He and his four-strong team worked practically every waking hour to make the deadlines for its physical release. “We were all really burned out by the time we were close to the finish line and it in many ways didn’t feel like it was going to be real. We didn’t have time to feel anything at that point. Our only concern was to deliver on what we had set out to do.”

Eric ‘ConcernedApe’ Barone felt much the same. Stardew Valley’s four-and-a-half years development ended with him working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and he was fixing bugs and making last-minute changes right up to the end. “I remember staying up all night shortly before launch day in order to fix a major bug that would've ruined it.”

But not all crunch is specifically about work hours. Ben Porter is programmer, designer and art director of MoonQuest, a platformer with Terraria-style exploration and crafting in distinctly weird generated environments. He managed to work nine-to-five days before its July Early Access release, but after six years, he was exhausted—and also a new dad. “Luckily my daughter had started to sleep through the night so I started to get more rest and could concentrate for longer,” he says. But final rounds of testing threw up all kinds of unanticipated new issues that had to be fixed.

For team Villa Gorilla, the multiplatform release of its wonderful pinball-platformer Yoku’s Island Express was handed by its publisher, Team 17, who governed a carefully plotted series of submission deadlines. “It’s a super-intense period, but nice because we could tick off individual problems to tackle,” programmer Jens Andersson says. “But even at that point, you know there’s stuff you want to change but it takes a lot of work and it’s not worth it. The side effects might make the game worse.”

For Joakim ‘Konjak’ Sandberg, the final weeks of making the sprawling platformer adventure Iconoclasts, which he created entirely on his own for eight years, were quieter. He spent the time testing and trying to promote it, contacting streamers and press, but he was feeling extremely anxious.

Release day

“It’s not healthy to make a game on your own,” Sandberg says. “I built up resentments and worries on the way, that Iconclasts was weird, too specific to me. I didn’t know how people would react to it, which I think is normal, but I worried.” He spent much of launch day in and out of sleep, checking streams to see if it was being played yet, waiting for the hour his publisher would launch it. He was worried that he’d done too little promotion, thought streamers wouldn’t bother playing a story-driven game. Would it grab anyone?

Barone was in a state of nervous excitement, also not knowing how the game would be received. He knew there was hype around it. “Still, there was a big unknown, and that always causes some stress. I had poured my heart and soul into Stardew Valley for four-and-a-half years, in private. For that to suddenly be revealed to the world was both exciting and terrifying.”

Villa Gorilla's Andersson felt more confident. The rigours of testing, along with all his experience as a dev at Starbreeze made him feel somewhat confident that Yoku’s Island Express was a good game. “But you can never be certain. You don’t necessarily know what your game is.” It’s hard to see a project when you’re so close it for so long; he knew that he’d have to wait until the reviews before he’d get a coherent outsider's view. To take their minds off it, the team planned a tiki-themed release party. “That was an interesting experience, reading the first reviews at the party. A little risky!”

For Ben Porter, MoonQuest’s launch on a Saturday morning was all about going through a checklist: unlocking the website, making the trailer public, unlocking the game on itch.io and the Humble Store for his Kickstarter backers, and pressing the big ’Release Game’ button in Steam. He then started promoting the game on Twitter and Facebook, posted an update to backers, sent emails to gaming sites, contacted friends. “And on and on. It was a pretty intense few days.” He was worried that the game wouldn’t technically work, and knew that it couldn’t on some PCs, especially those without dedicated graphics cards.

The Owlboy team were at Anderson’s house, having scrambled to fix some final issues. “At some point, with great hesitation, we announced it was time to hit the launch button. We did, and you would think this would be the pivotal moment.” In fact, the moment fell flat, since they couldn’t check that it was live and functional, so they had to dig out an old laptop and install Steam on it. “We stood there for 20 minutes of absolute agony before we finally knew if the game we had spent a decade on was live and working. The second the intro screen booted up the entirety of the team broke down in tears at the same time.”

Life in the aftermath

“I got drunker than I’ve ever been in my life because I was so anxious,” says Sandberg of the hours after Iconoclasts released. He watched one streamer get a soft-lock—a crash—and quit. “That stuck with me for many days.” He fixed the bug instantly; it was to do with pressing certain buttons during a cutscene, an action so esoteric that it didn’t come up in testing. “But that’s what happens. And three months later I was in hospital.”

Sandberg’s anxiety had continued after launch. He worried about his financial security and felt like he’d wasted the last 10 years of his life. Every time he saw a bug he felt like he’d failed. Every time he read criticism of Iconoclasts he’d fall into a hole for an hour. These stresses combined with long-standing personal issues lead to a breakdown. Sandberg admitted himself to a psychiatric ward. He only stayed three nights, but came out having learned his breakdown was exacerbated by his social isolation during development. 

“The way I made the game, I sat by myself thinking it’s what I had to do and nothing else, and this is where I am now,” Sandberg says. It’s taken him a long time to get back to work, porting Iconoclasts to Switch, and he's still finding it tough. But the experience has taught him an important lesson: “Don’t squander your close friends. The most important thing is to be able to walk away, to take weekends. I didn’t do any of that.”

“Whenever you work very intensely with something and then suddenly you’re done, there’s an emptiness, a hole; there’s nothing driving you any more,” says Villa Gorilla’s Andersson. He says that during development he’d look forward to the end, playing more games, having a drink, sleeping in. “But more often than that you wake up feeling depressed. A lot of people just stay in bed for a couple of weeks.”  

Villa Gorilla also had to say goodbye to a couple of developers who were hired just for Yoku’s Island Express. “It feels so sad to break up something that was working so efficiently, but you can’t stay in that super-productive mode forever. You sort of wish you could because you could put out more games!” Andersson has experienced this lull several times. “Perhaps you have to go through this hump to become inspired and creative again,” he wonders. “I just know it’s no fun. It’s terrible.”

Simon Stafsnes Andersen felt many emotions at Owlboy’s release. “The most intense feeling of relief, pride and happiness I think I’ve ever felt in unison. But only for a brief while. It quickly gets replaced by feelings of doubt. What happens now that people are playing it? Are there negative reviews? How is our community doing? Did someone discover a bug? What do we do now in terms of promotion? It turns out the feelings you have before the launch never really go away.”

He and the studio failed to hold a party; Anderson instead found himself feeling dread, the team swept into dealing with bug reports and watching streams for issues. And rather than working on the dozens of projects he foresaw himself launching into once Owlboy was done, he instead found himself having to take time off. “The unexpected element was honestly the exhaustion. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to start something immediately. I tried a number of times and eventually had to admit I just needed to get away from the office for a while to recharge. It’s a strange moment when you realise that you’re not actually a machine and it’s possible to do human things again.”

For Porter, MoonQuest’s Early Access release was just the start of the road to full launch. Happily, it came with the relief that it generated enough sales for him to keep working. “I also think my emotions are spread over the lifetime of the project, so I might feel a little happiness and anxiety every day, but I don’t think there’ll ever be a day where I feel super happy to have finished the game. Right now I’m excited to get straight back into development. ” 

And that means browsing the Steam forums for news of major issues and feature requests. “I’ve avoided the Steam reviews for now, but I see the game has a positive rating, which I’m happy with,” he says. After all, with release comes paying customers. Porter had already grappled with the idea of people giving him money for his work during MoonQuest’s Kickstarter campaign. “I felt really strange about it,“ he says. “I felt really indebted to all the backers, and this led to the game being delayed as I felt they deserved something better.”

For Barone, releasing Stardew Valley was a time of relief and pride. “I had been telling friends and family about this game I was making for five years, and I think many people were wondering if I’d ever finish it. The feeling of pride was more a sense of accomplishment that I was able to complete this gargantuan task.”

But it was strange to know it was out there. “I imagine it would be like raising a child and then seeing them leave your house for good. You’re still the parent, but they have a distinct life of their own now.”

After the launch, his routine changed; he spent more time on social media, dealt with technical issues and did interviews, responding to the game’s surge in popularity. It was a good problem to have, but after a month he had to take time off. With its success came a sense of responsibility, and with that, stress.

“But after a while, you acclimate to whatever your new situation is," Barone says. "That’s where I’m at now. I feel about the same as I always have, maybe a little more confident in myself. I’m happy that so many people love Stardew Valley, and that I now have the ability to continue doing what I love.”

Welcome to our round-up of the best Metroidvania games. That slightly awkward portmanteau refers to a hybrid genre inspired by Metroid and Castlevania. They tend to be 2D platformers that have you exploring dungeons, defeating bosses, and picking up items that unlock new zones of the map. Within this simple format there is plenty of room for variation and, it turns out, lots of gorgeous art. 

A few of the games on the list have been lovingly crafted by small teams and even individuals over the course of a decade or so. Others, like Dead Cells, experiment with fusing the metroidvania with other genres to create a powerful hybrid. Whichever games you pick, expect lots of 2D platforming and some tough boss fights.

Ori and the Blind Forest

Ori's warmly animated world and slightly tearful opener barely hint at the incredibly tricky platforming challenges that follow. PC Gamer's Philippa Warr has compared this to a teddy bear that wants to punch you in the face—it's a cute and beautiful-looking game, but damn tricky. The pleasant soundtrack puts you at ease while the game rarely does.

 Axiom Verge

One of the very best modern examples of the form, Axiom Verge is set in a dark, Giger-esque alien world populated by mysterious giant mechanical beings and, of course, a slew of bullet hell boss monsters. New paths open up as you discover fresh alien gadgetry, like a trenchcoat that lets you phase through walls, and a device that lets you control a small alien bug to crawl into new cave systems. 

Combat is simple—blast the alien things flapping around each level—but there are loads of weapons to discover, and plenty of secrets if you’re determined enough to glitch or blast your way through secret walls. It’s a sinister and slightly unnerving game with some genuinely dark moments, but that makes it a fitting tribute to the lonely hostile corridors of the original Metroid games. 

Hollow Knight 

This one takes a while to get going, but once you have a few upgrades it’s a spectacular hand-drawn metroidvania with a snappy melee combat system. Hollow Knight borrows its melancholy apocalyptic atmosphere from Dark Souls, and also its currency recovering system—if you make it back to the place you died you can reclaim your last life’s earnings.

Hollow Knight looks gorgeous, and it’s full of interesting bug characters that sell you new gear and give you extra quests. The bosses are challenging and the dodge-and-slash combat is a serious test of skill once you’ve unlocked a few moves and started running into the game’s more serious enemies. The world is beautifully put together, too, and you learn more about the fate of the city as you dash, skip, and double-jump into new zones.

Owlboy

You’ll notice that many of these games are set underground in endless cave systems. Owlboy is set in a floating cloud kingdom. As said Owlboy, Otus, you have to flap around the world in a slightly cumbersome manner befitting a character who is regarded as an idiot by his village. You can teleport friends into your claws as you fly around. Different pals come with different abilities; some will fend off nearby enemies with projectile attacks, others will help you to access new zones in true metroidvania fashion. It’s tricky to say much about Owlboy without spoiling the story, but suffice to say it’s an emotional ride depicted in lovingly detailed pixel art. 

Shadow Complex Remastered

Blast your way through a military compound with machine guns in this futuristic Metroidvania. It’s billed as a “2.5D” game, which means you run and jump on a 2D plane, but can shoot into the background as soldiers and battle robots. You play as an ordinary man called Jason Fleming who gets lost on a hike and stumbles across a high-tech group bent on starting a civil war in the US. The game escalates from there you strap on their armour, raid their armoury and start blasting their mechs. The game was originally released on XBOX Live Arcade, but lives on Steam now as Shadow Complex Remastered.

Cave Story+

Daisuke Amaya’s seminal indie metroidvania is available on PC as Cave Story+, which features the original 320x240 visuals and the updated version. You play an amnesiac boy who wakes up in a cave full of rabbit folk called Mimigas. They are being picked off by the malign creations of a mad scientist, who you need to chase across 15 levels. It’s a big game, especially considering it was made by one very dedicated creator with a clear love for the 16-bit era. An absolute classic and a must-play if you love metroidvanias.

Iconoclasts

From one solo creator to another. Joakim Sandberg spent many years painstakingly designing, animating and composing for Iconoclasts. The result is a cheery and colourful metroidvania starring a friendly mechanic called Robin. This is a relatively shooty one featuring more than 20 bosses, but the worlds are packed with chatty characters. It’s worth picking up to see what seven years of one guy’s life’s work looks like.

Steamworld Dig 2

Approachable, and not too difficult, the Steamworld Dig games deliver a gentle hit of Metroidvania action supplemented by lots of Terraria-style digging. You can pickaxe your way through the levels, but this isn’t a sandbox. You have to tunnel your way to new zones and grab new gadgets to upgrade your hero, a steam-powered cowboy robot in the first game and a blue woman in flying goggles in the second. The sequel has more varied environments and a bigger world to explore, so that’s the best place to start.

Dead Cells

Dead Cells straddles the line between Metroidvania and roguelike, which makes it a warped child of Super Metroid, Castlevania and Rogue. You battle through randomised dungeons, starting from the beginning each time you die. As you chop up enemies in beautifully animated exchanges of sword-blows and bow attacks they drop cells that you can pour into your character. 

This persistent element eventually gives your guy the sturdiness to reach new zones you haven’t seen before, fulfilling the typical metroidvania exploration pattern. Dead Cells is a game about blasting through dungeons as quickly and efficiently as possible. When you arrive in an area a timer starts on a hidden treasure door somewhere on the level, if you can find it before the timer expires, you get access to a room full of special items and sweet cash. Dead Cells is a high pressure game compared to others in this list (bar Ori and Hollow Knight), but if you like action and great pixel art Dead Cells is a good option, though it still has some time to mature in Early Access.

Robin is a mechanic, but the authoritarian society she lives in doesn’t want her to be. Jobs like this are outlawed for regular citizens, forcing her to keep her tool-slinging talents a secret from One Concern—the sinister religious regime in charge. Even so, she still helps out around the village with repairs, using a wrench hidden in her basement. You can’t keep a good mechanic down.

But after an unexpected run-in with Concern agents, she decides the thing that needs fixin’ most is the world. And so she embarks on a quest to make it a better place, accompanied by a group of like-minded rebels who share her hatred of the society they live in. It’s an engaging premise, bolstered by colourful writing, lavish pixel art, and superb animation.

Iconoclasts is clearly inspired by games like Metroid and Castlevania (if only there was a clumsy portmanteau to describe a game like this), but it has enough new ideas to stand on its own and not feel like a direct homage to either. It’s also a lot heavier on story than these games usually are, with reams of dialogue to click through, a huge cast of characters to meet, and frequent cutscene breaks. It balances pathos and humour pretty well, although I found some of the jokes a little too goofy for their own good.

A grease monkey is nothing without her tools, and Robin’s best abilities stem from the variety of gadgets she has hanging from her belt. As well as projectile weapons, including a stun gun and a grenade launcher, she can batter enemies with her wrench and spin it around like a Wild West gunslinger. And she can also jump in the air and unleash a devastating butt slam.

But the wrench has other, more interesting uses. Around the large, interconnected levels you’ll see glowing bolts, some of which can be swung on to leap over obstacles, and others that operate machinery. The latter forms the basis of the game’s well-designed environmental puzzles, which involve finding hidden bolts and cranking them to slide increasingly complex networks of doors and moving platforms around, creating a path through the level.

Otherwise, Iconoclasts is a fairly standard shooter/platformer hybrid—but, thanks to precise and responsive controls, an enjoyable one. Leaping around feels wonderfully snappy, and there’s a huge bestiary of enemies to fight, all with their own distinct attack patterns and weaknesses. It’s evident a lot of time has been spent refining the controls, making them feel just right.

The art is impressive, with chunky, smoothly animated characters reminiscent of SNK’s Metal Slug series, and some beautifully detailed environments. Robin’s journey takes her to a lush forest filled with weird geometric plants, a sun-baked desert, an underwater city, the roof of a speeding train, and other locations, all of which beam with colour and personality.

It’s a challenging game too, especially when one of the big, screen-filling bosses shows up. While they all boil down to memorising a few patterns, some of them are incredibly fast-paced and chaotic. Often you’re accompanied by an AI partner, including shotgun-toting pirate Mina and Royal, a man with telekinetic powers. And you’ll need all the help you can get. 

The level of challenge is nicely balanced, although a few sharp difficulty spikes did catch me off guard. I also had problems with clarity, occasionally unsure where to head next to progress, or how to take down a particular enemy. Sometimes characters will yell out hints during boss battles about how to beat them, but I found the wording of these confusing more than once.

Upgrades called Tweaks bring a little customisation to the game. These can be crafted by finding materials hidden in treasure chests, and offer useful buffs when equipped: holding your breath for longer, doing more damage with your wrench, running faster. And you get to choose which of these you equip, giving you some freedom to tailor Robin to your own specific play style.

Iconoclasts is a fine game, offering both satisfyingly sharp platforming and shooting, and some really smart puzzles. It’s enormous too, packed with secret areas and other stuff to discover. And although I found the humour a little glib and childish at times, it tells its heartfelt story well. A lot of Metroidvania games go for a bleak, downbeat atmosphere, but Iconoclasts is infectiously vibrant and sunny, even if the story does occasionally venture into dark territory.

Joakim 'Konjak' Sandberg is not very health-conscious. For the past seven years, he's been developing Iconoclasts full-time completely on his own. It's been a heady mix of design, delays and, occasionally, depression, but Sandberg's masterwork will finally release on Tuesday, January 23. When I sit down to talk with him, he says he'll try to remember to take weekends off next time, and maybe he could stand to plan things out a little more. But looking back, he's proud of how far he's come on his own.

We first played Iconoclasts in 2013, two years before it hit Steam Greenlight bearing an optimistic 2016 release date. But Sandberg started working on it in earnest in 2010, and the original idea for it came three years earlier. With art inspired by Monster World 4—an old Mega Drive platformer which was re-released in 2007—and gameplay inspired by Metroid Fusion, it was the biggest idea Sandberg had ever taken on. Compared to his previous projects and experiments, Iconoclasts stands out because of its size alone, but also, he says, because of its ambitious story.  

Iconoclasts is set in a world where everyone's jobs are decided by The One Concern, a sort of government overseer, Sandberg tells me. It's a world permeated by a fuel known as ivory, which is considered holy and used to power various machines. The mechanics who build and repair those holy machines command almost priest-like respect. So obviously you can't just decide to be a mechanic. That doesn't stop Robin, the main character and a so-called 'rogue mechanic', from doing just that after learning about machines from her father. 

Robin's nest  

"It is quite narrative-heavy," Sandberg says. "It's interesting, because I didn't have a script. I made the whole game just like I made games before: I make it as you play it. Which is not something you really should do if you want to have a view of your scope. You don't really know when it ends when you do that.

"At the beginning, the story is how I was thinking at the start of my 20s, and at the end it's how I was when I was reaching my 30s. It was always the intent that it starts very typical, very happy, sort of cliche, then turns into something darker. That's sort of how an adult mind shapes, I guess."

If you cut Iconoclasts in half, you could count the rings on it just like a tree. But rather than the game's age, you'd be measuring Sandberg's. He got into making games as a teenager through the development group Clickteam and, after a few years of tinkering with small ideas, started Iconoclasts in his early 20s. He's now heading into his early 30s, and that gap is reflected in Iconoclast's story. 

"It is sort of a growing-up story, but not in terms of love, in terms of attitudes toward people," he says. "Robin is the center of that. She doesn't speak, so she doesn't have much more character than is implied from others and what you get a feel of from talking to other people and helping them. 

"I'm a big fan of characters and I'm not a fan of lore. I want there to be character arcs. I go by feel when I write these things. Every single character is held back by something they want to be, but that they don't let themselves be because they feel the world wants them to be something else. Their conflict is being bitter about that and taking it out on each other. Robin, as the central character, succeeds and fails to get them to be more open about what they want. 

"At the start of the game, Robin lives alone and all she wants to do is help people. She's the happy young person who thinks you can help anyone if you just believe. Across the game, she meets people who've lost the ambition to achieve what they want to do in their lives. In a way they're bringing her down, trying to convert her to their line of thinking. The point of those characters is that, for as long as she can, Robin stays positive." 

Sandberg spent some of Iconoclast's development trying to stay positive and find motivation himself. For about six months around the end of 2014, he says it was hard to even work on the game. Finding his current publisher helped, but eventually, he says, it came down to "if I don't finish this, I've thrown away five years." Sticking to an art style he decided on almost 10 years ago was also challenging, he explains, as were the many factors that led to Iconoclast's long development.

Stuck in  

"It's a big game with one person," Sandberg says. "Relative to other games, I actually think I was fast to do this with all the breaks and losing motivation from time to time. What takes all the time for me—and bosses are always involved to do too—is I decided early on to have animated cutscenes, which was hard to get motivation to do and took forever to do. Making gameplay, it feels like you're actually creating content. Making a cutscene, which takes longer to make than a level, feels counter-intuitive. 

"And of course I went back and changed things. Stuff I wrote in the beginning was not stuff I wanted when I was 30. I mentioned I couldn't get a sense of scope. At the same time, if I wrote a script… It's not easy to write, but it's easy to write a lot. If I had a script before I made the game, I probably would have had something even bigger in scope, before I actually got a sense of how hard it would be to make. I think that's a benefit of making it up as I go." 

Sandberg says some of his best ideas were born from his on-the-fly schedule. For example, Iconoclasts originally had much more complicated power-ups. But Sandberg didn't want it to feel bloated—he wanted players to have "just exactly what they need." So, he pared back the upgrades to emphasize finding the right strategy as opposed to stronger gear. That process ate up a solid chunk of 2017, a year Sandberg confesses he can scarcely remember. 

Looking ahead, Sandberg expects he'll still be busy after Iconoclasts releases. He'll have plenty of post-launch maintenance to do, for one, and he already has an idea for his next game, which will be smaller in scope and different to Iconoclasts—something "I want to do rather than something I'm going to design to be successful," he says. But for now, as nearly a decade of helter-skelter development comes to a close, he's got just one thing on his mind: "I hope people enjoy it." 

Iconoclasts will be available on Steam from January 23.