Discoverability as an Indie Dev, The Term “Indie”, Poetry & Good Games with Nina Freeman | #IndieDiaries 1
Nina is an award-winning independent game developer from the United States, creator of Last Call and Cibele among others. She shares her story in this first episode of The Indie Diarist podcast.
Welcome to this very first episode of The Indie Diarist, a show on the most lovable, meaningful and inspiring indie devs and tales from the world of gaming. In each episode, I’ll take you through the stories of some of most passionate and dedicated unsung heroes in the games industry, to tell you more about their personal stories and why they love their job so much.
For this very special occasion, we meet Nina Freeman, creator of Cibele, Last Call and how do you Do It?, to learn more about her as a game developer and what drives her forward.
Cibele holds an incredibly special place in my heart: it’s one of the very first indie games I ever played on PC, back when it first came out nearly 10 years ago. It’s the game that really got me thinking about the video games medium, interactive storytelling, and the kind of impact video games can have with their storytelling.
From simply chatting about a bunch of great games together to the issue of visibility as an indie game creator, this first episode is already packed with tons of important topics — including whether or not we need a new term to identify “truly” independent developers. Enjoy!
Follow Nina around the web:
- Twitch: twitch.tv/ninamarie (also found on twitch.tv/britkcaley)
- Twitter: @PersocomNina
- Nina’s Website: ninasays.so
Nina’s mentioned games:
Something I’ve been burning to know for a while: how do you pronounce “Cibele”? Is it more like “Sybil”, or “See-buh-lee”?
I pronounce it Sybil. But I feel like people have all sorts of pronunciations for it, so I’m okay with anything! It’s also a name in different parts of the world. Whatever works, but I say Sybil personally. So I guess that’s the canon name!
What a great way to start. Tell me about yourself!
Sure! My name is Nina Freeman — Nina Marie is like my handle on Twitch and a bunch of other websites, because Nina was taken everywhere, obviously. So I added my middle name onto it! :)
I’m a game developer and a streamer. I’m based in Maryland in the US, and my focus has been on making narrative games over the years. But I’ve worked on other stuff as well; all in all, I’ve been making games for about 10 years.
Right now, I just work for myself with my husband, Jake, and we’re making games together. We’ve been working on a long-term horror game project for like, a year and a half now. And we’ve also recently released Last Call and Nonno’s Legend. This last one was made for the Triennale in Milan, so it was like kind of our last big project. It was a commission for them, super fun!
And yeah, I also worked on Cibele, and how do you Do It?, which are like two of the better known older games that I worked on. I’ve worked on a lot of games, it’s always hard to be listing them because there’s just so many! I started making games when it was still the flash era, towards the end of it, so I did many small games in the beginning. And now these days, I’m working on larger scope projects — as well as freelancing with Dontnod and the folks who worked on Life is Strange.
I always worked with teams of people. Somehow I’m often the one whose story is put into the game, maybe because I draw on my personal life for a lot of my games. So yeah, a lot of narrative stuff drawing on personal life, human mundane, ordinary life stories. That’s kind of my focus as a dev. So yeah — that’s me!
What’s your favourite game? Choose one indie and one triple-A if you can!
Yeah, that’s a hard question. I feel like my pick for favourite game is always changing. Like the game that I am the most fond of from my childhood, regardless of categories, is Final Fantasy X-2, because that was one of the first most memorable games I played as a teenager and it came out when I was about 14. And, you know, it was the first time I played a game that had protagonists that were similar to me or that I saw myself in because it stars three girls, like some sort of a pop group. Sort of a Charlie’s Angels vibe — and I imagine they were kind of drawing from that imagery.
But yeah, I loved their upbeat, silly, girly energy, so X-2 really shaped my interest in games from a young age. And I’ve loved Final Fantasy ever since. And I guess that’s the triple-A one.
As far as more indie stuff goes or stuff made by a small team, I think my favourite is Devotion by Red Candle Games, which is a horror. That game is amazing. It’s a horror game, but it’s really about a very human grounded story about family, and loss, and grief. And I could go on. It touches on so many, very human issues, using horror as sort of the narrative device in a super effective way. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. I super recommend playing that game. I consider it a masterpiece, regardless of genre, although it’s definitely my favourite horror game.
What was your ‘a-ha’ moment as a game dev? When did you realise developing games was the one true call for you?
I didn’t really think about making games until my early to mid 20s. When I was an undergrad, or when I was younger than that in college. I was studying poetry and literature at Pace University in New York. And then I finished there and worked on a job outside of my interests area, you know, to support myself and pay my rent in New York. And while I was doing that, and just getting by, I met some folks, including Emmet Butler, and Diego Garcia, who I ended up working with later, who were making games together.
And I was dating Emmet at the time, so we would be hanging out and while I was writing poetry he would be working on this game with Diego. And so I sort of like ambiently started to learn that games were a thing that people made! And I was like, of course, I should know that, I’ve been playing games since I was a kid! But I just had never thought about the act of making them
So once I saw someone doing that I felt really inspired and I ended up going to lots of game jams with them in New York — which are like weekend events, typically where you make a game based on a theme. And I had some sort of coding experience from when I was younger, because I grew up very online, making websites and stuff. So I tapped on that knowledge to go to these game jams, and helped Diego or other people in our friend group make games. And so for me it started really as a social thing, which then evolved into much more pretty quickly.
I haven’t looked back since.
You mentioned Devotion. Is there another game you played recently that left an impact on you?
You know, I actually I try to keep lists of this stuff. I have a list even of games that came out this year that I want to try and play by the end of the year. So I guess if I’m looking at that, I’ve been playing Norco and ValiDate, which are both games that came out this year. They’re pretty different games. ValiDate is a dating sim and Norco is sort of an adventure-game visual-novel. So I’ve been into those, although haven’t finished them.
Those are both indie games, by the way, so for a more mainstream game… Well, I don’t know if I could call it mainstream. It’s an old game — I’m really into playing old ps1-like retro games. I do that a lot on my Twitch stream. And I streamed this game called Echo Knight, which was an early From Software game. They’re the people behind Dark Souls and Elden Ring and such, but Echo Knight is sort of a survival horror-esque game about a ghost story set on a ship, kind of a Titanic style ship. And it’s just a really fascinating game without the traditional FromSoft combat that you think of. It’s more of a first-person exploration game as we think about it in the modern day. That, but made way prior to the industry acknowledging it as a sort of genre.
It’s something that I have experience with as a developer, I guess Last Call falls within that genre. Echo Knight is sort of like that, a narrative piece setting the mood with exploration, but on a larger scale. And I really enjoyed it. I loved the ghost story, and I would recommend it to anyone who’s into checking out that kind of game history.
What’s the very first game you played? (Not published!)
So I mentioned before that I was in school studying poetry. And, you know, I was interning in the poetry world, that was sort of my thing. And it was still my thing when I started to make games. So when I was trying to teach myself how to programme early on, I took one of the poems I wrote that was sort of a sci-fi one (I was really into sci fi poetry for a while, into reading it and writing it). So I took one that I had written, and I was trying to learn Python at the time, so I made a little Python game that you would play in the terminal.
That was just the poem mostly, but translated into sort of a choose-your-own-adventure, tiny, brief poem game. And it involved basically someone on a spaceship leaving Earth, and it was like about reflecting on what you’re leaving behind on Earth with a bit of choice-based exploration, to look into the memories of that person. I never released it. I think it might be on my GitHub still. But yeah, my very first one was literally something you would just play in the terminal. It was not a typical team project. It wasn’t even a flash game. I was learning Flash at the time as well, but I think the first thing I completed was that one Python script.
You obviously care a lot about Cibele and many of your other games. Which game of yours really matters to you?
Ah, it’s a hard question to answer, I guess. Probably my default answer would be Cibele, because it was such a career defining moment. And we won that Independent Games Festival Award, which was a huge deal to me, and I felt super honoured.
So that was amazing. But now… It has been my goal for a long time to be nominated for a narrative award in the Independent Games Festival. I always wanted that because I feel like that’s my category. It’s the one I’m always the most excited about personally, it always felt like getting in there someday would be a great goal to have. And we finally did with Last Call. So I think that that was also a huge honour — we didn’t win it, but even just being considered for it was a big honour to me. And so now, Last Call might be the most important project that I’ve worked on. Even the New York Times noticed it and interviewed me about it, which was pretty wild. So I guess it came with its own milestones.
It has been my goal for a long time to be nominated for a narrative award in the Independent Games Festival. I always wanted that, because I feel like that’s my category.
So Cibele, for a long time, that was the most important to me. But now Last Call, has sort of signified a turning point in my career, because I’m working for myself now, which is a huge accomplishment, and not many game developers can do that. It’s really difficult, especially financially. But my Twitch stream helps support the independent game development that I do, to the point where, you know, I can freelance and do Twitch and still have time to make stuff like Last Call with Jake. Last Call is sort of a culmination of all of that. And I’ve been working towards being self employed for a long time. So I’m super proud of being able to do that, and I’m glad that Last Call came out of that. Alongside Nonno’s Legend, of course, which is the other game that we’ve released, since being self employed. But that’s a little different, because it’s a commission. Last Call was really the first time of just us making a thing. Super proud of that project.
Why are you a game developer? What drives you forward?
Uhm… Sometimes I think I make games just because it’s the only thing I know how to do. Like, it’s just the thing that I’m naturally doing all the time.
Because for me, even when I was just doing poetry, I wrote poetry just because I felt compelled to do it. I’ve always liked making things. And you know, even prior to that, when I was in high school, I was a theatre kid. I did a lot of photography. Like, I’ve always just been the kind of person that wants to be working on something or making something creative. And, you know, games has ended up being kind of the culmination of all that. Games are very theatrical, in a sense, and in the end, while I’ve worked on many text-only games, my passion is being able to combine my interests with someone like Jake, who is a visual artist, and creating something that is interdisciplinary. So I’ve just discovered that making games is so fun, because it’s interdisciplinary, it draws on all these different creative interests I have. It’s the perfect art form for me. And so I keep doing it because of that, it keeps me excited.
It is a career. Sometimes it can be tiring, but I usually find a way to make it fun. Because there’s so many different skills involved. And you know, when you’re working independently like this, I’m drawing on all of them all the time. So you know, it’s just a fun job.
Here’s a heavy one. Your games are like a window into you as person. You often depict sexuality, relationships, acceptance, all that stuff. These themes clearly matter to you, but they also sound very personal. How have you learned to separate Nina and her projects?
I don’t typically refer to the character in a game as “me” when I’m working on them. Instead, I say “that’s Nina,” and talk about myself in third person. This may sound weird, but it’s important for me to maintain critical distance from myself when writing games based on my own life.
Yes, I’m drawing on my own life, because it’s the thing I know the best; but I’m also trying to tell a story. I can’t include every detail of my lived experience in a game. Instead, each game I work on is a distillation of a larger experience. That distance helps me not take things personally when it comes to someone discussing the “me” in the game. It’s a distillation of something true, but written to convey something intentional.
For example, in Last Call, you learn about me through poems scattered throughout an apartment. You play as yourself, moving through my personal space and learning about my experience with domestic violence. You have to talk to the game to progress, which makes it an intense and intimate experience.
In Cibele, you play as me in an MMO and have a romance in that space. That felt more distant to me, since it’s based on an experience from 10 years ago. My sense of self in games is something I’ve played with and thought about a lot, but it’s always changing.
Do you ever feel lonely or discouraged as an indie dev?
I feel like this question is definitely tied to the pandemic world. Before the pandemic, I was really into going to events and networking in person. I’m an extrovert, so I love socializing and connecting with people in the industry. But now, that’s just not as possible as it used to be. So my approach has changed.
I used to go to a lot of events, but now I’m more cautious about COVID and don’t go to as many. But I’ve found a way to connect with my audience and the industry through Twitch. I stream myself playing games and commenting on them while I play. For example, I streamed myself playing Echo Knight and shared my thoughts as I played. People can chat with me while I’m playing, which has been a really positive way for me to engage with my audience and the industry.
I’ve found a way to connect with my audience and the industry through Twitch. People can chat with me while I’m playing, which has been a really positive way for me to engage with them.
My Twitch community has been so supportive and I can’t thank them enough for helping me as a self-employed independent developer. Twitch has become a really important space for me since I’m not able to do as many in-person events. It was a big adjustment to go from in-person events to just streaming, but I’ve really embraced it and I love it.
I stream four days a week, so I’m constantly in contact with people. I also work from home with Jake and freelance with Dontnod, so I’m always too busy to get lonely these days, which is nice. I like it that way.
If you could change one thing about the games industry, what would it be?
I feel like I have a lot of answers to that. There’s many things I would change about the industry at this point. But I guess one that comes to mind is that I think a lot of people (game developers as well as players!) often forget that the term indie is more complicated than it may seem on the surface.
You know, for example, Jake and I are working on a game, and it’s just us two. We’re self-funding we don’t have a publisher or anything for our horror game we’re working on. And that is like a completely different scope from other like indies that might have a publisher, like Devolver or Annapurna.
And some of those teams are really small too, probably some of them are only two people. But having the support network of a publisher is a completely different experience from what Jake and I are doing. So I kind of just wish we as an industry had better terminology for that, because it can feel weird.
Like, say I’m judging for an award or something. It’s hard to compare a game made with a big budget to one made with a small budget, which is what Indie games are, and even in the indie scene, the budgets vary wildly. And that is not always something that is super visible. So you know, I wish there were a better way to talk about all of it. It’s a complicated space. And I think not all indie games should even be compared to one another, because they’re just made under such different circumstances.
It depends on where in the world the devs are, what access to resource they have, the publisher’s location, all of these things really matter when discussing indie games. It’s not really talked about; people just want to get really excited about indie games, which usually means the most visible, which usually means the ones with publishers, which means it’s the ones with the most money — and I could go on, but I think you know where I’m going.
Thank you for your time, Nina. Are you working on your next project right now, and can you tell me what it is?
Of course! I’ve talked about it to an extent — Jake and I have been working on this horror game for a while. We’ve released Last Call and Nonno’s Legend while working on it, so it’s been one of those weird projects started in early pandemic and subject to a tumultuous cycle, where we’ve released other projects to balance it out.
But now we’re back to working on it; it’s set in a department store in the 2000s, when I was a teenager. It’s a horror game about body image issues, my relationshipwith my mum, shopping and clothes. I haven’t shared much beyond that – only some screenshots and images from time to time on social media. We’re keeping the details kinda secret until we have a trailer or some sort of announcement.
We also don’t have a release date yet or anything; because we’re self-employed and my Twitch community is supporting these efforts, it’s awesome because we don’t have to be tied to strict publisher deadlines or similar. We’re iterating on the game a lot; we’ve rebuilt it two times, and I think we’ve hit the sweet spot now. It’s been super freeing to have the privilege to have the Twitch community supporting this project, and I really look forward to sharing with everyone — I think it’s going to be really special.
I’ll share more when we’re ready! Follow me on Twitch and my other social media channels to stay up to date.
