New dawn

Being an independent developer can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you’re free to work exactly as you like in a manner that you feel is most productive and creative. On the other, it’s easy to feel isolated. Without a place of employment to head to each day, or the security and social benefits that come of being part of a greater whole, it’s possible that many talented up-and-coming indie devs give up on going it alone before they even get started. Asobu aims to change that. Founded by a team of industry luminaries, it’s an indie incubator – an ‘indiecubator’, if you will – designed to foster a community in which Japanese indie game creators can grow and thrive together. With the help of funding from sponsors such as Makers Fund and Microsoft’s ID@Xbox program, it’s designed to offer devs a centralised resource of support, putting on seminars, game jams, playtests and networking events – all for free.

The first spark of the idea came to co-founder – and VP of production and business development at Enhance Games – “about six or seven years ago”, he says. The localisation company he worked at, 8-4, was looking to bring indie games (most famously, and ) to Japan – and vice versa. “We kind of did a state of the union of, ‘Okay, let’s look at the whole landscape of Japanese indie games.’” The one thing they couldn’t find was any obvious indie dev community. “We kept asking them ‘Where are the Japanese indie messageboards? Like, where’s the spot that you all hang out?’” MacDonald says. “Because in the west, there’s a few of those: these conglomeration spots, these places where people meet up, and they form teams and trade tips and all that kind of stuff. It’s so important when you’re small. And everybody we were going to was like, ‘Oh, yeah, um, there something like that? If you find out there’s something like that, like, let us know.’”