An indie role-playing game is a role-playing game published by individuals or small press publishers, in contrast to games published by large corporations. Indie tabletop role-playing game designers participate in various game distribution networks, development communities, and gaming conventions, both in person and online. Indie game designer committees grant annual awards for excellence.
Within the field of human–computer interaction, accessibility of video games is considered a sub-field of computer accessibility, which studies how software and computers can be made accessible to users with various types of impairments. It can also include tabletop RPGs, board games, and related products.
The AbleGamers Foundation is an American nonprofit organization dedicated to improving accessibility in the video game space, enabling more people with disabilities to be able to play video games. The charity creates resources, assists individuals in getting the peripherals they need, runs scholarships, and works with video game publishers and video game companies to improve accessibility.
The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 – Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie – Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa, also called Barkley 2, was a role-playing video game being developed by Tales of Game's Studios. The game was intended to be a sequel to Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, a 2008 freeware title which itself is a fan game sequel to the basketball game Barkley Shut Up and Jam! and the film Space Jam.
Donut County is a puzzle video game developed by American designer Ben Esposito and published by Annapurna Interactive in 2018. The player moves a hole to swallow objects, which makes the hole increase in size. The concept originated in a game jam based on pitches from a Twitter account parody of game designer Peter Molyneux and later added a mechanic similar to that of Katamari Damacy. Other inspirations for the game included Hopi figurines—a theme Esposito later relinquished—and locations from Bruce Springsteen songs. Donut County was released in August 2018 for iOS, macOS, PlayStation 4, and Microsoft Windows platforms, while versions for Xbox One and Nintendo Switch were released in December 2018. It was also released for Android in December 2020.
Agar.io is a massive multiplayer online action game created by Brazilian developer Matheus Valadares. Players control one or more circular cells in a map representing a Petri dish. The goal is to gain as much mass as possible by eating cells and player cells smaller than the player's cell while avoiding larger ones which can eat the player's cells. Each player starts with one cell, but players can split a cell into two once it reaches a sufficient mass, allowing them to control multiple cells. The name comes from the substance agar, used to culture bacteria.
itch.io is a website for users to host, sell and download indie video games, indie role-playing games, game assets, comics, zines and music. Launched in March 2013 by Leaf Corcoran, the service hosts over 1,000,000 products as of November 2024.
Nina Marie Freeman is an American video game designer known for her games with themes of sexuality and self-reflection. A former game designer at Fullbright, she developed and published numerous video games and is a co-founder of the Code Liberation Foundation, a non-for-profit organization that makes an effort to diversify employment within STEAM fields.
Celeste is a 2018 platform game developed and published by indie studio Maddy Makes Games. The player controls Madeline, a young woman with anxiety and depression who aims to climb Celeste Mountain. During her climb, she encounters several characters, including Part of You, a personification of her self-doubt who attempts to stop her from climbing the mountain.
Queers in love at the End of the World, also stylized as queers in love at the end of the world, is a hypertext game created with Twine. Developed by Anna Anthropy in 2013 for the Ludum Dare Game Jam, the short, ten-second narrative faces players with how to interact with their partner before "(e)verything is wiped away".
Baba Is You is a puzzle video game created by Finnish independent developer Arvi Teikari. The game centers around the manipulation of "rules"—represented in the play area by movable tiles with words written on them—in order to allow the player character, usually the titular Baba, to reach a specified goal. Originating as a short demo built for the 2017 Nordic Game Jam, the game was expanded and released on 13 March 2019 for PC and Nintendo Switch. Mobile versions were released in June 2021. A free update titled "Baba Make Level" was released on November 17, 2021, featuring 150 new and previously unused levels and a level editor with online sharing. Baba Is You received generally favorable reviews from critics.
Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning is a 2018 puzzle horror game developed and published by Micah McGonigal. Set in a schoolhouse, the player must locate seven notebooks which each consists of math problems without being caught by Baldi, his students and other school staff members, while also avoiding various obstacles. The game became popular for its difficulty, nostalgic gameplay and graphics and elements of surreal humour and simplicity.
Voodoo SAS is a French developer and publisher of mobile apps and games based in Paris. The company was founded in 2013 by Alexandre Yazdi and Laurent Ritter. Voodoo's games began predominantly as free-to-play "hyper-casual games", which they helped popularize. Since then, the company has shifted to developing and publishing casual games and apps. Voodoo’s games and apps have surpassed 7 billion downloads as of 2024. The company has been criticised for cloning other games.
Ian Danskin is an American YouTuber, whose YouTube channel Innuendo Studios discusses politics from a left-wing perspective. He is primarily known for "The Alt-Right Playbook" series of videos. The channel has been described as part of "BreadTube", an informal group of left-wing YouTube channels.
CraftStudio is a collaborative cross-platform game engine used to create voxel-based video games, developed by Sparklin Labs.
Dorfromantik is a 2022 strategy and puzzle video game developed and published by Toukana Interactive. In it, the player places a series of hexagonal tiles containing elements of a pastoral environment to create a landscape. They earn points and additional tiles by connecting like sides of the tiles together, closing off fields, forests, and villages, and completing quests to make areas of contiguous regions. An additional creative mode allows the player to create their own landscapes.
Fortune-499 is a role-playing video game in which the player takes on the role of an oracle working in the "magical resources" department of an unnamed corporation, and has to prevent an acquisition by monsters after the company makes an initial public offering. In-game combat is card-based and takes the form of rock paper scissors matches. The game was initially released for Windows in February 2018.
Sokpop Collective, also known as simply Sokpop, is an independent video game development studio located in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The studio was founded in 2015 and consists of four people. The studio is run as a collective, with no formal leadership structure or managers, but a flat hierarchy where everyone works as equals.
Avery Alder is a Canadian tabletop role-playing game designer. She designs games with themes of LGBTQ self-discovery, community building, and post-apocalyptic survival. In collaboration with Benjamin Rosenbaum, Alder invented the Belonging Outside Belonging system, which became a template for future designers' games. Her work is a topic of scholarship in the history of game design.
