The DeanBeat: Even for a second-generation game designer, being an indie is a survival journey

Theresa Duringer spent the last three years of her life as an indie game developer. She thought that experience would be like a Lone Ranger. But she found that her world had become more interdependent than ever. In her journey, she found it takes a village to make a game. And that it is best tackled by tapping into the economy of favors, where indie devs help each other out. In her case, she was able to publish a 2D strategy game called Cannon Brawl on multiple platforms.

Duringer is but one in a million among indie game developers, each one of them trying to score hits with digital games. But she’s got a unique story about getting help from others, and she recently told it in a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I also interviewed her and discovered that her mother was a game developer as well. That’s a rarity in itself, having a parent, let alone a mother, as a game developer. The field of making games is only a few decades years old, so there aren’t that many multigenerational game development families yet. I felt like Duringer’s tale of survival and endurance — and her tips for fellow indies — were very instructive.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.