Developer Spotlight: How Lunaris Games Went From ‘Happy Accident’ to Self-Sustaining Studio

If you’re someone who pays attention to the ever-growing queer indie game scene, you may have at least a passing familiarity with Lunaris Games. Not only have they been featured multiple times by Gayming Magazine, they’ve even had some coverage from larger outlets like Fanbyte. That level of coverage is often aspirational for indie devs, especially those without publishers. So how have such a small team managed to garner so much attention?

“We’re kind of selfish in our motives honestly. We just make stuff we’re personally thirsty for and if other people are into it then that’s excellent,” said Lunaris director Kris Wise. “I think if you’re fully just all about the shit that you’re making then people can tell.”

Clearly, people can tell. The Kickstarter for the team’s next release –a queer-centric, 1950’s eldritch visual novel named Call Me Under — made nearly £55,000, over £14,000 more than their original £40,000 goal with 1,451 backers. Beyond that, the team has been working on several projects, including the ReVamp of their first title, When the Night Comes, and their second release, Errant Kingdom. Call Me Under isn’t even their most current announcement.The studio is currently in pre-production for their fourth game, In the Blood. 

This might seem like quite the workload, but the Lunaris team assured me that this is the norm, not just for them, but for most devs of their size. “A lot of people don’t know that it’s actually normal and necessary to work on multiple projects at once,” said Lunaris’ VO director Souha Al-Samkari. “Indies can’t keep going if they don’t have multiple things going at once! All your favorite studios have multiple irons in the fire.”

“Yeah, it seems like people are always shocked, but it is definitely very necessary to have the next thing AND the thing after that in the pipeline, especially for indies,” Wise added.

Despite this rapid-fire pace, the Lunaris team has found ways to make their work sustainable. Not everyone on the team is a full-timer. The main team consists of Wise and art director Anna Tsagada mainly, while most others who work on their projects are freelancers. The work is also divided across smaller teams within the studio, so most folks aren’t working on multiple projects at once. Communication is a big priority as well, as Tsagada and Wise both conduct check-ins and set deadlines for their teams. All that said, Wise acknowledges that they’re probably not as balanced as some of their teammates. 

“I’d say that everyone has a good balance where they manage their own time really well,” Wise said. “Probably not me but… I live haha.”

Though they have so many projects in the works, Lunaris doesn’t have a publisher, and currently isn’t seeking one. They’ve been self/crowd-funded from the start, with Wise originally paying people out of their own pocket from their day job earnings. Eventually, donations to their itch and Patreon, along with some merch sales got the studio to a place where it could pay people from its own revenue. These days, their income is even more steady thanks to the fact that they now charge for all their games (WTNC was free while it was in development). This, combined with their successful Kickstarters have put them in a fairly stable place. 

Despite this success, Wise acknowledges that things would likely be easier for them if they had a publisher. “Life would absolutely be easier if we DID seek a publisher/investor but it’s not something that we’ve considered up until this point,” Wise said. “I’ve seen too many peers go through it and it feels kind of hopeless for a queer VN, honestly.”

While working truly independently is definitely the harder path to walk, Lunaris has risen to the challenge for the sake of the stories they want to tell. But it’s for that same reason they’re not completely opposed to signing with a publisher down the road. 

“That might change in the near future as we are in pre-production for a much more ambitious title, but we’re kind of just seeing where we go with that,” Wise said. “We may just pursue another crowdfunding campaign, but it’d be more ambitious than our previous ones. In an ideal world we never do have to seek publishing, but if it’s required to make the games we want to then I’m happy to try.”

Ultimately, making the games and telling the stories they want has always been Lunaris’ main objective. They came together to do that, becoming a studio and business were just a result of chasing those goals. 

“We didn’t really even think of it as a studio then I don’t think,” Wise said about founding Lunaris. “It was genuinely like a hobby project that got out of hand when people actually liked what we were putting out.”

The team being “on their bullshit” reached new heights when they were able to secure the voice acting talent of Gideon Emery for the WTNC ReVamp. All of them hold Bioware, and specifically Fenris from Dragon Age 2, close to their hearts, so having his voice actor in their game was pretty special to them. They were able to access him through the magic of union voice acting. 

“The magic of union projects is that you end up with access to these actors who feel like they ought to be out of reach,” Al-Samkari said. “Union VO is more affordable than ever these days thanks to the low budget video game agreement they negotiated a few years ago. Not every actor will take those rates but many do. So this means you can do union acting with a lower hour minimum and it just really just makes things a lot more achievable for smaller studios.”

Lunaris is a pretty prime example of what smaller studios can achieve, as they make the jump to developing for Switch and other more ambitious projects down the road while currently remaining unsigned. But they’re just as inspired by other indies on the scene.

“There’s really so many inspiring people making incredible queer content,” Wise said about their fellow indie devs.

“And yeah as we grew and found more indie studios and games the inspiration and adoration skyrocketed,” Tsagada added.