Indie game developer Gwen Frey shares her journey to solo success

Two years later, Gwen was back on the East Coast. She was now at Irrational Games in Boston, working as a senior technical animator on Bioshock Infinite, part of the hit triple-A BioShock franchise. “I really loved working on that title,” she says. “The character that I'd worked on was painted on the side of a skyscraper. We had advertisements for it during the Super Bowl. It was huge.”

Despite the franchise’s massive success, two and a half years into Gwen’s stint at Irrational Games, its founder decided to close the studio in order to pursue a different path, and Gwen once again found herself out of a job. But with her irrepressible spirit, she was able to find a silver lining. “I was in Boston, I was surrounded by incredibly talented people that I loved working with, and I managed to get together with five of them,” she says. “And we founded our own studio, The Molasses Flood, and that's how I went indie.”

At The Molasses Flood, Gwen and her team worked on a game called The Flame in the Flood. Initially, sales were not great, and the team struggled to keep the studio together. Over time, however, the game did much better, and it continues to be developed today. “That gave me the strength and the background I needed to go and take off completely on my own,” says Gwen.

“I had started this side project at home; it was a tiny project that couldn't sustain a larger studio,” she says. “And so I talked with the team and we came to an agreement: I just had to take off and go work on this smaller thing.” 

To do this, Gwen founded her own studio, Chump Squad, and that small side project became Kine, a hugely successful 3D puzzle game. “Over the course of two years, it became a game that is now on every platform, it's on every console,” says Gwen. “It was a launch title on Google Stadia last year. And I'm extremely proud of how that panned out.”

Gwen says she could not have created Kine without Unreal Engine, and in particular, its Blueprint visual scripting feature. “I'm a studio of one person full time with a couple of contractors. I don't know C++. There was a time when I couldn't make a game like this,” she says. “This engine has reached a point where somebody like me, who comes from an artist background and who does not know how to program, can make an entire video game using Unreal Engine just in Blueprint scripting.”