The Standup with ThePrimeagen Indie Game Dev is Way Harder Than You Think
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Mar 17, 2026 Adam C. Younis, indie game developer and pixel artist behind Insignia, and Nolan (E-I), maker of experimental browser and terminal games, join to talk indie dev life. They discuss making many tiny projects, game jams, weird technical experiments like terminal games and scaling viral projects, and how streams, tooling, and AI shape creative workflows.
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How Small Projects And A Water Tower Jam Sparked Collaboration
- Nolan learned game dev by making many tiny projects and discovered Adam's pixel-art tutorials improved his sprites.
- He joined a 24-hour water tower dev stream with Adam, which led to collaboration and better, more consistent pixel palettes.
Make Lots Of Small Games To Learn Faster
- Make a lot of small games to learn quickly instead of one huge project that may never be finished.
- Nolan observed tiny Godot projects taught concrete lessons (consistent pixel size, palettes) that scaled to later work.
Wardle From An OpenSearch Hack Led To Hacker News
- While at the Recurse Center Nolan experimented with weird UIs and made Wardle by abusing the OpenSearch suggestion endpoint.
- That project reached Hacker News and pushed him toward playful, experimental web games instead of standard genres.