The Billy Basso Founder Story Behind Animal Well

One person made Animal Well: Billy Basso, a working game programmer in Chicago. He spent roughly seven years building the game entirely on his own while holding down a day job. The result was a debut title that became one of 2024’s best-reviewed games. This Billy Basso founder story covers the custom engine he wrote from scratch, the seven-year schedule, and the Bigmode deal that published the game.

Basso’s path to Animal Well began with a deliberate choice. In a PAX West 2023 interview with Boss Rush, he recalled deciding early on that he wanted to handle everything himself. “I knew I wanted to make this game by myself and I didn’t want to form a team or hire anyone,” he said. Interviews with Boss Rush and TheGamer confirm that Animal Well is Basso’s debut title, developed entirely on his own.

Sustaining a seven-year side project took steady effort. Basso told Boss Rush he worked on the game “every day, pretty much. Even if it’s just for 10 or 20 minutes.” His advice to aspiring developers, from a 2023 interview, lines up with that same patience: “be prepared to sink a lot of time into a project… have no expectations of making money on it for a while.

The Custom Engine Behind Animal Well: Why Basso Built Everything from Scratch

Before Animal Well was a game, it was an engine project. Basso started from an empty code base in his free time, deliberately taking on the engine work himself to keep full technical control, according to a 2023 Boss Rush interview. That decision meant he never had to adapt to someone else’s toolset or compromise on how the game looked and felt.

To keep the solo workload manageable, Basso made two deliberate scope cuts:

• Low-resolution 320×180 pixel art, which avoided the burden of 3D modeling

• A world limited to a 16×16 grid of screens, capping the playable space at roughly 256 distinct encounters

Both choices reduced the visual workload and shaped the game’s identity. The pixel art gave Animal Well its distinctive look, while the bounded world forced Basso to make every screen count.

The engine delivered far more than the modest resolution suggests. All lighting in the game is dynamic, including rim lighting and real-time shadows cast by lanterns and other light sources. A real-time fluid simulation drives the smoke and water effects, and signed distance fields render some backgrounds. Basso wanted the game to “feel like a first party game… designed with that platform in mind,” and the engine was built to that standard. Yet all of that technical ambition fits into a final file size of just 34MB, which GamesRadar noted is “probably smaller than its own 4K PS5 background.”

Building it all from scratch carried a steep cost. Basso estimates he “probably designed over 500 rooms” that were “cut or altered beyond recognition,” meaning he created at least twice as many rooms as actually appear in the game.

Development was “super-iterative,” as he put it. Each section went through “probably five or six iterations of just playing through and trying it.” The design process compounded itself. Every new item added to the game forced “a whole pass through everything,” since a fresh mechanic could change how earlier rooms played. That compounding workload is the real price of building from scratch, and it helps explain why a game of this scope took seven years to finish.

Seven Years of Development: The Schedule and Design Density That Shaped Animal Well

Basso spent roughly seven years on Animal Well, though by PAX West 2023 he put the project at about six years in. At that point the credits were already reachable, and he said the remaining work was “filling out a few missing details, and polishing, and adding some end game secrets.” The core content had been locked for some time, and the final stretch was devoted to refinement rather than building anything new.

That extended tail makes sense given how Basso described his process. He told interviewers he was “almost like I’m designing the game three times over… it feels like putting a puzzle together.” Each pass through a room or mechanic reshaped what came before, so the design layered on itself rather than being assembled linearly. The puzzle metaphor fits: pieces had to fit within their own screen and across the entire interconnected world, and adjusting one often meant reworking several others.

The Ostrich boss demonstrates how far back some of those pieces went. It was one of the first bosses Basso designed, and the very last level he created was the second Ostrich encounter. An idea sketched early in Animal Well development stayed relevant through the entire schedule, evolving alongside everything else rather than being replaced by newer concepts.

The Bigmode Deal: How Dunkey’s New Publishing Label Made Animal Well Its First Title

Bigmode didn’t exist when Animal Well first took shape. The label was co-founded by YouTuber Jason “videogamedunkey” Gastrow and his wife, streamer and YouTuber Leahbee, and announced on September 21, 2022. It brought a YouTuber-run publishing operation into the indie space at a moment when the industry was watching with some skepticism about whether a content creator could succeed on the business side of games.

The reveal came quickly. On January 8, 2023, Animal Well was announced as Bigmode’s first published game. At the time, Dunkey had 7.29 million YouTube subscribers, and his enthusiasm for the project was clear in how he described it: “one of the very few games at E3 this year that caught my eye” and “a game coming from a very pure place of love for video games.” That endorsement, delivered in his “Dunkey’s Best of 2022” video, carried a lot of weight given the size of his audience.

The deal itself grew out of an unlikely chain of events. Dunkey first gave Animal Well a five-second shoutout in a Summer Games Fest video, which was enough to trigger a big wishlist bump on Steam. Later, a Tokyo Game Show selfie with Shuhei Yoshida led Leah to follow Basso’s business partner Dan Adelman, and that connection opened the conversation. Basso was not actively seeking a publisher. He had been working with Adelman on publisher-type matters already.

Basso’s initial hesitation about the arrangement was creative control. He feared a publisher would want to steer the game’s direction, but he found Bigmode “very friendly and respectful of the game.” He sent builds every one to two months, and the feedback came back “without the expectation that he would implement it precisely.” After Bigmode announced its involvement, Basso said Steam wishlists “skyrocketed,” and he credited “the Dunkey stamp of approval” with helping market a game that was hard to sell on concept alone.

The visibility implications were significant for a solo project with no prior track record. A seven-year project from an unknown developer could easily have faded into a crowded release calendar, but the partnership gave Animal Well an audience that already trusted the person vouching for it, which few indies get.

The Animal Well Success Story: Launch, Critical Acclaim, and the Secret-Hunting Community

Animal Well launched on May 9, 2024 for Windows (Steam), PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, with a 30% launch discount on Steam. The response was immediate: the game became a top seller on Steam a day after launch, reaching No. 4 on the platform’s Top Sellers chart and later settling at No. 5 between Helldivers 2 and Gray Zone Warfare. For a debut title from an unknown solo developer, that commercial traction was not guaranteed.

The critical reception matched the sales momentum. On Metacritic, Animal Well opened at 91, tied with Tekken 8 for 2024’s highest PC score at that time. Across platforms, the settled scores were consistent:

Metacritic reports 100% positive critic reviews based on 30 critics. The acclaim extended beyond the aggregated scores, with outlets including Eurogamer, Game Informer, GameSpot, GamesRadar+, IGN, and PC Gamer all publishing strong reviews. OpenCritic reports a 98% recommendation rate, and Steam user reviews remain “Overwhelmingly Positive,” with 95% of 12,915 reviews positive as of the page snapshot.

The success story extended beyond review scores. The community’s layered secret-hunting became a defining part of the game in the weeks after launch, as players realized the surface-level puzzle platformer contained depths that kept unfolding.

One major secret was solvable solo. Dan Adelman assembled it across roughly 250 playthroughs, but it is “meant to be solved collectively.” The collaborative effort reflected the game’s design philosophy, which Basso had described as “about secrets and holding back information… it’s hard to market a game like that, I can’t just show the best parts.” He has also acknowledged limits to what even the most dedicated players will uncover: “There’s definitely some stuff that I’ve put in there that I don’t know if people will ever find. And that’s okay!

The Billy Basso Founder Story in Three Lessons

Taken together, the seven years of evenings, the custom engine, and the publisher that trusted the work offer practical lessons for solo founders considering long-horizon projects. Three stand out.

• Animal Well’s depth came from a self-contained design. Basso’s guiding principle was that “everything in the game stays within the game,” meaning no external dependencies, so a copy purchased 30 years from now still works. The result was a dense, secret-filled world far harder to replicate than a faster, thinner release, because its complexity was baked in rather than bolted on.

• Pair deep work with someone whose audience already trusts them. A publisher can supply the visibility a game about hidden secrets lacks on its own, without requiring the developer to build a marketing machine from scratch.

• Basso is already in the very early stages of setting up a new project post-launch, a signal that the daily building habit outlasts any single release.

For solo founders weighing a long-horizon project, Animal Well proves the model can work, but only under specific conditions. Basso combined total technical control with a small, respectful publisher to reach a wide audience, and the game was built to be found. It was dense with secrets, polished to a standard that earned universal acclaim, and self-contained enough that its value will not erode with time.