Incredible Indies: Cowleyfornia Studios on being a BAFTA nominee and developing Iron Roads

The games industry has many big-name studios with eager eyes on them, all waiting to see what their next big hit could be. But giant studios aren’t necessarily the home to what could be your next favourite game.

There are thousands of independent game studios and solo developers, all hard at work crafting new game experiences with often unique ways of looking at games. In this series we aim to highlight those very games and the developers behind them. 

In this interview we spoke with husband and wife team Marina Sciberras and Duncan Steele, who formed Cowleyfornia Studios together. So far the couple has released two games and has another in active development called Iron Roads.

We discuss the pros and challenges of being an indie developer, and what to expect from the team’s upcoming release.

PocketGamer.biz: Cowleyfornia Studios is a husband and wife team-up! Can you tell us how/why you both decided to start making games? Have you both always been avid gamers? 

Duncan Steele: We were looking for a hobby project to do together, so we had to think about our interests and skill sets and concluded that making a game together would be a fun thing to do. We’ve both always loved playing games, which was an obvious lead-in.

We also felt this sense of wanting to be involved in what we consider to be an exciting era of an evolving artform.

Is anyone else involved with the studio, or mostly just the two of you?

Marina Sciberras: For the most part, it is just the two of us. While this has its drawbacks, we find it keeps us focused and flexible and means we’re both always learning – we need to figure most things out ourselves because we don’t have a larger team to fall back on.

We should mention that for our upcoming game Iron Roads, we have partnered with Hawthorn Games to translate the game to Chinese and help us navigate an unfamiliar market.

Do you both work on a bit of everything regarding game design, or are there certain aspects that each person is responsible for? 

Steele: Marina does all the art, while I write all the code. The game design, however, is shared between us.

We believe that game design choices must be shared in a small team such as ours. Any decision, artistic or technical, must be considered in terms of its effect on the players’ experience of the game.

By keeping this at the forefront, we can minimise any disagreements that boil down to personal preferences. 

And what are some of the highlights of being an independent developer? 

Steele: I take great personal pleasure from looking back at a game we made and knowing we created all parts of it from start to end. 

Sciberras: For me it is probably being able to stick to our gut instincts, free from external pressures. This allows us to create games that are perhaps less commercially ‘safe’ but which remain true to our vision. We hope this leads to a more unique and satisfying experience for players.

We also love the convivial atmosphere among indie developers, and our experience has been with a community that is helpful and open to sharing opportunities, advice, and experience. 

On the flip side, what are some of your biggest challenges as an indie studio? How could indies be supported more?

Steele: In small teams, you wear many hats, which is usually fun but can lead to overload at times. If we are working on new content – say, a creative task that needs uninterrupted concentration – even a five-minute urgent admin task can cause outsized disruption. At times like that, it would be great if there were more of us.

Exposure is another big challenge. There are so many brilliant new games being released every day, and getting people to know about your game, let alone play it, sometimes feels overwhelmingly hard. We obviously could never compete with the marketing budgets of big studios, so we have to be creative about how we market our game without it using all our time or costing a lot of money.

We’ve personally found the big platform holders to be supportive of indies, not always directly, but by giving indie games similar exposure to games made by much larger studios. For example, Apple featured our second game, We’ll always have Paris, on the front page of the App Store, which was huge for us. 

You’re based in the UK. What is the indie development scene like there?

Sciberras: We’re very lucky because we have so many events and opportunities happening near us. That being said, we think that physical location shouldn’t be a barrier to making games – you really don’t need too much to start making a game besides a dogged determination to plough on to completion! 

And about the games themselves, you have a couple under your belt now, including your title. We’ll always have Paris being a BAFTA nominee. How do you reflect on the journey you’ve had with that game? 

Sciberras: Of course, we were beyond honoured to be nominated. We’ll always have Paris, which led us to take making games more seriously. After all, it was a project we worked on during evenings and weekends, and seeing people enjoy our game and acknowledge our work gave us an enormous sense of validation. 

You’re also developing a new game, Iron Roads, which you mentioned earlier. It’s coming to mobile. What can you tell us about the game and how development has been going? 

Steele: Iron Roads is a top-down 2D train management game with a focus on optimising train networks. We’re aiming for the accessibility of Mini Metro and the depth of simulations such as OpenTTD, while also capturing the irreverent tone of games like Theme Hospital.

Development has been a lot of fun. Our previous games were narrative games designed to be played only once. Iron Roads is a simulation/management game that is – hopefully – playable many times, for many hours.

This has allowed us to build a community of playtesters, discuss the game with them, and then iterate on it. Aside from any positive effect of community feedback on the game itself, we’ve really enjoyed interacting with players in this way.

Writing a deep management game while maintaining a clean, mobile-friendly interface has presented many challenges. Games in this genre need to communicate an abnormally large amount of information to a player.

We’ve had a lot of fun finding ways to present this in a straightforward manner, especially with a phone’s limited screen space.

Do you have a release date in mind for Iron Roads on mobile? 

Sciberras: We’re aiming for a release sometime in June 2025.

Over the course of your time as an indie developer, is there something you’re most proud of achieving? Or any particular highlights? 

Steele: Iron Roads has a weekly challenge and a highscore board. A recent and surprising highlight for us was the day we were no longer able to beat the high score in our own game.

It meant that playtesters had taken the time to understand the systems we built better than we had. As a creator, you want nothing more than for what you create to be taken seriously and for someone to get what you were trying to achieve. What greater feeling could there be? 

Sciberras: Similarly, it meant a lot to us when people with personal experience of memory loss or dementia got in touch to tell us that We’ll always have Paris resonated with them.

And finally is there anything else we should be on the lookout for from you in the future? And where would you like to see Cowleyfornia Studios in five years time?

Sciberras: This close to release, it is hard to see beyond Iron Roads, but we’d love to continue maintaining it and start work on another management game. 

As for five years time? Who knows! But hopefully, we’ll have a larger catalogue of our games out there that players enjoy, giving us a sustainable foundation to keep doing what we love.

Anyone who is interested can keep tabs on what we’re up to.