Most people picture a game studio as a big office with departments, producers and a pipeline that takes years. Leekon is the opposite: a small indie Unity game studio in Islamabad where the people who design a mechanic are the same people who code it, art it and play it every week. Here’s how we actually work, from the first grey box to a game in your hands.
What “indie Unity game studio” means to us
“Indie” isn’t a budget size for us. It’s a way of working. We choose our own projects, we keep the team small on purpose, and we only ship games we’d want to play ourselves. Nobody outside the studio decides what we make or when it’s “done”.
“Unity” is the engine we’ve built everything on. It lets a small team ship to PC, Android, iOS and the web from one project, and that matters when you don’t have a separate team per platform. One codebase, one set of tools, and every build is playable on the devices our players actually use.
Put together, an indie Unity game studio is a small team that can move fast, try a lot of ideas cheaply, and still reach players on every major platform.
Step 1: find the fun with grey boxes
Every Leekon game starts as a scene full of grey cubes. No art, no sound, no menus. Just the core mechanic and a build someone can play by the end of the week.
This is the most important habit we have. Polished art makes an average mechanic feel better in a playtest, and that false signal can cost months. With cubes there’s nowhere for boredom to hide: if people replay the loop without being asked, we’ve found something. If they reach for their phone, we haven’t, and it only cost us a week to find out.
We wrote about this loop in detail in Grey boxes first: how we prototype.
Step 2: playable every week
Once an idea survives the prototype, the rule becomes simple: there is a playable build every week. Progress you can play beats progress you’re told about.
A weekly build keeps the whole team honest. Design changes get tested in days, not months. Bugs get caught while the code is still fresh in someone’s head. And every Friday, anyone in the studio can pick up the latest version and tell us if it’s getting more fun or less.
Unity helps a lot here. Its editor makes it quick to tweak values while the game is running, and tools like the Unity Profiler let us check performance on real devices early, before a slow frame becomes a slow game.
Step 3: cut scope, then cut again
Scope is the real boss battle for any small studio. Every feature you add is a feature you have to design, build, test, balance and support after launch.
So we cut in the open. If a feature doesn’t make the core loop better, it goes on a “later” list, and most of that list never comes back. The games that ship are smaller than the first pitch, and much better for it.
Step 4: build for every screen
Because we ship on both PC and mobile, performance is part of design from day one, not a clean-up job at the end. Mobile games need to hold a steady frame rate on mid-range phones, keep batteries cool and load quickly.
Our checklist covers draw calls, texture sizes, garbage collection and physics settings. We shared the full process in Unity mobile optimization: 12 ways to hit 60 FPS on low-end Android. The same habits make our PC builds run smoothly on older machines too.
What we’re making right now
Here’s a look at what’s on the workbench:
- Layerfall: a co-op dungeon extraction game for up to four players on PC. Go deeper, grab more, and make it back up alive. The Layerfall devlog covers how we designed it.
- Survival: an isometric 3D zombie survival game for Android, in development.
- Countdown: a game-jam game about getting everything done in one school break.
You can see all of them, with our earlier prototypes, on our games page.
Why small teams make better games
A small team means fewer handoffs. When the designer, programmer and artist sit together, an idea goes from “what if” to playable in an afternoon instead of a sprint. There’s no telephone game between departments, and everyone owns the whole game, not just their piece of it.
It also means we can say no. We don’t take on more projects than we can give real attention to, so every game gets the care that made us want to make games in the first place.
Working with Leekon
We don’t only make our own games. The same team and process are available for studios and founders who need help building theirs, whether that’s a fixed-price prototype, full production, or co-development alongside an existing team. See our Unity game development services for the details, or read more about our game studio in Pakistan.
If you have a game idea, or a game that needs a hand to reach the finish line, tell us about it. We read every message.
