Games

Haven't seen these mentioned, Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters by Jump Over the Age are incredible games, beautiful artistically and really great world building

Not technically in their bedrooms but made by students - Narbacular Drop. It was the game that spawned Portal. It’s not a great game, per se, but I’ll never forget the paradigm-shifting moment I had when I realized what was happening.

Valve ended up hiring the entire team to work on Portal.

Salt and Sanctuary and Hollow Knight.

IDK if this counts, but I loved SPACEPLAN.

Rain World and Space Station 13

Untitled Story was by the person who made Celeste. It's old and looks like it was made in mspaint, but it was such a good metroidvania.

Signalis just affected my fucking life it was really something else.

Rodina is a very cool space game. You fly a starship - which you can completely design and walk around inside - around an open solar system. You land on planets and asteroids ( seamlessly in real-time) and collect pieces of the very awesome scifi novel-like story. I believe there are now enemy alien bases you enter, but when I played the real draw was the incredible lonely atmosphere of space. It has some of the best newtonian space flight/combat I've played to this day, and the gun play is kind of like old school Doom. I'm sure it's come quite far since I played years ago, but it was literally a one man project at the time.

Graphically, it's very low-poly, and it's not the most varied game, but what's there is 👌

Anyone who likes space scifi should play it. It's incredible, and it came before No Man's Sky released.

Shadow Empire without a doubt. Practically a one-man team, and yet a better logistics and supply system than any other game out there.

i couldn't put celeste down the first time i played it.

very fun game :3

i also remember a game called webbed, where you were a spider and got to do actual web physics and swinging. That was pretty cool.