Betting on yourself, Graham's job as an Indie dev
Hey everyone welcome back to the second Interview on //CounterCulture! This time I talked to GrahamOfLegend about his career, what inspires him, which of his characters should join Smash Bros and dinos features?!
Here I interview Graham Reid developer of 'Super Space Club' and 'Ourlands'. Graham first appeared on my radar with his Xbox release of Super Space Club. Instantly fall in love with the game since its scratching my Geometry Wars itch. We talk about how he became a game developer, his games mecchanics and some other fun and serendipitous questions.
Can you please introduce yourself?
Of course! Hey there, reader! My name is Graham Reid, digitally known as GrahamOfLegend, and I'm a Jamaican indie game dev based out of New York.
I mostly work solo, and so I'm an art director, a game designer, a ux/ui designer, an extremely reluctant programmer, a marketer, a businessman, and about 37 other things that solo devs or small teams have to juggle.
I'm also an avid gamer (when I can find the time anyway), a husband, and a father.
Graham Reid
You work as a solo dev and publish your own titles. How is it going for you in 2026?
That's a great question. How is it going? It's tricky to be honest with you. I've been doing this full time since 2021, and somehow I'm still here hah. We thank God. I've managed to release two games as GrahamOfLegend — the first was 'Super Space Club' in 2023 which dropped on Steam and then later on Xbox and the Epic Games Store, and then 'Ourlands' came out earlier this year in June.
Ourlands
Release: June 2 2026
Ourlands is a cozy island builder where you handcraft and play around in bespoke little lands and truly explore your creativity. No goals, no management, just vibes. In Ourlands, it's up to you to build cozy and unique little islands free from objectives or restrictions. With dozens of items to discover, your islands can become whatever you need them to be! From chill beachside campfire cookouts to lonely rocky hilltops, items will help you fully explore your creativity.
Developper: GrahamOfLegend
Publisher: GrahamOfLegend
It's been an extremely fun, extremely rewarding, phenomenally challenging feat to not only make games predominantly by myself but also run a business and help to support my family from it. I wasn't expecting 'Ourlands' to retire me —wouldn't that be great?— but I was expecting it to do better than it did. So yeah, 2026 has been a whirlwind. Even though it was 3 years between the two games, it never actually took me 3 years to develop it, it was just... Life being life, different things taking priority at varying times. Also porting 'Super Space Club' was a bi... it was rough haha. I'm an artist and designer first and foremost who then learned to code from YouTube, so dealing with porting my game to closed off environments like consoles took me way longer than I had ever expected. All of that to say, 2026 has been hard, but I'm still in the game and I'm planning to ensure that I release more games in way less time. Can't take another 3 years before my next one drops, else I probably wont be in the industry anymore. Not as GrahamOfLegend, anyway..
What made you want to become a game dev? Was there a certain game or role model that inspired you?
Funny enough, it was never a plan for me. Even though I grew up playing so many games, I never really knew that it was something that I could do, especially not as a career. I never knew that it was something a kid from Jamaica could actually get into, something that I could aspire to, you know? I grew up mostly playing console games and PC games made by big companies like Nintendo or EA or Rockstar. I don't think I even knew indie games even existed. It's funny, in hindsight, because I played a lot of flash games too, like on sites like Newgrounds or just random sites back when the internet was cool and wasn't just a handful of social media spaces. We need to figure out how to bring that back somehow. Butit never occurred to me that those games were made by just one or two people in their spare time using tools I could have probably gotten one way or another.
(...) I grew up playing so many games, I never really knew that it was something that I could do, especially not as a career. I never knew that it was something a kid from Jamaica could actually get into, (...)
It wasn't until the rise of smartphones in the late 2000s along with the rise of Unity that making games even became an option for me. Two of my closest friends, also from Jamaica, and I decided to do the Global Game Jam in 2012, and once we did, I realized that we could actually make games and put them on phones, especially on Android phones. After the jam, we expanded and polished that game which launched as 'Shapes & Sound: The Shape Shooter' as a paid Android game. It did relatively well, even for a paid Android title! Feels like that's so rare now unless you have millions of dollars in ad spend. But yeah, making a game wasn't something far fetched anymore. Suddenly I could actually combine a core part of who I was, who I am, with a profession. I went to college for motion graphics, so I've always been more on the art side of things, but this new revelation was about to change that somewhat. I never took the jump to doing this full-time for almost a decade after that, but that's 100% where my journey started. So there wasn't really a specific game or person that inspired me, but just my creativity combined with my absolute love and adoration for the medium along with tools like Unity and YouTube that enabled me to create, and platforms like the app stores and eventually Steam which enabled me to publish games in a commercial way. Just a 'right place right time' thing I guess.
Your first game, 'Super Space Club', is an arcade game similar to Asteroids and Geometry Wars while your latest title is a game about creating small island postcards. How did you come up with those ideas and how was moving from one project to a completely different type of game?
Well, with 'Super Space Club', I've always loved arcade-y type games like Geometry Wars or Luftrausers from Vlambeer, and space conceptually has always been cool to me. So I've just always wanted to make a space shooter and make my own take on it. The idea for it actually started as a mobile game way back in 2014 or so, and it was inspired by yet another Vlambeer game—Ridiculous Fishing. I had wanted to make a gyro based game where you're piloting the ship left and right, and you have to try and get as far as you can go before you run out of energy. Collect space bits, upgrade your ship so you can go farther and father into space, rinse repeat. I don't remember what made me park the idea but I went on to make a game called 'Hectiube' instead which was on Android and iOS, and then I took a full-time job at Snapchat for 6 years. The idea for 'Super Space Club' over that time evolved into many different iterations sporadically over that stint at Snap, and between Steam becoming a more open platform and the mobile market becoming more focused on free-to-play hyper casual games or games-as-a-service, I knew I had to not only change what the game was, but also make a switch to making a game for PC and consoles. It became a lot more mechanics heavy with the 5 characters, ships, and weapons, and required a lot of balancing. That's a part of why the art direction, while powerful, is so simple. I had to put most of the focus on the gameplay itself. The game went from having nocharacters, to taking inspiration from Star Fox. It went from a more retro black-and-white style to an explosion of color, directly inspired by Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. 'Super Space Club' was a game made purely out of what I enjoyed playing and what inspired me across different aspects of my life.
Super Space Club (2024) - Xbox PC Android iOS
Then, heavy burnout came. Between the burnout I experienced from working at Snapchat —that went on a solid 2 years after I left them, by the way— and just burnout from trying to juggle the development of 'Super Space Club' and being a new dad at the time, and honestly even just trying to balance all the game's mechanics, tweaking all the numbers, and playtesting regularly to make the game feel the way it feels today.
I wanted my next game to be a complete 180 and to be lead more by my art background. Something where I could spend most of the game's development doing illustration and animation and motion graphics after setting up the gameplay aspects of it. On top of that, cozy games were on the rise, so it felt like the perfect time to dive into it. Since I'm from Jamaica too, a nice little island in the heart of the Caribbean, why not make an island builder instead of a city builder? There weren't really examples of that at the time, especially not in the way I had envisioned it, so it just made sense. I do miss making more gameplay heavy games, so don't be surprised if my next game goes back to that kinda vibe.
In terms of how was it completely switching genres? It wasn't that hard I guess. That's part of the fun of making games to me. It's not like I spent the past decade making only one type of game and have never explored other genres and even other platforms. I've dabbled with a lil bit of everything, and I love to learn and evolve my skillset, so it wasn't anything too crazy. I feel like I just continuously build on my knowledge, so, while it may seem like something brand new from the outside, I'm just here low-key collecting ideas and skills and then combining them in new ways. The harder part was actually switching engines from Unity to Godot, which, surprisingly also wasn't that hard? Just took a couple months to get back up to speed, and I have absolutely no regrets.
In 'Super Space Club', you have a single resource which is used for life energy, ammo and boost.
Yet it feels really well balanced —how did you do that? Why did you choose to use one type for everything instead of three?
Thank you for saying that! I really love that it resonated with you. That was probably the most divisive thing in the whole game. Some people hated it and didn't understand it, and some people found it really cool and refreshing and couldn't imagine it any other way. I would absolutely make another game with a mechanic similar to this for sure.
I ended up with this design because I didn't want to just have the typical life bar plus ammo combo. I'm the kind of game designer who tries to make everything you do in the game make sense. If there's a button in the game that lets you fire bullets, what is a reason that you'd let that button go? What's stopping you from firing infinitely? If there is no reason, why not just make it so that you're just always automatically firing bullets? There are a million ways you could solve that problem, and this is just where I landed that felt interesting from both a gameplay and subtle narrative perspective.
vieko
I mentioned Luftrausers before as a big inspiration for the game, and how they handle that same issue is that you can actually fire infinitely. However, they made it so that you couldn't heal while shooting. Do you risk it all with a sliver of life to get a specific kill, or do you ease up off the trigger and refocus? Those are the seemingly small choices that game design decisions like these force you to make, and make an experience unique and interesting. They also made turning slower when you were actively shooting. I didn't want to just straight up take their solution, even though it was an excellent one, and I'm glad that I didn't because I like where the problem lead me to.
What if instead of having health and ammo, you just have a combined energy bar, and energy is a resource that the ship uses as both ammo and, not as health, but as a shield that replenishes? So you're not actually taking critical damage when you get hit per se, but rather your shield is using up energy to withstand taking too much damage. It's almost like how in Uncharted, Nathan Drake didn't actually get shot. He wasn't a bullet sponge. When the screen turned red, it was actually his luck running out and then once your luck runs out, then he gets shot and it's game over. I wanted the game to have a similar feeling to that, which creates a lot of tense moments, but made it so that your ammo also had a significant impact on the choices you made each moment.
It's funny, early on, even just flying used up energy, so the gameplay was more about managing how much energy you use to thrust you into a certain direction alongside firing and taking damage, and there was no regen. Once you were out, that was it, and one of the upgrades was to make that last longer. After taking the game to a couple events though, I tweaked it to what it is today. Turns out, the part that people enjoyed the most —space flight— wasn't as enjoyable when they were essentially being penalized for flying. I made flight feel too fun haha. A great problem to have.
In 'Super Space Club', when you lose a round you basically escape instead of dying. What was the thinking behind that?
Yeah, so, like I said earlier with the energy bar —it's not really you losing life, but rather your ship using up energy and you needing the energy to actually survive, to make sure your ship doesn't take any critical damage. Since the game is a roguelike, I didn't want to make the characters die because then I would have to figure out narratively why that would make sense and how to move forward with that... or not, I guess?
It could just be —it's a video game, they die and come back again— but, to me, I just didn't want them to be dying and coming back and dying and coming back. I wanted it to feel a little grounded, like they're characters that you care about. It just felt too arcade‑y at that point to just have them explode or something. I wanted it instead to feel like they're narrowly escaping death every time, and so once you take too much damage, you barely get a chance to use the last bit of energy you have to blast off to safety again.
Initially, I had planned an entire story arc for the game and even a sequel that started out with that exact mechanic going wrong. Nothing ever truly goes to plan though and I never had a chance to dive into a real narrative for the game, which lead to it being mostly an arcade experience with missions and objectives. The barely escaping bit ended up sticking though. It just made sense to me, and I really love when games find ways to make roguelike mechanics and especially death —or lack thereof— make sense in the world. Probably my favourite example is with Hades and how you're just returning home to hell haha, but there are other games that have handled it really well too, whether it's a descendent of the previous character, or your disembodied head possesses a new body, or you just control an entirely new unimportant character. Then, there are games like Spelunky which don't bother to care about the main character dying thousands of times, and it's okay. It's still a genre defining game that's more true to what being a rogue-like even meant, depending on who you ask anyway.
Which one of your 'Super Space Club' characters would you love to see in the next Smash Bros?
I'm sure at some point I've spoken about my love for the Smash Bros franchise, and I'm not sure if you actually knew that or if this question is just serendipity, but I have 100% thought about this question before. Goals really.
I remember how I felt when I saw the very first Smash Bros trailer for the N64. I never had one, but a close friend of mine did, and he got the game, and I remember us playing nonstop. The pure joy of seeing these beloved Nintendo characters coming together to fight it out with items and stages from each game was just so legendary. Since then I've played every single version of the game. I even played in some tournaments in college. Never won any haha but I'd get far enough. Smash Ultimate is absolutely an all-timer for me. Depending on the day you ask me, it's in my top ten. It's a perfect game to me, and the only thing that could make it even better is if they added a few key characters that never made it over.
If you've ever seen just how fast they whip their tongue out to catch their prey, you'd instantly understand why that's his ability.
Which 'Super Space Club' character would I love to see? Roscoe the Chameleon without a doubt! His entire backstory is that he's a bounty hunter, but he's also very dripped out so he has some swag to him too where all the other characters of the game feel more serious. He'd fit in nicely alongside Fox, Captain Falcon, and Samus I think. Especially next to Fox since Star Fox was also a big inspiration for the game's personality.
I can already envision his entire move set, even his Final Smash. In 'Super Space Club', his ability is to slow down time, or rather, get a quick burst of energy and move at a heightened speed which I translated to time being slowed down. If you've ever seen just how fast they whip their tongue out to catch their prey, you'd instantly understand why that's his ability. Visually I took a lil inspiration from how the Sandevistan in Cyberpunk Edgerunners looks, so I could see his Final Smash being something along those lines where he'd be in a full-on frenzy, zipping around the stage to attack everyone on sight. Yeah... He'd fit into the game pretty well I think.
I've told you about my idea: I believe creative people give creative answers and that I would love to ask silly questions in interviews. I told you that you're safe...
Yeah, that was a lie. Graham, we basically know nothing about dinosaurs. What is a feature you believe dinosaurs should have? Like breathing fire or something like that.
You tricked me! Well, joke's on you, I love this question haha, although you took away my immediate thought. Dinosaurs breathing fire would be so dope! It would essentially make them all like dragons, but the way I imagine it, they'd all breathe fire in different ways based on their size and even their diet. Some would breath fire in a typical way we'd see dragons do it, like pterodactyls raining fire down from the skies, and some could do fireballs, regurgitating things they store to light on fire essentially. Some would be tiny flames and some would engulf entire forests. I guess though they would have essentially destroyed the planet way before we got here!
Beyond that, I think it would be simultaneously hilarious and absolutely terrifying to hear dinosaurs speak in human languages and ultimately having our level of intelligence. It's kind of ridiculous to think about haha. Like, imagine what types of conversations a caveman and a raptor would have. Would some of them be friendly, or would they all be mean? Or you could imagine them in modern times and scenarios and how we'd coexist with them. Somehow though, I imagine certain humans would try to capture or enslave them and maybe even cause their extinction. History all too often likes to repeat itself.
Otherwise, I don't know what else dinosaurs would do, really. I feel like media has already covered a lot of ground with this idea. I even saw a game on socials recently, I forget the name, where it's a dinosaur that fights with a sword. As if dinosaurs aren't cool enough!
In 'Ourlands', players create island sceneries for postcards. How were you hoping players would engage with your game? What role did players sharing their creations play in your vision?
So, the whole point of 'Ourlands' is to just kinda vibe out and make cozy islands. Sometimes, to share with your friends, sometimes, to just have a zen moment to yourself. Your call.
With the postcards mechanic though, I adore when a game has a good photo mode, and since the game is primarily focused on creating things, a photo mode made perfect sense. The art direction and the fact that it's little scenic islands at some point made me think, What if it's not a photo mode, but a postcard mode?
Then from there, sharing them with friends and online made even more sense, you know? You make a cool lil land and then you get to customize it with whichever frame our layout you desire. Your little slice of paradise.
When making the game, and while playing it myself, it gives me the same feeling playing with and building Lego gives me. I could just enjoy the time to build something by myself and that's where the satisfaction comes from, or I could then go on to share it around like Hey, look at this dope thing I made!
Both are valid ways to play the game, so I just wanted to make it easy to do and an integral part of the game for players to make their own postcards vs just having to take a screenshot.
You make a cool lil land and then you get to customize it with whichever frame our layout you desire. Your little slice of paradise.
I also love in these types of games seeing what people online do with it! Some people are insanely clever with how they use a game's tools to make something completely unexpected. People have used the items in the game to make art, like make entire faces just by using the colors and shapes of the items in an abstract way so it's no longer trees and houses but shadows and light, and then some have made scenes way more intricate than even I have. I love seeing that kinda stuff, it's like getting a glimpse into how other folks think.
There was a year in college when I played Minecraft heavy back when it was in alpha or beta or something, I'm not even sure if there was an endgame yet haha, but I remember playing with some college friends on a server and it was so cool to every now and then check in and see how far along everyone had progressed and what exactly they made. While I spent hours carving out the inside of a mountain to build a secret hidden town, someone else was building a massive tree of life, that you could see from pretty much anywhere, as far as your machine would let the game render anyway. So yeah, since the game doesn't have multiplayer —I am just one man— I figured what better way to let others experience your creativity than with beautiful postcards?
Thank you so much for you time! Anything else you want the tell the readers? About your games or just something in general?
Thank you so much for chatting with me! And thank you, reader, so much for getting all the way to the end of this lil chat. I'm cooking up new things for 'Ourlands' which I'll be sharing very soon before the end of the year, and I've also actually started on my next project already! I hinted at what kind of experience it'll be if you were reading keenly, so, stay tuned. Otherwise, I'd love for you to lock in with me over on... everywhere really. I'm (re)starting my YouTube journey which I want to use to showcase what it's like for me, a dad and solo indie, to make my games. I also have my newsletter where I send updates, playtests, and just generally talk with my audience about all the things I'm up to because it's so easy to miss out on socials. If you're always on socials though, I'm @grahamoflegend pretty much everywhere that matters. BlueSky, Instagram, Threads, FKA Twitter, TikTok, etc.
The reason I make games is because I can't help myself. I love it too much. (...) So lock in with me! I'm just getting started.
I don't make games just to make money. Far from it —if that was the case, I definitely wouldn't even make em at all. It's a brutal industry. The reason I make games is because I can't help myself. I love it too much. It's my vocation. I love sharing my vision with you and the rest of the world, and I love being able to bring you the same levels of emotion I've gotten from playing games myself. I also enjoy being able to bring light to the behind the scenes of it all, bring light to my journey as a brown boy from Jamaica who loves video games and once upon a time never knew that making them was going to be his reality, and bring to light that it's something that you can do too, no matter who you are, how you look, or where you're from. So lock in with me! I'm just getting started.
Thank you so much for reading this weeks Interview with Graham! If you’re interested in one of his games please do check them out!
I'm currently on a small break but the next interview is already in the works.
Hope you have a nice week and see you next time.