Irina has worked in film, gaming, and VC, which is basically the career equivalent of a triple combo move. She thinks everything should be more joyful and playful so naturally, she ended up at Codecks handling all things marketing. When she’s not helping make Codecks delightful, she’s scaling rock walls, diving into the ocean (hello new PADI certification!), or on an eternal quest for the world’s best meal. She firmly believes Ori and the Will of the Wisps, It Takes Two, and Breath of the Wild are the best games. She’s probably right about at least two of those.
Codecks is a project management tool inspired by collectible card games. Sounds interesting? Check out our homepage for more information.
How Pixelsplit Games Manages Production (Deadly Day: Roadtrip)
Most indie studios take 2-3 years to ship a single game. Pixelsplit Games has shipped seven games with a core team of five people—roughly one game every two years, sometimes faster.
The German studio behind Deadly Days, Indoorlands, and the horror title REVEIL has built a diverse portfolio spanning zombies, theme parks, and narrative horror. Their latest, Deadly Days: Roadtrip, launched into Early Access in September 2024 and hit #2 on Steam’s top sellers, ahead of major releases, behind only EA Sports FC.
Riad (Codecks) sat down with Bennet Jeutter, co-founder of Pixelsplit Games, to understand how they maintain this output, what they learned from working on multiple projects, and why their vertical slice is the most critical production milestone.
The Ideation Triangle: Want, Can, Market
Before prototyping anything, ideas pass through three filters:
- Games We Want to Make – Team excitement matters
- Games We’re Capable Of – Is the team skilled for this scope?
- Games Where There’s a Market – Is there an audience?
“Each idea has to fit into this triangle.”
They have an ideation channel in Discord. Anyone drops ideas. Quick discussion—intuition-based. But the real test? Prototyping.
Prototype Weeks: The Real Validation
The structure: 1-2 internal game jams per year. Everyone pitches ideas. Vote. Spend a week building.
If it’s promising, extend another week. If not, kill it.
“After one week you see, okay, this is pretty cool. Or this is not fun at all. We don’t see any way to find the fun.”
When to kill:
- Cool mechanic, but no vision for the full game
- Excitement drops
- Prototype doesn’t validate the core fantasy
The key insight: “Without deadlines, everything is important. When you have a deadline, you get the feeling of what is important.”
Working Backwards: Budget-Driven Timelines
Pixelsplit doesn’t plan forward from ideas. They plan backward from financial reality.
The process:
- Monthly liquidity planning – Current expenses, income, how long will the company last?
- Timeline = Budget + Buffer – “In that timeframe, plus a buffer, we need to complete the project”
- Event-driven milestones – When’s the next Steam Next Fest? Work backwards from there
- Scope to fit – Build what’s financially feasible, make it great within constraints
- We reverse engineer our timelines based on our budget.”
The Four Phases: From Chaos to Structure
For years, Pixelsplit ignored production phases. Then Bennet read “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” by Jason Schreier and it clicked.
“I studied computer science and was taught iterative working, but I never believed in these production steps. Then I read the book and it changed the game for us.”
What resonated: Concentric development—you work on new stuff, but you also come back to old stuff. The closer you get to release, the more you refine (not add).
The phases:
- Ideation: Prototype weeks, test ideas, kill most
- Pre-Production: Build vertical slice
- Production: Execute, iterate concentrically
- Post-Production: Updates, patches, community support
The Vertical Slice: Most Critical Milestone
Why it matters: Pre-production ends with a vertical slice. This is where you figure out workflows. How long does a character take? An item? A level?
“It’s an important milestone to have everything in place. Everything done two times—two items, two characters—and then learning from that.”
What they use it for:
- Pitching to publishers
- Releasing playtests
- Putting demos on Steam
- Estimating the rest of production
Why you need shippable quality: If you only do gray box or rough prototypes, you’re not answering the difficult questions that could screw you later.
The Sprint Reality: 50-60% Completion Is Normal
The structure: Two-week sprints. Planning before, review and retrospective after.
The painful truth: They usually only hit 50-60% of what was planned.
“This really hurt a lot. I wanted to have at least 90%. But stuff comes up that you didn’t plan for.”
Why they over-plan anyway: If they only planned 60% to guarantee hitting 100%, nobody would have vision for what’s next. Transparency would suffer.
“Every day stuff comes up that wasn’t planned. I accepted this.”
Why Remote Forced Better Planning
Pixelsplit had an office for years. During COVID, they closed it. After two years remote, they shipped almost two games.
Office vs Remote: They debated hybrid. Decided against it.
“Hybrid is really the worst of all. If half the team is in the office and half remote, the office people will have some sort of silo.”
The production benefit: “In the office, over-scoping could happen more easily because nothing was written down. With remote, you are forced to plan stuff, create tickets.”
Remote work forced discipline. Everything gets documented.
How they compensate: 2-3 physical meetups per year. Gamescom. Team trips. Not team-building exercises—just existing together.
“It’s not much more that you need. At least in a small team.”
Genre Lessons: Systemic Games Scale Better
What they learned: Linear horror games are super hard. The horror game they planned for three months took five years.
Why systemic games work better: Systems create content. Developers don’t have to hand-craft every interaction.
“If you have systems in place, stuff is created by the systems, not by the developers.”
Scalability: With systemic games, you can estimate: “One character takes us a week.” You can plan. Hire freelancers. Do DLCs.
With narrative games, every scene is unique. Harder to estimate. Harder to scale.
Why they still make different genres: “We don’t want to do the same thing over and over again.”
Deadly Days: Roadtrip is compatible with the original (roguelike, zombies, shooter) but different enough (survivor-like + inventory management) to stay interesting. Visual style changed. Genre shifted. Same IP, new challenges.
Community as a Production Asset
Why community matters: Not just marketing. Making the game better.
“If you want to make a good game, you have to listen to people who consume your game and steer in the right direction without losing your creative vision.”
How Codecks helps: Open decks. Community members create cards, upvote features. Structured feedback instead of scattered Discord messages.
The asset: Community is something you take from project to project. New prototype? “Hey community, want to try it?”
The systemic game advantage: Procedural games are playable earlier. Longer playtime (400+ hours) means community members stick around longer. More engagement. More stream-ability.
Closing Thought: Sustainable Beats Heroic
Pixelsplit isn’t shipping seven games because they work harder. They’re shipping because they work sustainably.
One project at a time. Budget-driven timelines. Vertical slices that answer hard questions early. Accepting 50-60% sprint completion. Remote work that forces documentation.
As Bennet put it: “We try to be as sustainable as possible. Bootstrapped. No obligations to the outside world.”
The goal isn’t the perfect game. The goal is to keep shipping games, sustainably, for as long as possible.
Because seven games with five people isn’t magic. It’s discipline.
Woww you read all the way through! 😻👏
You now have Pixelsplit’s playbook: ideation triangle, prototype weeks, budget-driven timelines, vertical slice quality.. Check out our YouTube channel and join our Discord for more.
And if you want to have the best game production, check out Codecks—the tool Pixelsplit uses to keep production structured.
