Adam Kugler had a good career making triple-A games for Blizzard Entertainment, working in a 12-year stint of art and design jobs that culminated in a job as associate game director.

But then he left the company to pursue his own dream: a deeply personal journey of making a game by himself as founder of Cyan Avatar Studios. And now he is unveiling MoteMancer, a fantasy puzzle game where alchemy meets logistics. The PC game is in alpha testing and is available for wishlisting on Steam.

MoteMancer is a beautiful game, envisioned and produced by Kugler, who left the dream job at a triple-A game company to pursue his passion. The players job is to automate a sustainable natural ecosystem across six elemental planes using magical structures on an alien planet. It’s about restoring life. Kugler spoke about his shift from triple-A to solo dev in a roundtable at our GamesBeat Summit 2025 event.

A mote of dust

The title itself channels Carl Sagan, the creator of Cosmos. Sagan had a famous quote about the earth being a “pale blue dot,” and that the planet was like a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The players has to use alchemical ingredients and spells to create elegant systems on a 2D hex grid. The six planes are kind of like six different planets, but they’re all co-located as alternate dimensions in the same space. You can swap between the planes in real time.

“I was always really inspired by indie games along the way because you have the food that feeds you as you’re as you’re creating things,” Kugler said. “And so this is my step into indie as my love letter to the space that inspired me so much.”

Each plane has its own unique set of resources and tools. Players solve logistics puzzles on a hex grid where beauty, elegance, and efficiency naturally occur. Players have to discover spells, aspects, and magical structures through alchemical experimentation. And they have to defend their natural network against Entropy, a creeping adversary that disrupts your designs. The goal is to restore the game’s main portal. In each of the planes, the player has to access different tools.

“I come from a system design background, and so one of the things I wanted to provide was every single plane has its own set of tools,” Kugler said. “I really like sandbox games, where players have their own tools and their own way to solve the problems that they create for themselves. Like Minecraft, Factorio and iso-Sphere.”

The title bears no resemblance to the work that Kugler did at Blizzard, which included the World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online role-playing game, which had a big development team.

As you can tell from a quick look at the trailer, MoteMancer is a beautiful game that looks like it was built by a much bigger team. Kugler self-funded the game and built it himself, with some help from friendly developers. He is shooting for a demo release by June in time for the next Steam Next Fest and Automation Fest in July.

The solo life

Kugler isn’t alone in turning his back on triple-A and going the solo route. Some popular indie hit games made mostly by one person include Billy Basso’s Animal Well (a big hit in 2024 that was made over seven years); Balatro, which was made by the anonymous developer LocalThunk; George Fan’s Octogeddon (made by two people); Potions, made over a decade by Renee Gittins and a small team.

Motoviti had a couple of devs and a small team who worked on Elroy and the Aliens for 11 years. And Stardew Valley, which sold more than 41 million copies, was made by Eric Barone. Jonathan Blow is also well known for making games as a solo dev on titles like Braid and The Witness.

Of course, as with many hit solo games, Kugler is getting a lot of help. There are categories where he tapped freelance contributors for help. But the vision was his. He thinks of it as a “love letter to the genre” of fantasy automation, which moves away from more traditional industrial complex games.

One friend is helping optimize the game. Another focused on innovations. An artist helped do concept work. But Kugler did about 80% of the game and probably 95% of the coding.

Alexandria Makova composed music for the game under a contract. The music gets more intense when you have to deal with problems like meteors, tornadoes and other disasters.

“It’s not necessarily about making the largest factory possible. It’s more about the logistics puzzles,” he said.

Game mechanics and Elemental interaction

Kugler said the game mechanics use the use of power plants, root systems, and alchemical elements. The game allows players to visit different planes, each with its own set of elements and tools, creating a dynamic and interconnected world. The planes create challenges, where you can’t place certain buildings in some of the planes. And the constant enemy is entropy — the notion that natural forces tend toward disorder — which saps energy from the player’s bases.

In one level. you use solar leaves to soak up energy from the sun, but you can’t do that in the shadow plane. The research tree includes air, water, life, earth, fire and shadow. Each one has a different kind of power to fuel the creations.

“There’s an enemy in the game, but it’s much more of a relaxed enemy, as it is entropy. That’s this black and white cloud I can actually show up,” he said.

There are super powerful combinations of elements. Life and water, for example, can grow coral, which is just a slow growth process. If you’re playing earth and fire, there are self-powered rivers that will move items without needing to use power. Shadow and fire have a combination that lets you do wireless power so you can broadcast it across very disparate areas.

“What I’m hoping is for players can find the super powerful pieces that speak to them the most and then choose them as their main base of operations,” he said.

Finding the time

Kugler spent about 2.5 years developing the game, starting first as a side project while he was at Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard had an official program for side projects.

“I love automation and probably have thousands of hours in automation games at this point, across many different games,” he said.

Kugler was trained as an artist, and he used the Unity game engine to make the game. He had to learn coding in order to do the project. He used ChatGPT to brainstorm and he used Trello for tracking tasks.

Ultimately, Kugler has a passion for inspiring the next generation of creators to make their own dream games. The game also has a message about ecological sustainability, whereas many of the games in the automation space involved giant industrial complexes that pillage the environment. Kugler is starting to engage with creators who can help publicize the game.

One of the easy things about going solo is that he didn’t have to create a design document so that he could explain the game to a 300-person team. When someone came in to help, he would have to talk to them for a while.

“Ever since working in triple-A, I’ve been super inspired by especially the one to five person teams,” he said. “A lot of times I wake up and feel like, ‘Here’s what the game needs done today.’”

He admires games like Valheim, Return of the Obra Din and more.

“Used sparingly, I think that AI tools are super powerful, but I think they’re more of a workflow helper, rather than like a means to an end,” Kugler said.