What Every Indie Dev Can Learn from Edmund McMillen

Edmund McMillen just launched Mewgenics to massive success, selling 152,000 copies in three hours. But this overnight success was two decades in the making. His path from Flash games on Newgrounds to one of the most influential indie designers alive is packed with lessons for anyone building games today.

Start Small, Ship Often

McMillen didn’t begin with a hit. He spent years making small Flash games on Newgrounds. Coil, Triachnid, Grey Matter, the original Meat Boy. Most of them were weird. Some of them were rough. All of them taught him something.

His first “real” indie game was Gish in 2004, a physics platformer about a ball of tar. It won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at IGF and its $20,000 prize money. But more importantly, it proved that small, personal games could find an audience.

The lesson is simple. Don’t start with your dream project. Start with something you can finish. Then finish another one. Then another.

Design Around a Core Goal

McMillen’s most quoted piece of advice is this: “Find out what your goal is, and interweave every aspect of your game into that goal.”

In The Binding of Isaac, everything serves the theme. The randomly generated rooms reflect the chaos of a child’s imagination. The grotesque enemies reflect childhood fears. The items are absurd because the whole world is absurd. Nothing exists just because it looked cool in another game.

This is what separates memorable games from forgettable ones. When your art, mechanics, music, and narrative all pull in the same direction, players feel it even if they can’t articulate why.

Lean Into Your Weirdness

McMillen has never made a “safe” game. Super Meat Boy is about a skinless boy saving his girlfriend from a fetus in a jar. The Binding of Isaac has you fighting your own mother with your tears. Mewgenics is about breeding an army of genetically modified cats in a post apocalyptic world.

Every single one of these pitches sounds like it shouldn’t work. They all did.

His philosophy is that the best way to stand out is to be authentically yourself. “An artist can’t help but put something personal about themselves in their work,” he says. The developers who try to chase trends end up making forgettable clones. The ones who lean into their own strangeness create something people remember.

You Don’t Need Permission or Money

One of McMillen’s strongest beliefs is that you don’t need a publisher, a budget, or anyone’s approval to make something great.

“All that matters is that your game is well designed or doing something interesting in some way that hasn’t been done. I don’t think you need to sacrifice, or borrow money, or need a publisher, or whatever else to do these things.”

The Binding of Isaac was made in roughly three months with programmer Florian Himsl using Flash. McMillen released it on Steam in September 2011 without marketing, without a publisher, without expectations. It became one of the most successful indie games ever made.

When asked how a new solo developer should approach game making without resources, McMillen always points to design over production value. A clever mechanic in pixel art will beat a generic mechanic in polished 3D every time.

Know When to Kill Your Darlings

Mewgenics was first announced in 2012. It was cancelled, restarted, redesigned from scratch, and went through multiple complete overhauls before finally shipping in 2026. Fourteen years from announcement to launch.

McMillen could have forced an earlier version out the door. He chose not to. He recognized when the game wasn’t working and had the discipline to tear it apart and rebuild until it was right.

This is the hardest lesson for any creator. Sometimes the best thing you can do for a project is admit it isn’t working yet. Not every restart is a failure. Sometimes it’s the only path to something great.

The Manifesto

McMillen published a design manifesto years ago that still holds up. The key points:

• Be honest. Don’t manipulate or condescend to your players.
• Embrace risk. Innovate in gameplay, aesthetics, and mechanics.
• Practice constantly. Make lots of small games to test ideas quickly.
• Think critically. Find the weaknesses in your design before you build.
• Study games. Play widely and analyze what works and what doesn’t.
• Stay humble. Accept feedback. Never stop learning.
• Don’t copy trends. The market already has those games.
• Don’t let ambition exceed ability. Match your scope to your skills.

The Takeaway

McMillen’s career proves that the indie path works. Not the sanitized version where everything goes smoothly, but the real version where you make dozens of small games, follow your obsessions, kill projects that aren’t working, and keep going until something clicks.

Twenty years of clicking later, he’s sitting at number one on Steam with a game about mutant cats. If that isn’t inspiring, nothing is.

For more on McMillen’s latest game, check out our coverage of Mewgenics hitting number one on Steam.