What Rami Ismail learned with his return to game development

Bryant Francis,Senior Editor,GameDeveloper.com

November 3, 2026

schedule7 Min Readvia Rami Ismail/Aesthetician Labs/Mystic forge

The video game industry wouldn't be the same without award-winning developer Rami Ismail. Even though the celebrated indie developer parted ways with Vlambeer co-owner Jan Willem Nijman in 2020 and sold his shares in the studio in 2024, he's maintained his status as a globetrotting sword-for-hire helping small studios accelerate their work and pitching in on projects, particularly in developing or underrepresented regions. But the itch to jump back in and direct another game only grew stronger and stronger as the years went by. Now he's back and about to launch Australia Did It: End-of-the-World Railway Defense Business.

It's a turn-based strategy game (with a hell of a name to chew on), a very drastic shift from the fast-paced games like Nuclear Throne and Luftrausers that he and Willem Nijman used to collaborate on a decade ago. And returning to active development meant grappling with how much had changed. "It's a very different industry," he observed in an interview with Game Developer. "It is more brutal. It is far more risk averse than it has ever been."

Ismail's return to active game development in this more "brutal" game industry comes as layoffs and closures have driven industry professionals to ask themselves a hard question: Will they ever get to make another video game? He doesn't have the answer to that question—but his experience does illuminate what it's like for developers jumping back into the trenches, showing not only how to adapt to change, but also how their expertise still matters in this brave, uncertain new world.

Australia Did It has an unusual origin story

Ismail had one major leg-up for venturing back into development. Unlike many of his peers rushing to event to event to pitch publishers and scrounge up funding, Ismail was lucky enough to be approached by publisher Mystic Forge, who pitched him on the idea of backing his next game.

"I don't think I've ever been pitched by a publisher to make a game," Ismail said, explaining that the company was motivated to support development in order to "stress test their processes and making sure they're all set up." He teamed up with Rochester, NY-based studio Aesthetician Labs and other collaborators like the artist "castpixel," musician Max Caulkins, and visual effects wizard Jack Gutmann, and embarked on a journey that ends next week with the game's launch with additional development support from Dreams Uncorporated.

But after launch, the Australia Did It team will shake hands and go their separate ways. This is one major way Ismail said he's adapting to the modern game development landscape. He and Willem Nijman always agreed that Vlambeer should never grow to be larger than two people, but now even that studio structure doesn't feel sustainable. "There's just no there's no variant of game development currently that offers stability," he said. The point of the studio model was that it was supposed to keep developers employed to build institutional knowledge and personalized best practices—but building a company means mitigating risk, and Ismail wanted to make a riskier, more unusual game.

"I can't build a careful version of Australia Did It," he said. "This has to be a big swing... and the the only reasonable way to build this seemed to be to bring together a team [that wasn't obligated to always stay together]." And building a "risky" version of Australia Did It was especially important for Ismail, who lived through the saga of seeing his game Ridiculous Fishing cloned a decade before today's rush of indie game cloning. Making a game this unusual offered a "moat" that copycats would struggle to cross.

Ismail explained that the assembled development team had to quickly reckon with the fact that though everyone involved had good working relationships with each other, they didn't have those shared best practices that come with a studio model. "The first months was really about figuring out like what the game was and also [asking] 'how does this team communicate?' Who talks?' 'When do they talk?' 'What process do we use?'" He praised Aesthetician Labs' Sam Magnolia for leading the way in this effort, taking the role of game producer off of Ismail's shoulders. "As the person who has the creative director hat, I can't also have the producer hat, right," he said. "That's that's too much power consolidated into one voice."

Releasing that responsibility also supported Ismail's vision of taking a "big swing" with Australia Did It. A producer worried about timelines, stake, and scope can't also pitch the biggest, most far-out, and uncertain ideas. Ismail described it as a more "gig-like" experience, which follows a broader trend in modern developed economies of more and more knowledge-based jobs becoming freelance or short-term based, offering everyone the job stability of a backup musician.

He's not opposed to working with the Australia Did It development team again, or even one day returning to a more stable studio model. But the way he sees it, this is the best way to make the kinds of break-the-mold games that put him and Willem Nijman on the map at Vlambeer.

Learning the rules of a new genre

It's often assumed that developers moving from one studio to another will stick to their areas of expertise, often working in the same game genre. That's not been the case for Ismail. Australia Did It is a slower, strategic experience, and that makes it harder to measure the "fun" of than the kinds of action games Ismail's previously worked on.

"it is one of those design processes that fundamentally requires you to trust your vision," he said. On his previous games, whipping up a prototype and testing quick combat encounters could help identify if a game was "fun" quickly. At Vlambeer, he and Willem Nijman wouldn't greenlight a game unless it was fun "within two weeks."

Strategy games reward long-term thinking, and to get players to embrace that playstyle, you need a lot more content, and some degree of game balance in place, which takes more than two weeks. "Everything is about getting that balance right. So you need everything kind of in there before you can go 'ah-ha, it clicked!'"

"I remember when it first really clicked for Australia Did It and I was like 'thank god, thank god,' because it is such a strange game," he said. That moment apparently hit about four to five months after kicking off development. It was a very different experience for Ismail, who had to identify some means of measuring strategy game balance to learn this new manner of game development.

What makes Australia Did It so "strange" is that it's a base-building strategy game with no conventional base-building. Instead of acquiring buildings that spawn units, players acquire units individually and merge them in a means to fit their strategy. To implement that system, the development team created a "progression checker" that helps players understand if they're "up to speed" with the units they have. "I want this game, every 5-10 minutes, to just go 'all right, let's see how you're doing.'"

Ismail said this system eliminates a frustration he used to have with games like StarCraft from his younger days. In StarCraft, players can review match replays and see where they and their opponents made different early strategy choices that sometimes pre-determined the entire game outcome. "You're three-and-a-half minutes in, you go down one tech tree, your opponent went down the perfect counter for that tech tree, and you could have just thrown the game right there."

Image via Rami Ismail/Aesthetician Labs/Mystic Forge

That same experience can happen in single-player games like 2003's Fire Emblem, which punishes players who don't understand the need to diversify their unit list. Ismail recalled how he relied heavily on a paladin character named Marcus who starts the game at a higher power level than the game's protagonists. By the endgame, he found himself in a mission where he was forced to sacrifice Marcus, and he'd have to do the final missions with under-level units.

"Those memories really went into Australia Did It," he said, proving how even the self-avowed "screen-shake guy" known for fast-paced, well-"juiced" explosions could translate his sensibilities and preferences into a new style of gameplay.

But of course, diving back into game development means embracing that no matter how confident you are in such high-minded design thinking, it won't matter until you see how players react to success and failure in such a system. "I'm genuinely very proud of what I built with the team, and also I'm a little nervous what people think of it," he admitted. "It's scary, even with the playtests and all the systems that we built."

"I just want to see people make a merge, see it fire once, and go, 'oh shit, that's cool, or 'oh I should not have done that.' Both of those [outcomes] are amazing to me."

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About the Author

Bryant Francis

Senior Editor, GameDeveloper.com

Bryant Francis is a writer, journalist, and narrative designer based in Boston, MA. He currently writes for Game Developer, a leading B2B publication for the video game industry. His credits include Proxy Studios' 4X strategy game Zephon, Iron Anchor Studios' Down With The Ship, and Amplitude Studio's 2017 game Endless Space 2.

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