A profile of Anthony Tan, the solo developer of Way to the Woods, a game that received Epic Games funding and remains unreleased nine years after its conception
Anthony Tan was 16 when his idea for a video game about a deer caught the industry's eye. Nine years later, he's still working on it. Mastodon: @dctrjack@aus.social Mastodon: Jack Ryan / @dctrjack@aus.social : 🦌 Today's New York Times Great Read is a story I've been writing in my brain for a few years now, about a ‘silly deer game’ and the man who has been building it since he was a kid. It's about growing up, making art, video games and life. — This is The Long, Long Way to the Woods. …
Context & Ripple Effects
This profile places a long-running solo project alongside independent-game coverage that spans text-driven creation tools such as Twine's enduring role in interactive-fiction development and commercially distinctive design work such as Monument Valley's break from free-to-play conventions.
It also adds a counterweight to the more durable solo-development path described in Eric Barone's decade with Stardew Valley: external attention and funding can sustain a creator's ambition without making a release timetable predictable.
First-order effects
- Anthony Tan remains responsible for completing and shipping Way to the Woods, despite the project's early attention and Epic Games funding.
- Epic's support is now associated with a game whose delivery remains unresolved, rather than a completed title it can point to in its funded-project record.
Second-order effects
- The prolonged production cycle underscores for prospective indie backers that funding a solo creator does not remove the execution and time risks inherent in a single-person project.
- Other solo developers face a sharper trade-off between preserving a personal creative vision and setting a scope that can reach release while attention still converts into audience interest.
Third-order effects
- If similar projects remain in development for years, indie financing may increasingly favor staged milestones, collaborators, or smaller initial scopes over backing a single creator's open-ended production.
- The broader market will continue to distinguish between the visibility a solo game can generate early and the operating capacity required to turn that visibility into a shipped product.
The trend: Indie games are increasingly shaped by the tension between creator-led ambition and the production discipline needed to convert early attention and funding into a release.