How indie dev Dejobaan juggles three games at once

Boston-area dev Dejobaan Games, known for its base-jumping game AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, is currently working on three different games at the same time -- boss rush title Drunken Robot Pornography, procedurally generated music game Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby, and art game Elegy for a Dead World. It's fair to say that most small, indie studios can feel stressed out enough with just the single in-development game, so Gamasutra put it to Dejobaan's Ichiro Lambe: How the heck is his team able to work on three titles at once? "Have you met my biz strategy guy Rohit [Shenoy]?" Ichiro says. "Whenever I talk to another game developer, Rohit will pull that game developer aside and say 'Hey, make sure Ichiro doesn't start another game.'" "You laugh, but this has actually happened." Lambe notes that back when Dejobaan was founded at the turn of the century, it was just him and his ideas. Over the years Dejobaan was now become a "we" and as such, there's now the potential for the founder's ideas to sprawl and be properly explored -- especially with help from other studios. "We have a number of teams working on a number of projects," he continues. "For Monster Loves You, which is a monster visual novel life-simulation thing we launched last year, we partnered with Radial Games' Andy Moore, And we had a team on that." "Then for Drop that Beat Like an Ugly Baby, we're working with Zapdot and Hybrid Mind Games," he adds. "Drunken Robot Pornography is an internal project. For Elegy for a Dead World, we're working with local Boston studio PopCannibal, who also created Girls Like Robots and are working on Captain Astronaut's Last Hurrah." "So we're doing a lot of collaborations with other studios, and that's allowing us to work on these multiple projects." Notably, just because Dejobaan has three projects on the go doesn't mean that each requires the same level of attention all at the same time. "Elegy For a Dead World was supposed to be a one-week project," notes Lambe. "We called it 'Pickled Ginger' because, you know, if you have sushi between courses, you're supposed to have this pickled ginger as a palate cleanser." "I was getting burnt out on Drop that Beat Like An Ugly Baby and Drunken Robot Pornography, and I said 'Hey, let's just do this one-week project, get our minds reset,'" he continues. "So we did the project, but it was so good that we said 'Let's make this a real project,' I think in part, much to Rohit's dismay." Adds Lambe, "It's not at the forefront of our minds, and we come back to it every few months and improve it." Drunken Robot Pornography is currently available through Steam Early Access.