Indie studio Evil Trout Inc is preparing to launch its second release, The Incident At Galley House, on Steam. Like the company’s first game, The Roottrees Are Dead, the new title is a remake of a free detective game that originally found an audience on itch.io. In both cases, founder Robin Ward has taken an existing indie project created by another developer and helped transform it into a premium release with new production values.
The pattern was never part of Ward’s original plan. He founded Evil Trout in 2023 after leaving tech startup Discourse to pursue game development, initially intending to build his own project, The Secrets Of Skellig, a third-person puzzle game. That route changed in late 2023 after Ward broke his arm and could not continue programming. While recovering, he came across The Roottrees Are Dead, a puzzle game by developer Jeremy Johnston, and saw commercial potential in a more polished version.
Johnston’s game had begun as a Global Game Jam entry in 2023 and later expanded into a free itch.io release in November of that year. It drew attention quickly, despite being promoted only through a few forum posts. One issue stood out: the game used AI-generated character portraits. Ward approached Johnston with a proposal to bring the game to Steam, finance new art, and present it as a fuller commercial release. Johnston accepted after Ward showed a concrete visual mock-up of the project.
Ward funded development by selling some of his shares in Discourse. The budget for The Roottrees Are Dead was about $60,000, much of it spent on commissioning artist Henning Ludvigsen to replace the AI-generated portraits. Ward says he was prepared to lose the money, but the gamble paid off: the game recovered its budget within 48 hours of release and continued selling. According to the report, that success directly financed The Incident At Galley House, giving Evil Trout a business model built around turning standout free games into Steam-ready products.
Source: gamesindustry.biz
