Alumni Story: Building a Gaming Startup From a Bhayandar Garage

Most aspiring game developers in Mumbai assume you need a Bandra office, a fat investor cheque, and a team of twenty before you can call yourself a studio. The story of one Storyboard alumnus proves the opposite. He turned the back room of his family home in Bhayandar East into a working two-person studio inside eighteen months, and that journey holds practical lessons for any gaming startup founder Bhayandar hopefuls can actually use.

This is a case study about scope, survival, and shipping, not a fairy tale. The numbers are modest, the wins are real, and the path is replicable for anyone willing to put in the hours.

The Starting Point: A Diploma, A Laptop, and A Locality

When our alumnus enrolled at Storyboard around 2021, he was a Bhayandar resident with a Commerce background, zero coding experience, and a habit of sketching characters during accounting lectures. He chose the gaming track because it combined the only two things he was sure about: storytelling and Unreal Engine tutorials he had been pirating on a slow connection.

The first thing the programme corrected was the assumption that gaming is one job. It is at least eight: design, art, rigging, animation, programming, sound, level design, and production. By the end of the second term he had narrowed his lane to gameplay design and technical art, and outsourced the rest mentally for later.

That clarity matters. Most indie founders fail not because their idea is bad, but because they try to be everyone on day one.

Year One: Freelance Before Founding

Before he ever filed for a sole proprietorship, the alumnus spent his final two semesters at the Mira Road campus picking up paid micro-projects:

• A mobile match-three prototype for a Goregaon agency
• Three Unity asset-pack revisions for a US client found on a freelance board
• A Diwali-themed advergame for a regional FMCG brand, routed through a Borivali design studio

The cumulative income was around ₹1.4–1.8 lakh across nine months. Not life-changing, but it did three critical things. It validated that strangers would pay for his work. It built a portfolio that did not lean on student projects. And it taught him the unglamorous discipline of scope documents, invoices, and GST.

By the time he graduated, he had a small but real client list, and the courage to convert the garage attached to his family's ground-floor flat into a workspace.

Why the Garage Mattered

The Bhayandar garage was not a romantic choice. It was an economic one. A 200-square-foot coworking desk in Andheri would have cost him ₹12,000 a month before electricity. The garage cost him a coat of paint, a second-hand split AC, and a noise-dampening curtain his mother stitched from old bedsheets. His monthly burn dropped to under ₹4,000 in fixed costs.

Low burn buys time. Time buys learning. Learning buys revenue. That is the only loop that matters in year one of any indie game studio India venture.

Building the First Real Product

After roughly fourteen months of freelancing, he and a fellow Storyboard classmate, a 3D artist also from the Mira Bhayandar belt, decided to co-develop something they actually owned. They set themselves three rules:

1. No game would take more than four months from prototype to publish.
2. The first title had to be playable on a sub-₹15,000 Android phone, because that is what their cousins and neighbours owned.
3. They would charge nothing for the base game and monetise through cosmetic in-app purchases and one rewarded-ad slot per session.

The first title was a casual, India-flavoured runner game built around a street-food cart dodging Mumbai monsoon obstacles. It was not going to win an IGDA award, and they knew that going in. The point was to ship, to learn the publishing pipeline, and to test their internal workflow.

It launched in roughly five months instead of four — a normal indie overshoot — and crossed 40,000 organic installs in its first quarter. Revenue was small, in the low five figures monthly, but the metadata they collected on retention, ad ARPDAU, and crash rates became the spec sheet for game two.

The Numbers Behind a Two-Person Studio

For anyone reading this and quietly doing the maths, here is what a realistic indie setup in the Mira Bhayandar belt actually costs in the first year. These are approximate, drawn from common founder conversations in our alumni network:

• Workspace conversion (garage / spare room): ₹25,000–40,000 one-time
• Two mid-range workstations and licences: ₹1.2–1.6 lakh
• Engine and asset subscriptions (Unity, Unreal, Substance, etc.): ₹15,000–25,000 yearly
• Sole-proprietorship registration, GST, accountant: ₹8,000–12,000 yearly
• Marketing, store fees, build tools: ₹20,000–30,000 yearly

A two-founder studio can realistically operate for a full year on under ₹3 lakh in overheads, provided both founders are still living at home, which is the quiet superpower of building in a place like Bhayandar.

What the Storyboard Programme Actually Contributed

It is fair to ask which parts of his diploma actually showed up in the startup. The alumnus is honest about it. Three things did the heavy lifting.

A Real Production Pipeline

The studio briefs at the Mira Road campus are structured like client work, with milestones, reviews, and deliverables. By the time he was freelancing, deadline panic was already a familiar feeling. He had been managing it since term two.

Cross-Discipline Vocabulary

Because the gaming track sits next to VFX, animation, and UI/UX cohorts on the same floor, students absorb the language of neighbouring crafts. When he later hired a freelance UI designer for the runner game, he could brief her in terms she actually used, which cut three rounds of revision out of the project.

Mentor Access and a Local Network

Half of his early freelance leads came from seniors and instructors he met on campus. The Storyboard placement and alumni network is dense in the Mumbai western suburbs, which is exactly where most small studios and agencies actually sit. You can see the broader pattern on our placements page — the ecosystem in Mira Bhayandar, Borivali, and Andheri is more interconnected than it looks from the outside.

Lessons for the Next Alumni Founder

If you are sitting in Bhayandar, Mira Road, Dahisar, or Borivali right now wondering whether you can replicate this, here is the compressed playbook from his experience.

• Start narrow. Pick one craft inside gaming and become genuinely employable in it before you try to found anything.
• Freelance for at least nine to twelve months before incorporating. Real client briefs teach you what no course can.
• Keep fixed costs absurdly low until your second shipped title. Glamorous offices are a tax on focus.
• Ship small games. Two finished mediocre games teach you more than one unfinished masterpiece.
• Treat publishing, analytics, and store optimisation as core skills, not afterthoughts. Building the game is half the job.

The Indian indie scene is small enough that being a competent, reliable, on-time alumni founder is itself a market advantage. You do not need to be the next Supergiant Games on day one. You need to be the studio that picks up the phone, ships on Friday, and invoices on Monday.

Where the Studio Is Today

As of mid-2026, the studio is still two people, still operating out of the same Bhayandar premises, and is now working on its third title — a co-op puzzle game targeted at the South-East Asian market. Their combined personal drawings are in the ₹6–12 LPA equivalent band when you account for project revenue, and they have turned down two acquisition conversations because they like owning their IP.

That is the unglamorous, completely achievable version of indie success that no one puts on a LinkedIn carousel. It is also the version that a disciplined Storyboard graduate from Mira Bhayandar can plausibly aim at within three to five years of starting the diploma.

Thinking About Your Own Path?

If this story sounds like a version of your own ambition, the next step is a real conversation, not another YouTube tutorial. Talk to our admissions team about the gaming programme, the projects you would build on campus, and the freelance scaffolding around it. Call Storyboard at 091521 55527 or reach out through the contact page, and we will map out an honest timeline from where you are today to where this alumnus stood at graduation.