ARC Stories: Chris Ashworth - Video Game Developer
Updated: Oct 13
A little while ago, we ran the ARC Stories podcast, chatting to the people behind the businesses, projects and ideas at ARC.
We’re bringing ARC Stories back in a slightly different format: a series of short stories on the ARC Space blog, celebrating the people who make up our community.
Rather than a traditional podcast, we’re having informal conversations over lunch at ARC. Other members are welcome to join, listen in and ask questions, making each session feel more like a genuine discussion than a formal interview.
For our first story, we’re getting to know Chris Ashworth, a video game developer building his own indie game studio here in Nottingham.
Chris has worked across programming, finance, AI and some of the biggest names in the games industry, but after years of working remotely and moving between jobs, he decided to take a different approach: choose where he wanted to live first, and build his work around that.
A visit to ARC Space played a surprisingly important part in that decision.
Now based in Nottingham, Chris is developing his first indie game, Heliocentricity, while balancing freelance AI work, building a YouTube audience and figuring out what it takes to run a games business on his own.
Some of our members sat down with Chris over lunch to hear more about how he got here, what he's building and why having somewhere like ARC to work from has become such an important part of it.
From gaming degree to finance and back to games
Chris graduated with a gaming degree in 2004, but his career didn't immediately take him into the games industry.
“Graduated in 2004 with a game development degree, but as needs must, I took a job at a local software house, and starting cutting my professional teeth on ERP and business intelligence fields for a range of clients including Pret a Manger before getting my foot in the door of the world of finance working on dismantling the remains of Northern Rock after the financial crisis.”
After some time at RBS in London, Chris was offered an opportunity in Hong Kong in the Trade Finance division of JP Morgan Chase, leading a software development team.
“Several years of intense work in the crazy pace of life in Hong Kong at JPMC and HSBC, while challenging and rewarding in it’s own way, had me re-evaluating my motivations for work, and I decided to move away from the world of finance.”
After initially moving to Düsseldorf, Germany, where his partner had taken a new role in the fashion industry. He was able to quickly get a foot into the games industry at Blue Byte, now Ubisoft Düsseldorf, working his way up to Lead AI Programmer on titles such as Avatar : Frontiers of Pandora.
Some six years later he later returned to the UK for family reasons and taking a Senior AI Programmer role at Microsoft studio Rare near Twycross, followed by stints at Tanglewood Games and another spell with Ubisoft in Leamington Spa. Like many people in the industry, his career became increasingly remote during and after COVID.
After leaving Ubisoft and taking some time out from the increasingly dire state of the AAA games industry, Chris spent some time teaching part-time at Staffordshire University while thinking about what he wanted to do next.
Deciding to go independent
Rather than simply looking for another job in the games industry, Chris decided to approach things differently.
“The appeal of relocating for another industry job when they're laying people off left, right and centre was not very appealing and I decided I needed to take control of the situation and try and decide where we wanted to be and make the work happen around that rather than the other way around.”
At the time, Chris was living in Melbourne, a small village in Derbyshire. While he liked the area, working remotely there had become increasingly isolating.
“It's a nice little village but it's very quiet, revolving around mainly families and pensioners. If you're just sitting at home programming can get pretty lonely.”
He had been considering moving to Sheffield, partly because of his interest in climbing and the proximity to the Peak District. Then he visited ARC.
“Once I came in here and started attending the co-working space I instantly realised how much I miss living in a city.’”
That helped cement the decision to move to Nottingham and set up his own studio, which he did towards the end of last year.
Building Heliocentricity
Chris is now developing Heliocentricity, a sci-fi roguelike for PC. The idea came together towards the end of last year, when he was looking at a few different concepts and trying to work out which one would be realistic for a solo developer to make.
When asked whether the game had been an idea for a long time, Chris explained:
“I’ve had several ideas in my head over my years working in AAA development, and over Christmas I jotted a few of them down and mulled over which one is going to be the most achievable.”
The game takes inspiration from indie game FTL and has been designed around what Chris can realistically build himself, with limited funding and without a large art team.
It's currently being developed for PC and is already running on Steam Deck. Chris is now working towards getting the game ready for a marketing reveal, while also building an audience around the development process.
Doing the whole thing himself
One of the biggest differences between Chris's current work and his previous career is the amount of control he has over the process.
After around 15 years working in large AAA game studios, he knows what it's like to be one part of a huge production.
“Because I've worked in big AAA game studios for like 15 years, so I know how to be a cog in a very large machine working with multi-million pound budgets but I've never done one myself from start to finish including all the marketing and distribution.”
Now, he's responsible for much more than just developing the game. That includes the business side, marketing, content and planning for the eventual release.
He's also started a YouTube channel documenting the development of the game. Chris previously ran a climbing YouTube channel which reached monetisation, so he already had some experience with creating content and building an audience.
This time, there's another reason behind the decision to put himself at the centre of the channel: the increasing amount of AI-generated content online.
“At the moment the whole industry is kind of getting swamped with AI generated content... Fronting the YouTube channel and sticking my face up there, however uncomfortable that is at first, is a good way to cut through all of the slop and be a human face.”
AI consultancy alongside the game
While the ultimate goal is to make a living from selling games, Chris is also a certified Claude Architect and has been working on AI implementation for businesses.
One of the questions from the group was:
“What is a Claude architect and what do you do for that?”
Chris explained:
“Not specific to Claude it's about integrating LLM systems into anything you want to plug in AI to, which is a surprisingly complex topic, and lots of caveats about what things AI is good at and what things it's terrible at, understanding where AI can be a good fit, and where it can get you into trouble, or run up huge inference bills doing work it’s not suited for!”
His main consultancy work has been for a London fintech startup, Ledger Rocket, founded by former Revolut staff. He's been working on things including agentic pipelines, chat assistants and other AI tooling.
He's also happy to chat to other ARC members who are thinking about how AI could be implemented within their businesses.
What does success look like?
Chris isn't expecting Heliocentricity to become an overnight hit.
When asked by the group what success would look like at launch, his answer was fairly straightforward:
“Erm, quite modest really, initially. Success for me right now is just make enough money to give me another two years to pay my bills. I'm not trying to make a massive runaway success and get rich on this first title, I will make mistakes and learn from the process. If I can lay a foundation to make the next game, then the ideal scenario is generating enough sales to create employment and take on some artists and build a small, focused team delivering memorable indie game experiences long into the future.”
For now, Chris is self-funding the studio, with his freelance and consultancy work providing the runway to develop the game.
He's also applied for the UK Games Fund and plans to apply again when the next round opens. If successful, that funding would allow him to bring in some outside help, particularly with the art.
He's already started building those connections:
“I went to all of the local university graduate shows and have a collection of promising young local talent to draw on, frustratingly I don’t have the funds to offer a lot of work right now, but the aim is to do so as soon as funding allows.”
Taking the risk
There is obviously a point where Chris will need to decide whether to continue putting all of his time into the game or return to freelance work.
One question from the group was:
“How do you know when to make that decision? Is there something that's worth pursuing or not worth pursuing?”
For Chris, there is a fairly clear point at which he'll reassess things:
“I'm old enough that retirement isn't a distant abstract concept so I can’t afford to just get by paying the bills indefinitely, so there needs to be a path to a sustainable, profitable business.”
His current plan is to keep pushing the game through the next few months, but if it's still a long way from release by March or April, he'll return to freelance and contract work.
“If it comes to like March, April next year and I'm still miles away from being able to release it, I'll go back to doing my freelance work. I've got enough of a network that I'm confident I'll be able to find more contract work.”
That gives him the opportunity to build something of his own, while knowing he has an established career and network to fall back on.
Why self-publishing?
For now, Chris is also planning to self-publish the game rather than immediately looking for a traditional publisher.
He's conscious of how quickly costs can add up once multiple parties take a percentage of the revenue.
“If you're selling something on Steam, you're losing 30% of that... And if you start having publishers involved taking their cut, it can quickly just eat your revenues so I'm trying to avoid it right now as long as I have a runway to self-fund. If I can get the game to market 100% independent that would be ideal, but definitely never say never, I am acutely aware of the benefits a publisher brings beyond funding, in terms of marketing, etc.”
The longer-term plan isn't necessarily to spend years working on one game. Chris is interested in building a catalogue of games that can continue generating income over time.
“I think that's the key to success in games at the moment is not to put all your eggs in one basket, see what works and try and build a back library of titles, with a long tail.”
Why ARC?
For Chris, one of the biggest benefits of ARC hasn't necessarily been a particular piece of equipment or service. It's been having somewhere to go.
When asked how working at ARC had helped him, particularly with the game development community and other creatives around the building, he said:
“Initially, the biggest improvement was simply getting out of the house.”
Even when he was living around an hour away, he found that making the journey into ARC was worthwhile.
“Even when I was living an hour away and I had to commute in, it was just really nice to get out of the house and say hello to some people, it just made me feel mentally a lot better after five years of being sat at home in an office on my own.”
He's also been getting involved with the game development meetups at ARC and hopes to do more now that he lives much closer.
For someone working independently, that community has become an important part of making the move into self-employment work.
“It really was the case that I think I could not continue being a solo remote-working developer living in the countryside.”
“It’s been a rough time the last couple of years. Some close friends passed. So being able to move to Nottingham and live in a nice place like this to come and hang out and work at ARC Space, it’s been a really positive step.”
“I’m not the most extroverted person, but I do enjoy coming in and being around people and the buzz of the co-working space”
From finance in Hong Kong to AAA game studios, AI consultancy and now building an indie game from Nottingham, Chris's career has taken a few unexpected turns. What comes next is still being worked out, but for now, he's got a game to finish, an audience to build and a studio of his own to grow.
And, importantly, somewhere to come and do it.
Keen to connect with Chris? Find him on LinkedIn, here.
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