How Queen’s Domain’s 2-Person Team Remade Elden Ring’s Legacy in a Basement

Eric Berger and Bradley Boothe, a two-person team at Freshly Baked Games, made Queen’s Domain after leaving studio jobs to pursue a project they wanted to play. The first-person fantasy role-playing game draws on FromSoftware’s King’s Field and centres on exploration, interconnected level design and familiar mechanics, showing how a small team can build an expansive game independently.

Berger, who has worked in games for more than two decades, met former software engineer and technical artist Boothe at Final Strike Games. Their initial project proved too ambitious, so they turned to a simpler concept that was meant to take a year but took three; Berger says they wanted to deepen a solid foundation rather than invent a novel hook. He spent five or six years living in his mother’s basement, while Boothe had support from his partner to try independent development for a couple of years.