How Two Friends Made Hollow Pines in a Garage Over Five Years

Sam Avery and Nina Cho started Hollow Pines in 2021 in Sam’s garage in Columbus, Ohio, with a borrowed laptop and a spreadsheet of savings that would last eighteen months. It took five years. The game they finally released this spring, a hand-drawn detective story set in a small mountain town, is now one of the best-reviewed indie games of the year, and it was made almost entirely by two people sitting at a folding table next to a lawn mower.

Savings, a borrowed laptop and 4,000 hand-drawn frames: the story behind the year’s best mystery is a story about patience, stubbornness and a lot of cold coffee. We spoke with both founders of Two Owls Games over video from their new office, which, they’re quick to point out, has heat.

Two friends and a folding table

Avery and Cho met in a college game design class in 2014, where they were paired for a final project neither of them remembers fondly. “It was a platformer about a sad toaster,” Cho said, laughing. “It was terrible. But we liked working together.”

After graduation, both took jobs at larger studios, Avery as a programmer and Cho as an animator. They stayed close friends and spent weekends sketching ideas for a game of their own. One idea kept coming back: a cozy-looking town where every resident is hiding something, and the player slowly realizes the friendly surface is a mask.

In early 2021, they both quit. Avery cleared out his two-car garage, set up a folding table and a pair of secondhand chairs and borrowed a powerful laptop from his older brother. Cho brought her drawing tablet. They built a spreadsheet of their combined savings and calculated they could survive for eighteen months.

“We were very confident,” Avery said. “We thought eighteen months was plenty. We were wrong by about three and a half years.”

The lean years

They took freelance work three days a week and built the game on the other four. When the savings ran low near the end of the first year, the founders made a rule: freelance on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays to pay the bills, then spend Thursday through Sunday on Hollow Pines. Avery built websites and fixed bugs for other studios. Cho drew illustrations for children’s books and animated short ads.

The schedule was exhausting. Avery estimates he worked six or seven days a week for most of those years. The garage had no insulation, and Columbus winters meant working in coats and fingerless gloves with a space heater pointed at their feet. In summer, they ran two box fans and kept the door open.

4,000 frames by hand

The biggest time commitment was the art. Cho insisted that every character animation and every background be drawn by hand, frame by frame, in a detailed pixel style. By the time the game was finished, she had drawn more than 4,000 individual frames.

“People told me to use shortcuts, and they were right that it would have been faster,” Cho said. “But the way a character walks or fidgets tells you who they are. In a game about secrets, those little details are the clues.”

Avery built the game’s systems around her art: a daily schedule for every resident, a dialogue engine that tracks what each character has told you and a clue board where players pin evidence and draw connections. Rebuilding the clue board alone took most of 2023 after early testers found the first version confusing.

Almost quitting, twice

We almost quit twice. Both times a stranger emailed to say the demo made them cry.

Nina Cho, co-founder of Two Owls Games

The first near-quit came in late 2022, when Avery’s brother needed his laptop back and the founders had to scrape together money for a replacement. Both were tired and broke, and they spent a weekend seriously discussing returning to studio jobs. On Sunday night, an email arrived from a player in Oregon who had tried a free demo the team had released at an online festival. The player wrote that a scene about a lonely lighthouse keeper had made them think of their late grandfather.

The second came in 2024, after a publisher deal fell apart at the last minute. Again, the founders talked about stopping. Again, an email arrived, this time from a teacher in Georgia who said her students had been arguing for a week about who had committed the demo’s central crime. “We printed both emails and taped them to the wall,” Avery said. “They’re still there.”

Help from the community

Instead of signing with a publisher, the founders decided to release the game themselves. A small crowdfunding campaign in 2024 raised enough to hire a composer and a part-time tester. A growing community of fans on their forum and social channels played early builds, reported bugs and suggested improvements, several of which made it into the final game.

Here’s what the founders say made the biggest difference during development:

• A strict weekly schedule that separated paid work from game work
• Releasing a free demo early and listening closely to feedback
• Building a small, loyal community years before launch
• Cutting features that didn’t serve the mystery, including a fishing minigame
• Keeping the budget tiny, from secondhand chairs to a borrowed laptop

The launch

Hollow Pines sold 200,000 copies in its first week, enough to fund their next game. The founders watched the launch numbers climb from Avery’s kitchen with a few friends and family members, and Cho admits she cried when the game passed 100,000 sales on its third day.

Critics have been just as warm. Respawn’s own review called it a cozy mystery with sharp teeth and praised its writing and gorgeous pixel art. Players have flooded forums with theories about the town’s secrets and fan art of its residents.

The launch wasn’t flawless. A save-file bug affected a small number of players in the first two days, and the founders worked through a weekend to fix it. Avery answered support emails personally until three in the morning. “We’d spent five years with these players,” he said. “We weren’t going to hide from them when something broke.”

The success has changed things quickly. Two Owls Games moved into a small office in Columbus’s Short North neighborhood this summer and hired three new team members. Avery’s brother received a brand-new laptop as a thank-you. The founders say they want to keep the studio small.

Key takeaway: Five years, two near-quits and 4,000 hand-drawn frames later, two friends from a Columbus garage made one of the year’s best games by staying patient and listening to players.

What’s next for Two Owls

The founders are already working on their next project, though they won’t say much yet. Cho hinted that it will be another story-driven game with hand-drawn art, and Avery said it won’t take five years. “Maybe three,” he joked.

For other small teams, they offer simple advice: protect your health, keep your costs low and release something early so real people can tell you what works. “You can’t make a game alone in a garage,” Cho said. “You need players. We just didn’t know they’d show up through our inbox at exactly the right moment.”