With the twenty-first cen­tury comes a new breed of strug­gling inde­pen­dent artist: the indie game designer. Refus­ing to toil for major devel­op­ers, these inno­va­tors inde­pen­dently con­ceive, design, and pro­gram their dis­tinctly per­sonal games in the hope that they, too, may find success.

Super Meat Boy is the pride and pas­sion of designer Edmund McMillen and pro­gram­mer Tommy Refenes. Their orig­i­nal video game is their sole occu­pa­tion and after three painstak­ing years, they’re wait­ing to see it drop on Xbox LIVE. Will the masses embrace the highly antic­i­pated game or will it lan­guish in vir­tual oblivion?

Mean­while, devel­oper Phil Fish lives with the hype of his incom­plete game, Fez. The pres­sure is get­ting to him. Regard­less of their medium, every inde­pen­dent artist faces the anx­i­ety of never being noticed, or worse, falling short of expectations.

Guid­ing us through this world is sage Jonathan Blow, the mind behind Braid, one of the most suc­cess­ful inde­pen­dent games of all time.

First-time film­mak­ing duo Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky cap­ture the emo­tional jour­ney of these metic­u­lously obses­sive artists who devote their lives to their inter­ac­tive 21st-century art form.

Four devel­op­ers, three games, and one ulti­mate goal— to express one­self through a video game.

The music for Indie Game: The Movie is by Jim Guthrie, the Cana­dian musi­cian behind this year’s iOS hit, Super­broth­ers: Sword and Swocery EP. You can check his sound­track (‘The Bal­lad of the Space Babies’) and more of his great work on Band­camp.