Nathaniel McClure thought his resume would make it easy to break into the indie game industry. He worked at Activision for years, starting in 2002 with QA and quickly rising to producer on a host of AAA games, including Star Wars Jedi Knight 2, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and a lineup of Call of Duty games.

By 2007, McClure wanted out.

"It was 3AM when I woke up on my keyboard at the office," he told me. "I was a few milestones in, working on my fifth Call of Duty title on my fourth straight year of promotion, when it hit me. If I was to keep loving what got me into making games I would have to quit one of the largest and most popular video games in the world, something I dedicated years of my life to."

McClure resigned that year, when he was a producer on Modern Warfare. He started his own studio, Epicenter, with the goal of making games that he - and other people, he hoped - would want to play. But indie development came with its own brand of bureaucracy, and dealing with publishers, platforms, funding and legal matters made McClure's journey more complex than he imagined.

"I thought my Call of Duty and Wolfenstein credits would land me a dev deal no problem," McClure said. "I was an idiot - it doesn't work that way, and I am grateful that it doesn't."

In 2009 - two studios, a handful of unfulfilled publisher promises and a few indie releases later - McClure founded Scientifically Proven. This year he'll finish development on a gothic, eye-catching action platformer, and what might be his favorite game ever: Blood of the Werewolf.