Sixteen solo-dev projects closed Sybil's second Berlin arc

Sybil calls itself a studio for the research, development, and distribution of “weird gaming,” and its Kreuzberg space has quietly become one of the more interesting rooms in Berlin—open around the clock to artists making games that fit neither the industry nor the white cube. In June, the studio's second six-month residency cycle closed with A WORLD of ONE's OWN (the solo-dev arc), a collective showcase of sixteen projects, curated and designed by Beth von Undall. The showcase announcement doubles as a census of who is making games alone right now, and it's a list worth saving.

The premise of the arc was the solo dev as a mythological figure. Sybil's open call argued that being a solo dev “has more to do with the autonomy of one's desire to create worlds” than with any claim to authorship or independence—a third path branching off the long-standing indie/AAA dichotomy. The showcase title runs the argument through Virginia Woolf: a room of one's own, upgraded to a whole world.

The residents include artists we'll be watching—Jira Duguid, Harriet Davey, Joaquina Salgado—alongside a longer roster the studio has hosted since 2025, from Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley to Trevor Paglen. That mix is the point. Killscreen has been tracking the space between contemporary art and game development since the “New Weird” in videogames, and Sybil is the first institution I've seen build its whole operating model on that borderland rather than visiting it. Founded in 2025, run by Alex Declino, Beth von Undall, and Stefan Cantante, it's an institution-shaped answer to a question most residencies haven't asked yet: what does support look like when one person is the whole studio?