About Absolutely Skint | Indie Games & Manga by Pistol Taeja
I run Absolutely Skint. It's just me — Pistol Taeja — making indie games and manga out of a home setup that is, at any given moment, approximately three unpaid invoices away from becoming someone else's problem.
The name isn't a brand exercise. It's a description of the budget.
What Absolutely Skint actually is
Absolutely Skint is a one-person indie studio. No team. No publisher. No office with a ping-pong table. Just me, a drawing tablet, a compiler, and a worrying number of browser tabs.
I make two things: games and manga. They usually come from the same source — a stupid idea I can't let go of until I've turned it into something you can actually play or read.
On the games side, the main project right now is P For Pistol, a game I've been building and rebuilding and rethinking for longer than I care to admit. Before that came Pan Airways — Papers Please at an airport, but with more apes. Then there's Enemy of the State and GRILLFRIENDS, both sitting in various states of "nearly there" that translate roughly to "I've started them".
On the manga side I've got A Boy Named Dorothy, which is exactly the kind of title that makes people do a double take. There's also Strangebaby, Kongoland, and a comic called Salaryman that started as six rough MSPaint sketches I sent to an artist on a dare. Spoiler: it became a real chapter.
Who is Pistol Taeja
I'm a developer and creator. I've worked in the games industry professionally and I build websites as a side hustle that funds the stuff I actually want to make. That's not a complaint — it's context. The day job pays for the dream job. The dream job is Absolutely Skint.
I've been making things since before I knew what to call it. The earliest incarnations were embarrassing enough that I'm not going to describe them here, but they exist and I'm not entirely ashamed. You don't get better at something without making a lot of bad versions of it first.
The way I work is basically: come up with a ridiculous idea, obsess over it for too long, start building it, pivot slightly, rebuild, ship. Repeat. Sometimes the pivot takes me from "Black American baby Isekai'd into Korea" to "airport management game with apes". That's just how the process goes.
If you want a more accurate window into how my brain works, the SEO article I wrote is a decent place to start. I wrote it partly to explain my own thinking and partly because the irony of an indie dev writing an SEO post about why indie devs shouldn't do SEO was too funny to pass up.
Why "Absolutely Skint"
"Skint" is British slang for broke. The "absolutely" is for emphasis, because regular broke wasn't going to cut it as a studio name.
The honest version is that I started this with very little money and a lot of ideas, and that ratio has stayed pretty consistent. Every project gets made on whatever is left over after actual life happens. The budget is not a talking point, it's the constraint that forces the decisions. When you can't afford to make something big and bloated, you have to make something tight and weird instead. I prefer weird.
There's also something clarifying about a name that sets expectations upfront. Nobody looks at "Absolutely Skint" and thinks they're getting a AAA studio. They know what they're in for. I like that honesty.
What's currently in progress
P For Pistol is the main focus right now. It's a game with a visual style I'm genuinely proud of and a premise that makes sense once you play it. I've documented a lot of the development process on this site, including some honest writing about what it's like to make a game solo without a marketing budget or a Twitter following large enough to move the needle.
The manga work runs alongside it. A Boy Named Dorothy and Salaryman are both at various stages. Sometimes a manga project becomes a game concept. Sometimes a game concept becomes a manga. The boundaries are loose on purpose — I'm one person and I'd rather follow the idea than force it into a format.
If you want to understand how I actually approach building something from nothing, the manga writing guide I put together covers the full process from stupid first idea to finished chapter. Real examples, not theory.
Conclusion
That's Absolutely Skint. One person, a bunch of projects, a name that aged well.
If something on this site catches your interest, the best place to start is P For Pistol — it's where most of my energy is going right now and it'll give you a pretty clear idea of what this whole operation is about.