Iberante shouldn't exist
Some studios are born from opportunity. This one wasn't.
Iberante was born from stubbornness. The kind of conviction that doesn't go away no matter how hard you ignore it — that survives failure, and years, and versions of yourself you barely recognize. The belief that video games are capable of generating experiences as profound as any other art form. And that there was something only we could make.
That doesn't make it easier. It makes it inevitable.
A project that shouldn't have survived
Iberante didn't arrive all at once. It arrived after failed attempts, after moments when everything seemed about to click into place and didn't, after a pandemic that stopped what had been set in motion.
It could have been the end. For most projects, it would have been.
But there's something peculiar about people who make games: the inability to abandon an idea they believe is honest. So instead of giving up, the team that would become Iberante kept learning, kept building, waiting for the moment when preparation and circumstance would create something that could actually hold together.
That moment came in 2022.
Eight people and a Monday night
There was no office. No funding. What there was was the conviction that it was time to stop waiting for the right conditions and start creating the necessary ones.
The team formed the way real things form: slowly, improbably, through unexpected connections. A 3D artist who arrived through a friend of a friend. A programmer found on Stratos, the forum where the Spanish game industry has been talking about what it does for decades. People who had never met, but shared something hard to articulate and easy to recognize.
The team grew. And shrank. And grew again. There were people who contributed enormously and departures that hurt. There were moments when everything nearly stopped. What kept the project alive wasn't certainty — it was mutual accountability. The sense that stopping meant wasting the time of people who had bet on something they believed in.
Sometimes collective responsibility is more powerful than any individual motivation.
Two years later, we are eight. We meet every Monday from 7 to 10 PM. We work remotely, from different places, investing our free time. One game designer, one 2D artist, two 3D designers, one programmer, one animator, one sound designer and one composer. Eight people who chose to give what they have — not what's left over — to build something that didn't exist.
Why hell. Why now.
Iberante works on original IPs. Universes that couldn't exist in any other format, or have been created by any other team. That's not marketing — it's the only criterion that matters when we ask whether a project deserves to exist.
The first is called Project: Catalepsy.
It's a third-person action roguelike set in the circles of Christian hell. Dynamic combat. Procedural exploration. Permanent progression. A dark universe built in layers, designed for players who don't settle for the surface — who want to understand what lies beneath the mechanics, what each design decision means, what the world says about something beyond itself.
We didn't choose this project because it was the easiest or the safest. We chose it because it was the only one we could make — not any other team. Because the violence and the beauty and the darkness of that universe require a specific vision. And that vision is ours.
In 2026, Catalepsy was nominated for the European International Music Awards in the Best Game Music category. It's the first external recognition of something we already knew internally: what we're building has an identity of its own.
What comes next
The prototype is underway. We're close to seeking investment. And this blog is the first space where we'll document, with transparency and without filters, what it looks like to build an indie studio from scratch in Spain.
Not the milestones. Not the press releases. The real process: the hard decisions, the mistakes we wouldn't repeat, the things that worked better than expected.
If you're the kind of person who reads post-mortems before buying a game, this is for you.
Welcome to Iberante.
Project: Catalepsy — third-person action roguelike. Descend into hell. Fight. Progress. In development. Visit: catalepsygame.com