91
How do solo devs make an entire game themselves? M
(discuss.tchncs.de)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
91 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
44149 readers
1271 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
One thing I'll throw out there is while there are rare cases where a solo dev really does everything themselves, when you see a really ambitious looking result from a supposedly solo dev, it's very likely they either contracted things out, bought/found assets, or had on and off help from people. It's only solo in the sense it's their vision and they get to put things together/make all the final calls on the game.
Making stuff solo is hard. I'm doing it right now and I'm purposely trying to use a lot of stock assets for art and music because the game alone is already a massive task by itself. Don't be afraid to use what's out there. If your game feels good to play most people will never worry about whether you hand built every blade of grass. In other words, go for as small a scope as you can, and don't be afraid to cut corners.
Thanks. This is likely very true, I think Stardew Valley is a game where the dude did it all, but I guess that’s the exception and most games are collaborative efforts.
People like that really aren't fair, are they? Save some talent for the rest of us. 😅
It's worth noting the dude worked his ass off and had financial support to pay living expenses from his partner:
Not diminishing his accomplishments at all, but I think it's always good to compare effort to effort, resources to resources, rather than simply team size. Most people can't spend 4 years with that pace without investment backing.
If you end up going in the Godot direction, a friend of mine has some useful tools to easily get started on animation rigging and controllers here.
He got started a couple years ago with no game dev experience, and he's done a couple of game jams recently, but most of his time has been spent building workflow tools. A couple months ago he finally got around working on one of the original games that he's wanted to make since he started.