Can one man really make something respectable?

Of course I think!

1) If you feel good with the stuff you do - it's respectable.
2) Be sure what stuff you have to know/learn to do it.

So here is my story:

I'm doing it alone at the moment and I was waiting for this decision around 2 years. Yes! I was walking around this project like a tiger 2 years. You know what? From time to time the ideas came back, I was seing my planned character in mind, I still liked my story, I had new (I hope cool) ideas.

Around 1 month ago the decision was made. Put in stone. I will do it!

***BUT*** (yeah, this is the nasty "but-part" - must be!) ***BUT***

After the decision I made a plan how to do the project. This plan had a big, big number one rule: Be realistic! So I was working on my plan how to do the project working out some keyfeatures:

1) It will be done only by me
2) It will be done based on any helpful tutorial that is for free and could be found legal in the internet
3) It will be done with free and legal software
4) It will be done in my freetime
5) It will be done till the end
6) It will be done starting with a really small, basic version that covers the later gameidea, mechanics, story
7) It will be done seperating any aspect of the game into pieces to understand

Something like this.

I must say I was playing around with Photoshop and Truespace (and other rendering/animation software) 15, maybe more years now, i'm composing music for fun over 20 years, i know much much games since 1st computers came out.

If you have special stuff you can't do or things you don't want to do - some of this things could be override by the game structure. Everything is possible.

I wish you could see my first blender human. He is looking "kind of" human in the meaning he (or better it!) have a head, 2 arms, 2 legs and it is animated but I swear any alien would be frightend because it's so ugly and have hands like plates lol...

Wanna know more - ask!

PS: What many people do when they wanna do a game is following:

1) Plan: get a unknown girl next weekend
2) get a good job, buy a house, adopt 2-4 children, go bodybuilding, read much books to be intelligent enough
3) at weekend go to meet her and learn that she's married and will move to alaska tomorrow

Small ideas need roots - growing bigger they need wings! Don't learn to fly first...

 

Star Wraith 3D Games is one man who's been making and selling space sims for 20 years. He does all the scripting, art, voices, and sounds by himself. http://www.starwraith.com/ His newest game is a top seller on Steam.

 

Ummm is this that guy who made... don't remember the name - battleship? It was 10 years work and never worked properly

 

This is truly impressive.
The full games list : http://www.spacecombat.org/

 

This is words of gold! Really motivated me

 

I found the old game I read about long time ago... http://www.3000ad.com/games/battlecruiser-3000ad/

 

You are right of course. Still... if you pay people to do artwork, but keep creative control over the entire project, I think that's close enough

 

Derek Smart? No, it's not the same guy.

 

You will fail. Unless you drop ALL of your expectations. The latest Star Wars MMO cost $330 Million. Which is easily 1500+ man-years. It's unrealistic with so little experience for you to create a 'serious game' with a 'good story' and 'good level design' and 'great graphics'.

But don't get discouraged! Consider my story. My latest product went live on Saturday (link in Sig). It was four months of blood, sweat, and tears. The art is hand-drawn, and there's only 20 minutes of content. But, despite it's limitations, I created something meaningful - unlike any other Unity app every created!

You can too. But it takes time. And here's how you get there: build something tiny; release it; learn new skills; read books EVERY DAY. It's kind of like the instructions on the shampoo bottle: Learn. Do. Repeat as desired.

Good luck,
Gigi

 

2 weekends ago I went to iFest here in Seattle and listened to two presentations that were pretty good.

The first guy was the producer of a game called "hawken" which he said started as a team of 5 people living together working on a prototype they were able to shop to a publisher to get funding. He emphasized the importance of being able to demo your game, and constant play testing. He said he had a publisher go out of business and was able to shop the demo to another who picked it up, and it grew to a much larger team. He gave praise to both UDK and Unity, saying they've published games with both.

The second guy was the programmer for a game called "Spore" and he gave a speech on prototyping, saying everyone should take 20% of their teams time towards prototyping and exploring what's possible (but also limiting it to 20%). He walked through the stages that led up to "spore", basically he made 3 prototypes of different mechanics in openGL (when it was brand new) and then was able to sit down and figure out what kind of game they could make using their mechanics. The demo he ended up getting a publisher to fund was a bunch of circles, squares, triangles, nothing visually pleasing. But he had core mechanics that were amazing at the time (lots of volumetric stuff) and was able to sell the vision.

 

Make playable basics first: I am making a single player FPS (Ordenkar) on my own and my approach is to start with the basics and build my way up. I have one weapon, one enemy, one level and I refine it. The game will eventually have five more weapons and 11 more enemies, but I can work on that later. I did the basics necessary to make a playable game, so something has been brought to life. It's much more motivating to work on a project when you have something going already.

Use a back-burner list: I also keep a back-burner list for all the pipe dream ideas I have. Nothing on that list needs to be finished for me to have a completed project, it's all bonus. In this way the project stays doable with clear boundaries and yet I can also feel enthusiastic about what it could be. I can't imagine working on a project without a back-burner list.

Solo developing can be good for some: As a solo dev, you don't have to worry about conflicting ideas, programs or directions. You have complete control over everything and that can allow you to work more fluently. You don't have to train anyone on how to do stuff. But this is only useful for those with a broad range of skills like me, and the unfortunate fact is us jack of all trades are undesirable as we don't stand out exceptionally in any one area.

 

Awesome. I wonder why no game development studio has ever employed this guy... I mean we have a lack of decent space shooters for at least 10 years now (since the last Wing Commander or Freespace). With a little help in artwork and storyline his game could be polished up to an AAA title. Interesting are also the screenshots which show the progress over the years, and that he always built on top of the other, never getting bored by it. One can see, that it takes lots of years though...

 

Khyrid: Good way! Same way I do.

marctro: Please don't forget Freelancer and X...

mbublitz:

That's the way I meant...

Think about making a concert for 100.000 people. You will suffer. You will. I make any bet.

I made concerts for around 50 people to 250 people - just for fun. It was based on my knoledge, manpower and so on. Sure a big concert with Justin Bieber is a dream for many eventers... Not for me. I hate big concerts and also Justin Bieber. lol

If you wanna take a deep breath of doing a concert, make it local calculated for 10-50 people with cheap selfhanded flyers. It's kinda safe, not that expensive in money time and the official damage is small when it suffer.

Think about this and do Game = Concert

 

Tauchstation

 

I love this because I can solo build a house, so solo build a game here I come!!!
I know what you were trying to get across as I wasn't so discouraged as the OP but looking into game development there is alot of work to do and I was getting worried if I can do it. But Notch built minecraft solo for 6 months or so...

Thanks for the pep.

 

I think specialising in one aspect of game development and contracting/collaborating the rest of the work out is the way to go. It's more efficient and you'll end up with a better result.

If you've got the time and you want to master everything, it's going to take ages to do so, and in most cases you'll have a mediocre product across the board than if you had specialists in each field doing the work.

But hey you can still have a mediocre production that has amazing gameplay and concept, which of course is the exception.

 

I think you need to look at your overall goal. What makes your game stand out from the crowd? Sure we have games broken down into catagories, but is it innovative? What research have you done to bring something new to the table? As a genre of entertainment, theres only so much free for all people can take. gaming with story, interaction and challenge will always win over graphics. Look at everything mario. simple graphics. Interactive. challenge and gameplay win. What made Angry birds successful? Innovation. the game has a story. even though you are simply throwing a bird at a pig. The part that grabs you is that it hasnt really been done well before.

As a general rule, people will flock to new ideas. So if you can come up with something to insert into your game that hasnt been achieved yet, you will find that people will want to be apart of it.

 

From my hobbyists angle of view everything finished is something outstanding. It shows that you did something right.

 

Modern game studios don't care about the story/gameplay and do only what the player expect to find.
They use amazing graphics to hide this lack of interesting stuff.

This is how indies have to do if they want to release something interesting: focus on an interesting gameplay/story/univers/whatever and not on the graphics.

Story make games, not the other way around!

 

Another one-man-army game : http://kotaku.com/5917329/this-gorgeous-action+rpg-was-made-by-one-man
Looks very good