Could I make a living being an Indie Game Dev?

I have yet to see a product demonstration of Promethean AI in any context that leads me to believe they have an actual working product.

 

Yeah , Shenmue games already useds such tool to quickly place furniture for interiors.
I think the next level will be AI able to make 3D models and textures from photos or art references.

It's always better when it's crafted, like your pastry made in factory or made by someone, it's not the same quality

A nice C64 game

 

Yes that was a good game. Good one to inspire people maybe.

There were many great games I played on the C64. I like games that combine arcade action with a bit of depth and this is a great example. It was Will Wright's first game. Most people will know him better I'd guess for SimCity and The Sims.

Anyway, the Bungeling empire is a growing place. They research new tech and you will see this show up with the longer it takes you to destroy their factories the more advanced they will become as I recall. Boats, jets, etc. I'd guess this was his first experiment with making such an AI to manage resources, build factories, produce the various things you need to fight, etc. Which of course is quite different from simply saying hey it's been x minutes bring out the jets, etc although to the player the experience might feel the same (to me it seemed different having some kind of "model" at work beneath the action) for him it set the foundation to continue on that simulation path.

I often think many Indie devs today write all of those early games off as such simplistic things (which in some ways they are due to constraints) and many are probably much more involved than people realize. You just can't go by screenshots of them.

 

Just seen this, it's really sad when someone is having some bit of fun in VR, but he doesn't realize he is alone while he should have real friends for such event party, something VR can't replace.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BqF6AXFBlyn/

Back to pixels, another game with great art reminds me a bit of HyperLightDrifter

 

I think Max Weisel is probably doing just fine for himself.

 

I don't know the guy and i'm not interested in follow him, i just found the relayed video and i found it was a really sad moment.

 

Yep, extreme sports, sex, traveling and seeing exotic places is always better todo in real life.

 

It's like five minutes out of the dude's day. Do you... seriously not ever just goof off for five minutes on your birthday?

 

Ha ha. I went to dentist office last week and was packed. Every person except for myself and another older guy was sitting there with heads down staring at their cell phones fingers scrolling probably browsing their FB feeds. 10 out of 12 people lost in their own little worlds completely immersed in a virtual world and probably forgot at times they were even sitting in the waiting room. I've done it before too. Get lost in the sea of information delivered by the small rectangle.

Max might have friends just they weren't around or maybe one was recording the video? Or he might just be a loner type. Or just being silly? The birthday aspect I guess makes it seem a little unusual.

That game has nice graphics.

 

I don't know, i thaugh it was celebrating it's birthday alone, it's supposed to be some important event, you never know lol

It was about it's birthday event, not something as common ad waiting in a room and reading your phone.

Yeah a very promising one

 

Strange thoughts.
You don't know if his colleagues are not standing behind a door, or other corner and laughing hard, while he is performing.

 

I hope it's not the real and only birthday event he got lol

 

Yeah I was just mentioning it is a bigger thing in general. It was "common" to actually speak to other people in the waiting rooms. So I think it is more of a cultural shift in general. That's just how I see it. Doesn't matter where people are a good number of them will be lost in a virtual world of one kind or another. I am "lost" briefly in one right now.

Seems like it might be easier develop a low poly 3D game in Unity than a 2D game? For you I mean. Unless you specifically are interested only in 2D games. Thinking you could make some very simplistic models for human sword warrior, wizard, dwarf with axe and elf with bow. Use color as a big visual indicator of which is which. But can give them simple weapon props. Then just take the same models color them different & make the models a little more triangular as in "pointy" and there's your hordes. Knock out some cube floors, walls and ceilings for dungeons and there is a base environment. Of course can always iterate on models in future. Mainly just saying it would probably be less work to go with 3D than 2D and Unity seemed better suited for 3D than 2D "out of the box". Might have changed but used to be that way.

 

Me too lol
Anyway , i think we manage how much we can stay lost.
While there is forums where i see the same people like all time lost and all the day long non stop, that's sad for them.

2D Tiles are easy to make, but i find for example a simple3D character without details more easy with sculpting, 3D tiles or 3D environment is not very hard but it asks more work than just painting 2D tiles.
Unity is doing well in 2D with many new features and tools, but some people prefer the simplicity of a fully 2D engine and editor like Game Maker , Construct 3 , Love 2D for example. Godot was mainly 2D , last version is strong on 2D and simple to use.
I would find lot more simple to make 3D gauntlet with simple cubes (like the dark souls 3D cube game lol) , because there is no limits and problems with characters rotations.

Another great graphics style game

 

That instagram floating camera in the birthday is definitely sentient

 

Anyway, let's focus on the game, this was some side discussion like million things we can discuss lol

 

Definitely a person needs to find the right framework & workflows that suit them so I understand that. I can't seem to use any of these big GUI-based game engines... well I can use them but it isn't as productive or enjoyable for me as it could be.

As we've said many times it just comes down to the person and there are so many options today it would be silly for everyone to force themselves to use the exact same thing anyway.

That game looks like a perfect scope for a small team like theirs. They seem to have been able to smartly reuse the assets to make a big world and one more to add to the list of visual styles.

For my own part I decided to go ahead and add the powerups. Then I will wrap up the game and see how it is. Thought that might be a good compromise and also once these are implemented and the other remaining work is complete then adding one or two micro game modes will not seem like such a big deal. Sometimes you have to trick yourself. Lol

 

BY the way they updated their video

 

This video answers some of my questions. It seems it does understand context and such. Obviously there has to be a limit though. Be interesting to see what happens when you say create a forest... add a treehouse.... OR build a castle... can it work at that level? idk. It's not of much use to me really but people striving to make movies or kind of sort of AAA-like games will probably find it useful.

When they make a tool that actually creates the art itself in this manner instead of just building the scene out of assets you provide now that will truly be of great interest to me. I don't know how much I would actually use it for game content but it would be very interesting.

 

@zenGarden the reason I mentioned the idea of using very simple 3D models (I mean very simple pretty much cube or other primitive-based) is because I still believe as long as the game is actually good & interesting there is an audience for it.

Thinking about it I remembered one of the best examples I have seen which I think would maybe fit your game very well is Cube Destroyer.

I like this style a lot for a gauntlet inspired game (and it works great for this game too imo). It's interesting with a huge amount of readability to me at least.

But imagine taking that view and in your case you do just enough to give a hint of a sword warrior, axe warrior, archer and and a wizard with staff. And the nice thing about these kind of visuals is that it would be super easy to allow players to customize a lot more things to their liking. Like you could start with a default set of colors for these like just use primary colors blue, red, green and white then have a set of more "artsy" hues and finally a set of pastel colors. Super easy to do in this context but means a huge amount to the players. Maybe lose the red for a player character because red for enemies reads very well. Maybe have a light blue sword warrior and a dark blue axe warrior.

Anyway, then you can focus on building an awesome game out of it. Yours would be much more involved and more interesting I think than this one. I think this camera distance and the shadows looks good. And making the content should be quite straightforward. Of course you'd have to spend the time thinking of how to make each enemy and collectible but ultimately if you tell the player this red colored cube the same size as your character is an orc and this rectangular longer magenta color cube is a dragon and this small sphere (or maybe use pyramid shapes or whatever for collectibles with color indicating the kind) is an apple, etc that is how they will read them. They will end up associating those things with those objects "that damn dragon friend me again!" even though it is just basically just a magenta colored cube.

Oh you might want to check out that developer's Tank Destroyer game on Steam too.

 

...That's it? This is the product?

ffs this is basically just a blender plugin with bounding boxes and a dictionary of assets. I've made things like this for my own Unity projects.

 

I'm really disappointed lol

I think he is just starting is own business, but i don't find the product great until i would make a game mostly indoor with repetitive rooms and repetitive assets.

It's some sort of auto placement objects helpers using objects and room data for relationships.
It's not ai able to create rooms from scratch, creating models and textures from scratch , or guessing what objects are where they should be placed based on a simple photo. This is what i expect from ai full generation from a simple photo.

This reminds me Dungeon Architect or precedural buildings.

This will be great when ai will be able to read some city and buildings theme from a simple photo, then generate any variations.

An evolution most game creators need, and that is not enough present, is procedural generation tools included directly as feature of 3D engines editors.
Want to create different type or rocks, buildings, roads or objects, then use procedural tools included in the 3D engine as basic functionality.
Terrains procedural option systems should also be native in all 3D engines editors.

Instead of needing to buy x or y plugin or use x or y modeler and have to import models.
It's not the case because 3D engines consider procedural tools as external or plugins instead as fundamental 3D editor tools or in game real time procedural.
So you'll even wait lot more for other more powerfull ai system assets creation lol

I don't like the design, i think they missed it.
Floor textures should not have grain noise and details, they don't match with the cubes simplicity, or level should be cartoony shader. They are more then simple cubes, i don't know but i find full red and blue don't work they should used some pastel less intense color.
Unlike the dark souls cube game, this one looks exactly like a prototype without beeing coherent about art direction mixing bad color choice, texture not fitting, 3D models not cubes or should be more detailed.
I think even static low poly characters just sliding would fit better.
Anyway it's perhaps my own taste , i don't know, but it's possible to make a game using cubes, but it must have some theme and some simplistic art guidelines to stay coherent and look good like the dark souls cubes game.

 

I don't know anyone can live good with game programming (indie) but I have a sentence: one cannot get rich without engaging in trade, why??? stop touch your keyboard minutes and listening words... outside, there's a country which they always proud of that they're best imitation people in the world, they can make Apple scary, let Mark Zuckerberg must leave his kingdom to walk under polution air, even they can convince Supercell sold out their brainchild because power of $$$, Do You-Know-Who you are? by the way, they're good when understanding gamer mentality, for example, I will show a screenshot from a game which they made and it really spreading in my community.



in social, you can be zero, but when joining this game, you can become hero, house, servant and ... wife, but to enjoy romantic feeling, you must pay for it if you don't have enough patience & lucky, "it's suck, I won't give any penny for it" well, uhm okay... really outside there's lot of forever-alone people just you don't see them and that is target which this game kind want direct to, so, what plan? frameworks to create similar games kind appeared countless outside, you only search something on google, bargain to get source code, edit language and upload market, tomorrow morning, you can lie on the beach, get cocktail and read revenue report, you can assume as I am iiar about above things which I said, same as no one organized deep web existing if they don't see it, thanks reading!

 

Lol yes I said simple cube and other primitive based models. Sure you can use multiple cubes even for arms and legs if want and can even animate them. But not necessary other than adding visible sword, axe, bow, staff weapons and a frame or two of animation for the attacks. Mainly I was getting at the camera distance and angle is quite good. It should work well with such simple models. It would be a complete waste of time to make finely animated super detailed models when the bulk of the details couldn't be seen anyway.

And for the colors right... when I think about using these kind of visuals I am thinking about all of benefits and playing to the strengths. I mentioned you can provide multiple palettes... allow player to choose which one they want. It is super easy to style it all just setting the color of the objects. Same for showing one sword is stronger than another... maybe default sword is medium gray. Stronger sword is light gray. Strongest sword is white.

I do think some of the floors are overkill for sure but who knows what the builders wanted (not the game dev but the virtual beings living there who built the virtual floors). A few of them fit well I think. Sure you can adjust the colors as desired.

Anyway just thought I'd throw it out there. That game has done quite well much better than many Indie games.

 

Think of it as 2D and color palettes, you must have good colors choices in 3D also.

The floors keep your attention because of detailed textures vs cubes colors not textured.

Glad it worked for them
So you know you can also do it LOL

 

I agree... I place a lot of importance on color. More on that than anything probably.l

EDIT: I see color as probably the most important aspect for VISUALS I mean. Lol Not the most important thing for a game period.

 

Back to subject of thread... it really comes down to figuring out what you want to do what you would enjoy doing and finding people who would appreciate it enough to pay for it.

I've often thought the ideal for me would be to build a subscription business where I knock out one or two tiny games per month. Kind of a membership / subscription thing where I can just either make whatever in heck I want to period exploring "crazy ideas" or making whatever in heck I want for a specific genre of games or specific subject (games about elephants... text adventures... 80s style single screen platform games, all games based only on cubes, only games on or about the moon, etc).

That for me would be the absolute ideal. And is definitely possible there are enough people out there just need to find them which would take some time and work of course.

But yeah basically do like one or two game jam level projects per month and get paid for it. That would be a lot of fun.

Really there are so many ways to do things probably a main thing holding people back is not clearly defining the business model. What do they want to do. And the plan... how will they make it happen. Seems like a lot of people are working hard. Very hard even but maybe they lack a clear direction as to the business side? I think maybe so.

 

When its is passion but money get involved, yeah it's a bit more complicated lol

There is already Microsoft game pass, for an indie to propose a small and retro games per month the price should be really low, it would become your main job because it's too short one month until you work all day long and night on the game, or the game would be something very simplistic.
Why not making mobile ? That's almost the same ? each game you create each month you publish it with a price.
While creating some game service, you must deliver a game per month as a service you provide, when you can't release a game for some reasons, things could get quickly complicated for you LOL

Perhaps there would be some niche players for your game service.
I can only say, do what you like, try making some game pass and see if that works ?
I like the idea, it's something new you could try.

 

Well Microsoft game pass and other subscription services would have little impact on it. And one or two games per month would be very achievable. Obviously if doing it very part-time I would go for one game per month. They would be ultra tiny focused perhaps a bit rough around edges etc. Not retro games. It could be retroish games. But the key is just tiny games period. That's the critical part for producing the games for such a service. Needs to be tiny games that you would enjoy developing that can be completed in about 7 to 10 days .

The scope of what can be produced in a week will grow over time as your library of code, graphics & sounds increases. But the games themselves could be anything. They could be 3D. They could be games all done with primitives and that is the angle. They could be all games about pit bulls. Or all games testing out "crazy ideas". It could be all science games like evolution, basic ai, gravity, etc. Super small basically like weekend game jam games in scope. That doesn't mean they couldn't have many levels or a decent play time just they would be quite focused around one or two mechanics or ideas.

Absolutely it can be done. I guarantee right now there are already many people doing this kind of thing either making a good chunk of extra money every month or even living off it completely. Again it's going to be people you almost never hear about on sites like Polygon and so forth because they do not fit the mold of trying to make ultra huge complex super shiny games and instead are taking a different approach for a different audience. And for the most part I am sure they are quite happy with most people outside their target audience not even knowing they exist.

To me it's a smart model because if you can do what you enjoy doing and also have a much more constant flow of income month to month that is pretty much golden imo. Not to mention you can also work on bigger projects over time and maybe once per year or two might release one of those as an upsell. Of course give the subscription folks a deep discount like 50% over what everyone else would be charged through Steam, itch, gamejolt, Kartridge, etc.

But again... it is not a matter of try it and see it if works. It will work it's a question of does a person want to spend the effort & time to build up such a business and how long would it take them to build it up to the point that they are happy with the income from it.

Like any other model it takes work. It always comes down to building a business and that takes time no matter what the business model itself is. Locating that target audience... the best ways to reach them... reaching them bit by bit slowing building up the userbase over time and sticking with it long enough for it to grow into something worthwhile financially.

Anyway I was just sharing that idea for the benefit of the thread. Thought it might be possibly be a model many people hadn't considered.

 

I was thinking the asset store might be really handy for this model because a person could basically find some nice assets and build games around the assets.

Anyway I decided to do some searching to see if I could find any. I knew it would be very hard because most people doing this kind of thing are quite likely part of specialized communities and as such would be seen more as that then a game business or game developer.

But I still went on a hunting mission.

I found this site that while offering a bunch of Free Online Math Games (and this would fit well probably with using assets from the UAS) seems to do so as a lead-in to their two different levels of subscription service.

I found this site which seems more geared to teachers but I don't know much about it. I look at this like there are a lot of educational sites online and many of them don't have any kind of games so an enterprising game dev could make a couple simple educational games and approach such sites (do some research first to try to find some that seem to have a lot of people using the site) about partnering up by making educational games they offer through a subscription service to their community and try for a 50/50 split. At any rate here is a video I found while digging inside trying to see what in heck this one actually is about (again I wouldn't suggest this one rather helping other perhaps less formally oriented sites to be able to do a similar kind of thing). Go to the 1:40 mark to see the game.

This one I found is nearly spot on about making tiny "crazy idea" games except they are "making experimental games". But they literally say these 4 young Indies are making 1 new game every 2 weeks. And they already have an income of $2,700 per month and appears to have launched on January 1st of this year. I think that is really good to have built up to this level already. Here is their video.

This one seems to be a subscription service for $8 per month to get 4 new piano skills learning games every month.

That's all I found. It is so difficult to find such things because as soon as you enter terms such as subscription games or games every month you get bombarded with the huge businesses like Humble Bundle, Xbox Live, etc, etc, etc. This is why it is vital to be in communities outside of games and game dev. There you will either find people doing this or YOU can be the one doing it.

Still the fact I found these in one sitting (and especially those dudes actually making 1 tiny experimental game every 2 weeks) should be enough to show yeah... Indies can do this. Just have to think out of the box and not just bombard Steam and mobile and other stores competing with so many Indies and instead do your own thing.

 

Oh kind of unrelated but just wanted to mention that during my search I also came across this...

Old School RuneScape and here is the Twitter account.

And the blurb says... Relive the challenging levelling system and risk-it-all PvP of the biggest retro styled MMO. Play with millions of other players in this piece of online gaming heritage where the community controls the development so the game is truly what you want it to be!

Which would seem to be rather strong evidence that making games that look like this...

is not an issue to your success. I mean all of these people certainly don't have to be playing this game. They are doing so because they want to.


Alright... again I am just throwing this stuff out here with the idea being it might actually help someone to get an idea for an Indie game business they could build and one day make a living from making games they enjoy making. Just offering suggestions for a different way of looking at it other than the constant "you have to work your ass off for months (maybe years) when developing your games and you have to make the best of the best top quality all the way around blah blah blah" mindset that is pushed all the time. So it is all meant well as a hopefully helpful thing.

 

All these "ugly" games also have zero friction toward play, helpt by having low requirement graphics

 

The game graphics always evolved, still not trying to be AAA, i would not be surprised there will be another graphics iteration later lol

The game success is about content i think, i played it some hour some time ago, it was not bad, but i didn't find it was so good, not enough dynamic, graphics was not so great when i could play games with more engaging graphics, or perhaps it's not my style of mmo game.
I'm among those that will not pay 2 or 3$ for prototype looking games or very simplistic ones when i can spend time on a better game.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-l...UTF8&qid=1542286391&sr=1-3&keywords=fable+360

Educational games is another way if you really like that, while it will perhaps not be as fun as making crazy games ?

There is many game dev people with online tutorials subscription or courses you buy, you could teach how to make games.It's cool because you can deliver tutorials as you make some game at your own speed.
Again will you find it fun ?

Patreon is different, there is many game developers making patreon to support their work, some also give shaders , tutorials or code.
https://www.patreon.com/minionsart
This is perhaps the one among other easy way to allow access to games you make and get money support.

To get a personal store, you'll have to get a server and manage licenses, game bug fixes and licenses support, it will take time on your personal free time outside of making the game.

Anyway, it's up to you to find what works for you about making money from your games.
Whatever you choose to use your own store, mobile, patreon or anything else.

 

True but these are different cases. The game I linked above is specifically for Old School RuneScape that was brought back due to high demand and looks like the video. That's reason I shared that. There are millions of people who have chosen to play this old school version instead of (or possibly for some in addition to) playing the newer improved graphics version. They are two separate things.

And yes for sure I think that is clearly it... the older version something about the gameplay experience people enjoy much more. It's much like Diablo 3. There were millions of people who preferred playing the more primitive in comparison looking Diablo 2.

Basically I am just saying people believe the stuff they hear constantly about graphics thinking they have to strive to produce professional artist quality graphics or nobody will play their games. If you want to produce that level of graphics then by all means do it. If you do not want to spend so much time on graphics (or are not an artist) and would rather spend that time on the game then you can do that.

In the end there are plenty of people who will appreciate a great game pretty much in spite of how it looks. There's even a strong chance many of those people prefer the more primitive looking visuals over the fancier visuals.

Basically just saying people shouldn't continually lump all people into one basket constantly telling people you have spend the time or money to make visuals of a certain "quality" and telling people if they can't then spend time improving their art skills. That is a very close-minded view that obviously doesn't match reality.

Just focus on making good (or better) interesting games and finding people who appreciate them.

 

That's great, i think the game must have good rpg system with good content and interesting story and dialog.
I'm not sure the game become popular so much quickly when it started.

Sure, there is lot of people that will like simple retro graphics, i think it really depends on the game and what player expects about graphics.

There is Spyro remake, i can tell i would not play the original PS One while i would play the new remake for sure.
I always found N64 games graphics better, because no imprecision math jittering and better textures filter.


Or a game like Horizon, once you played it you would not want to play a downgraded PS2 version for example lol

While i'm playing Batman on Snes mini and enjoying it a lot more than many indie platformer games.



So yeah, sometimes low rez graphics doesn't matter and can still have some charm when well crafted.
It really depends on the game and what player likes.

Sure, there should be games different graphics from low rez to high rez for anyone, because there is audience for any style (if the game overll is not a crappy game lol)

You are speaking for yourself ( you know what you have to do )

 

Lol yep. And soon I will have another break from here. My 4-day holiday weekend is coming up real soon. The 4 retro calenders I ordered from a fella I met onTwitter came in a couple days ago. Lives over in England or maybe it was Ireland. Anyway not sure what I will do with 4 2019 calendars but they were all cool so I got one of each kind he made ZX Spectrum games, C64 games, Amiga games and Arcade games one game for each month.

I mentioned I want to check out that modern day FREEZE C64 mini magazine next and the dude said "I subscribe to that and have a duplicate copy of one of the issues around here someplace I'll throw it in the box." Sure enough he did. And yesterday I ordered my C64 Mini supposed to be here tomorrow. So 4 day weekend will be reading the mini mag checking out the C64 Mini and doing some game dev.

 

I think you'll enjoy the C64

 

Yeah it will be cool to have it. I had a C64 long ago. Some of the games are quite good and some are terrible. Terrible controls and such. This latest model has great support to load games on a USB plug that in and you can then play all of those games on the C64 mini instead of just the 64 built-in ones. I bought the C64 Forever & Amiga Forever emulators several years back and they came with a lot of legit disk images for games so I can just load a bunch on a usb and play them on the tv as well. Looking forward to trying it out.

Also has the C64 BASIC available and you can plug in a keyboard. I wrote a C64 assembly language program a year or so back first one in decades. So it will also be kind of fun to be able to do some more of that turn it into an image and try it out on the mini. I won't do all of that in the near future just saying at some point. I have so many things I want to do and never time to do them all. I've never understood the numerous people irl I have heard say "I am bored". I just can't relate to it at all. One day I will be retired and all of that extra time from not having a job will be immensely appreciated.

Hey that Batman screenshot is the NES Batman not SNES. Is that actually the one you are playing on the SNES mini?

 

I would rather play the spyro on emulator that uprez the game that the new one, the graphics have shadow that break form and silouhette and give me headaches, while the original was perfectly readable. I always made at people who just make hi def graphics without taking into account the graphical legibility

 

The remake is 30 fps wich is really bad, looks like the game was not optimized on Unreal 4 (no material and models LOD, occlusion zones etc ...). They just throw 3D models and that's it lol
It's a remake , they don't expect the same sales as some triple A games, so they must have some limited budget to work on the game and must do compromises.

 

That is relative point of view.
For many will be more than sufficient.

 

Whatever is games or anything else, it's easy to scatter in many things and never go deep enough on something. It's a matter of focus, i think you need to select less things to do and do them instead. Perhaps that extra time will be to run your own game company lol

I tried it and it gives me headache, specially when turning the camera, it's not the first game at 30fps giving that feeling.
Until you got some TV that is 100hz and smoothing the game frames, it's not good, better play on PC.

 

LOL! Well first I am a sort of 50/50 inside/outside person. As much as I enjoy playing games and making games I enjoy being out of the house walking, hiking, working on the yard, etc. I like a balance.

I've done the entrepreneurial thing a few times so far in my life having a business. Offline building applications & websites for local businesses and online building an affiliate marketing business. Once had a business with 2 friends with a vending machine route we had 100 vending machines. Always been quite entrepreneurial but things change. So I did my own thing for a while then got a job for a while. Do my own thing for a while. Got a job again. So... maybe... I've had a little interest in an Indie game business for a while now but then I think of all of the work and decide it can wait a while longer. Lol

I know a person can build a business from it... question is do you want to spend the energy & time doing so. It's very satisfying on the one hand and a lot of work on the other. Like when I did the IT business for example difference is at a job someone else (sales team) handles all of the marketing & customer acquisition and I just focus on design & development, someone else (installation services team) deploys & trains people on software. Someone else (accounting) invoices them and is sure we get paid. Someone else handles the frontline support for aftercare. etc. In contrast when I did it as a business I did all of the marketing, I had the meetings with potential customers, I prepared the quotes, I did the actual development, I wrote user manuals, I showed up to install the software, train them on it & hand them the user manuals to refer to, I invoiced them and then started all over again to find the next project while providing aftercare for the previous customers as needed. That is exciting and tiring.

So when I think of being an Indie Game Developer that is how I look at it. Although I do think it will be much less involved than running an offline IT business. Still if I am going to do it then it needs to be as exact to my ideal for the game dev part as possible. Because the actual game design & development is only one piece of the business. There is other work involved from marketing and building the customerbase to technical support and interacting with the community in general, etc. Making games is the easy part imo IF a person doesn't make this part much more difficult and time consuming than it needs to be.

 

Sometimes I think a good way to go would be to just hire people to do the actual game development. Find some ambitious young people who can develop very quickly & solidly and have them develop the games a person designs. Then that person can focus on just building a business. Of course that does remove the joy of the actual game development and I'm not sure many people could do the development "properly" (i.e. cheap, fast & solid) lol but something worth considering.

 

Thats ok, if you not doing this as hobby, but mainly for selling. Is difficult to maintain something, if is written by others.
Unless you set concrete rules, you may don't like how code was written. Then what, rewriting all again? Or accept as it is, providing is working.

I suppose, as hobby, you would like continue dev of our game forever, while watching others enjoying it. Weather it is possible, or not that different matter. However, I know person who does that for quite few years, with a single game.

 

Yeah that's the big problem with programming in general it is extremely rare to have 2 people even out of 100 do things the same unless it is "new" people where it is obvious they are pretty much following the same tutorials or something along those lines.

I guess I could try it and see how it goes. Head to itch or GJ and find some games I consider well made very solid and then contsct those people. My main "rules" would be absolutely no added complexity. Keep the code as flat as possible as clear as possible don't abstract just because you enjoy abstraction but absolutely modularize and use meaningful naming conventions, object pooling, etc.

Anyway yeah it is a real challenge finding people at the same point in their programming journey.

 

It's team projects, there can be amateurish or pro with money involved and agreements.
The best combination is a coders and an artists working together.

I remember joining a newbie team for fun on some project they had good ideas, but many worked not enough and many left. The guy who was leader, gave the impression we wanted others to do the game for him for free and perhaps sell it without talking money with others LOL

Team work will do better when there is money involved, it's more motivation for people.
Starting with a detailed project and content makes people lot more confident to join, they know there has been lot of research and work to define the game and it's not just "let's make a beat them up".

There is jobs as designer, game director, coder, graphics, perhaps you would like a job as game designer ?

 

Yeah a few years back I was hiring people to do art when I was still testing out different frameworks and such. I did enjoy hiring people to do the art. It worked out well. When people work for me like that I generally send them extra money at Christmas as well. Depends on how much I have worked with them / how much they have done.

I probably would almost certainly hire someone to do the graphics for going Indie. Heck I mean I hired for several completely free hobby games in the past. One I spent $600 on low rez graphics and never even finished or released it. Actually there was another one like that too. Lol

I always look for passionate artists who are not artists. Er... I mean there are a lot of people who are working jobs they don't really like and making graphics is their passion. They do it all the time for free for sheer enjoyment. Because they do it every day they are super fast & good. So offering them money they are super happy ti actually get paid to do something they love to do. Works out very well.

I am very cautious on teams. I have tried teaming up with others to make games several times in my life since the Amiga days. Of those only one time did a game get completed. I'd much rather it just be my thing and I hire help.

If you can find the right people to team up with I do think sure it will work but finding likeminded people who can stay excited after 2 to 3 weeks is very difficult.

Anyway part of why I am thinking about it again now is because I finally found a great dev environment that works extremely well for me. That makes a huge difference and you probably wouldn't believe how many different ones I tested. Lol

In other news my C64 mini arrived today.

 

Another thing on the teams at least in my experience with it is people looking to team up seem to have such ridiculous ideas. I start out thinking & pitching "let's come up with a very tiny game can be something we make up or it can be making our version of a very early arcade game. This way we can get firsthand experience working together, work through any issues, make the process more efficient, etc and see how we gel as a team. You can come up with the idea or if you want me to I will choose something" and the vast majority of people I have encountered that are looking to team up are focusing on these ridiculous size projects. Massive game projects despite never having worked together not even knowing if the team can work well together not having an opportunity to improve processes or anything.

So that is a big thing to watch for. Of course there is also the part where I see it like if we are all working and there are 2 or more people involved then we should be able to make a very good (tiny!) game in just a few weeks time. I mean some people make some pretty cool stuff in a weekend game jam.

I think although there are benefits to having multiple people working on a game there are also many benefits to staying solo. You don't have to answer to anyone or debate things to death, take votes, etc. And even then maybe the decision ticks someone off. "Oh no lil Jimmy is no longer talking ever since Big Bob told him his idea was crap" If you want to work you work. If you need to take a night or two off then you take take a night or two off without someone crying about it. It's just a lot simpler.

But there are benefits of teaming up and obviously some people do it successfully. Seems like many get that first "test" project from teaming up in a game jam and continue working as a team after.

 

You know, that was to solve that exact same problem and some more "game jam" where invented, deadline will cut short all the crap, and since it was organized by a core team of dedicated people they set the example, now game jam are a tradition. The whole "you can't make a game alone" or "you can't make a game in a week" are now myth, and that was before access to good game production tool.