If you were just great at programming, artwork, music and animation what game would love to make?

Completely blue sky dreaming but, let's say you had all the skills needed to make a game what game would you like to make or have made?

For me it would have to be a Halo style FPS with a bit of Half-life gravity gun action and a large world so you can fly around a massive battlefield.

And it would look a bit like this...

Like I said if you had all the skills what would be your dream game?

 

Would like to make a 3d fps puzzle game somewhen, but my 3d modeling skills are 'beginner' right now.

 

If I was an ultimate one man band, I would like to make a GTA/Sandbox type of game.

 

I would say anything Star Wars related, but that would require licensing rights in addition to the skills you listed for this thread.

 

Once I get into 3D (probably sometime next year) I will be targeting something like these:

Of course, I'll do a few 3D game projects first just to figure out the best way to do 3D games in Unity. Move my 2D game libs and such over to 3D and try to keep the same basic architecture. The first couple or so "scratch" game projects will be for that purpose.

I'm still completely satisfied with my 2D game projects at this point. And with that in mind I need to get back to work on my Halloween game which really needs to be completed today!

 

I would build a two player split screen battle game. Kind of reminiscent of mortal combat. Except instead of human characters I'd use boats and canons. I'd then build in some crazy water physics to make awesome waves and make the boats do awesome flips. Cause regular physics is boring.

 

Sounds familiar....

 

So twisted metal on the water? That might just be awesome.

 

I am kind of an ultimate one man band but you know you would still spend years making this magnum opus then collapse. I'd rather share game dev with other people... I don't want it to be a solitary experience.

If I do something myself it'd probably be retro or something.

 

You forgot few important pieces of the miracle:

also at marketing, running successful business, there were 300 of you and you had 50 million usd in your pocket to fund the whole thing....

No matter how great you are, you'll still need to pay your utility bills AND amount of work would be still quite large. The point of teams is that the people work in parallel.

I'd love to tackle large scale procedural world generation and full world simulation (dwarf fortress style), but that would need insane amount of money and people.

 

Aside from marketing, etc., the single most important commodity you're missing is time. I did all programming, artwork and animation for my game Horde Rush (link in signature), and it took me four months to get to a polished state, and even then, there's still plenty to polish. Anyone thinking to making a AAA level game by themselves in a lifetime will never see it finished.

With all that said though, my planned "magnum opus" would probably have the quality level of Prison Architect, Frozen Synapse, or Advance Wars. But I don't have any plans starting that before shipping a few more smaller games first, while I build up my tech library. Note, I've worked as an engineer for a large game studio for 10 years with the last 7 on a AAA title, before declaring indie, just to give you a sense of what skill level can produce a game like Horde Rush in a 4 month timespan.

 

Something something voxels something something avatar element bending.

 

Something something Dark side something something and the Fire Nation attacked.

 

To hell with that, I'm making the game I want to make now regardless of my lack of programming, artwork, music and animation skills.

 

It is a nice attitude. However you can waste few years of your life with that with no results to show. Just a warning, no offense. Technology keeps marching on, and you'll be chasing it.

I beleive it will be possible to develop something like that alone in the future, however we're missing a lot of tools right now, and I'm not sure if anyone is working on their development.

What you need is a lot of procedural approach. The ideal workflow would be that you have an overall vision, while machine fleshes out details for you.

We ARE moving in that direction - we have unity, we have mixamo fuse, makehuman and allegorithmic substances.

Sadly the general attitude in the industry is that once someone comes up with a cool technology they'll try to rip off anybody who would try to use it. As a result technolgies don't really converge into single product. Everybody has a piece of puzzle. Euphoria did procedural character movement. Substance did materials. Makehuman/fuse did character generation. There were terrain generators, planet generators, building generators, whatever generators, but nobody combines them all into a single piece of code. was quite surprised to find out that thee are at least two free 3d reconstruction programs (sfmcmvs, visualsfm). The catch? "non-commercial license".

Meanwhile big studios don't seem to be THAT interested in something like full world simulation, and instead can employ "hire more monkeys" tactice when making games. Why bother investing in R&D when you can just hire more artists? It is depressing.

 

I can't argue with that, but "the future" is at least several decades out, which is probably "a lifetime" for many users on these forums.

This is the reason why I like to find other one-man-band studios and read their devlogs. The one that really stood out to me in recent memory is Shining Rock Software's Luke Hodorowicz, who developed Banished all by himself over the course of I think, 2 years? 3 years? He did all the programming and artwork (excluding music/sound effects) all by himself, and chronicled it in his devlog. He even mentions going through his savings, and taking up contract work to keep the dream alive, too.

It really irks me when other "solo" developers say they developed their game "themselves", because that usually means they just programmed or designed it themselves, with a lot of work done by others, typically the artwork. I'm actually okay with excluding music and sound effect authoring as part of the "solo" label, but everything else really has to be done by yourself to be considered a solo developer.

Anyone else know of any other developers that actually did "everything" themselves? I think Lucas Pope did Papers, Please all by himself, starting from a game jam...

 

I'm curious why you feel it is okay for a person to not create the sound FX and music and still be considered a "solo" developer and yet if they do not do the graphics they are not a "solo" developer?

I don't see the sense in that definition really. It kind of seems like you are not giving credit to all of the sound artists and musicians out there and looking at it like "well they can get that crap any place". lol Sound FX and music are very important for a game just as much as the graphics. Perhaps even more so in some cases.

 

It will never be possible to develop AAA content as an individual. AAAs get tool upgrades too. A team of 50 with the same tools will always be able to do more then a solo.

Case in point - now as a solo dev with unity I can quickly whip up a doom quality game. But doom is no longer the AAA standard for FPS games.

 

I figured someone would take some offense to this. So, I do apologize to all the sound artists and musicians if my view on it did so. I agree that there are some games where the audio component is a lot more important than the graphical component, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that for the most part, this is not the case. First and foremost, these are video games. There's not much sense in playing a video game if I can't even find a start button. That's essential for completion, unless, of course, the game is completely voice driven (I'm not aware of any). I think sound effects and music are very important for video games, but I see it as return on investment to author the audio. If I spent another week or so, on recording my own sound effects for a game rather than spending a couple of days to select sound effects from an existing library, would it be time worth spent?

To be fair, I'm not completely happy with the music selection I used for my game trailer, but it was the closest I could find with the time constraints that I gave myself. I spent some time trying to find a good track on the Youtube audio library, and chose the most appropriate one for my game, even though it wasn't exactly what I wanted. I spent a couple of hours editing down the track, and had to scrap it and re-edit it because I just couldn't be happy with it. The final cut of the soundtrack goes off beat somewhere in the middle, but luckily, you can't really tell because the game's sound effects take over somewhat.

Additionally, I had plans for producing my own soundtrack for the game, controlled by FMOD. I spent a week evaluating how I could do it, found a great VSTi plugin with orchestral samples for FL Studio, and started playing around with it, and was happy with the sound. I didn't get a chance to produce any actual music for it, because I felt the gameplay and art were not at the level of quality that I wanted. So, something had to get cut in the time budget.

Also to be fair, had I hired a musician to do my soundtrack, I would have added the musician to my credits, without hesitation. And in the credits for my current game, I do list the audio libraries that I used for my sound effect selection.

So in this sense, I'm kind of retracting that statement, if you permit me to do so... =)

I have a feeling that I should now refrain from considering myself a solo developer now. Especially since, it's true that I've used all those assets to finish a product. So, then where do you draw the line for those who consider themselves "solo"?

 

The line is drawn where business sense and marketing dictate.

After all, we still consider devs working in unity to be solo. Despite the fact that there are about 500 odd devs on the engine.

Consider yourself solo if you are the only one working specifically on your game.

 

If I was the uber game maker I'd like to make a procedural furniture generator... to place randomly on a room generator, which would lead to a whole building, then city block and finally city that adapts to an irregular terrain. It should be optimized enough so it uses as little resources as possible. That'll serve as a base to build an alien invading game that puts you in the shoes of the leader of a mercenary organization. So you hire team members that are of course generated proceduraly, and you buy and/or manufacture the gear, various means of transport, facilities and handle your finances. Research tech, plan out missions and eventually kicking some aliens ass.
All this must be in a VR context that uses oculus controllers.
I should point out every element in the game is destructible. Even whole buildings.
Aliens will also wear hats.

 

So maybe I am just a little arrogant. But the OP amounted to asking "What are you working on now?" It's not dev skills I lack. It's time and revenue.

 

I'll be sure to mention you in the credits

 

That's funny. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd love to play a game like that where you made big changes to a voxel world. My friend seems to have stopped working on his isosurface attempt at voxels ._. there is no hope

 

I would like to make something. Anything! I'd love to put together a team or something but I'm unsure about how to go about achieving that. Of course I would feel awful if I were like "Here's my the plan, do my bidding" without paying anyone. I primarily just want a few friends who would like to work on a game.

One man can't do it all himself!

On one hand you can easily spend large amounts of time working on something part-time. On the other you could invest some money and try going about it full-time preferably with some teammates. I am unsure about going either route. I kinda just play it safe. Keep working my day job (school atm) and the game "when I feel like it", which is much more often than it sounds. It doesn't help that I have no skills at all outside of programming, at least digitally!

I say that because I don't want to begin a full-time endeavor without the proper skills. That would be a foolish and exasperating thing to do!

 

Hah. Finish and publish your game first.

 

You always build on top of work of other people. No matter how much you try to do yourself, in the end you'll be using programming apis developed and maintained by other people.

I believe elysyan tail was pretty much created by one guy (or two guys), and spiderweb games (avernum series, geneforge series) also have very small team. There's dwarf fortress which is maintained by two brothers. Then we have minecraft.

Have you seen this movie?

Now go to its wikipedia page and look at the team size.

You shouldn't ever say "never". There might be a way to cut corners or creative approach. When you decide "it can't be done", you stop looking for the way to make it happen.

 

I don't think I could make my dream projects even if I could do everything in the same way that a single person cannot build a skyscrapper even if he has all the skills needed... I rather have the money to hire a team.

That said, one of my (many) dream projects is to make an open world cyber punk action game (kind of Ghost in the Shell meets GTA).

 

Ah, how could I forget Jeff "Bottom feeder" Vogel, and Notch. Haven't heard of the other one. I will check it out.

 

My point exactly. Its six minutes long. It has okay quality. Its nothing compared to the current AAA standard in movies.

My point still stands. Sure tools are getting better and allowing individuals to do more. But they also allow the AAA teams to do more too. 50 people with the same tools can always do more then 1.

Individuals can compete on creativity and flexibility and risk taking. But volume and quality will never be the individuals weapon.

 

I'm always a bit confused about the salutations of solo-devs, to be honest. To me, and apologies to any solo-devs out there, it seems to be an inefficient way to approach what I consider a collaborative multi-disciplinary visual media. It is wasteful because the dev's time is valuable, and the dev is likely to underperform and overspend time doing things he or she is not confident in.

I mean, the closest comparison to this media is films, and nobody would ever talk of how a lone director made a feature length film, and nobody would expect a lone director to create Alien without involving any other people. I don't know why many expect anyone to create Mass Effect 2 in their bedroom.

Even the simplest mobile games are multidisciplinary in that they need coding, art, and sound. It seems better, from a quality perspective, if people who are interested and talented in the different disciplines involved do the work. I can't help think that lone devs doing everything needlessly impose constraints on their games quality.

Lone devs, it seems, are more a collaboration constraint. Either they're unwilling or they're unable to gather the necessary team to do the job. Isn't that the problem, rather than focusing on the lone dev as some kind of slightly heroic figure?

 

ok after reading some of these posts I got to ask, anyone up for creating something that hasnt already been created or even something similar?

do we really need another FPS or do we have enough of them for several more generations already

 

Some combination of the concepts from Dwarf Fortress and Bethesda's games.

 

I see what you're saying from the perspective that I've mentioned several times on these forums that I have no interest in FPS games. That is not entirely correct though. What I mean when I say "not another FPS" is yet another COD/BF/Similar kind of games.

I'd be very interested in seeing more FPS games as long as they are not modeled after army dude/team going to war. It just seems like it has been done to death yet they sell in the millions of copies (AAA) so a lot of people seem to want them.

I don't even mind if the FPS has an army dude for the main character. I just would like to see some creativity in the environments, interactions, objectives, story and so forth. Borderlands is a great game I enjoyed playing for quite a while. It actually had some meat to it. Tons of different gear with different traits, moddable to customize it a bit more to your liking. In my opinion it is one of the best FPS ever created very interesting game-world to explore. The bandits, the creatures, the missions just everything oozes with creativity and style compared to the other mainstream FPS.

Another great game was Hellgate London. Unfortunately it was a very rushed-to-market game and they went bankrupt before patching it fully. It was still a lot of fun and very different from most FPS games. Had a ton of potential.

And I guess that is what burns me out on FPS. There is so much potential yet "everyone" seems to come into game dev with the mindset of "i gonna make my own COD!" and so forth. Why? Why not just play one of the many COD games or BF games or any of the other popular mainstream FPS?

 

Yeah. I'm with you on that. FPS is, essentially, just a collection of systems focused on a first person perspective with lots of shooting. Well, duh, I guess. It's called a First Person Shooter.

I guess my point is, if the S in Shooter meant 'Story' instead, FPSes are one way to tell a story through a game. What I'm a bit tired of is that FPSes always tell a story that involves shooting people while dressed in a uniform, while treading over the same 'Rah rah military rah hell yeah'.

I'd like to make an FPS where you couldn't shoot. I mean civilians are, mostly, terrible shots and wouldn't know which end of a gun pointed what way. What if one made a game about such a normal person? I toyed with the idea of making an FPS based in part on the premise of 'This war of mine' and the current refugee situation in Syria. Wouldn't it be a challenge to make an FPS about a refugee fleeing a warzone?

Take Third person games: you have wildly divergent games such as Witcher, Fallout 3/NV (shoot me, I always play Fallout in 3rd person), and Mass Effect. Why is it that FPSes doesn't seem to have this breadth?

I actually think Alien Isolation was such a fresh take on an FPS. As was Dishonored, even though ultimately it was a shooter.

 

If you have skill, experience and a decade's worth of work flow experience then a ME2 style game is perfectly viable. Let's not forget it's a linear third person RPG, with frameworks and tools available today it's a possibility even as a solo.. Sure a mega time sucking difficult adventure, but a possibility..

The issue is AAA doesn't just "stand still", in terms of scope current AAA games dwarf ME2.. Look at Witcher 3 / Fallout 4 for example, were talking hundreds of hours gameplay.. I'll straight out say it, no "indie" even with a couple of million in their pocket is going to come anywhere near it.. Never mind solo dev's.

You got to think, teams are expensive.. A five man team costs around $250K a year, not only is it reckless to put that sort of money on the line with the current industry (unless you have built a solid foundation already) it's simply a no-go for most. So you do what you can within the confines of what you have, doesn't mean you can't do a game in the style you love it just means it won't be no where near as big.

 

Hell, double that for what would be closer to the actually running expenses. 250K is five people living with their parents and working in one of their basements.

 

I'd make a game that basically closely simulates reality. I guess where every object has damage limits and once broken would have modelling internally so you could break... everything. Then of course you could possibly invent something in the game which later you find works in real life haha, because of painstakingly detailed object properties, so saw things apart and nail them together so on and so forth. Obviously even this vague pipe dream where I haven't gone into detail is far from a realistic game idea but maybe one day... in a few decades or so!

 

This is something I have always been interested in as well. It's one of the biggest reason I don't care as much about graphics as most people do. I'd gladly take ultra low poly models if when I saw a stick laying on the ground it was more than just a decoration and could pick it up and use it as a weapon, make a torch or even just throw it for the hell of it. For me interaction has far more impact on immersion than the graphics quality does.

 

Anything is possible given enough time and bloody-mindedness.

I just question if there doesn't come a time when you say "Okay, I can choose to spend £250k a year on this" or "I can spend the next decade on this". Ones own time is not worthless. If time is valuable, then I just think that 10 years work is worth more than that initial £250k. If money is the sole purpose for making games, one would earn more than that over ten years.

That makes the problem less of a money problem - but more of a barrier of entry that's defined by ability to scrape together that quarter of a million in a short amount of time. But isn't that a problem in any media?

 

Axiom Verge, Cave Story, Gratuitous Space Battles all made by 1 man bands. But they all took along ass time to make. Say you want to make the game you want without comprising

 

Well, the thing is that for full feature film you need actors. In case of games you can create them. You also can create everything else.

The only requirement to start making games is pretty much a computer. Many people have that. In case of movies, you're looking at unaproachable physical tools that cost money and require maintenance.

There are full-length movies made by small teams, though. Phantasm comes to mind.

 

Based on the wikipedia entries on each of those games (because wikipedia is the definitive authority on the Internet ), it looks like Axiom Verge and Cave Story were definitely single-handedly developed. But it looks like the GSB dev contracted out for art/UI, and a composer to boot. If that's correct, this is the sort of misconception that I'm referring to.

 

I would make a *great* pong remake, with hundreds levels, even if they looks the same, I'll put my name in the credits "fo sho" (for sure), in a bold police, fancy, and I will not forget my new avatar pic, hell yeah !
then people would buy millions copies just because "it's the game by that soooo skilled guy"
yeah blue sky dream, and above all, with the bare minimum of effort
LOOOOOL

 

I am trying not to be negative here but why is everyone post basically something that has already been done multiple times?

 

I'll have to double check on my laptop later but I think one of the artists in my contact roster did (at least some if not a lot or even perhaps all) of the graphics for Cave Story.

If people are looking for truly 1 person did everything from design, graphics, sounds, music, programming, play-testing, balancing as well as all marketing I think you'd find very few cases, if any, that are successful. Within the past few years or so anyway.

A decade or more ago sure it was possible for one person to do it all and succeed. It's probably still possible but things like Unity and GMS have raised expectations for the quality of the graphics, sounds and music by a degree for sure. Due to all of the games flooding the market that although the games themselves don't have much to them at all they still look and sound very good. So this now creates an added burden on the solo dev. Although perhaps something like Minecraft could still be a way a solo programmer could cut through some noise. With a lot of hard work on the design and programming sides and simplified graphics and sounds.

 

Are you positive? Both Wikipedia and Cavestory.org state that it was one developer over a period of five years. At the very least for the original game. The newer commercial releases may have been different.

I do know it was translated by another group though since the original was in Japanese.

 

Not positive need to check later. It could very well be an entirely different game. There are so many of them sometimes they kind of "run together".

 

I know the feeling. After a while I start confusing which game actually has which mechanic.

 

Something somewhere between Megaman Zero, Metroid and bionic commando.