people told me that I can not do all the coding and 3d Modeling by myself. Is that ture?

Hey Unity community. It is my first post here, thank you for reading this and helpfully you can answer my questions.

The following is a short story of mine, feel free to skip it.

I am a Chinese programmer with one year Android developing experience. My dream is to be an independent game developer and to make my dream real, i quite from my job. I am currently in a full time lessons about how to use unity engine and C#, but their goal is to make people capable of doing programming work for a game. I believe it is far away from capable of make a game alone. So, I decided to learn whatever I need by myself. I can't do music, I can't draw, but I can code and maybe I can do modeling.

So I asked people around to get as much suggestion as I can about how to learn 3d modeling. But all of them told me that it is not possible to do all the programming and modeling alone. I quite from a great job to chase my dream and they told me you can't do that. Its just upsets me.

TL;DR : A boy has a dream but no one support him.


So, dear unity community, I wish to know the answer of the following questions:
1: It is ture that one person is not possible to finish all the programming and 3d modeling work by himself?(I can buy music and arts , it is affordable for me)
2: I may need a route map to reach my goal. Maybe a list of stuff I should learn?
3. Any suggestion for 3d modeling software?
3ds Max , Maya, blender, cinema4D ? I learned a bit about c4d but it seems like c4d is not friendly for unity since texture is not avalible to be used in unity?
4. Basic Workflow:
I found this post https://forum.unity.com/threads/game-development-workflow.65158/
It was posted in 8 years ago, can someone please tell me how can do all those steps by myself. I mean, what do I learn.


PS: I know if I master 3ds Max or any of those software, I can reach my goal. But I also knows that there are a lot of functions I dont neccessarily need to know in those 3d software. So, if you can, please be spesific.

 

It varies depending on the game size. Look for games similar to what you want to make and see how big of a team they had : )

 

That makes no sense, there's not any basis for you to even know that this is something you'll enjoy doing since you have no experience doing it.

My advice is go get a real job, start learning dev on the side using money from your real job, complete some smaller projects with money from your real job and lay out your plan for developing full time after understanding the cost instead of just flamboyantly deciding to quit your real job.

 

When people tell you something is impossible, reply to them by saying "cool, so it's impossible for me to fail, thanks".

You will never know why you failed if that failure was born from the words of another who convinced you not to try.

 

Check this out: https://forum.unity.com/threads/no-heroes-a-realistic-multiplayer-fps.96339/

The creator, @eskovas , is a one man army. Everything you see in the screenshots has been done by him alone - and I mean everything. You see... it is possible, but it takes a lot of time to learn the required fields (modelling, programming, etc).

For modelling, you can use Blender just fine. It does may require some fiddling to get used to it...

Also, what @Amon said.

 

Can you handle the business aspects too? With the current state of the market any game you release without any form of marketing is practically guaranteed to have zero success. I'm not referring to paying for ads but rather to spreading word of it on reddit, getting people to stream gameplay of it (eg YouTube), and so on.

Blender. It's free which will save you a great deal of money that can be spent elsewhere.

 

It depends on your game. I am doing a mobile puzzle game and am doing the programming, design, art, and audio on my own. It is simpler than the FPS mentioned above, and I have been working on it a long time, partly because I also have a part-time job that takes up a lot of my time.

My game has around 200 models, but all are simple (all less than 500 polygons, quite a few less than 10), and have no animation. I use Wings 3D for modelling. It is easy to pick up, but has no animation (not a problem for my current game). As I am multitasking in many roles, the simplicity of Wings is important as I can switch to it and be productive immediately, whereas I would be having to relearn of how to do some things when I came back to a more complicated app after not using it for a while.

 

I did this remake of Doom level one by myself...

You might have to go for a retro/voxel or low poly art style depending on your level of skills or the funds you have available to purchase assets.

I think that's the key work out what you can make or train yourself up to the level where you can make your dream game. e.g. You could start out with games in the same genre/style but with much lower quality requirements then build up gradually.

Note: I did my own 3d modelling in blender, Unity now has Pro-Builder (in editor 3d modeller) which should make doom like levels even easier to throw together within unity.

 

There's a lot of skills required to both build and market a game. Trying to master them all by yourself is quite a large task, and even if you already knew everything it is still a lot of work. It isn't that it is impossible, but it may be bigger than you think.

On the first game I released, even though the gameplay is fairly original, I leaned heavily on 3rd party graphical assets and models and used a lot of primitives. I also generally failed at promoting the game. The current game I'm developing is much larger in scope, and I outsourced the creation of custom models for the game (and put most of them up on the asset store in order to offset some of the costs of making them, which is another suggestion), and have a much more thorough plan for promoting the game other than my original "Let's just see what happens" approach.

As far as learning 3D modeling, I'd suggest just taking a Udemy course. I took one for blender and successfully made some of my own models that turned out pretty well. What I learned most though is I could end up spending months just making models instead of the game, and it made sense to just pay someone experienced who could make them faster and at better quality than I could being new at it.

 

The kind of modern, high quality games you are probably used to playing are built by professional teams with money.

The list of games built by a single person or even just a few people is very small, and by necessity these games are very basic games. Doesn't mean they aren't fun and sometimes -- rarely -- they strike it big.

You can do it all yourself, but it is unrealistic. Are you one in a million? Only you know the answer to that. I know that I'm not. I work pretty hard but I'm not very smart. So I resign to just focusing on art, and plan to get into making games later when I know some reliable people to collaborate with.

People naysaying does not mean that they don't support you. If they didn't support you, they would ignore you. Try not to take what people say personally, but try to understand where they are coming from. Every person is a vast resource of knowledge and experience -- try to learn what you can from them, but then ultimately make your own decision.

IMO, it is definitely not realistic to expect to make marketable games without at least a years experience of all-day-every-day practice in game making. If you've quit everything to learn game-dev, you need to study like your life depends on it.

What is more realistic is focusing on developing skill in a single profession. This could be programming, 3d art, 2d art, animation, VFX... these are all vast professions that can take you multiple years to get proficient in, but I think that is the fastest way into the game industry. Like learning how to replace a carburetor rather than learning how to build an entire car. Which do you think you could learn faster?

People here will definitely support you.

 

scope is everything
well, and how clever you are in building assets
obviously its not enough to know how 3dsmax works and how unity works
these are only programs, you need to know how to build things the correct way, and this is something you won't learn in a year or two, especially in more than one field (like 3d art & programming)

but, look at games like rocket league, the scope is doable
no storymode or quests
limited number of assets (if you concentrate on the basics, you can add skinns and stuff later on)
gameplay mechanics don't look too complicated

i would say a reduced version of it can be done alone in a reasonable amount of time

 

Like they have said, keep your scope down. You certainly can do both, I know I have. Unity3D has already done all the programming for you, you only need to input the behavior of your models.

 

"People" will tell you everything is impossible.

 

You can accomplish anything you are intent on creating. There are many free resources available on the internet thanks to hundreds, thousands, millions* of people. You can search for Blender scripts for automating certain aspects of model creation and learn how to program specific Blender functionality via Blender scripting to make modeling easier and more efficient. Also search for scripts and add-ons for Blender that can help you accomplish what you are trying to accomplish; for example, Blender skybox generator, or Blender automated space ship generator.

As far as Unity is concerned, when I first started it took me approximately 6 months to figure out how to implement space flight controls, which I can now do in a morning or afternoon. So with experience comes faster turn around. I am assuming all the people telling you that you can't develop a game on your own don't have access to the internet and/or helpful friends, or or gave up to early into their development, or are just trying to obstruct your dream because they are bad.

Some things that I found useful are search engines, the Unity/C# and Blender Udemy Courses, Unity answers, stack overflow, Unity API, Github, and searching for C# libraries if I couldn't find a solution via the Unity API: for example, instantiating and keeping track of a timer. I also have found that buying Assets as a new programmer is not as beneficial as you might think. I spent hundreds of dollars on assets when I first started, just to end up having to learn and program the scripts myself, more efficiently and in a way that makes sense to myself. If you buy an asset, and don't or can't understand the implementation, it will be very difficult to modify the scripts to your needs. I am assuming that if I were to purchase an asset now, after a year or two of Unity programming, I would be able to understand and modify the scripts to fit my needs. However, with so many free resources available, I am enjoying the challenge of creating assets myself, and hopefully one day contributing back to the community via YouTube or uploading scripts to Unity Answers, and various forums that allow access.

If you are committed to success, you will learn a lot, and probably make the game of your dreams!

 

Yes, you can do both! But you’ll need a strong will, and plenty of time!

 

Making decisions based on emotion and blue-sky dreaming is not a likely path to success.

When "all" of the people around you say something is "impossible" I wouldn't necessarily take it at face value, but I would give it solid consideration.

I suggest starting by reading this fellow's story. It's a sad and uncomfortable example showing why a lot of the stuff people have already said, and the things people regularly overlook, can wreck your plans before you've even started.

The biggest things are that you've started on your journey by throwing away your existing security (ie: job with income) without having built up a new foundation yet, and that you've done so without even knowing what the path to success looks like. People have succeeded like this before, but I wouldn't recommend it, and certainly it involves more luck and more risk than other approaches you may take.

For starters, if you've identified modelling as a weakness, I'd have taken the time to shore up that weakness before throwing my income away.

As for whether it's impossible? No, it's not. There are people who've made one-person games, and it's probably easier today than it has ever been in the past - stuff like Unity and Unreal get us off to a fast start with accessible pricing*, stuff like the Asset Store and other online content providers mean we don't have to do the whole job ourselves, when it's made we have easy access to sales and distribution channels like Steam and iTunes and so on.

So yes, it can be done. But it's a heck of a lot of work, it requires a heck of a lot of knowledge (or ridiculously good luck), and you'll be up against stiff competition from people with years of experience already under their belt.

My suggestion is to start by making informed decisions rather than emotional ones. And then, start with small projects - tiny ones - and work your way up.

* When I started the choices were pretty much "roll your own engine" or "$250,000 license fee"

 

Another thing to consider is the question, do you want to make games or do you want to finish games? At first they sound like the same thing, but really they are an entirely different mindset.

If you just want to make games, you can take all the time you want, do everything yourself, learn the ins and outs of everything, all with no pressure. If your goal is instead to finish games, everything you do in the process should be to reach the goal of finishing within a set time frame. Learning a new skill always takes longer than paying someone for their existing skills. Adding more features always means more development and testing time than without. etc, etc

 

This is a couple of paragraphs from the blog post I linked above. The bold emphasis is theirs, not mine.

 

Technically, you can probably learn anything given enough time and effort with the exception of the art. I think people vastly underestimate what it takes to be a good artist. Most of the good ones started out with talent, then layered on top of that years and years of drawing, painting, sculpting, etc. Anyone can learn to use Blender or Maya or Max, but being a good 3D artist and modeler also requires artistic skill. Makes me chuckle when I see advice like "Dude, just learn Blender!"

So in answer to the OP's question, I would say while doing it all is theoretically possible, it is not at all probable. When you see the one-man show success story involving a game where the art matters, it is usually the case that they had an artistic background first (or at least the talent) and then developed the technical skills to pull off the programming, etc. Of course there are examples where the art was less important because of the style, and success was based on other merits (e.g. Rimworld, Prison Architect), but those are pretty rare.

 

A lot of people seem to like to see others fail or not do as well as themselves. I've got one friend that does nothing but play video games all the time and has no life ambitions other than to just play video games and he expects everyone should be just like him and continually tries to get me to play games with him while I'm developing. That friend once told me that I'll never succeed or make any money with game development. When he told me that he was expecting to break me down into a "woe is me I'll never succeed" mindstate so that I would come play games with him. It had the opposite effect. He can rarely get me to play a game with him now because I'm almost always developing, at least 12 hours a day.

I did what you're talking about doing 4 years ago and quit my job to develop games and make a career out of it because with the skillsets I have and the location I live in game development is the only viable way I can see of actually making a decent living. I don't have any 3D modeling skills but I've got a lifetime of art experience, 20+ years of coding experience, and at this point I've got close to 5 years of unity experience.

As someone above said there is a big difference between making games and finishing games. I spent the first 3 to 4 years of my unity journey making stuff and not finishing it. I've got a folder full of dozens of incomplete projects. Some of them were very promising good ideas, some were failed ideas, others were just experiments, and most of them were too big in scope and complexity for me to finish on my own.

I've currently got a game in development that hopefully when complete will actually make me something, but in order to publish and market it I'll have to take a job at some retail store. Until then I'm living pretty much in poverty and working harder than I've ever worked in my life trying to code my way out of the hole I've put myself in.

What I'm getting at here, is even with all the experience I have, I still haven't made any money with game development. So if you have no experience at all, if things go in any way similar for you the way they've gone for me, it will be a long hard road, likely many years, before you make any money in this field. Unless you get very, very lucky.

The game I'm currently working on is one of the most simple concepts imaginable that I thought "oh that'll take me a month or two to finish!" and I decided that no matter what I'm sticking with this one and seeing it through to the end. At times it's seemed hopeless but I've persisted and kept at it. It's now been 9 months and 2,500 hours of work so far with several months of work still to go. I'm finally in the polishing stage and the end is in sight. But I still don't know if it will make me enough money to have been worth all the effort. My situation is the kind of situation you're setting yourself up for.

Get another job. Keep it and develop on the side. Stick to small games with very little complexity that you have the skills and time to actually finish, and stick with them even when it gets rough and seems hopeless.

 

[Contrarian Advice]

What if you took you dream game idea as a pitch Hollywood style to venture capitalist or Kickstarters and went for a funded hiring/contracting out based approach to game development?

You would be taking on the don't go solo advice but instead of having to go royalty cap in hand or other job to support your game development habit you start out building a game studio for your game.

Isn't this how the Film industry works, you start with a concept build a script up and pitch to people with money?

Why don't successful game developer studios re-invest in the game development community the way Hollywood does.

Look at the Hollywood business model/ecology, it keeps a pool of talented people working consistently and makes money by re-investing in itself and promoting itself. This has not happened (to my knowledge) in the games industry even thought the games industry is nearly the same size financially.

Note: I am a solo indie game developer so cannot provide venture capital or business advice.

 

You must have no idea how difficult it is to break into film. It's even more difficult than breaking into games.

 

They do, that is pretty much exactly how games get made.

 

Why not go for both at the same time...

 

Great so who do we pitch to?

 

You should ignore what people say. I used to advise people the right action to take, from experience but then I realised, it's far more efficient for both parties if you just go right ahead and try. You will find your own limitations, which will be somewhere nobody in this thread will predict.

Then when the sky falls and the seas boil, you can return looking at how to improve. For now just get started. That's the hardest step. The first.

 

Where do you pitch your movie ideas to?

 

I hear it's usually to a dude in an elevator.

 

i thought its in a bar, completely drunk, to a stranger who's also completely drunk

 

Only I'm talking comparatively about the games and movie industries, you are making the declarative statements therefore the onus of proof is on you... please support your view factually?

 

I think you have this backwards....

"One way in which one would attempt to shift the burden of proof is by committing a logical fallacy known as the argument from ignorance. It occurs when either a proposition is assumed to be true because it has not yet been proved false or a proposition is assumed to be false because it has not yet been proved true."

 

obviously you want to pitch your ideas to someone who has money and wants to invest it in your idea
either publisher or private investors
so you write them and ask for a meeting, or approach them at a convention

there`s even a gdc talk about pitching your ideas to potential investors

 

OK point is the movie industry has matured and to my knowledge works in a much more flexible and dynamic way than the games industry, with companies forming around a film and workers brought in on demand per product (actors and staff).

And I can see how much the games industry is moving towards a similar level of technical maturity with roles and technologies like game engines that allow different styles of games to be made with the same technology.

As this maturity grows and the ability to off the shelf or out of the box setup entire wardrobes/sets/actors/furniture and props for a game in that setting will we also see a move in the business side of things to more of an on demand per product staffing.

I have even pitched this idea (an out of the box plethora of sets, props and actors) to Unity as a way forward in games and technology platform development...


Or to put it another way you don't hear many people comparing the camera technologies of different movies the way you do game engines they compare the content.

So could the industry and it's workers benefit from a more Hollywood industry/business approach.

PS: Hollywood has a sweet overtime policy where to push staff further than their agreed working hours they pay double for overtime imagine that as a game developer in the crunch zone!

 

I went to an event where indies got to pitch their games to publishers and investors (the event was repeated once, but then stopped), I wanted to meet publishers, but also ended up with some meetings with investors. They all wanted a minimum of 3 founding partners before they would consider anyone, which ruled me out. It makes sense as if someone drops out, there is still a product being made. And the investment in legal agreements means things are being taken seriously.

An important point when pitching: Tell them what is in it for them, and what you are doing to maximise the chances of success.

 

A big difference is much of the film industry is centred in Hollywood. Games are scattered around the world. It is easier to move from project to project when they are all in the same place.

 

Won't VR/AR/XR fix this a bit, although still an issue with global office hours e.g. 2 pm PST -> 5 am PDT

 

The words you're missing from this statement to make it intelligent is "... into a model that makes sense for film production." The flexibility of the studios has almost everything to do with the hiring practices. Unless you are in a managerial position, everyone is working on contract, and only work on the project for a fraction of the time.

How do you possibly compare that to a game studio that has a staff in the hundreds working full-time for the entirety of development?

 

Your knowledge is incorrect, If you think the movie industry is more flexible than the games industry. Simple observation contradicts that assessment.

Games are vastly more flexible. Concepts/prototypes can shifted around between companies and developers very easily and not bound to physical things like locations and actors. You can completely shift change the project part way through development with minimal effort compared to movie. And there are many more market tiers, distribution points and ways to monetize. There are also many more games released than movies, way more. If you look at just the top tier only, there were around 700 major console titles released in 2017, and about 300 movies with theatrical releases. There were around 180k games released on a single platform (ios) in 2017. The industries are quite literally incomparable in terms of flexibility. How many people do you know who have released games, how many do you know who have released movies?

But the process for getting a movie/game developed is basically the same. You can pitch a game/movie to a studio if you have the reputation / connections to do so and/or have been asked or contracted to do so. Unsolicited pitches are generally rejected without being looked at. (For legal reasons). If it’s direct to investors, you’ll have to have a track record and/or talent associated with the project to justify their time to listen. Everyone has 'idea', the people producing the work don't have time to listen to random ones without something to convince them you are worth their time. And not all producers/investors are actively looking for projects all the time. If you don't have any of that (connections, track record, talent), then you self fund.

 

That's a good point I hadn't thought of, as Hollywood is not fully digital yet... they have to assemble and coalesce onto sets and locations suitable for their products production.

Could it also be a size of staff issue as apparently top films have an average of 588 crew credits, with blockbuster movies having thousands of staff e.g. Iron Man 3 - 3,310 credits.

Compared to a couple hundred staff working on AAA game titles, which in theory is much easier to manage and maintain across multiple games.

However I still think as the game engine technology matures we will see a more dynamic job/production section as democratisation of game production makes it easier for people to make new games. Then as with the movie industry the focus will be more on content than technology.

 

"Dripping water eventually wears away stone"

Chinese proverb

 

As someone who is currently building his project in order to end up in a situation where I can merge pipeline of movie, animation and game (for audiovisual content), though unity is laying the ground for me with timeline and cinemachine, only lacks digital puppetry).

Movie are maybe less flexible in resources, but also less complex and with a healthy pre prod phase that can help mitigate risk (like script and story boards) which mean all the complexity is focus on logistique, many movie dev are actually 3 years long with only the last years dedicated to actual shooting). Script and storyboard allow you to assess very early the quality of the composition, which mean you only have minor adjustment to do to adapt to dev uncertainty.

Game on the opposite, you don't know how they will turn out until the end, with a large part of dev about figuring out the actual mechanics, pre prod seems to be basically having the theme down, and even then it can change during dev. That mean game dev is way more uncertain and shaky than film making, you are essentially building the car and driving it at the same time.

Also I don't like to compare movie to game in terms of production output, both don't cover the same breadth of content. Game mean all genre and format of the medium, movie is a subset of audiovisual broadcasting (that also has documentary, advertising, tv show, motion graphics, music clip, youtube video, etc ...) and they are made using the same tools. If you factor audiovisual subgenre, I think it's bigger than game.

 

Hey guys, thank all of you for your suggestions. I feel like everything in this post is people's real thought. In real life, people say things on purpose and somethings its hard to figure out what to believe. Anyway, I am just trying to describe how important and helpful you guys are.

There are reply saying my decision of quitting from a formal job is making no sence. Yeah, I was trying to make my post short so I missed a lot of details. I dont wanna talk about what i do before, but i can talk about that you if you are interested. It was serious amount of money and I quit beacuse they are doing every wrong things even thougt it is legal. My moral sense will torture me everyday, so I quit.

What happened on me does not matter that much. I can feed myself for a year without working and I am like 12 hours study time everyday right now. I will keep my eyes on this post and make a good plan of studying 3d modeling.

once again, thank you very much.

 

I've decided to chime in.

It depends on the level of fidelity you want.

A game with a low poly aesthetic is perfectly doable by one person.

Spoiler

My own entry from LDJam 37

However, if you want high fidelity visuals like those in witcher or tomb raider, you'll likely fail, because one character in those games can easily require a month of work of a team of artists.

Spoiler

Trying to match "AAA" quality is not a good idea, because you'll almost certainly fail. That's what people (probably) meant when they said you can't both program and model.

Learn your limits and know them.

If you're used to programming, I'd recommend to concentrate on 3d modeling for now, and attempt to reach a level where you can make a model you find passable. Then learn how to animate them. Then try to find that one visual style where you can create content very quickly, while still being satisfied with the way things look.

If you're using to modeling, then concentrate on learning how to use unity first.

I use blender 3d, because it is free, and quite versatile.

 

Well they said it all :
- You can do it all by yourself but it'll take more time, depending on the kind of game you want to make it can take you 5 years to achieve your goal alone. Keep that in mind.
- An advice : start advertising your game from the beginning ! It's hard to build a community so go hard on social networks !

 

This is a good reason to quit your job. If you're uncomfortable with what you're doing then my advice is to get the heck our as fast as you reasonably can.

Great point here. My only caveat would be to do some market testing of your game (or better yet, several games) before committing to a project, and not to start marketing it until you're 100% committed to seeing it through. But as soon as you are, don't be shy.

 

No Is not true, I'm pretty well doing code and 3D models for my little game for the last 6 Yr and more to come!
Hope that one day I will ship it...

 

Completely out of the box advice : Be a java / c# freelance programmer in the business world for a few years, do not buy a house or a porsche, rent an apartment and a corolla keep the extra money and self fund yourself: Alternate business contracts of 3/6 months and work on your game. You can work on games as a freelance too, but be cautious it pays less and it's harder ! If you are good enough to grasp game code, you can do business code half asleep