Should i quit my job and make a game?

Agreed, except for the bit at the end

 

It’s your life dude, don’t get advice for life decisions from random strangers on forums.

 

I'm with this.

The OP has the skills and experience. They have the financial cash buffer. They can easily secure another job. They are unhappy with their current career trajectory. This is the perfect opportunity to do something else for a while.

Sure 99% of indie games might fail. The OPs will probably be one of them. But so what? The OP is in a position where failing isn't a problem.

 

To all the naysayers : Thank you
To all the supporters : Thank you

I needed to hear both sides. I understand that it is very risky and most indies fail. I dont think i am lucky or unlucky, i dont feel my game would make me a millionaire. This isnt my first game, i have shipped 2 mobile games which failed but had moderate success when ported to WebGL. This would be my first PC game. i would be happy if it made even $10k.

I dont have any experience with crowdsourcing. But i understand these key points:
- Need a community around the game before i start a kickstarter campaign
- 6 months might not be enough to have the game ready to be crowdsourced
- Need to market the game
- Cant expect success just by finishing the demo and hope for funding

I know i can make the demo in 6 months, but i now understand that i will need to share demo on various platforms and get users interested in it then make changes based on reviews. I plan on making around 3-5 hours of playable demo that shows around 50% of the game mechanics. Its going to be a JRPG (turn based RPG). Its not going to have something innovative. The final product will have a rich lore and a great story (not everyone will like my story telling but i hope some will).

I am going to push back the campaign to 10-12 months from now instead of 6 months.

I am absolutely sure that i can easily survive till then and get a job after that, i used to be a computer science professor so i have other opportunities even if no one is looking for a Unity dev. Even if that doesnt happen, i know plumbing and electrical work as well.

I thought if i can get a game crowd sourced in 6 months then i should continue, otherwise give up on my dream to support my family with a normal job. But i know that 6 months isnt enough. I didnt wanna spend more than 6 months but i guess i should try for a year at least.

I dont know about making multiple games and seeing what will have more success. At least for the first 4 months i will be working on the JRPG project then will share it here/gamejolt/reddit etc. based on the responses i will see if its worth pursuing the game further.
I do have other ideas but Legend of Dragoon and Final Fantasy 8 are my all time favourite games and i wanted to make an JRPG ever since.

Thanks everyone

 

Don't wait till post release to find out if the writer "you are hiring" (even if it is yourself) was any good. Let him write something that you can present to your target audience and see if they like it. Make it part of your community-building campaing in some way. Like e.g. a series of short stories that describe parts of the world from the perspective of a character that isn't a key part of the game's story, but might show up as an NPC at some point. It is my understanding that your writer has a strong portfolio for technical tasks, but is relatively unproven in the creative areas. Many of those successful indie devs that landed successes and did their own writing had extensive writing experience from either previous jobs or at least had lots of hobbyist writing practice. I forgot the name but very recently there was a movie-writer guy here that offered his advice, maybe talk to him and see if he can help you in some way.

JRPG as a genre seems like a strange choice to me in so far that your strengths are in tech, and those games need strong writing, music, and art to succeed, and as far as I can tell barely benefit from your strong tech skills. I would have recommended a genre that benefits more from your own skills, or skills you can quickly built, and is less reliant on the quality of outsourced work. Maybe a PCG Roguelike with some JRPG influences in the theme and aesthetic?

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Rya..._Indie_Hit_How_to_Choose_the_Right_Design.php
Choose your hooks carefully. Imho nowadays rich lore and good writing barely can be hooks, because who's gonna read a lot about your game before even playing it? Your target audience now has to sift through hundreds to thousands of new releases to find a game they like. Imho you need something that can be discovered and appreciated at a glance. You really need to think about the funnels through which your players will later be guided towards your game and how you can convert those views to sales. That isn't something you can just do after the game is done, it has wideranging implications on design decisions imho. Check this out:

 

P.S.: This talk is about pitching your game to a publisher but I think some of it applies also to pitching your game to a crowdfunding audience:

 

Well, if i am following my dream then i should follow it fully. If i wanted to do something technical then i would continue my job.
It wasnt until i played JRPG games that i start loving video games. But this genre is no longer that popular, everyone wants ARPGs now. i know there are very few AAA JRPGs released in the past 5 years. So i dont expect my game to be super popular, i just wanna make this game for myself and similar JRPG fans.

I have seen the Pitch your game video already. If you have more links that would help me start then that would be wonderful.
Unity 2019 LTS has been released so i guess its a good time to start a project.

 

I agree with Martin. "It has deep lore and a great story" sounds fun to plan (trust me, I wrote a novel in high school, so I feel the same way), but to a consumer there are a billion crappy-looking RPGMaker games on Steam that promise great stories. There are tons of well-established A or AA JRPGs (I just finished Tales of Berseria for example) that promise stories with deep interconnected lore.

And again, I'm much the same - I'm planning like 5 games in disparate genres all centered around my "awesome" story with "deep" lore.

You should test your creative chops before you make this the "hook" behind your game.

Edit: and about your PC game making "at least 10k," well, you'd have to be in the top 15% of indies to do that.

 

The thing is that the vast majority of games on steam are simply crap. Given the OP's experience I'd give them a significant advantage.

 

this indicates the sheer quantity of low-effort games flooding the marketplace I'd expect.


To the OP, if you want to test your chops with story it would make sense to make some trial runs first. Given the effort to complete a game, it might make more sense to work on your story telling craft by writing some short stories or maybe some visual novels first. This is a way you can work towards capturing an audience as well.

This way you have quicker iteration and can focus solely on the art of storytelling (and if you do visual novel, you can work on the cinematic arts a bit too).

Like anything else, it seems not too hard until you get into the work, so getting through the full development as quick as possible is best thing to do.

 

100% agree. But the "classic" FF style JRPG is a saturated market on Steam. And such a game based around a "great story" is going to depend on creative ability and ability to produce an appreciable amount of creative content. Does the OP have experience in those areas?

Edit: I agree with BIGTIMEMASTER as well. Visual novels are a great way to focus the experience on the writing quality. Plus it's a far less saturated market (OELVNs in particular).

 

If you have all bases covered, then you should "just do it". The reason for naysaying is that there are a lot of people with unrealisitc expectations. For example "I want to quit my job and start learning programming to get employed and earn high salary a year later". This is common, and exceptionally unsafe.

Not quite.
"RPGMaker JRPGs" are saturated market. You see one of those games, recognize default tileset and then you skip it. Something that stands out, however, gets attention and sales.

JRPGs include Dragon Quest, Trails in the Sky/Cold Steel, Tokyo Xanadu, Final Fantasy, Atelier.... also Neptunia. The moment something good or at least decent appears, it is sold. I Atlus released persona or megaten, it would sell very well.

 

RPG tag on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&tags=122&category1=998&os=win

Counting backwards through May, I stopped at 100 on May 15 (Wasteland 3 is in there for some reason?)

RPGMaker tag:
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&tags=5577&category1=998&os=win

22 in May. There are almost certainly some games that don't have the tag, though.

Either way, I'd argue that the market for an RPGMaker FF5-style JRPG today has a lot of overlap with the market for a 3D FF8-style JRPG. The OP himself said he wasn't going anything different gameplay-wise and that the focus was on story. That's not going to change much between the two styles.

Edit: about persona - https://www.gematsu.com/2020/06/persona-4-golden-coming-to-pc-on-june-13

 

You seem like you're looking at yourself objectively and gathering information responsibly and I think that's incredibly important. You seem to be good at reality checking. You're listening and adjusting plans based on what you learn. Because of all that, you won't fall into many of the pitfalls less prepared people fall into. I'd say you have a better chance at success than most people making this decision and you have less to lose than most. Go for it.

 

Given the second game on the list is called "Leisure Yacht" which clearly wasn't an RPG, I wouldn't use this as a metric for determining number of JRPGs at steam.

However, in this list there's a huge number of rpgmaker titles. I counted 60 RPGMaker titles before I realized the page switched to autoscroll mode. Majority of those use default tileset and default character sprites. 3..5 of them used Daz3d to render model, and a dozen or so used professional VN-style sprites for chracters while keeping everything else unchanged. Few games used "child-like" or stylyzed drawings. I'd say it is 80% of games on this page is RPGmaker titles.

That's what I was talking about.

JRPG mostly refers to specific type of story, storytelling and characters, and japanese origin. For example, Code Vein and Dark Souls would be an JRPG.

 

Absolutely. The vast majority of the games on Steam are things that nobody should ever fork over money for. I can't figure out why anybody thought they were worth releasing to the public in the first place. It's the same with mobile games. Of course most indies fail. Their games are objectively awful. If the OP can put out something that is genuinely interesting and genuinely polished, he'll already be far above the fray.

 

...this is a really dangerous path to take, I have really weird views on the "what is an RPG?" question. I wouldn't consider either of those JRPGs (and in general I don't consider most JRPGs to be RPGs at all).

That said, my point remains: that a JRPG that's "not going to have something innovative" in terms of gameplay is going to depend almost completely on story, and thus the market will overlap between traditional RPGMaker 2D JRPGs and traditional 3D JRPGs. And that market is saturated.

 

I think there's something to be said for the obviousness of how well a game will perform when you look at it honestly. Over the last few months I've gone through as many releases as I can find in the genre I'm making a game in, and I have not found any real surprises so far (assuming that number of reviews is a useful metric).

I decided to also buy games that I honestly thought were good (as a way of proving my analysis). So I was really looking hard for good stuff. In the end, I found that I even overestimated quality, as a customer.

I know it's hard to look at one's own game objectively, but it has to be done if you don't want to get blindsided. And I don't think it takes a lot of technique or experience. You just have to put yourself in the place of a customer and look at it with a certain degree of suspicion.

 

A bare bones would be "a game where you can pick a ROLE and have the world react to your choices". Dark Souls, interestingly, has choices. However, JRPGs are normally focused on letting you experience chracter's story. Additionally, many times in JRPGs there's a mix of genres and gameplay types.

They are JRPGs, though. a good thing to compare them to is Baroque. Another good one to take a look at is Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne.

A game that is not going to have something innovative would stand out simply by not being made in RPGMaker. The next important thing would be (IMO) presentation, and not the story. The presentation pulls player in, the story makes them stay.

 

The problem is that doesn't mean anything. DMC is an RPG because the enemies react to whether I use Stinger vs Million Stab. Forza 7/Horizon is an RPG because the other cars react to whether I nudge other cars off the track or try to race clean. Monkey Island is an RPG because Guybrush Threepwood reacts to whether I click together the right or wrong random objects. Oxygen Not Included is an RPG because my Dupes live or die based on my choices.

In my opinion, an RPG is a game where another person can watch you play and, at the end of the game, understand your character as a person based on the choices you've made. This usually means dialogue choices, not gameplay choices (like most games presume an RPG to be) or even necessarily story choices. Choosing magic missile or blizzaga doesn't tell me jack about a character. Choosing to fight or have a drink with Letho tells me a little bit about a character, but it's still a broad area. Stating an opinion on the genophage tells me a lot about the character. Stating an opinion on the Grey Wardens tells me a lot about the character.

Quite debatable, depending upon what one's definition of a JRPG is.

Fair point. I confess I avoid RPGMaker games simply because I hate the style. Even so, I still believe that outside of RPGMaker games the genre is pretty saturated (that Steam list is hardly objective proof, but surely it can be considered evidence), and on some level you'll still be competing with those games.

 

(-_-)
"Reducito ad Absurdum".

Do you really need an explanation?

RPG means means development of the story and decisions beyond "which weapons to use to stab things", you can pick what you want to do and the world will play along. A "role". In ideal form it would be a digital westworld. Where you have a location where multiple storylines unfold, but you can butt in and make them go in unpredicted directional, build fame or infamy, have the world respond, or just ignore it all and do your own thing.

In lesser form it would mean branching storylines, or reactions to your actions beyond a single combat encounter. In most games, reaction is absent, as you do not make a difference, and your opponents simply despawn once killed.

The way I see it, their opinion on my character shouldn't matter, as half of the process happens in my head, and they aren't a telepath.

I see RPG as a story where my character can leave a mark based on decision I made. For example, if you're talking about choice of magic, then it could result of opening a location or story ark that is only accessible when those conditions are met. Gothic series did that many times. JRPGs are different in that regard because they usually use your character to tell you the story, and consequences and actions are more subtle.

 

I disagree. I'd love to keep discussing this (I'll just point out that this definition doesn't preclude Oxygen Not Included or similar games), but we're getting off topic.

 

I wouldn't love discussing this, as this seems to be a semantic argument.