This guy instead of asking how to make a MMO in Unity, actually did that.

I see that too. Problem is most of us can't compete. Look at Kickstarter. Experienced AAA industry developers get a million bucks from the fans and 9 million from outside investors to make AAA games.

Most of us won't get that much and certainly not enough to make a AAA game.

And those AAA industry developers? They now claim the indie title.

 

Exactly. There are no impossible things, there is only lack of skill needed to complete the task.

 

And money.

 

I'd say time. Not money.

 

Which is why there are some things that are simply beyond reach. One guy, three guys, there are only so many hours, so many days, and so much attention.

One of the things that impresses me about the Boundel is that he really packed in a good amount of polish. It might not be WoW, but stuff like the mount system and the fluidity of the transitions, the overall quality of the UI, he did very, very good work. It's the attention to detail that really takes the time. Even if a Skyrim or WoW is simply too much labor, examples like Boundel can still be inspirations.

A solo dev can produce incredible work and make great games, even if there are limits.

 

Fixed that for you. Just look at Dwarf Fortress. It's a great example of a concept that would normally be out of reach for a developer if it wasn't for the fact that said developer is willing to live with some limitations like graphical appearance.

I don't see any reason why an indie developer couldn't create an equivalent to Skyrim if they were willing to cut corners.

 

Yep it is a great example of cutting the fluff (Not that graphics are only fluff although they surely can be and also are probably the most time-consuming piece at that! here I mean they just weren't important to focus on) so they could deliver a rich world. From what I've seen around the Internet this game has a lot of fans. Read an interesting subreddit one day where people were talking about the interesting things they saw in the game. Of course not literally saw visually but rather they meant interesting events described with text.

 

Except that skyrim is not one of them. The game is already developed by smaller team using creative cutting of corners.
Something that is "beyond reach" must be much bigger than skyrim and have significantly higher visual quality.

 

You are being very silly now, perhaps intentionally. If you believe this, it's fine. Again, we are talking about different things. If something like this exists now, or exists in the future it has many corners cut, much detail reduced, and scope reduced. This is not the same game... Yes, you can build games with corners cut, without all the details and 'unnecessary' elements. A slimmed down game that's less dense, or has less attention to detail, and therefore lower quality. These can be fun, but they are not the same thing.

Please, let's stop. Maybe you will give me a link to some game, and I will explain how the scope differs or the quality differs. I don't want to criticize games, especially games made by small teams and this will inevitably be where this argument leads. Can't we simply celebrate a good production by a solo dev and agree to disagree?

 

If you want an example of a game that is "out of reach", that'll be GTA5. Not skyrim. That's because skyrim is result of clever engineering, asset reuse and cutting corners, while GTA5 is classic example of throwing money at the problem in order to hire army of artists. So, don't set your "impossible" bar too low.

Either way, I'm in seriously bad mood today, so I'll just drop the subject. Have fun.

 

For the record, I'm not saying an individual can compete with AAA. What they can do is duplicate AAA from a decade or so ago.

As to why, well, you probably shouldn't. Most of the time succesful indie games come from doing something AAA is not. Not from doing something AAA was doing 15 years ago.

 

You mean like creating a good SimCity game? Though that might not count since Colossal Order isn't a solo dev.

 

That still counts as doing something that AAA is not!

So yes, forgotten, abandoned, or just messed up AAA concepts from yesteryear can be worth doing.

 

It's skill and time, with time I think being the important part.

Building things doesn't necessarily take long. Yes, if someone gave me appropriate tools and content I could probably assemble a Skyrim-type game in a year or two. But how do I know what to assemble? It's easy to look at the end product of a game and say "yeah, I could build that", but a huge amount of effort in a game is put into stuff that we don't see. How many iterations of a quest are created, tweaked and/or discarded before it reaches its final form? How much time was spent writing all of the Elder Scrolls lore that Skyrim is based on? How many times was the world map created and recreated before they decided "yes, this is the size we want"? How many features, quests, skills, plot lines, areas, dungeons, characters, and other things were partially created and then scrapped because they didn't fit?

So sure, I agree that tools can enable building of such things, and probably in reasonably short time frames. But I also agree that just being able to build it isn't the whole story, and thus that improved scalability in that area won't help with the man-years of effort still required elsewhere.

I do think that there's huge areas of cost that could be dropped from some "AAA" styles of games with minimal impact on the experience, though. For example, when playing an RPG how often do people actually listen to all of the voiced dialog? Many players just skip it until they get to the instructions. Many prefer to read (which isn't helped by the often lacking quality of the voicing). Of the remainder, I wonder how many would feel that the experience was worse if non-key dialogue was delivered in written form? And that wouldn't just save money and time, it'd also make development more flexible, because you can't easily tweak the writing - or anything that depends on it - once it's voiced.

 

I think people tend to look at large games and focus too much on the art. People say "Skyrim" and just think "lots of assets" but so much more than that goes into a game like this. There's so much deep coherence in Skyrim, from the character clothes to the architecture to the fauna to those beautiful Skyrim mountains. It has such a strong aesthetic, backed by massive amounts of lore, content, dialog, all of this stuff that reinforces itself and makes it so famous for being a "huge world".

I honestly dislike the entire Elder Scrolls series, all the way back to Daggerfall, I never really "got" why it was so popular. But I can appreciate the craftsmanship and the tremendous amounts of work. Even the UI is beautiful and thematically consistent, while remaining modern and crisp.

So much care and attention needs to go into something like that to have so much coherence at so many levels. It's not about tools or tons of assets. It's about many tens of thousands of man hours all being invested in a coherent vision.

 

What we need i these discussion of like skyrim and like mass effects is hard cold number.

How many assets, their categories, their distribution in the game, teh load of each scenes, list of items, number of gameplay system, etc ...

We have some number like the number of line but by itself it says nothing. With cold hard number we can look at the result and find solution to get more or less the quality target, we have a hard target and goal to match and can contrast what's possible or not.

We know characters, terrains and items is almost a solved problem on the level of skyrim if you use procedural generation and a few hand made primitive (strike them if you want to make uncharted 4's level of quality you can't).

I propose to scope skyrim, I have started in another thread, I have redownload the game + creation kit to see if I can further count assets etc ...

 

This. Those tens of thousands of man hours require a significant amount of scaling man hours and tools just to manage the production of content. Content scaling is exponential not linear.

It is also worth noting that a large scale game is a very different game architecturally than a smaller game.

 

Y'know I'm on the fence, there are some games that are simply out of reach. But I know of "indie" MMO's custom made with 40,000 + assets, factions, crafting systems, character creations systems, derived AI subfunction state tree systems etc. etc. it was originally made by a team of three and now it's a team of 8? Roughly. I know the guys, great bunch and very hard working..

MMO is a bit much for me personally, but it shows that you can do things other's believe aren't possible.

Again if nothing else, they made it happen.!

 

That won't really tell you a lot. That would just be an accounting of what the shipped with. It won't help determine dev time. No game is an optimal development process. A raw set of final assets won't tell you anything about pivots, rejected content, iteration, system/tools/pipeline refactoring, plans/ideas/concepts that failed or were discarded. Direction change, or forced adaptation.

In any game, development is a moving target, large or small. With large games, while a lot of effort is put into avoiding course correction, it is still there. And when it happens on a large game, it can be a huge amount of hours to adjust. Seemingly small changes can take months.

And 'procedural' isn't really a huge time saver as you might think. Mainly because it isn't free. Getting quality procedural content requires significant investment of engineering and design and art, and a lot of iteration. Additionally, it is often specific to single game and requires maintenance. So the investment can't always be shared across projects. (At least not without additional investment). Often it can be cheaper (and less risky) to just add more artist hours.

 

I'm still going to prove you guys wrong. But let's not worry about that now, I just wanted to tell you all I've been enjoying checking into the forums about once a week

 

I know that But we still need some hard heuristics, something from which we can check assumption against. Yau say getting quality procedural generation require investment, that's true, but sometimes those investment are already made, I think character and lipsinc are solved problem, at least on the level of skyrim, how would you know? well if we had the heuristics we can look at it, we can contrast, and we can identify more precisely the problem, maybe I under estimate the generation of head topology across multiple race? who know? Or maybe it will make huge number irrelevant as we discover iteration suck all the cots? We can only make vague assumption right now? The hard number (because we also know team size, the legacy (4th in a series), and the dev time) would allow us to dispel myth and prove where the hurdle are really located.

 

I think you mean statistics not huristics, 'hard huristics' is nearly an oxymoron.

Regardless, even with detailed statistics about skyrim the best info you could hope to glean, is the amount of time it took to build skyrim. Not a game like skyrim, only skyrim. So many other factors that are not precisely trackable (or shareable) have massive impacts on production. Massive. And while, sure, procedural may exist, that doesn't mean they are available to you, or if the were, that they would be of any use.

And even in the best cases r&d investment is very difficult to account for. If a particular tool or process fails, the result may still have lead to a valuable learning or process. If a tool / process is done very well, it's total value is hard to determine because the process it replaced Is then never fully assessed. It may even be the case that tools/processes/automation is built as a preventive measure to account for pivots or features that never come to pass. Like a fire suppression system... If you never have fire, was it a waste of money? Procedural systems/tools are like that. The need to built early enough in the process that you can reap the most benefits, but not so early that they may be completely tossed due to scope or design changes. (We just hit that particular fun event).

So, looking at other games won't really help. It can, in a broad sense, but details won't. If you are straight cloning, the details of the game you are cloning will have tons of development and research time yours won't. If yours is different, r&d won't be accounted for.

Don't worry about other games and how they were built to determine your scope, there are too many variables, and things you'll never know about their development. If you want to get an idea how long your game will take, just scope and plan it, and build an exploratory prototype and a small cross sample of your best idea of final quality of your assets. Do your best (realistic) guess at what parts can be automated / made procedural, then do the math. And then double it. (Twice). That should give you a idea of time and resources needed. A much better idea than counting assets in someone else's game. In the end it makes no difference what another team has done, only what yours can actually do.

 

Well the whole question is can indie can make a game like skyrim ? Making skyrim some gold standard make sense, the problem is scope and quality.

I think it's rather obvious that every project is different, it does not mean some mean of planning and evaluating is useless. In fact any sensible project does it even though the evaluation will end up revised, that's why people advise people to not make an MMO, it's possible but the scope is obviously big, we check ambition against rough evaluation to make decision. The reason why it's an heuristic is precisely what you say, there is thing we can not track and only guess.

Since Skyrim is often cited, it's useful to contrast:
1. how much your project differ and what you learn about it
2. how much your project is similar and how much you can look into that to optimized.
We can for example look at the effective diversity of assets and reuse, we might learn how we over shot or under shot our own target as their game achieve similar impact with more or less etc ...

That has practical application, I already use this kind of heuristic to make some analysis in other thread, for example when there was discussion about foliage, I could show effect vs asset load by looking at the number of assets and their use, and point how much lower the actual target was to create similar scene. It's a tool!

No plan resist the terrain, but failing to plan is planning to fail!

But the post is about that question, can indie make a game like skyrim, if you want to know, you need to scope skyrim. And the answer will be how much we can and in which domain .

 

An indie couldn't afford to make a game like Skyrim.

And no, before somebody shows up and says "it's just a matter of time, not money" I'm going to have to shoot that right the hell down. Skyrim is a lot of content and content takes time, sure, but content also takes money. For instance, Skyrim uses over 70 voice actors to record more than 60,000 lines of dialogue. That's something an indie won't be able to handle without a load of money.

Then there's things like QA. Sure, an indie could do all the QA by themselves, but the game would be in testing for so long that it'd never get released. Skyrim had a QA team of 82 people. Assuming a very light work week of 40 hours, over Skyrim's 4 year dev period you're looking at 682,240 man hours of work, or roughly 77 years. So naturally you're going to want a QA team, which most indies aren't going to be able to afford, especially in any size really needed to handle a AAA open-world style RPG like Skyrim.

This is just for voice acting and QA, both of which can see substantial cuts but both of which missing will make the end product significantly less than a Skyrim-like open world RPG. This doesn't even touch on the art, the music, the multitude of design roles that will need to be filled (quest design being a huge role in itself), the sounds, etc.

Skyrim is a Big Game™ and making a game like it is well outside of the scope of an indie.

 

It also really depends on what someone means by "Skyrim".

For instance, if you mean "huge 32km map with billions of trees and rocks" then you can make this with a button click in map magic or gaia.

If you mean a full game where your players lose themselves in a deep and rich world that really feels complete and whole, then it is an entirely different kind of effort.

What sets Skyrim apart from most other games is how rich the world is along with its very large size. This is why people really love it. This is also what sets it apart from many other games with giant maps. They get lost in the fantasy of it and the sense of adventure.

 

But this why you want a hard heuristic (like there is 1800 character) instead of soft heuristic (like there is a lot of character).

The thing is you look at a "lot" instead of actual number and quality, you can't really make an analysis on that. You can't solve the problem without actual data. I need to data to make estimation. It's probable that voice need to be rules out, but at the same time many thing as been solved since then and are done better and faster. Tossing hand in air and sitting down is just as stupid as blind faith. It's notable that skyrim is also only possible because they did just that, they made analysis and devise method to make more faster at a lower cost. Their dungeon design methodology reflect that.

And I'm not interested at "you can't" but HOW MUCH you can and how!

 

Hire friends or college students

Early Access. Gamers will find bugs for you. Also it's not that Bethesda's QA is particularly competent... Three words: Bucket On Head.

For art there's asset store where you can get fairly coherent set of assets as Boundel had shown (where most of the assets are from the store). And every indie HAS to be good at design, otherwise he'd make a S***game no matter of the genre or scope.

 

Still costs money, especially if you want competence. A bunch of inexperienced college students or friends are going to stick out like a sore thumb and ruin the polish that a Skyrim-like game absolutely requires.

Early access is not a substitute for good QA. Not only that, but your example of the bucket on the head thing isn't a bug. It's the game working as intended as the NPC is now blind due to an inability to actually cast rays from their eyes to see what the player is doing. They are as blind as a person with a bucket on their head. It may look silly, but it's the rules of the game being handled perfectly.

Bethesda makes huge games and huge games are a QA nightmare. If you want to make a game like Skyrim, you are going to need loads of QA and early access won't cut it.

Again, we're talking about a game that is similar to Skyrim, which Boundel is not. Compared to Skyrim, Boundel looks positively ancient.

 

I have updated the game to version 0.9a

You may want to check it at
Steam Store Page.

 

I just bought 3 copies. LAN MMO sounds perfect. So long as there's some content to run through, progression, and a good skill/item system I'm good. Albion Online has me hooked right now.

 

It's funny that people say that in the future two guys will make something like Skyrim. XD

I like to compare software/game development to construction development. Skyrim could be compared to a large office building. Something like Flappy Bird could be compared to a kennel. It's kind of obvious that one skilled builder can make a great kennel in a short time. However its also VERY obvious than a single guy can't make a huge office building alone. There is no way for many reasons and everybody intuitively understands that. In game development there is an endless stream of clueless noobs who think that with enough patience, creativity and good tools they will be able to make a huge skyscraper alone. When noobs talk about procedural generation they often think that it means that content will just magically make itself in a few minutes. XD

 

Just like two people can't make an MMO, right?

 

In the future, why not?

A generation ago it required a genius to build pong. Now any 10 year old can put it together. Determined individuals already can build games on par with Diablo 2 or Doom. Both were pretty significant technical feats in their own time. Give it another decade or two, and Skyrim will be in reach of the average game dev. In fact there are probably geniuses out there now who have the ability to build a Skyrim on their own, the game is starting to get long in the tooth.

This is a fine analogy if you are talking about today's standard. But not if you are going to put 'in the future'. Today I can build on my own a residence that rivals that out performs everything built a few centuries ago. With the current rate of progress it wouldn't surprise me if there comes a day when one man can build a skyscraper.

 

You miss my point. I mean that certain projects require certain amount of work and it can't be circumvented. For ex. a large 3D RPG is a task which requires around ONE MILLION of man-hours to create. There is no way around it. Great tools and skills can allow you to work faster but not 100x faster.

Building a game does not require "a genius". It's not about being smart. It's a lot about being patient and putting in the hours. No genius is going to make a Skyrim clone since it takes a million hours to build it.

There are HUGE gains of development speed by employing high-end specialists. These guys can work 100x faster within their field. This means that a 10-man team can be 1000x more productive and one man "team".

 

The reason Pong took a genuis but today any of us can knock it out in an afternoon is because we're building on untold millions of hours of work by others and the resulting economies of scale, which is the same reason no individual or very small team can reproduce whatever the current top-of-the-line product happens to be, whether it's a AAA title or a skyscraper. If it later becomes possible to reproduce that with a small team, it's only after supporting industries have provided shortcuts to skip over all the labor that made it a unique product in the past. All that work is still there, you just don't have to do it yourself.

And of course, for extreme cases like a skyscraper, it's entirely possible the supporting industries will never provide those tools because there isn't sufficient demand for Every Joe Blow to stand up his own 40 story building.

 

Yeah it's definitely a moving target. That is the reason solo or tiny Indie teams will not make current gen AAA RPGs. It's just not possible unless the Indies just happen to be 50x as skilled and 50x more productive than their AAA team member counterparts to make up for the human resource and funding gap.

However, a lot of the stuff AAA work on seems like a waste of time. As in it is perhaps nice to have but certainly not necessary. So I do believe a small Indie team and even a solo Indie can capture the essence of the AAA RPGs... the things that make them worth playing.

And that's all that is needed. There comes a point where players won't notice the difference. The key is to figure out where those points are. Maybe 1 hour of speech is all that is needed instead of 10 hours. Maybe 3 unique trees are needed instead of 30. Maybe working 1 hour on a texture instead of 10 hours is all that is needed for the majority of stuff.

And instead the Indies focus on the core parts. The things that really matter. That could be the quests, combat and leveling experience. Or whatever people like the most about the AAA RPGs. Maybe it is the world size. Figure out what is the essence and focus time there and spend much less time on the non-essential stuff.

 

Personally the reason I keep using skyrim as a benchmark is that it's hardly top AAA today, the lesson were learned and the procedure accelerated, there is still some aspect to innovate on certainly to reach that level, but for sure it's a great benchmark to strive. I have installed mass effect 1 today, I was stun how much indie have catch up to that in term of quality, though the new one .... I don't know yet. Mass effect 1 has a surprising amount of recycling of character mesh and animation, just employed the right way to hide them.

But the next stuff that will fall will be text to speech, google just made a breakthrough that open so many doors! Given that a previous breakthrough (artistic style transfer of picture) got from 30mn per image on top gpu to almost real time now in less than a years to a very successfull app (prisma: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neuralprisma&hl=en ) with plenty room for improvement, I have no doubt artistic text to speech is next! The underlying process is almost the same ... In fact art anything will have a HUGE revolutions in the five years happening.

 

Indie developers are constantly gaining access to new resources that previously weren't available and these have greatly increased our workflow. In some cases it actually eliminates stages that would have been necessary otherwise.

Just as one example in the past we would have had to manually create the trees in a game like Skyrim, but today we can go purchase a license to SpeedTree, purchase a few base trees, and export a few trees with randomized attributes giving us forests with only a minor investment of time and money.

 

Is he using Unet?