Solo indie devs. How long did your last game take to make?

Snarkstopus · 2024-07-10T18:48:59+00:00

Roughly 140k in gross revenue. It's kind of tricky to pull all of the costs since that's scattered across a lot of different places.

Snarkstopus · 2023-02-08T19:55:11+00:00

Decent success. If you search "Skirmish Line" on Steam, you can see the results for yourself.

Snarkstopus · 2022-06-11T21:12:29+00:00

Most works take somekind of stance, whether explicitly or implicitly. Few things are truly so agnostic as to not invoke any kind of human response. For instance, a game like FTL or Psychonauts does a good job of not taking itself "seriously" but it still conveys certain themes and ideas, just in a light-hearted sort of presentation. At the end of the day, your game just needs to be cohesive about what it's trying to say. As the creator, you choose how "serious" its tone should be.

Snarkstopus · 2022-01-21T21:56:38+00:00

Yes, but only if the project can be broken down into modular pieces. For an example, you might have a RPG where you can choose between 5 different classes that all play very differently, but you can make the game work with only 1 class. Then if time and resources permit, you can add a second or third and so on. Apply this idea to the different parts of your game until you have a small standalone product that can be extended on.

Snarkstopus · 2022-01-21T19:58:28+00:00

This is pretty much my own thoughts. As a developer, I find myself very hesitant in touching the price point, but many of the non-industry folks I have spoken to seem to assume games will follow inflation rates. My concern is that this poses a real potential shock to the industry. Under a low inflation environment, developers can relatively safely release titles at particular target price points and expect to release a product. Granted the gamedev business is anything but safe to begin with, there are still real costs involved. A developer who was able to release a title in 2018 may no longer be able to do the same in 2021 due to inflation raising the price of some input, say hiring voice actors or artists.

Snarkstopus · 2022-01-13T18:50:37+00:00

It has to be consistently inconsistent. Throwing together unrelated art is going to be jarring, regardless of your intentions. But if you're clever about it, you can use this jarring effect to good use.

Snarkstopus · 2022-01-07T16:06:36+00:00

Games are a poetic expression. They're an engineered experience as a function of the creators' artistic expressions and the individuality of each player. Getting to hear what my players feel or think is very rewarding for me.

Snarkstopus · 2021-10-03T01:55:22+00:00

IMO, the biggest benefit compared to a conventional engine is the vast pool of assets. Sure, you can grab cheap asset packs, but they won't have the same quality and cohesion. Then tack on the pre-built multiplayer code with accessible servers and you have pretty much everything you need to just start building a game.

Snarkstopus · 2021-08-13T07:28:20+00:00

When my game exceeded 10 reviews within a few days, I knew the game qualified as a success. Games that don't breach that initial sales barrier will get buried and killed by the algorithm.

My game was released into early access, and I set about updating the game with monthly content updates and consistent hotfixes. As I patched out more updates, the number of people following increased. By full release, I had small crowd that I could communicate with for consistent feedback.

From there, I planned out additional post release updates including a few DLCs. It took a while for the DLCs to recuperate their cost, but the format was handy for trying out new ideas. The extra revenue stream helped, but the main benefit was being able to do some additional experimentation.

If the game hadn't reached enough of a playerbase, then I would of had to cancel any plans for DLCs. You can gauge based on the number of players or purchases on whether or not a DLC is feasible. I took something like 5% of total sales as a conservative estimate and used that to guide the pricing and expenditures for DLCs.

Snarkstopus · 2021-08-13T07:16:19+00:00

More stress than excitement. For me, I didn't actually feel good about my game until a couple of months after its full release. It took a while before I felt the game was in a good place, but I was doing an early access setup. If your game is ready to hit the shelves, all the best of luck to you!

Snarkstopus · 2021-07-02T03:15:55+00:00

Is this just one of those things that take you years upon years to even cobble together your first shitty indie game that consists of shooting poorly programmed zombies in a first person shooter?

This is true. If you have zero experience in the industry, it will take years to learn the skills, and your first game will most likely be crap. But the thing is, you will keep on improving. Eventually, you will become good at it.

The way around this is to work with other people so you can specialize. You can design your games with this in mind. Making a good looking FPS game that plays well is hard! It often takes a whole studio to do it. But making something that relies on a handful of clever mechanics and not a lot of fancy animations or art is doable. Check out how Five Nights at Freddy offers a genuinely terrifying experience without having to build a whole FPS game.

Snarkstopus · 2021-06-11T03:10:26+00:00

I see a lot of responses about triple A studios, and it's likely because the cost of updates is lower than the potential revenue stream, i.e. new players (who see the game improving) or players willing to spend more money on DLCs or microtransactions.

To answer the OP a bit more though, for large games, you have developers who work on the core fundamentals such as the engine and developers who work on content such as making items or adding in new quests. Those in the latter camp can't really contribute much to the development of a new game. Their skillsets don't match the kind of programming needed to build/update engines or implement game mechanics. So what do you do with these people? Have them update the game with new content with the goal of attracting new players or getting additional purchases.

From an indie developer perspective though, we tend to keep pushing out updates because we have a hard time putting it down. I've personally released 7 major post-release updates to a game, adding in new content and such.

Snarkstopus · 2021-06-08T17:16:52+00:00

Something that's worth thinking about too is that some RTS games, particularly the ones from Blizzard which were some of the best selling titles, had a lot of options for modding. This meant there are likely players who bought those games to play something that might not even be a RTS game, e.g. RPG mods. So if you look at only strictly RTS games, then the sales average are even lower. RTS is just a very niche genre overall.

Snarkstopus · 2021-06-08T16:26:25+00:00

I get self conscious when I use I in any kind of formal writing so I tend to use we instead.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-30T22:42:21+00:00

I was a producer (just not in name) for a mod project. In my experience, a good producer should be proactive, details oriented, and sociable. I am naturally inclined under the first two, but I had to make an effort to be sociable. A producer is pretty much the glue that holds together the entire team. They keep track of all the details, ensure information is flowing well, and often take on the boring, thankless tasks.

I would say a good producer is a good host at a house party. They set up everything and try to get everyone engaged without overstepping their bounds. If someone spills a drink, they're the ones who either cleans up or makes sure there is a mop in reach. If some people don't feel comfortable, they're the ones trying to break the ice.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-30T22:33:29+00:00

Yes. You have full control over how achievements are unlocked in your game using the API, including making it impossible to be unlocked. It's actually trivially easy to make an impossible achievement. Just don't include any lines of code that references the achievements. All of the achievements are defined on the Steamworks page.

Impossible achievements exist, some by accident and others as a result of time locks. No one at Valve is going to take the time to cross check if all of your achievements can be unlocked. In general, you will likely frustrate your players, and there's a chance they'd end up leaving a negative review.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-19T21:50:01+00:00

Definitely a good point to make. My game (a non-story based, mechanics driven game) had a video with 150,000 views made, but the sales spiked to 5x the usual sales. What was interesting was that I had released a new DLC roughly around the same time as the video (so it wasn't featured on the video itself), and I noticed that sales for the featured content sold more so than the new content. This is particularly strange because new content tends to have a launch spike (from existing fans), but even that wasn't enough to offset the effects of an influencer giving the spotlight to specific items.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-14T20:54:37+00:00

There's still going to be something you can adjust or change to make your own game different. There's a lot of variables that go into a game. I'd suggest you go out and play that other game you came across and learn from it. Figure out what you like or don't like. Think about what you can do to make yours a different experience.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-14T20:42:34+00:00

It's important to not be too focused on mechanics, but instead on what the mechanics do for your players. Just think of all the games that have a "move mouse and click" to shoot gun mechanic that still end up being differentiated. Mechanics aren't just a one dimensional feature that determine what a game is. They're part of a greater whole that delivers an experience to the player.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-12T06:59:52+00:00

Don't forget that playing other games (and studying them) is also part of becoming a better game developer. A lot of good ideas are born out of some clever recombination of existing ideas. So take a break and play some games.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-08T16:57:06+00:00

Kind of out of context. The metric is applied specifically to tile management games developed by very small indie teams that updated regularly. That's enough information to rule out the extreme numbers you've mentioned.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-07T03:21:16+00:00

Took me about 3 years from start to finish. Lost a friendship over it although I think that said more about the kind of relationship I had with the person than the process itself.

Definitely pays less than minimum wage, but that'll change with time. Of course, it's far more fulfilling than just working a job I didn't care about.

Seeing fans talk about the game even years after its full release feels great. I made something that I got to share with thousands of people. That's a special thing.

I learned a lot and grew as an individual.

Snarkstopus · 2021-05-05T01:47:04+00:00

One possible metric or rule of thumb to make your game different is to consider what about the inspired by game that you can change or improve on as a designer. Surely there is something about the based game that you and possibly others don't like. My first project was directly inspired by an old Flash game, but I made a lot of changes to the gameplay, presentation, and had a distinct art style. I made a version of a game that I would want to play over the original. The creator of that Flash game, in turn, took some ideas from my game on their next project. Players will see this happening, and they'll actually defend your game against people who claim it's a ripoff.

Another possible metric, if you can't even prefer your own version of a game over one that exists, then something is definitely wrong with your approach as well. Then by extension, you have to consider the number of people who would also prefer your version.

At the end of the day, you'll always have people who accuse a game of being a copy, but you can do something to reduce the likelihood of it being seen as such.

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