Ask HN: I'm quitting my job, will create a game – any advice?

Funny how "lottery" is the word that comes out the most when we talk about making games for a living.

Big studios solve this by publishing games by the hundreds.

Random thoughts from a solo game developer:

- Validate the idea. Try building a prototype and verifying your idea before comitting to it. You'll learn a lot about whether your game idea is fun/can be made fun, and learn the ropes of your new dev environment in a way that'll let you throw away your early code with no regrets.

- Pick Unity if you don't have experience with either. You'll get to results faster, and at solo dev scale, the quality Unreal offers won't matter.

- If you've decided on a mobile game, do some research on how effective monetization on mobile works, come to terms with how bad the options are and decide if you're still into it

- Runway seems OK for what you're doing, but word of advice: it is mentally taxing to some people to be in financial "freefall". I know this hit me hard when I made a similar decision to yours.

That said, there are a lot of good parts as well. Seeing people play and enjoy your brainchild is definitely more rewarding than working somebody else's startup or company, and as a venue for creativity, game development is hard to beat for somebody with a programmer skillset.

I love that energy, and totally sympathize with the desire to take charge of your own vision. One of the great things about this industry is the willingness to take risks. Creating my own successful game is one of my life goals as well! Game creation can be a really meaningful experience and its a great combination of a lot of different skillsets. It's also a ton of fun.

But.

If you want to make this successful, first you're going to need to understand the risks here, as well as define explicitly what you're looking to get out of this. Are you looking to just make money, or execute a creative vision? What will you decide to do if those two things come into conflict?

Second, of all the potential business models out there, making a game is probably one of the riskiest ones you can possibly work on. You're going to need to come into this knowing what you're doing.

At minimum, you should be able to answer the question - "Why does the world need this game?" Why would someone play this game, and more importantly, pay for it?

If you were an experienced game developer who had released some number of small indie titles and looking to spend some time on a title you know can have an impact, thats one thing. But making a good game that people want to play is very difficult, time consuming, and requires a lot of experience. It takes years to build the skillsets needed to be successful in this industry, and thats even with a programming background. The fact that you don't have an idea yet of what game you want to make, nor have a familiarity with an engine yet, tells me you're a couple years away from being able to quit your job. Also, the fact that you say you're motivated to do this because you're bored of your job and want some self-actualization, tells me you're doing this for the wrong reasons. You should only quit your job and make the jump if you're already progressing on a game you know can be successful and just need time to develop and publish it.

So here is my advice. Keep your job for now, or if you don't like it, find a new one. Join a game jam on itch.io, timebox yourself and your partner for some short amount of time, like a week or a month, to create several small "throwaway" games to build skills and the understanding of how much you can accomplish. If you don't have many obligations outside your job (kids, family, etc.) you should be able to accomplish a small complete game in a month in your spare time. Do this for a year or two, and if eventually you find yourself making a really great game you just need more time to work on, then you have your answer. But by choosing to quit your job before you have even started exercising these skills you're setting yourself up for failure.

I sincerely hope you succeed and find your vision. But in order to succeed, you need to have a good understanding of the risks involved, and the skills and experience to know how to overcome them in concrete terms.

As someone who's just completed a game jam with a small game, this is a fantastic hobby at minimum and I hope you're not deterred from being creative. I only advise caution when talking about turning this into a job. Who knows, by doing this just as a hobby at first you may even find that this gives you the right outlet you need to enjoy your day job more! That was more or less the case for me, since my present job means I'm not building things as much and deal more with a lot of team dynamics and bureaucracy.

Edit: This video was pretty enlightening to me in terms of pitching game design - if he won't accept your pitch, why should you? Theres a lot of other good videos on the GDC channel as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTtr45y7P0&ab_channel=GDC

I work in a mobile gaming development house, so maybe I can share my 2 cents.

From the look of it, the landscape of mobile gaming is pretty competetive nowadays. I'm not sure which genre you are targeting, but from what you are describing I think it's a casual game? I strongly recommend Deconstructor of Fun to you as it covers mobile gaming pretty extensively and we have been using it for industry information from day zero. Subscribe to the newsletter and try to figure out the landscape for your genre, and see where you can find an edge.

That said, unless you have been going through a full scale mobile gaming dev from begining to end, you might overlook some aspects. For example, you didn't mention method of marketing (but do have a market target), but that's one of the key areas that contribute to the success of a mobile game (and pretty much every indie game), and could be pretty expensive if you go through some channels.

Another thing to think is how easy it is for others to copy your game. It's almost fair practice that companies start copying other games, not only the gameplay flow, but even the look and style of it. Big companies do that as well, so be careful.

Your financial looks good, 12-18 months should be good (I'd target for 2 years though), and about the engine, we are using Unity, but I guess it depends on the project and your experience. If you think the gae won't have top graphics and you don't have a solid C++ background, maybe Unity is easier?

I wrote a game with a friend early on for the App Store. I second the notion of validation. It's great you have a friend who can design graphics for the game, but prototype and test the basic mechanics before you get too wrapped up in the appearance. Using simple placeholders will speed up your iteration as you refine the mechanics. I spent a lot of time writing a vector graphics layer (this was in the days of iOS 2), and while it was very cool, it took a lot of time that could probably have been better spent trying experiments with the basic gameplay. The game was not a big success.