Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

I've been researching solo game dev for decades now, and that definitely mirrors my conclusions so far.

Just keep the end goal in mind and don't reinvent the wheel, unless you desire a career in wheel engineering. While you're working on your stuff, remember that others are also working on their stuff, and a lot of useful things are shared freely and continually popping up new.

Have the courage to recycle your ideas, and the ruthlessness to streamline your development process. Going solo is all about coming to terms with your limitations, and building solutions to work around them. Maximize the impact of work you like doing, while minimizing the necessity of work you don't. Sacrifice your creative vision until only the core remains. Resist the creeping scope of scaling it up, but also keep firm in your artistic requirements. Keep your "must haves" short, solve the hard problems first, manage your expectations, and above all be stubborn enough to tread through it.

- https://twitter.com/IndieLegion

- https://howtomarketagame.com/ Discord

- https://twitter.com/gamediscoverco Plus subscription's Discord

- Godot Engine's Discord

I've connected more deeply with some of the folks I've met on there, so it hasn't felt lonely at all.

I'm also doing an indie dev masters via Falmouth, and my cohort meet up weekly (and we have a Discord for daily chatter), and it's a great community, but I'm not sure if that will last past graduation in a few weeks.

(I'm on the marketing video super cringe)

https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/study/online/postgraduate/indie-g...

I spend a lot of time thinking about how independent developers can better spend their time. A lot of developers get caught up in design documents, or thinking about how they want to make a game, but not seriously understanding how many hours a week you need to commit to a project and over how many years.

As a rule of thumb, about 20 hours a week over a period of multiple years dedicated to a single project seems to bisect game developers into categories of those who are productive and those who aren't.

We have had conversations with different developers in communities, like LÖVE's, for instance:

Surprisingly, many developers aren't interested in serious commercial efforts. A lot of them fixate over matters that don't make significant product impact. As an example, there's some sort of "ECS" fad going on right now. Years ago there was some sort of "push/pop game state" fad.

Professional game engines aren't built this way, so I have no idea where these fads originate from.

We are a group of former Source Engine contractors, game technology developers, and designers. We have written some articles on embedding Lua, multiplayer game networking, and introducing a CSS 2.1 compositor into game engines, among other things.

I'm interested in having conversations with other game developers, and as a like to have, we love talking with those who have written significant pieces of software in the open source community.

As a crude ballpark, a measure of "significant" might be any repository with over 75 stars, or development of a technique that is novel in game software, etc.[2]

[1]: https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-2d

[2]: https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/github-statistics