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Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

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Re: Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

#71

Post by hpx7 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #27

I own Planimeter. We publish Planimeter Game Engine 2D, which was previously called Grid Engine 9.[1] 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 o…

Hi there! I started a company this year focused on multiplayer server infrastructure. We also built a multiplayer game framework for Typescript that has gotten 400+ stars on Github in the past few months: https://github.com/hathora/hathora

Would love to connect and exchange notes about multiplayer development -- if you're interested, my email is on my profile.

Re: Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

#72

Post by mrandish »

lijogdfljk wrote: post #11

I might be interested, but this group sounds too "serious" for me. Ie i'm serious, but i have a full time job, and i'm obsessive so i'm yakshaving the foundations of my projects. I'm less concerned with the final game, and more concerned with building a platform that helps me efficiently create. While the game is my goal, i focus on the platform because i feel solo devs have a ton of overhead. I figure if i can optim…

> "i'm obsessive so i'm yakshaving the foundations of my projects."

As an aside, an indie developer should make a literal yakshaving game. Just because.

(extra credit for an Ultra setting which squanders GPU power on ridiculously high-fidelity fur simulation)

Re: Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

#73

Post by hpx7 »

k__ wrote: post #3

Half-OT: Anyone got pointers to game engines for solo devs? Something to get 2D multiplayer games out of the door quickly.

If you're interested in using web technologies for your game, you may find the framework I've been working on to be interesting: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/

I've had success using it as the backend+networking stack in conjunction with game UI tools like Phaser and Pixi.js.

Re: Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

#74

Post by andrewmcwatters »

cupofpython wrote: post #70
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Planimeter, we're doing this internally with a game product called Planimeter Game Sandbox. Over a decade ago, under a different team name, we published an open source game called Half-Life 2: Sandbox. It was closer to a game than a game sandbox, which I would, like you, categorize as different than a game engine or a standalone game. But the idea is the same. We see that there is a market for developers who want…

>we have spent time looking into other game engines besides our own to see if we could move faster on established products while minimizing risk, but the landscape is amazingly poor. i hadnt done a real deep dive yet, but from introductory readings on a few engines this was my impression too on what we are looking for in general. Glad to know im not the only one to feel it. >So ideally you and I would have access to…

I am happy to send you an internal build. It's an unreleased product on Steam.

Edit: It's probably just easier to mark our private repository as public for today. It contains copyrighted material as well as some assets from commercial games we use for internal testing so I'm essentially leaking an internal codebase, but we just don't have enough eyeballs on this for it to matter. I'll mark it private by the end of the day.

Keep in mind the main branch is probably broken from our experiments with uplifting the UI to use Yoga. CSS 2.1 and Flexbox are on the product backlog, but I may end up ditching Yoga since it's becoming too much of an engineering time drain. Feel free to git bisect it until you find the working commit. My apologies.

That being said, the Planimeter/game-engine-2d repository is only a few major features behind this branch.

https://github.com/Planimeter/gridsandbox

Re: Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

#75

Post by andrewmcwatters »

hpx7 wrote: post #71
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #27

I own Planimeter. We publish Planimeter Game Engine 2D, which was previously called Grid Engine 9.[1] 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 o…

Hi there! I started a company this year focused on multiplayer server infrastructure. We also built a multiplayer game framework for Typescript that has gotten 400+ stars on Github in the past few months: https://github.com/hathora/hathora Would love to connect and exchange notes about multiplayer development -- if you're interested, my email is on my profile.

I have watched your company build up this tech for a little while now, I suspect there are realistically really only handful of us in game software who really know this stuff inside and out and who are contributing back their knowledge.

Thanks for dropping a reply on HN.

I can be reached at andrew at andrewmcwatters.com. I'll shoot you an email.

Re: Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

#77

Post by amitmathew »

Our company is building a community for solo devs and small teams around the Godot game engine. We’re a few months away from launching, but I’d love to hear what indie devs would want in a community and what resources would speed up their development (email is in profile). We’ll have tutorials, game templates, and art assets to that will help people get started. We’re also sponsoring open source plugins and tools for Godot. Let me know if you know of a deserving project to support!

Re: Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?

#78

Post by ccvannorman »

I'm a solo game developer! I love working on games in Unity and PlayCanvas. Thanks for starting this thread.

One thing I'm constantly surprised by and grateful for, is the enormous amount a solo dev can do on top of today's stacks and tools. And it's only going to get easier (I hope).

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