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Confessions of a failed indie developer

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Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#71

Post by rgbrenner »

tieTYT wrote: post #70
rgbrenner wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You wouldn't start building a webapp by building your own web framework first." If I were starting from scratch TODAY, then I agree with you. I started a small ecommerce site back in 2003, and django, etc didn't exist. So I did develop a framework from scratch in C. 10 years later, it's the engine my new data storage startup (Nuevo Cloud). Point is, things like web app engines and game engines aren't things that pay…

First, yes: You can only tell someone, "Don't reinvent the wheel" if the wheel has already been invented. Re: your last sentence: Isn't it even more likely that it could end up being a complete waste of time and effort and be inferior to other frameworks/engines?

Yes, that is probably the most likely outcome. That's why I said "can be" an advantage, but maybe that's too strong wording.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#72

Post by benihana »

usea wrote: post #52
pjungwir wrote: post #38

I really enjoyed and appreciated this article. So many harsh comments! Yes, what he did was foolish, but thank god for foolishness. And these things are easier to see from outside and after the fact than when you're following a dream. I've had a lifelong dream of building my own game, and I'll be sad if I die without trying. I'm way less prepared than the author. I've done web dev for 15 years. My last game was an AS…

I've also read Game Engine Architecture, and I've written a (much less sophisticated) engine on a small team in school. Unless your goal is to make a game engine rather than a game, it would be the height of foolishness to build a game engine. The main takeaways of the article are "have a business model" and "don't build your own engine." It adds years to the process, it's extremely difficult to get right, and the en…

I like this analogy much better than the one above about using a web framework. This is more in line with the amount of work it would be to build a game engine.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#73

Post by chii »

bluedino wrote: post #8
programminggeek wrote: post #2

I think as a developer, the easiest thing to screw up is the understanding of what a business is and how long it takes to build (and how much it costs to run). Say you are making $50,000 a year. The owner is probably paying more like $75,000-100,000 when you include insurance, rent, taxes, equipment, etc. Now, imagine you are on a small team of five - an artist, game designer, 2 devs, and a qa person. That is an outl…

If you don't have an artist, you need to be able to do art+code. Even if you're making as simple puzzle game, your game is going to look a hundred times better with jewels/blocks drawn by someone who knows what they are doing, compared to something you hacked up in MSPaint. And don't go super-cheap on the artist. It might take them a few hours to do just a few simple icons/items, so pay them what you'd want per hour…

what's a good rate for music for games? I can see two situations - you either find an artist whose style you liked/suites the game, and pay them for an original composition, or find an existing song that suits the game and pay a "licence" to use it.

I have no idea how much it costs to do either - i'd really like to know.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#74

Post by chii »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #33
zanny wrote: post #21

As a 21 year old, I don't see how you could try to go indie with a family and mortgage. I'm in a position where I could now (couchsurf my family until my thing is ready and have $0 expenses) but I just look out at a sea of mediocre indies with "fresh" ideas that are just respins on the same old, often in the form of some 2d platformer with sprites or on Unity. That just isn't compelling to me, but that is a personal…

Re: Unity I've often heard the "Unity look" criticized, but there is no Unity look. That's just a failure of art direction. I.e. any engine that supports shaders well doesn't have a particular look. Because Unity and UDK are such time-savers, they're used in a lot of student projects. Often these have very low production values that bias people against these engines. A good analogy is particle systems. The fundamenta…

yep - the default art assets tend to have a style that people can recognize. But sometimes that's hard to fix since you don't have budget to make new assets. I guess it must be up to the developer's creativity to break the mould - and not many can achieve that.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#75

Post by gfodor »

Honestly this guy was never developing a game, as he said, he was deluding himself into thinking a game would materialize if he built a game engine. He also managed to burn many bridges along the way by taking money from people in his personal network for the luxury of spending his afternoon messing around with computer graphics algorithms in Visual Studio. A total and completely expected and avoidable disaster.

Honestly if you start a company and don't have a plan and can't connect the dots to how you'll actually ship something you aren't "learning from failure" you are just being stupid and ignorant. And selfish if you are leaning on others to enable you to do this. If the guy read a little bit more he'd know "build a custom 3d game engine" is not anywhere on the list of things to do if you are bootstrapping an indie game. If anything it's on a list of what not to do. Beyond that, there was no game in mind to warrant building a new engine. At least if he had a game in mind that clearly needed a stunning new engine that current tech couldn't handle he could argue he was trying to pull a Carmack and failed. But this wasn't the case since he had only a vague idea of what the game he was creating even was.

The thing to learn from this example is that you should at least do a little bit of reading on entrepreneurism and product development before trying to be an entrepreneur and create a product. (In this case, "product development" means "game design.") Even more simple, realize what product you are even trying to build before you start building intellectually-satisfying but ultimately useless software.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#76

Post by a8da6b0c91d »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #29
zanny wrote: post #21

As a 21 year old, I don't see how you could try to go indie with a family and mortgage. I'm in a position where I could now (couchsurf my family until my thing is ready and have $0 expenses) but I just look out at a sea of mediocre indies with "fresh" ideas that are just respins on the same old, often in the form of some 2d platformer with sprites or on Unity. That just isn't compelling to me, but that is a personal…

> As a 21 year old, I don't see how you could try to go indie with a family and mortgage. Older devs can more easily have 6 mo to a couple of years in savings. It's not fun to burn that down, but it's quite a different situation from having no savings and student loans. Also, having a partner with whom you can talk about money, strategize about money, and share income / savings with is a huge advantage.

I am struggling to imagine how a guy working for 13 years in software wouldn't have years of living costs covered with liquid assets. What the heck do people blow their money on.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#77

Post by bandushrew »

gfodor wrote: post #75

Honestly this guy was never developing a game, as he said, he was deluding himself into thinking a game would materialize if he built a game engine. He also managed to burn many bridges along the way by taking money from people in his personal network for the luxury of spending his afternoon messing around with computer graphics algorithms in Visual Studio. A total and completely expected and avoidable disaster. Hone…

Aspects of that comment are true, but that is a pretty harsh indictment on someone who took a real risk and worked to make it happen. Its easy to call someone ignorant and stupid because they did not approach a problem the way you would. Dont do it.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#78

Post by acuozzo »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #76
JabavuAdams wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a 21 year old, I don't see how you could try to go indie with a family and mortgage. Older devs can more easily have 6 mo to a couple of years in savings. It's not fun to burn that down, but it's quite a different situation from having no savings and student loans. Also, having a partner with whom you can talk about money, strategize about money, and share income / savings with is a huge advantage.

I am struggling to imagine how a guy working for 13 years in software wouldn't have years of living costs covered with liquid assets. What the heck do people blow their money on.

> What the heck do people blow their money on.

The interest on 130K of private student loans, to start.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#79

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

GBKS wrote: post #60
marijn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you should probably not think in terms of the release that ends the project Yes. I want to stress this some more. I know several people who are/were working on big ambitious projects in a kind of stealth mode, citing concerns that their idea will be stolen, or emphasizing that it isn't "ready yet". I suspect this is usually rationalizing a fear of criticism. A single-person personal project shouldn't be worked on i…

Reminds me of the story on how "Settlers of Catan" was created. "Every once in a while, he would bring the new game upstairs to test it out on his family. They would play along, but Teuber could tell that the game wasn't working. Sometimes, in the middle of a match, he would notice his youngest son, Benny, reading a comic under the table. Other times his wife would suddenly remember a load of laundry that needed imme…

That's the way to do it. Settlers of Cataan is a massively successful game, probably more than most videogames. Lots of lesson to take away from that article.

Re: Confessions of a failed indie developer

#80

Post by ANTSANTS »

tieTYT wrote: post #42
marijn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you should probably not think in terms of the release that ends the project Yes. I want to stress this some more. I know several people who are/were working on big ambitious projects in a kind of stealth mode, citing concerns that their idea will be stolen, or emphasizing that it isn't "ready yet". I suspect this is usually rationalizing a fear of criticism. A single-person personal project shouldn't be worked on i…

Do you have any advice on how to put it in front of users to get feedback? Friends are good for a while, but they're biased. Just go on IRC and ask a few folks?

4chan.org/v/
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