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The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

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Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#71

Post by sago »

archagon wrote: post #45
sago wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the myth of the one-idea-making-a-fortune is mostly that. A myth. Minecraft, as incredible as it was, wasn't the only game of its kind. People routinely underestimate the role of luck in these things. There is room for the one great idea. But the point is that the minimum production values on the platforms that sell that idea has risen beyond one person now. As it did in the 16-bit era in the late 80s and…

I disagree. There are no "minimum production values" if your game is good enough. A ton of popular indie games today (Hotline Miami, Risk of Rain, Gunpoint, Valdis Story, Terraria, many of Vlambeer's games...) are still made with pixel art using GameMaker, for example. Minecraft succeeded not because it was one out of a hundred block-based games that got lucky, but because it had a perfect mix of simplicity (slick in…

> There are no "minimum production values" if your game is good enough.

Which is just a tautology.

Hotline Miami - 2 core devs + 2 others; Risk of Rain - 2 core devs + others; Gunpoint - 1 dev (Tom Francis FTW, yay!) Valdis Story - Dunno, but website says "we" and mentions a few different people in blogs; Terraria - 2 core devs + others; Vlambeer - 2 core devs + others.

It is very difficult, almost impossible for a single developer to make a competitive game now. Not actually impossible, but the dev needs to be almost preternaturally productive. It is much more common to find programmer + artist + others teams, as it became after the transition to 16-bit. Very common to have programmer + artist for pre-alpha prototyping, contracting additional programmers + additional artists + sound guys (as for several of the games you cite) + platform conversion teams + music, etc.

> pixel art using GameMaker, for example.

Pixel art can have high production values. Pixel art was still the main requirement for 16-bit games, well after the demise of the bedroom coder.

If you think that, say, Risk of Rain doesn't have many person years of production input, you're deluding yourself. Try making something equivalent yourself this year.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#72

Post by MrMember »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #57
CodeCube wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is so much unexplored space in the medium. We might have stripped the surface, but there is gold down there somewhere. And so the cycle continues :P

:) Yes, pretty much. DotA was created as a small mod, and now look at the commercial explosion it has spawned, with tournaments containing $2+ million in prizes and everyone wanting to make MOBAs. I think in the past 20 years, we actually have not made as many breakthroughs in game mechanics (of course, this was easier in the early days). Games are still fairly similar to those of the 90s, only technically more compl…

I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now.

Genres completely abandoned by AAA developers ages ago are seeing a resurgence thanks to crowdsourcing. Space sims have been all but dead since Freelancer in 2003 but now there are several to play and look forward to.

Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL.

Hell, even the impenetrable Dwarf Fortress brings in enough money from donations to support future development.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#73

Post by archagon »

sago wrote: post #71
archagon wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. There are no "minimum production values" if your game is good enough. A ton of popular indie games today (Hotline Miami, Risk of Rain, Gunpoint, Valdis Story, Terraria, many of Vlambeer's games...) are still made with pixel art using GameMaker, for example. Minecraft succeeded not because it was one out of a hundred block-based games that got lucky, but because it had a perfect mix of simplicity (slick in…

> There are no "minimum production values" if your game is good enough. Which is just a tautology. Hotline Miami - 2 core devs + 2 others; Risk of Rain - 2 core devs + others; Gunpoint - 1 dev (Tom Francis FTW, yay!) Valdis Story - Dunno, but website says "we" and mentions a few different people in blogs; Terraria - 2 core devs + others; Vlambeer - 2 core devs + others. It is very difficult, almost impossible for a s…

Yeah, if you're looking specifically for 1-person developers, it's hard to find them. But I think that's because most people aren't comfortable making the art or music for their own games. (Or choose not to out of time pressure.) If Derek Yu had chosen to sell the original Spelunky, I think it would have done well. I think Towerfall might count, since I know Matt Thorson has done the art and music for most of his games. Nidhogg has been pretty successful lately, as well as Samurai Gunn.

For the record, I don't think pixel art has to be particularly high quality for the game to be successful. Right now I'm playing an alpha of Vagante and having a ton of fun. It's looking like it's gonna be a hit. The graphics are muddy and kind of NES-looking with lots of cheap rotations — and that's OK.

> Try making something equivalent yourself this year.

I'm actually planning to do just that. So I guess we'll have to see!

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#74

Post by drawkbox »

I think the lone developer, or lone lead developer as it truly is now, is still viable. It is probably better this thinking is out there though. Most games are a small team or require assets of many developers nowadays. The land rush is over but gaming is still the biggest draw.

Most projects we work on are in house or contract and they have a couple or few people on teams. Sponsored games and advergames were also the money makers with flash gaming and will be with WebGL and more. Internal IP or titles also help pad revenues and transitions. Gaming is big in agency promotions. Gaming is bigger still in mobile.

It is very difficult no doubt but even a single developer is more like a team now with things like Unity/Unreal/Cocos2d-x/etc as the engine team, asset stores for many things, contractors for art/audio/design/development and plenty of markets to get into. The age of the from scratch lone developer is over, but there is just as much opportunity as ever for teams of 1-5 or so.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#75

Post by codexon »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #57
CodeCube wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is so much unexplored space in the medium. We might have stripped the surface, but there is gold down there somewhere. And so the cycle continues :P

:) Yes, pretty much. DotA was created as a small mod, and now look at the commercial explosion it has spawned, with tournaments containing $2+ million in prizes and everyone wanting to make MOBAs. I think in the past 20 years, we actually have not made as many breakthroughs in game mechanics (of course, this was easier in the early days). Games are still fairly similar to those of the 90s, only technically more compl…

I think we are headed for the dark ages of PC gaming.

Before, the top AAA studios made games with mods in mind. This allowed massive genres like Dota and Counter-Strike to come into existence.

Nowadays AAA studios see modders as leeches and try to cut them out of the game so they can sell DLC and skins to whales.

You can see this happening everywhere.

- No modding in Blizzard's new games.

- No modding in Dota2.

- CS:GO and TF2: Making 3rd party servers hard to find compared to official ones.

- Minecraft declaring freemium servers to be illegal

The indie games on Steam Greenlight don't make up for this. It is much harder to prove a concept by making a game from scratch. Most of them are quite shoddy and get abandoned after they receive a bunch of money from early access.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#77

Post by gavanwoolery »

codexon wrote: post #75
gavanwoolery wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) Yes, pretty much. DotA was created as a small mod, and now look at the commercial explosion it has spawned, with tournaments containing $2+ million in prizes and everyone wanting to make MOBAs. I think in the past 20 years, we actually have not made as many breakthroughs in game mechanics (of course, this was easier in the early days). Games are still fairly similar to those of the 90s, only technically more compl…

I think we are headed for the dark ages of PC gaming. Before, the top AAA studios made games with mods in mind. This allowed massive genres like Dota and Counter-Strike to come into existence. Nowadays AAA studios see modders as leeches and try to cut them out of the game so they can sell DLC and skins to whales. You can see this happening everywhere. - No modding in Blizzard's new games. - No modding in Dota2. - CS:…

Some say it is the Golden Age (see MrMember's comment), some say the Dark Age. I say there is a bit of both, but it is getting so crowded with people trying to make a buck, vs. people trying to make good games, that it is easy to be pessimistic (I definitely am in many regards).

There is not enough accountability on Early Access and Kickstarter, and this is magnified by the fact that most people are not good at judging a team's ability early on (see: YogVentures, etc).

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#78

Post by benihana »

munificent wrote: post #47
ANTSANTS wrote: post #38

More like, the iOS app store gold rush ended. The indie dev scene is thriving on PC. Stop throwing your time and money away developing for a platform overwhelmingly used by people that don't really care about your games, that are looking for brief distractions while they wait in the checkout line, and by and large refuse to pay even a dollar for the privilege. Don't blame the industry because you avoided the platform…

> The indie dev scene is thriving on PC. Back when I was a console developer at EA, the ambient wisdom was that the money was falling out of (non-online) PC games in large part because of piracy. Is that not the case? Do you happen to have numbers on what the PC game industry is like? How much of this is because of Steam?

I'm not sure how much of the success it attributable to Steam, and how much of it is just a consequence of the times - lots of cheap tech, lots of people using cheap tech, and most importantly, video games being something everyone does. In the 80s and 90s, video games were for geeks. Ha, in my freshman year of college in 2001, my roommates were baffled that I would put on a headset and seemingly talk to my computer while playing a game on it?

Anyway, I will say the Steam Early Access program is amazing. It basically lets developers develop games in a Lean-Startup style, by releasing an MVP and then iterating on it, and it lets customers buy the game at any point to fund the development.

I've been playing Kerbal Space Program (highly recommended if you're interested at all in spaceflight, orbital mechanics or rocketry) on the Early Release Program, and it's just awesome. The developers are cool and are pretty at-large in the community on reddit.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#79

Post by duaneb »

MrMember wrote: post #72
gavanwoolery wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) Yes, pretty much. DotA was created as a small mod, and now look at the commercial explosion it has spawned, with tournaments containing $2+ million in prizes and everyone wanting to make MOBAs. I think in the past 20 years, we actually have not made as many breakthroughs in game mechanics (of course, this was easier in the early days). Games are still fairly similar to those of the 90s, only technically more compl…

I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now. Genres completely abandoned by AAA developers ages ago are seeing a resurgence thanks to crowdsourcing. Space sims have been all but dead since Freelancer in 2003 but now there are several to play and look forward to. Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL. Hell, even the im…

> Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL.

I actually trace this to Diablo II and Torchlight. Yes, they aren't strictly rogue-likes—among other things they're realtime—but they raised excitement for the genre just the same.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#80

Post by barbs »

ANTSANTS wrote: post #38

More like, the iOS app store gold rush ended. The indie dev scene is thriving on PC. Stop throwing your time and money away developing for a platform overwhelmingly used by people that don't really care about your games, that are looking for brief distractions while they wait in the checkout line, and by and large refuse to pay even a dollar for the privilege. Don't blame the industry because you avoided the platform…

> The indie dev scene is thriving on PC

Arguably this market is becoming over-saturated as well.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/the-indie-bubble-i...

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