From throwaway side project to Switch in 2 years: my indie gamedev story

I'm certainly not opposed to checking out alternatives.

Can’t see if this is multiplayer on the Nintendo store.

Great article! Just a thought: if it was that hard for OP to write the logic for the gravity manipulation, he should've taken this as an indication that it'd be hard for players to understand and learn this functionality too.

Perhaps one small lesson missed?

> Can one expect to earn like a full time job working on it?

It really depends on where you live. A full time job in California earns much more that many other parts of the World.

That being said, most indie games fail financially. There are hits, of course. But there's also a a middle ground if you can live on low funds.

I have been full time indie since 2013. I have released about a dozen games and 4-5 of those have been financially successful.

I made about $250k net (after all taxes and fees) in these 9 years, so around $2300 net / month. That's about 3-4 times the average wage in my country and is close to being on par with what I could earn outsourcing my programming skills to the western companies. I'm doing what I love and enjoy having freedom of being able to choose when I work and when I go on a vacation, etc. Sometimes I work 16-hour days for weeks. Sometimes I take 2-3 weeks off and just play games, read books, watch movies and hang with my friends and family.

You probably never heard about any of my games: Rogue Bit, Son of a Witch, Watermelon Party. I'm perfectly fine with that.

Yup, Toby Fox more or less did this exact sort of research in 2020 while developing Deltarune, and came to similar conclusions:

    We had actually attempted to develop the game since the time too. Development started around March 2019 and a 99% work was spent on investigating engines alternate to GameMaker, which I used for Chapter 1.

    Without getting into the details, I decided a few months ago to go back to GameMaker after all. It still felt like the best fit for the project. So using Chapter 1 as a base, we've started creating Chapter 2 since May 2020.

    A lot of progress has been made since that time. I believe we can complete this chapter, content-wise, before the end of the year (not accounting for translation, bugtesting, and porting).

    I feel very confident. And the strange thing is, even though we ended up using the original engine, I don't regret the lost time, either. Not only was I still busy designing the game, but during that long period, I was able to think of many ideas that make the game's story and characters better.

https://deltarune.com/update-092020/

Obvious caveat: He already had development in the game on one engine so that may have swayed factors. And of course, DeltaRune isn't going to be struggling to perform on any reasonable platform. But ultimately, the tool didn't limit his choices enough to make the jump.

At the end of the day, work to your strengths and consider your scope. Many people here are programmers so I understand if they want something more flexible than Gamemaker. But I wouldn't necessarily jump to Unreal Engine 4/5 if I'm making a small-ish scale 2D game.