321–330 of 582 posts
I don't mean to poopoo how hard it is to succeed as an indie game maker now, but I can barely find /any/ press or information about the game when I search for it. It's rarely enough to just build something and cross your fingers, especially in a saturated market. Coding heads down without any marketing or validation (like selling early release steam copies) and hoping it'll see viral growth is a mistake, for both sta…
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That's clearly not entirely true though, because there are hits. They're just extremely rare, but extremely visible. You can read interviews with the Stardew Valley guy all over where he talks about spending 4 years working solo on his game, refusing to give up on realising his artistic vision. Then he releases and it's a mega-hit. That's a very seductive story. This isn't a problem unique to indie games. Every creat…
You may have missed the nuance in the comment you're replying to. Everyone knows that it's possible to win the lottery. But the best advice you can give is to tell people they're never going to win the lottery. People who are super passionate about making indie games I'm going to do it regardless, so this is good advice.
The equivalent of lottery with video games would be spamming app markets with shitty games made in a week-end, hoping it catches up somehow. One day someone will make another Flappy Bird, but it will probably not be you.
I learned this painful lesson 8 years ago indirectly, working a mobile app studio. The app store, like games and music are superstar markets and the vast majority will fail, even if you've spent 3000 hours on it. That what makes stardew valley so crazy, because the %99 outcome of someone who works like him is failure and wasting 3-4 years of your life. At this point, I would do the 'test if there is demand method' be…
Obviously, you've never made a game before. 'test if there is demand method' does not work for games.
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The problem with games is the amount of effort involved just to determine if it is “fun”. When I was in it cancelling a game 1 year deep with 10 people was normal.
I think this is why minigame-style games (battle royale, fighting games, first person shooter competitive, etc) are so common. You can implement a simple version of your game idea in a weekend and, if your idea was good, people would likely already have fun playing it.
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If someone has spent 1000 days building their MVP and 0 days establishing market fit it's a terrible time to quit.
Realistically they've spent 1,000 days building a pet programming project with little regard to market fit.
I adopted a different strategy later on. I try to make things that I use myself. So if it turns out no one else uses it, at least my effort doesn't go to waste. My Android App is now sitting at 10+ downloads but I made peace with it fairly easily since I use the App myself twice a day.
I am the guy who shares this post on Hacker News. First and foremost, I wanna said that I am NOT the original author of the blog. Also, I am NOT advertising for the original author. As a software developer in Hong Kong, I am researching articles about game dev and find this interesting case. Therefore, I just wanna share on HN.
The discussion about this blog is really overwhelming. I hope that everybody can learn a lesson from this article. In my personal opinion, from a business perspective, I think to develop a hyper-casual game will have a higher probability of getting commercial success. However, from a more personal perspective, it is very difficult for a game developer to avoid the temptation of spending years to develop a hardcore game. I just wanna say: Game is the modern art form of the 21st century. So if we consider game developer as an artist, you will understand why he struggles about his artwork.
Anyway, I hope that everybody can earn something from this post. I read through all the comments and learn a lot. Thanks.
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Great analysis.. this applies to so many areas of software development. Building games, websites, any thing software .. > you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. > Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. > You need a massive…
You know, there's an interesting relationship between the graphic-novel industry and the TV/film industry at this point. Many TV/film screenplays are adapted from graphic novels, because a graphic novel is, in a sense, a "sketch" of a film—it's something that communicates most of the top-down spirit of the eventual work, while also being something that is able to be produced by a single creator, and so something that…
Also even graphic novels are generally two person teams. I think trying to make an indie game with a small team (2-4 people) is way more realistic than doing it solo.
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Because in the former case, it's a waste of time, duplicating work that others have done already available online for free, so of course there are no customers And in the latter case, it's got to be a poorly written mess, no 2d platformer could need so much game logic. That's twice the size of the entire Super Metroid cartrige, engine and assets included.
Wait... did you just compare lines of source code to the size of a compiled binary code of something that was written over 25 years ago and clearly optimized for the size of the deliverable? In that case you might just as well have compared an apple to the Apollo program LAM module. It is just not a valid comparison. I am sure that if Super Metroid were to be developed today in a high level language with the exact sa…
And I said that in response to the guess that maybe the 62,000 lines of code was all game logic, which is absurd.
Game logic, like, "when the player presses the fire button, spawn a missile" and "this enemy goes up 5 units, then goes down 5 units, then repeats". That's not the kind of thing that will change much from one metroid clone to another, regardless of what technology is used to make them. It is practically always the smallest part of the final product. And to have the game logic's source be bigger than the entirety of an almost identical game, with handcrafted levels, art, and engine included? It's absolutely absurd.
It was in service of the point above: that code is probably all the engine, which means that, yes, it probably was a waste of time, since engines made by professionals are available for free. At best, it's a line on a resume.