Is it realistically possible for a solo game developer working 10+ hours a day every single day doing their own code, art and music to create a game o...

Is it realistically possible for a solo game developer working 10+ hours a day every single day doing their own code, art and music to create a game on the scale of link to the past in less than five years time?

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

Homeless People Are Sexy Shirt $21.68

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

  1. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Depends. If said solodev was good at all of those things? I guess so, yeah. It would still be better to hire at least one or two more people to help with one of the tasks at least. If the solodev has no knowledge or talent in any of those areas, then no. Frick no.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      I think given the huge amount of free tutorials and programs and things like that it will be possible for me to learn the skills I need. If I make a quality prototype, it could be possible to crowdfund talent help me finish the game maybe.

      Link to the past sure. Ocarina and other 3d stuff is way harder.

      It would be a 2D action-adventure game. Probably made with gamemaker studio or godot.

  2. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    if they are savant level genius' in all those fields then probably. But it isnt realistic at all since we are human not robots

  3. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Link to the past sure. Ocarina and other 3d stuff is way harder.

  4. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Sure it's possible but will it actually be good? Maybe, hollow knight was made by 3 c**ts and it's one of the best games I've played in my 32 years on this gay earth.

  5. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Unless they have prior experience in all three fields and have developed games to completion before, probably not. Consider all the different mechanics Link to the Past has, the number of art assets, and audio (both music and sound effects) and you're looking at a sizable piece of work, regardless of how simple the actual gameplay is. Even trying to remake something on the scale of Zelda 1 would be months and months of work, especially for a solo dev with little experience.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      5 years of 10 hours a day is at least 18,000 hours of work though. A lot can be done in that time. The developers who made link to the past didn't have the resources that exist today.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >The developers who made link to the past didn't have the resources that exist today.
        True, but they also had years of experience under their belt and were being paid full-time to work on the game compared to someone doing it out of passion, where it's easy to burn out or lose motivation due to lack of progress or feeling comfortable with the state of the project.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          or feeling uncomfortable* with the state of the project.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          Valid points. I'm not asking if it's likely though, I just want to know if it's possible.

  6. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    cave story was made by 1 guy

  7. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    No, give up.

  8. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Easily, but five years is too long and you have to work with the skills you have at the outset. If you're going to learn during development you should choose one main area and maybe a side-spec with low expectations, knowing that learning will take up far more time than you think. On the other hand, you're really overestimating how long it takes to do work you're familiar with.
    What's important is not time, but how much you'll change during development. If you intend to learn more than one skill to the extent of creating something you're passionate about, you'll outgrow the scope of your project and get fed up with it.

  9. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Pixel art game? You should be able to do it faster than that, I would focus on progrmming and buying art and music when you're redy

  10. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Less than 5 years no especially on ALTTP's scale that's a huge undertaking

  11. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Two to three years is a better time-frame. You can't just give yourself an arbitrary amount of time and expect that alone just makes the pieces all fall into place. You'll end up with multiple great undertakings that don't meet in the middle and you'll finish no part of the whole.
    What you should be doing is finding the absolute minimum of work in every field that you can get away with. Once you have a project you know you can complete, then you scale it up as it seems you're finishing some parts early. Public domain music? How about focusing on just drum and bass or just piano melodies and making short twenty-second loops? How can you get away with a minimum of animation frames to draw, and what did old games use as a framework to make limited budget look good? In terms of code you should find the smallest viable number of non-repeating events, and otherwise events should be at the end of their own blind alleys leading to nothing to reduce complexity.

  12. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Even if you can use pre-made engines to handle complex stuff like collision, it's still dangerous to get outside of your own understanding. It's really best to at least have programming as a reliable skill before undertaking this. For instance, an STG only needs to check if circles are overlapping at the current frame and the result is a bullet or enemy disappears. If objects are bouncing off each other, that's getting dangerous. It's better to make things phase through each other or stop against an immovable object.
    I should tell you the trap of game design so you can avoid what makes these people say it's impossible. Listen.
    A game developer works for a long time without pay on a project whose success will come down to marketing he can't control. Don't expect that making a good game will make people buy it. "People will appreciate excellent mechanics." -is the statement preceding tragedy. You should work on the game as a hobby, from a position where you don't care if it succeeds or not so you can realize your passion instead of being crippled with anxiety of expectation. Now, the result of working like that it the developer over-focuses on some particular thing or other, "I don't want to do it wrong. I need to do it right from the start or people won't accept it." And they get bogged down. In RPGs you can level up your stats, among them attack. An idiot will put all of his points into attack and still die because even if every monster dies in one hit, he's wasted every level after he started one-shotting. That's how solo devs go insane and stick themselves in a hell of endlessly expanding a mechanic that will never fill out a game, or programming too in-depth for what the project needs. But you won't know when enough is enough and when you need to move on. That's why you can't let the project go on for too long; the sea of failed devs is littered with two-minute gameplay demos that manage a flash in the pan of interest but will never expand to a game.

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      I'm op and it will sound arrogant but I really think you are wrong. I do not think a game's success is about marketing at all, only degrees of success is determined by marketing. Stardew valley could not have failed if the marketing was bad because it offered a strong game to a specific audience that didn't have any real competition (modern harvest moon clone on pc). Stardew valley could possible fail if it was released today because theres a lot of similar games (inspired by stardew of course) but when it was made and released it could not fail. It was the right game at the right time. I do not care about making good mechanics for the sake of making good mechanics, or refining things I didn't like in popular games. I used link to the past as an example but I'm not making a zelda clone, I want to make a unique experience that I don't think currently exists and if the game is polished and fun I genuinely think there is *no* chance the game won't find some level of success.

      I've been on game dev reddits and every day I see people post their game and a thread that says "why my game failed" etc. They ALWAYS blame marketing. I always look at their game and 90% of the time think "wow this looks like shit". Even the ones that look decent, I think "why should I play this instead of elden ring" and the answer is always "there is no reason to"

      I think that the game I want to make will offer something that the market currently doesn't offer, and it's something people will like and not realize they wanted and because of that I know the game will succeed, as long as I can bust my ass and make it.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        >I think that the game I want to make will offer something that the market currently doesn't offer, and it's something people will like and not realize they wanted and because of that I know the game will succeed
        You want to remake Link to the Past. The market already offers Link to the Past.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          I just said that I don't want to remake link to the past

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            What do you want to make?

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              A wizard adventure game with a satisfying real time spellcasting system

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          I just said that I don't want to remake link to the past

          And don't let this voice guide you. This guy is seeking a termination to thought by reaching for an extreme. It's actually better not to try too hard to break the mold, because people will appreciate it more easily if they understand it's "like what I enjoy- BUT." While your work will be less stressful if you don't agonize over rejecting your inspiration. As a creative process too, you more quickly move past your inspiration and find your own creativity if you steer right into it. Once you've stolen the art that's gone before, you look at it and realize it's not what you really want, and then you know exactly where to go next.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        You are shining brilliantly. I cannot look at you. You are too new. I think you haven't played enough games yourself. Many were considered AAA in their day and failed due to bad luck. You're right to gamble on something unique, but know there are more concepts than not that people won't appreciate no matter how well they're realized. Give the player a long health bar, limited healing, and a mixture of avoidable attacks and bullshit you can only mitigate, and you've explored a unique concept but people will hate it. Even if Akira Yamaoka does the soundtrack, no one will buy Black Knight Sword. Even still, a critical hit is your only chance, so go for it. Just understand you're using weak examples and overestimating both how definitively worthwhile your game will be and how much people are willing to dig for gems.
        If that's what you're going for, don't let a delusion guide you. Make sure you really know what you're trying to make, and test your limited understanding to be sure.

        • 2 years ago
          Anonymous

          >you've explored a unique concept but people will hate it
          A unique concept has no innate value. I don't think my will be good because it will be unique, I think that being unique will help it reach its audience if it is good.

          >Even if Akira Yamaoka does the soundtrack, no one will buy Black Knight Sword
          Because having the best sound track in the world doesn't make a good game. Diablo (1 and 2) has one of the best soundtracks of all time but the game is still great with the sound muted.

          >If that's what you're going for, don't let a delusion guide you
          I know it's possible that I could release a giant piece of shit that everyone hates, or really that the idea I have in my head isn't as good as I think. But I don't actually feel that at all. I really, truly think it's only a matter of execution. My level of success doesn't mean making the next undertale though, it just means making a game that at least a small group of people consider to be one of the favorite games of all time.

          • 2 years ago
            Anonymous

            At this point you're receiving a muddying amount of unfounded doomerism and it sound like you know what you want and you're talking to your fears to assuage them, so it looks like you're determined to do it. My main message here is it's not that hard but you can't learn on the job too much, On the other hand you shouldn't want to master all the skills before starting either, that's another problem I won't get into.
            But my last caution is this: you say you know what you want to do and it's a matter of execution. The thing is, _real_ game-design skill is about the degree to which you know what you're doing. You never know enough, and there's always free real estate just lying around because other people can't even see it. There are little ways to improve your game everywhere and you need always be fearful of not knowing that. And don't expect to learn by watching GDC or GMTK good lord, the truth is it's hard to find because most devs are stupid and stumble into success and try to explain it after the fact. Expect that there are hidden bonuses everywhere and keep grabbing them to make your game better.

            • 2 years ago
              Anonymous

              Appreciate the advice anon.

      • 2 years ago
        Anonymous

        I have to agree with your train of thought. Making a genuinely new and unique experience in gaming is a lot like making a new color. People have no concept of how much they either like or dislike it before they can experience it. That Stardew Valley comparison is almost perfect. People didn't know they'd like Pong or Tetris before those were created and look where we're at today.

  13. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    0n?

  14. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Highly unrealistic but not impossible. You're assuming you will actually stick to working 10 hours a day consistently for 5 years which, I'm just gonna tell you right now, you won't. The only reason it's within the realm of possibility is that the tools you have nowadays do a lot of heavy lifting, but ultimately it comes down to your own artistic strength and latent abilities. If you're some kind of jack of all trades artistic prodigy, you could probably do it in under 3 years, but 99.9% aren't that

    • 2 years ago
      Anonymous

      Really you're all overestimating this. The most important skill is figuring out how to make a minimum of effort look good. I'm not telling you to make a mediocre game.
      See? This is a game I made is six months. It has five levels each with a unique design philosophy, a scoring system, and over a hundred enemies. All rotating sprites with no animations, made to look nice by silhouette and patterns like on my rug. I made the enemies in bichrome and color coded them in programming. There isn't even a background. I wrote the music too in four weeks starting with zero understanding of how to even use LMMS.and I still can't read music. I also hated the project by the end because it was too limited in scope, ironically, so there's that extreme as well.

  15. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    >can one random Ganker poster do in 5 years what it took Nintendo's dream team of developers and artists almost the same amount of time to do?
    that's a tough one

  16. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    Undertale.

  17. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    I work in a team of games developers and we spent the last two months just trying to get a basic REST API set up. We're a subsidiary of one of the big game studios too, no I'm not going to say which one but it's one of the really big ones

  18. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    It's possible but you'd need time and dedication. It's even easier in todays shitty indie filled world. Like Megaman corrupted is done by one guy.

  19. 2 years ago
    Anonymous

    of course dude
    if you're talented

Leave a Reply to Anonymous Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *