I've seen several people online talking about their grandiose plans for making a game better than Grand Theft Auto or something, and my advice to them is to sit down and read aloud the entire ending credits for Grand Theft Auto or whatever game they think they're going to do so much better. Then remember each of those names probably represents at least a year of their time.

Even "indie" games typically take a dedicated team of several people a few years.

If you want to do a game by yourself, you either need a ton of skills or you need to be brutal about cutting the features. For example, a single person can build an interesting ASCII roguelike today. But you're not going to get an AAA look, that's for sure.

Minecraft has already been mentioned elsewhere, but for me the comparison point I would draw people's attention to is Banished. The genre is pretty simple in terms of concepts and the game doesn't break any new ground (just executes on the formula really well). It was developed by an exceptionally talented solo dev with decades of game dev experience who could focus specifically on what he knew his game would need, and it still took north of two years to develop and still needed additional QA help from more contributors to get over the line. For anyone looking to get started on solo or small team game dev they really should temper their expectations.

You will probably have to make a game that is smaller in scope and/or less polished than Banished, or your game will take more than a single technology generation to ship.

Or alternatively, you need to define better in different terms. Something that I feel has stricken the heart of what good is the nature of run as found via Minecraft or Roblox. For anyone that cares about graphics, this was a punch in the face.

Fun, however, is a much harder quality to define.

There's 20 million games on roblox, and I read that 9 year olds are losing money trying to promote their games just to get players.

Completely agree. However there are a few exceptions to the rule, for example Minecraft was written by one person (Notch) which was successful before he expanded the team and then sold it off to Microsoft.

I mean arguably Minecraft is in the same category of "feature" cutting that the OP is mentioning. It certainly did not feel like it was a AAA game. I started playing Minecraft in Alpha and it sure felt like one person made it.

I don’t think that example contradicts what he said. Notch falls into the “have a lot of skills” category. Minecraft was built with a custom engine, and prior to that he worked on a two-man MMORPG (Wurm Online).

I think the game industry has a lot of extremely talented “10x” developers that are also underpaid and overworked.

That people are willing to put up with the terrible conditions in the game industry is an example of how interesting and fulfilling work is many times more attractive than a good salary and work/life balance. A boring SAAS company will probably never beat a game company with a fraction of the budget when it comes to hiring/retaining the best devs.

I'm curious what letters and how many you'd give me for the aesthetic of my solodev project.

I've got videos for days but this one's short and pretty representative. https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1493974909936189440

I'm shooting for AAA ASCII.

That's really hard to answer, because in practice there seems to be "indie" and AAA, and no words in between.

This is a terminology hole that I hope we fill, because I feel like the indie space is definitely rich with games that are certainly not 2022 AAA, but also obviously miles above ASCII Nethack or 2D pixel sprite art (which I like and all, but is not in the same league of difficulty). It feels like there's a lot of stuff in the sort of "pretty good looking for an XBox360/PS3 game" range.

Fair points.

There's definitely tons of ps3 games that look better than any indie games I can think of (mgs4 comes immediately to mind, what a visual feast.) I don't think it's inappropriate to say my game and many other indies are visually competitive with horse racing 2016, a game with a ps4 release.

Hardly AAA competition -- I'm just charting the territory of the bands.

The conversation muddies between talking about rendering features and aesthetic execution. If all we're talking about is rendering capabilities, I'm confident saying this segment here is beyond what a PS3 could do. The fillrate alone! https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1455511983512436737

Regardless, of course it isn't reasonable to outcompete 100+ people teams solo, but we can be scrappy and punch above our weight. :D

> That's really hard to answer, because in practice there seems to be "indie" and AAA, and no words in between.

There are some. III and AA come to mind.

This also increases the sheer quantity of "not good" games. And the ability for copycats to copy games in record time.

Relevant Escapist video about out-of-control rampant copying in Mobile Gaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q30qZSEnI9Q

Exactly, even if you make something novel and win the indie lottery, it's going to be ripped off immediately. Apple and Google are really failing at maintaining any level of quality in their app stores.

It’s pretty much all their fault. The same way the internet is overflowing with ad-riddled blogspam due to Google, the appstores are filled with scammy/exploitative clones because that’s what makes the most money when there’s no competitive forces to drive quality control of any kind.

For example, if the Epic game store became known as a source for good mobile games, customers will stop browsing the App/Play store for games and will instead go to the curated and high quality alternative, because why the hell wouldn’t they.

If Apple and Google are forced to stop suppressing competition on iOS/Android, it may lead to an entirely new mobile gaming industry that’s actually somewhat respectable.

> Exactly, even if you make something novel and win the indie lottery, it's going to be ripped off immediately.

Yep, see any of the 200+ Wordle clones and derivatives out there, only about two months after it went viral.

One of my video games has had at least five clones made that I'm aware of (probably several more than that), and it didn't have anywhere near the same success that a game like Wordle did.

If you make a game which can be cloned quickly, you've made something extremely simple. Don't do that.

Anyway, I would certainly not choose to develop mobile games, seems like a bad idea for many reasons. But look at PC games: you can make something as absolutely weird (and arguably 'unmarketable') as Disco Elysium, which needed no "lottery", it's simply a masterpiece.

I agree, when it comes to larger indie games. But there are still simple games that are worth playing, and certainly don't deserve to have their revenue stolen by content farms. The game referenced in the video above is an example of this. And people forget that 2048 was heavily "inspired" by Threes.

It's a separate discussion, but I believe there's still a "lottery" aspect to indie games. There's a lots of survivorship bias as play there. For every Hollow Knight or Disco Elysium, how many other passion projects run out of funding, or get released and go unnoticed?

There's a huge infrastructure for game discovery - Dedicated subreddits with millions of subscribers, curators, massive infrastructure from companies like Valve (Steam) and Google to help discoverability, forums and discussion groups and Discords and Kickstarter...

People are hunting endlessly for good games. But cannot find them.

Even me! I'm a knowledgeable nerd with time, but I can't find anything worth playing. I know many people in the same situation.

There aren't really unknown gems. Great games don't go unnoticed. Many indie devs just like to think they do because they don't want to accept that their game just isn't very good.

Hollow Knight and Disco Elysium are great examples. These could never have gone unnoticed. These are professional efforts from teams of dedicated, very skilled developers, who did a lot of non-obvious things the right way. Nothing replaces a game like Disco Elysium especially. It was always going to get noticed. (I don't know HK as well but from what I've heard it is also exceptional at what it does.)

I'd be interested if you could name any unnoticed game that approaches either of these two in being compelling to play.

I disagree.

Maybe if you substituted "AAA" for "good". But the plethora of tools for making games have once again made it possible to make some really good games with comparatively small teams.

This generalizes interestingly to any tooling that makes things easier. You may feel more efficient with better tooling but it's an arms race and once everyone has access to it you're all competing equally again (and it's back to whoever puts in the biggest product of time and energy).

Hence why you should sell shovels in a gold rush, and why it's a bit of a lie to sell any tool as "be able to do 2x in the same amount of time", since that's only a short term effect until everyone is aware of it and '2x' is the expected new norm.

Wordle alone proves you wrong. The "goodness" of the game is in its core mechanics and ideas, not what most people refer to as high quality (graphics, art assets, etc.).

Explain Undertale and a bunch of other games then.

Good games are good games. You can always sell a DRM-free executable and it'll have the potential to be considered "good" if it's..fun, memorable, clever, challenging, etc etc etc etc