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Comment by jharger | Hacker News Reader

I always find it sad, and kind of ridiculous, when indie game developers quit everything and live on no money for years trying to make the next big thing.

Making indie games should be about doing something because you love it. Keep a day job (even part time), then design and build something cool in your spare time. Don't worry about making money, worry about making something people want to play, and it will be much more fulfilling.

The game industry, just like any industry, is all about making money. It's not fun. It's not about self-expression... but doing it as a hobby is often both! Sometimes people who do it as a hobby end up making money, and that's great, but don't go in expecting that, because as the article states, it's very unlikely to happen.

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It's super, super hard to work a day job and then come home and work on your game. Not only the obvious mental difficulties that come from trying throw down 10-12 hours a day (8 at work, then 2-4 more on your game if your focus holds), but also just in opportunity cost.

Like, if you're an indie game dev you obviously enjoy games, but making your game leaves precious little time left for playing games, and you can frequently feel like that time spent on games is a waste that could have been spent working - even if you know you're feeling burnt out and just need a night relaxing.

I'm definitely not advocating bailing on your job and betting the farm and working through poverty while making Minecraft But With Cars or whatever, but I can totally see why it's attractive.

Source: I've been working on an indie game for the last year and a bit (http://chatandslash.com/) and I'm currently trying to decide if picking up Nier: Automata on sale is worth it because I may not end up allocating time to play it before the next sale.

This.

I got home from an 8-hour day writing code. The last thing I wanted to do was write more code. I wanted to play games, not make them.

Three months of freelancing later, I have a side project and I write code for it every day.

The energy you spend on work is the energy you have available for side projects. Either you have a job that demands nothing from you, or you have a side project that demands nothing from you. Or you compromise. Choose.

perhaps this is my youth talking but I feel no compromise working hard at my job then coming home and working on side projects (current one is a multiplayer 2d space dogfighting game, was using it as a learning project for clojurescript, now finishing it cos it's fun for me)

I've found that as I get older, my capacity for doing both consistently is slowly vanishing. Enjoy your youth, but understand also that it's temporary. Pay attention to the signs of burnout and be careful not to push yourself too hard, even if it feels like you have the energy to.

I've found that by pacing myself at my work (it's very easy to go too hard, I work in a customer service oriented field) I can retain the energy to make forward progress on my side projects, so I've achieved a balance. This is not easy to do however, it's definitely a challenge for most indies.

yeah, I found the same. But I'm not sure it's age. It feels more like experience ;)

I used to pull crazy stuff. I did 36 hours straight coding to meet a deadline once. Stupid. If I'd stopped at 10 hours, got some sleep, and come back to it I would have achieved a better result.

I did burn out (at least I recognise that in retrospect). I had to take a couple of years away from coding. Now I recognise when my brain is fading and I can stop and do something else. It's much better in the long term.

The amount of work to even build the simplest game is monumental. Saying that you should build something in your spare time is like saying that you should just make the days 30 hours long instead of 24.

I know of one person that's done this and it was a brutal affair for them.

(Source: I used to work in the industry and stay on top of the indie scene)

If building games is a hobby you have no problem doing it on your spare time. For me, making games is leisure time.

Yes, but there's a huge difference between having a hobby(that might never produce anything for consumption) and shipping a game.

90% of indie devs I know want to do the latter because sharing their game/art/vision and seeing people experience it is the goal. Totally fine to do gamedev as a hobby but that's something discretely different from being an independent game developer.

My approach has been to put it out there as soon as I had something playable, with an obvious disclaimer that you play at your own risk and may lose everything. I don't know if that counts as shipping but at least I get to see people experience it.

You're right though that I may not count as a real indie game developer since I do it purely for fun.

Yeah, take a look at Nuclear Throne [2] vs Wasteland Kings[1].

Nuclear Throne is something I'd consider "shipped". It's polished, the design is solid and it's currently sustaining Vlambeer commercially. Compare that to their prototype(wasteland) and you'd get an idea on the difference(also ~2 years dev time if I recall correctly).

[edit]

I can also highly recommend watching anything from Rami Ismail of Vlambeer. He's brutally honest about the realities of being an indie developer and the mindset you need to be successful.

[1] https://vlambeer.itch.io/wasteland-kings

[2] http://store.steampowered.com/app/242680/Nuclear_Throne/

I agree completely.

People often put this burden on themselves "we must ship and make money" when there is much more enjoyment out of just working on stuff when you feel like it. Learning new things like art, music, game design and sound effects. It's all quite fun if you have the right mindset!

People do this when working on the random open source project, why is this considered weird when you're talking about making games?

> The amount of work to even build the simplest game is monumental.

It's not much different than writing and editing a novel, or composing, rehearsing, and recording an album. The game industry is very much like the music and literal worlds these days.

You have a pack of companies (fewer and larger over time) and employees thereof who have figured out how to reliably generate cash. Think EA, big record labels, and big publishing houses.

Then you have a vanishingly small number of black swans who beat the odds, get huge, and make a ton of money (usually with the help of the above giant corporations). Think Bieber, Notch, and J.K. Rowling.

And then you have an enormous sea of people toiling in anonymity who will never find much money or an audience. That local band you see loading in at your corner bar. Every game not on the front page of Steam. Self-published fiction on Amazon.

As long as everyone recognizes what group they are in and are OK with it, I don't see the system as being intrinsically bad. Unfortunate that things are so skewed towards the small number of celebrities, but not outright cruel.

Where it gets creepy is when you have companies in the first category sucking money from the last category by promising them that they are in the middle one and encouraging them to make shitty life choices based on that.

There's nothing wrong with doing your weird little creative hobbies without reaching fame or fortune. I've been in local bands and made shareware games. I've written and produced goofy videos. It is all super fun, and I highly encourage anyone to do it. But it would not have been fun if I hung my livelihood on income from them, or defined my person sense of "success" in terms of audience size.

In terms of production(both in budgets and in mix of tech+creative disciplines) I feel like film is probably the closest analogy.

Either way I agree though, it's a brutal space if you aren't aware of the 90/10 revenue split across the industry.

This; but it disappoints me that the market is so winner-takes-all (skewed towards the top). I wish — for artistic reasons, not socialistic ones — that the money that is making a few companies very profitable were instead making 10x as many companies survivable.

Ten years ago we were promised that personalized recommendations and discoverability of the long tail would make this happen, and we're still waiting.

The expansion of the long tail has happened. However, global emancipation of internet access, software markets and programming literacy has also happened. So there are now way more people making a dime doing indie games (or youtube content, or selling weird long-tail diy stuff on ebay) - but a good majority of them will hail from China or south east Asia or Eastern Europe...

I loved art as a teen (I still do but time). I loved every piece of making a painting and even working at an Art store in town. I even sold some paints of mine up to $500. I then got an offer at 18 to work a full time job at a real design agency in NYC. I quit after a month and didn't touch it for 4 years.

Doing a hobby and doing it for a living were two totally different things.

Relative to say scuba diving it's a cheap and low risk hobby. Relative to say writing CRUD apps it's a terrible job.

But, the thing is this is basically the same as starting a band. ~90% have fun and lose a little money. ~9.9% brake even and make something between beer money and poverty level earnings. And 0.1% go from reasonable salary to ridiculous money at 0.00001%. Except, you have the vastly better fallback option of writing crud apps.

Absolutely true. I would take it one step further - don't even worry about making something people want to play. Make something YOU want to play.

The best experience of my life has been making an MMORPG per that motto. It's now at a point where I get completely absorbed playing it, to the extent where I forget that I'm playing my own game. It's a really awesome feeling.

I don't have any expectations on making money off it, or even have players at all. That other people seem to enjoy it as well is only a bonus.

link?

I actually had to take the server down a few days ago due to a bug crashing it every time someone logged on so you can't play it right now but here you go: http://canvaslegacy.com/

The bug is fixed but I forgot to branch the repo when I started on the new patch so can't deploy anything right now (since I'm working in master).

It's a browser game that requires no account so normally you would be able to open the link and start playing immediately.

Some media in case anyone is interested: https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/

This might be considered rough for a commercial project, but I can tell it has its own unique character, and I really like that.

Keep up the good work!

Thank you! I'm glad to hear that. Being one guy doing all the coding and graphics that's all I can ask for.

Looks awesome! I've been working on something like this as a hobby project too. I used to do a lot of MUD programming back in the day - it's nice having a project that is never really finished that you can always work on.

Thank you! I never did MUD programming but I played a lot of MUDs. I always dreamt of making my own though and a lot of my old ideas have been incorporated in this.

And yes, it will probably never be finished but that's the beauty of it. It's my own sandbox I can always work on.

Do you have anything to share?

Hah, I wish. Still working on some of the basics.

If you're looking to make a MUD not from scratch, I recommend checking out the ranvier MUD Engine[1].

[1] http://ranviermud.com/

I did this - kept a day job as a systems administrator while building a video game using Unreal Engine 4 (as a solo dev - no team). It took almost three years to "complete"... and I shipped it on Steam back in Feb. 2017. (it's 75% off right now during the summer sale!)

Making the game was a brutal experience. Little to no money because I was taking so much time off work to make the game (I'd work maybe 4-6 hours at my job, then go home to work on the game). Deteriorated health because I sat for 16+ hours PER DAY in front of the computer. Morale was extremely low because few people wanted to help me (building a team is super hard) and more often than not, people I talked to about it just assumed I wasn't even capable of making a video game, much less a video game business.

I basically just trudged through it. Forced myself to complete it and ship it publicly. I was rather happy with the end result - the game wasn't perfect, but it was mine. Player reviews tell a slightly different story for a countless number of reasons.

The day I the game went live I was so excited... but that emotion quickly faded as I realized I wasn't going to even come close to my sales goals. To date, I've sold less than 200 copies. Thousands less than I expected, and not nearly enough sales to make another game. Literally can't even pay rent on my tiny apartment for one month using those funds.

About 4 days after launch, I realized my traffic and sales had flat-lined at zero. I came to the painful realization that I had just spent three years of my life making huge sacrifices of my time and money to build a product that no one knew existed and only I really cared about. All of my efforts merely in vain. Despite numerous post-release product updates, it stayed that way for months, until yesterday with the summer sale. I've sold a few more copies over the last 24 hours, but again, I can totally forget about becoming a full-time gamedev. I literally don't even have the funding or even strength to make another game - as a solo developer who isn't a unicorn, it simply requires too much investment for too little return.

Building my game was one of the most influential and exciting experiences of my life. Trying to make a paying job of it was easily the most depressing path I've ever walked. I even thought my experience shipping a game in a modern engine would help me find employment as a gamedev... NOPE! I literally can't even get a rejection email from most of the hundreds of places I've applied to. Needless to say, I went back to SysAdmin full time because it's a stable, paying career. Which is also depressing because it's not really what I'm passionate about... I'm just good at it.

All the dreams of making a living building video games? Crushed. Forget about it. If you're able to do this and you're still passionate about it, consider yourself extremely lucky.

edit - the game is here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/428980/Ethereal_Legends/

Congrats on shipping a game! I hope your pain at the outcome fades over time and you get back into making games.

I think a lot of first time game developers are way overly harsh on themselves. Right now the expectations are all screwed up. Very few people go from nothing to writing a smash hit or best seller and the same is true for games. Scope small, ship often and concentrate on the last 20% where you tie the whole thing together because that's where the actual magic happens. Game development is deceptive in that regard and experience helps a great deal.

Scope small and ship often are easily the best advice points to give any aspiring game devs. I certainly made the mistake with Ethereal Legends allowing the scope to get beyond my ability and control, and because of that it took forever to ship.

I certainly won't make that mistake on the next game!

Thanks for sharing. Investing 3 years in a project to see it fail totally sucks. I think a lot of us have been down this road in one form or another. For every success story, there are dozens, if not hundreds of failures.

My only advice? Don't give up. Take smaller bites instead. If a project has a 10% chance of succeeding, it just means you have to try 10 times to have an even opportunity. Spend 2 or 3 months on it instead of years.

Because you're absolutely right, it's luck. But to maximize your luck, you have to keep trying.

I definitely need to iterate faster, and you're right, maximizing your opportunity generally boils down to making more attempts than the next guy.

Thanks for the support!

Everyone wants to make games. The game dev shops are flooded daily with young starry-eyed kids chasing a totally awesome career in game development!

The pay is garbage and the hours are beyond excessive. Unless you pick a winning studio, stay for 10 years, and that studio has several blockbuster hits your royalties are worthless.

Take your experience doing games and go for a career in regular software development. Plenty of people need to integrate 3D engines into their products and know nothing about it (eg: adding the ability to view a 3d model) and you'll actually get paid for your work.

As others have pointed out, today's content-rich world only rewards the top 1% and that incentivizes repeatedly trying with quick projects. Don't spend years on one thing, slap something together and get it out there. If it isn't an immediate hit move on to the next thing.

Yeah I'm definitely looking for other ways to leverage my 3D skills so that my gamedev/UE4 knowledge doesn't all go to waste. I currently work as a sysadmin for an advertising agency, and while I'm doing a lot of Azure and Active Directory stuff for them right now, I'm thinking I might be able to branch them into VR/AR advertisements in the future.

I definitely made the mistake and learned my lesson with building Ethereal Legends - scope and speed are key elements. You have to keep it small and ship quickly. Allowing the project to grow beyond my ability made for poor results and long development cycles.

Well, for what it's worth, that is an impressive looking game from a solo developer. Looks better than a number of (enjoyable) games by small teams I can think of. Tho I suppose that's a small solace, against the low sales numbers.

Thanks for the comment and support!

Congrats on trying and releasing the game! For a solo effort it looks nice.

I have 1 question: How is your game unique? This for me is the biggest selling pitch of a game. Which unique experience will I get from playing this game? I think this is one of the reasons PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds is so popular. Although the graphics and physics engine are horrendous, you get this amazing unique feeling playing it with your friends which I could only maybe compare to survival mods on Garrys Mod

At least you shipped something. That's better than I've been able to accomplish, and better than most self-described game developers.

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