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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is amazing and old school - doing the art, sound, music, programming. I think the only advantage he had was he could look up anything on the internet and possibly find an answer to technical road blocks, he still had to polish and rework for five years (and not feel pressure to get or work a regular 9-5 and keep his relationship going, though it sounds like it may have been a close call there towards the end with the three playtesters helping immensely).

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On that note, I highly recommend Papers, Please[1].

It's a one-person project as well, and a truly amazing work of art.

Played it with my partner to get all the endings and achievements; it's been an amazing experience.

[1]http://papersplea.se/

Seconded. This game is amazing, maybe a little miserable/funny. glory to arstotzka!

What I loved about Papers, Please is that it was actually a proper, fun game. Depressing too, but fun. I rarely come across 'art project' style games that pull their weight game-wise.

It really does have excellent gameplay.

Although I wouldn't call the game depressing - I found the satire funny as hell.

Undertale is another one-man-band project like that.

There's also Dwarf Fortress[0].

0: http://bay12games.com/dwarves/

That one is technically a two-man band, but definitely still fits the pattern of someone dedicating their life to making a complex game.

To the credit of GP, in DF there occurs exactly the type of obsession (in dwarfs) that the original commenter talked about, so it's worth a mention even if its "single creator" is two brothers

And also the venerable RollerCoaster Tycoon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RollerCoaster_Tycoon_(video_ga...

sawyer contracted out for the art (Simon Foster) and music (Allister Brimble). still a heroic individual effort though

Especially given that he wrote the whole thing in assembly.

And Touhou.

The Windows series of games are 16 years old today

It's still pretty successful worldwide, with major fan conventions and contents being released in PS4, Steam, etc. Quite an interesting phenomenon.

Actually, interestingly enough:

> But throughout the four and a half years, he never once reached out online by asking questions or speaking to another developer for advice. He hates asking for help.

Perhaps he did some searches but it sounds like he never interacted with a site like StackOverflow.

It seems to me that he only read answers, documentation, etc. Do not actively ask questions

True, I think that is the way most people use StackOverflow, searching, finding answers and not very often contributing in the form of questions, answers. I either find the question I have or something close enough that I can work from there to a solution. Rarely if I have something pressing that is time sensitive enough I go to the git repo page and look at the source and try to figure it out from there or see if anyone has suggestions there, or do a fork and try things with that.

Another one-person project, still under development http://www.itlurksbelow.com/. Granted this one person is David Brevik, of Diablo fame :)

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