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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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