Two and a Half Years in GameDev
smyachenkov.com
smyachenkov.com
I've been developing a city builder game "Metropolis 1998" [1] for over 3 years. My life has been constantly pulled in two or more different directions (e.g. creativity/artistic expression vs. logic/software). Most of the time the environments that allow these forces to thrive are incompatible with each other.
Since working on my game, I've been in a happy place where I get to go full throttle on both of those. I've created my own engine and I am designing the game, directing the art, handling sound design, marketing, UI, UX, environment design, etc, etc.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
My Steam page is perpetually far behind the current state of development: https://x.com/YesboxStudios
I am always impressed by what solo devs can achieve.
I had a good laugh at this. So many titles have taken money and silently failed or seem to figure they can stay in early access indefinitely. On the plus side early access seems useful to smaller devs that are close to finishing but need a bit more cash and free QA. But is also a bit of a scam the way is it’s used for many others unfortunately. Find a genre with a passionate fanbase, make a prototype, collect some cash and fade away.
Any way, not to suggest it’s a bad writeup as I enjoyed reading about the author's experiences.
There are certainly some advantages to being in a smaller company, but there are also gigantic downsides. The biggest one being that you have no budget. You are effectively competing with every other solo indie developer with a Unity install and a Steam AppID.
Being in a AAA studio means your impact is substantially reduced, but it also means that the project you are working on would probably have more ambition and excitement around it.
At this point, I'd much rather work on some dirty, boring tooling for the Battlefield team than be responsible for the entire game engine on a 3-man team.
Indies & small shops can release genre-defining titles, but the experience as a developer in this context is statistically very, very bad compared to AAA - even accounting for parties like Microsoft taking a flamethrower to the entire segment.
Which statistics? Almost every article I've read about game development describes AAA game studios as a horror show of workplace exploitation. I seriously doubt this.
Basically, the reason to sign up for tiny companies with no reputation is to give yourself project experience. But it won't necessarily result in deeper wisdom about the process. It could just mean the boss is overconfident.
Going it alone, the obvious alternative, tends to whip game developers into a self-exploiting mode where they crunch really hard on features or assets, when they actually need to step back, make some painful cuts that throw out months of effort, and refocus their design to have better synergy. The push and pull of a team tends to mitigate those outcomes through earlier interventions, but without financing it's very hard to keep one going.
So, yes, the big companies do have advantages. The upside of the indie space is that it is more in line with the rest of the arts than a corporate career path - it allows the process to be something other than a production built off the back of a market survey. But that means a prerequisite is exposure to the arts and to processes that aren't strictly industrial design. This isn't a well-developed thing in the indie scene since the early influences they are working from all tend to be in the industrial design motif: addictive arcade games, sprawling epic RPGs, etc. Starting from these kinds of premises tends to scope the project incorrectly for the available skills, while simultaneously forgoing alternatives that no company would consider.
Large (and/or profitable) studios can afford to try new game ideas and have them fail and nobody will get fired.
There is room for a range of people with creative or technical backgrounds, but as someone who likes playing games that are actually good, I hope that there are some people working in game development who do have a deep passion for games. Otherwise you can end up with something that looks and sounds great, has solid performance and responsiveness, runs reliably, and simply isn't fun to play. Or a game that is ruined by aggressive monetization, or is basically a glorified slot machine whose primary purpose to hook "whales".
Making games is incredible but also very challenging. That’s part of its appeal. Highly recommended.
How is that possible? There was no competition at all?
but more generally, people that want to try the game making adventure one way or another is kind of a recurrent theme in the industry.
A person with no game experience might be able to break in by simply taking a title demotion for a bit and be competitive.