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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Being a game developer, as a business, has more in common to being the owner/operator of a taco truck than it has in common with playing videogames. If you like playing video games but would hate running a taco truck, you should probably not get into business as a game developer.

n.b. This is broadly true of all software businesses, not just video games. (Though I think running a software business is in many, many important respects easier than running a software business which makes video games.)

n.b. #2: This is also broadly true of many businesses which have, shall we say, anomalously high status. "I love cooking... I should open a restaurant! Then I'll have total artistic freedom to serve the food the way it should be made! And every day will be totally awesome!" <-- Not predictive of successful restaurateurs.

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If we're talking indie game development here, I'd recommend getting into it in exactly the way as Patrick got into BCC. It should be approached as a hobby, until you're making enough money reliably enough that it becomes feasible to quit and do it full time.

That way you don't burn through your life savings, and you're very much aware of the day to day. Bonus points if you've had failures in between your successes. Patrick is dead on here - it's not all roses.

If you can't succeed doing it for 10-20 hours a week as a hobby, it's doubtful working even 80 hours will work. Game development is sort of like being a musician. If nobody likes your songs, you can't make up for it in volume.

Game development is an irrational choice in terms of return on investment. Patrick is also dead on here. Even the successful developers would have made an order of magnitude more money if they had applied themselves equally and had the same luck in other industries.

You have to genuinely find the prospect of working on your craft full time more important than financial returns. And having the perseverance to hone your skills and produce successful games in your spare time, even if it takes years, is a good litmus test for that.

(I'm awkwardly referring to patio11 by his name even though I was replying to him to differentiate the you [him] from the you [in general]).

> If you can't succeed doing it for 10-20 hours a week as a hobby, it's doubtful working even 80 hours will work.

Not necessarily. Speaking for myself, sometimes it's all or nothing. I can't imagine having the same enthusiasm and persistence for a hobby than for a full-time effort, particularly if the latter involved burning a few bridges.

I'm not arguing it's rational, or that one should blow one's savings on it, but sometimes full-time is your only choice.

I can only think of 1 successful game that was built as a part time hobby (Cave Story).

Development of even a simple game takes so much time I don't know how practical it is on 10 hours a week. Game studios have armies of employed people on 60+ hours a week each.

Dwarffortress - started out as an ASCII game and end as an ASCII game. Actually, it's two games in one, and also insanely complex.

Game studios that employ armies of developers usually have tons of artists and spend ridiculous amount of time on graphics and assets. That's why a massively complex game like dwarffortress are never created. So there's tons of niches for complex games with ASCII graphics. (Sorry, pixel arts also takes ton of time)

As everyone else already said, control your scope or otherwise you never finish the game. Dwarffortress got where it is today by simply not aiming for great 3D graphics.

There's plenty of permissively-licensed tilesets out there. Dwarf Fortress really had some trouble because it was built on ASCII until a fan was kind enough to write a graphics library : https://github.com/Baughn/Dwarf-Fortress--libgraphics- . Writing an ASCII rendering engine was probably more work for a lesser product than going with a library to begin with would have been.

Also, Dwarf Fortress isn't done yet. It quite possibly ends with beautiful procedurally generated graphics (though I can't imagine that would happen with Tarn keeping it a solo operation.)

Not quite: Dwarf Fortress has always used OpenGL (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=28841.0) to render tiles that just happen to be ASCII characters onto the screen. The fan effort was to port it to SDL, making it much more efficient.

Not many household name games are built as a part time hobby. I'm not saying wait until you're a multi millionaire :)

You can easily make a decent Flash game or experimental iPhone game part time. My first Flash game, with over 200 million plays, was made in two weeks including the time it took to learn Flash.

The additional hours will get eaten up by business stuff and maintenance once you're full time anyway.

I dogfooded my own advice, for what it's worth.

Would you mind linking to your first flash game, for the curious?

It looks like this is the game, made in 14 days, by a team of 6: http://www.bigblockgames.com/games/coffeehero/

This is the one, at my first company:

http://www.miniclip.com/games/stunt-pilot/en/

Two people, two weeks, normal working hours (Coffee Hero was an absurd crunch).

Very much depends what sort of game you're considering. Anything approaching the AAA space, agreed. But mobile games / Web games / anything with carefully controlled scope, not so much.

You may or may not have heard of the 48-hour game development event GameJam? http://globalgamejam.org It's possible to create something playable even in that time.

Also, Minecraft was originally developed part-time, according to Wikipedia.

Working on something serious part-time is hard, and I'm impressed by people who manage it. But it's doable.

I think Minecraft was developed this way too.

"Game development is sort of like being a musician. If nobody likes your songs, you can't make up for it in volume."

Love it.

It's also VERY important to note that the key part of this statement is not "Being a game developer" but "as a business".

I'm a professional filmmaker. I happen to also be the kind of person who hears the phrase "owner/operator of a taco truck" and immediately thinks "ooh, that sounds cool. I'd need to optimise the menu to minimise ingredient costs, obviously, and - ooh - I wonder if I could use extremely locally targeted Adwords stuff to market it and -"

(I've never even eaten a taco. )

Nonetheless, I also know a lot of other people who make films. Many of them don't have the particular bit of their brain that automatically starts writing a business plan when it hears any cool idea. However, they still make films - often really good films - and enjoy it. Sometimes they enjoy, or at least appear to enjoy, making their movies more than I do.

A very large number of those people also have an actual bill-paying job.

There's nothing wrong with creating just for the love of it. "Amateur" - one who engages in an activity for the love of it - is not a dirty word, and contrary to popular belief is not automatically inferior to "professional". You can achieve a pretty astonishingly large output if you're focused - I have a friend who was averaging >1 (published) novel a year whilst also running his startup. You can create great work. And you don't have to make the inevitable compromises that you do have to make if job #1 is "make enough money off this thing to live".

I've never even eaten a taco.

You seriously need to fix this.

I'd love to - sadly, I'm not wicked near any hubs of Tex-Mex food. Any recommendations for Scottish taco shacks?

Find the nearest American embassy, and then either ask them and follow directions, or go to the nearest mall and see if there's a Taco Bell / Pizza Hut place at the food court. This Taco Bell will not necessarily comply with the most stringent, culturally-sensitive rules of Mexican cuisine, but I still think you'll quite enjoy it.

Or, next time you're in Spain, you can find a taco place there. There are a lot of Latin Americans there (mostly Ecuadorians, though), and they'll probably be able to serve you excellent tacos.

There's something delightful about having to find an American embassy to find a taco place.

(for those interested in this concept:) I swear there was a much better written article on this subject, but all I can find right now is one from Slate (that actually was posted to Hacker News a few years ago), which I don't think was the one I wanted to find.

"Bitter Brew: I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461791

"I like eating varieties of foods... I would open a restaurant!" I'm getting hit by this thought regularly. What'll be your take on this Patrick?

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