Climbing an Unbowed Mountain: The Difficulties of Creating a Game Alone

Making video games is hard. But even harder to do them alone.

But when most people hear this, they think that this means technical complexity, artistic problems, the difficulty of gaining popularity, etc. All this is true, but one of the most difficult problems, which is not remembered, is loneliness and emotional stress from the independent passage of this path.
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This article is intended for developers traveling on a solo journey, as well as for those who have been on the road for a long time and are trying to release their first solo project.

We jump alone

Have you ever stood on the edge of a steep cliff, hesitating before jumping into the water far below? Remember that in this situation, people almost always decide to jump together? The most difficult thing in creating a video game alone is to make such a leap alone.


We hold hands, so that some clever man will not pretend to be jumping, and will not be afraid at the last moment.

The decision to start my project took me a lot of time. I had a lot of doubts. I worked as a designer for most of my professional career, so I was most worried about whether I could master other aspects of the design. Can I cope with programming? Will draw good graphics? Will you be able to collect everything in time?

One of the articles that helped me jump off a cliff was Fake Grimlock: Win Like Stupid .

The picture from this article describes it well in general:


Venn Diagram on how to win in life. The whole article is also worth reading.

To gain courage for the first step, you need to act stupidly, in the sense that you should not give the brain to think through all the reasons for which the idea may not work, and simply act instead.

When I finally decided to quit my job in San Francisco and go back to Europe to release my own game, my initial plan was pretty simple. Create a small mobile game in 3-6 months, make a lot of mistakes, learn from them and start a new project. I thought that the second time the cycle would be faster and better, and I would have a much better chance of success.

In theory, everything sounds great, right? In practice, I spent so much time on my first Hang Line game that I couldn’t even complete my plan! But more about this below.

Finally, I made the jump, and the next difficult step was the choice of concept. The good thing is that you can choose literally everything, because your decision will only affect you. The bad thing is that it makes a huge choice! This brings us to the next problem of creating games alone.

Paralysis of choice

Most often in the development process I felt like Homer

When working in a team, you rarely have to make a decision completely by yourself, especially when you are a designer. Almost everyone in the team has an opinion, and if you are in a management position, your task usually consists in choosing a good compromise between all these opinions. Lida usually make their decisions based on reliable feedback from colleagues.

When you work alone, you have no one to ask for feedback and no one to point out the mistakes ... You are alone. All responsibility lies with you.

This can make decision making incredibly difficult, and perhaps the most important one of them will be WHAT A GAME TO DO AT ALL? Faced with endless possibilities, you may find yourself paralyzed.


I decided that at least one timeline should be added to the article to make it look like I know what I'm talking about.

First of all, I tried to create something like a support group. It was a Slack channel with a small group of friends working on their indie projects or ending them. We wrote questions / articles / reviews and chatted once a week through Google hangout. This support group turned out to be useful in specifying the concept so that I would not have to fully trust only my instincts.

It is worth mentioning - for the sake of your mental health, choose a concept that you really like! Of course, you probably want the game to be financially viable on the market, turn out to be technically feasible, and so on, but creating a game is incredibly, incredibly difficult! Over time, you will get tired, exhaled and will experience a lack of motivation. If you are fed up with the idea that you are working on the coolest thing that you could invent, it will help to keep your focus.

I was always interested in rock climbing, and I had an interesting idea for a cat hook control system, so I started to create a prototype game about extreme mountaineering.


It may look simple, but you have to start somewhere!

After a month or so, I realized that working on my own, without a team, was very lonely.

Loneliness

A solo game developer can also be lonely, but without amazing views.

There are several aspects that affect how lonely you feel while working on a project:

• You do not work with others on a common goal.
• Physically alone at the place of their work.
• You are alone after the end of the working day.

The absence of colleagues means that you get the zero support and motivation that you usually get by investing in a project with other people.

If you work at home, you will usually be alone during the day. When I decided to start my project, I moved to another city, mainly to save money. This meant that it took me a while to create social connections, and sometimes there was a time when I literally stayed one whole day, and sometimes several days in a row! I started to go a little crazy. To cope with this, I decided to plan my week so that I could get out of the house and meet people at least once a day.

I also started attending coworking. This is the place where you sit and work in a room filled with random people. I did not want to spend money on renting the entire premises, so I found several groups of coworkers at meetup.com that were free and just worked in a cafe.


I go here once a week just to stop going crazy

Strange, but when there are people around you, you have a stronger sense of motivation, even if they don’t invest in your work! As for motivation, you will need it as much as possible.

Lack of motivation

Work without a team greatly affects motivation. And when you work alone, no one will tell you that it’s time to stop watching videos with kittens on YouTube. Sometimes I really liked Toggl website. He was recommended to me by Ryan Derse, who has a terrific post explaining the meaning of Toggl and telling about many other things: Making Moves .


Toggl is the best way to make yourself work more hours.

Toggl is the simplest timer that you turn on at the beginning of work and turn off when you finish, and then write a description of what you have done. This creates a feeling of needing to focus on work when the timer ticks.

In addition to distracting aspects and problems with motivation, there is your overall satisfaction with the work on the project. When creating a game, some of the tasks are interesting and creative, while others are boring and boring. But it does not matter - if you work alone, you have to do them ALL. You will have periods of low motivation, but there will be no team that could raise it.

A few months later, when my motivation fell a little, it turned out to be very useful to show the game to other people. This helped tremendously, not only allowed to get feedback from people with a fresh look, but also provided incredible support: watching how someone gets pleasure from your work is very motivating.


Even my father played Hang Line, and in fact he already has 84!

It is worth noting that at that stage the game looked like this:


Swing, avoid red objects, or die. That's all I had at that time.

Those. complete bullshit. But it is not important. Do not be shy. If you have something to play, then let people play. Other people will have a different look. Believe it or not, at this stage people playing the game asked where to download it, and then I only had a cube instead of the main character!

I also joined a group of local indie developers, so I could watch someone other than my friends and family play the game, which is useful for getting less biased reviews.

At this stage, my motivation was pretty strong, but I started to worry a lot about money ...

Anxiety

When you work for a company, your project usually has a deadline. But if the team misses this deadline, then you still usually get paid and work continues. When you work on the game alone, your deadline is essentially “savings”, which is set aside for expenses. When they are exhausted, that's all. This means that even when you are not working, you always think about time and money.

We must make decisions. Should I go on a trip with friends? Do I need to buy a new TV? Maybe choose a beer instead of an expensive cocktail? Very quickly you can walk to the smallest detail. I found myself worried a lot about small decisions simply because I was not used to surviving on savings.


I worry too much about money and that I will have to eat full-bodied bread every day.

The best solution for me was a small planning and the appointment of a reasonable weekly budget, depending on the total savings set aside for the project, and on the time I spend on it. Thus, the money seems to be “already spent”, so this makes not so much stress on small decisions. And yet - I know, you have heard it a thousand times, but I will repeat it, because it is important - do not lay down the budget for the project, lay down the double budget for the project. I put money on two games and only one took all my time.

After creating the budget and planning, I began to move more actively in the project. Pretty soon, I had a feeling that the basic gameplay was good enough, and I began to move from prototype to production.


Still not very impressive, but at least I replaced the die!

But around this point I began to have really difficult tasks, which took a lot of time. There is an old saying that the last 20% of work takes 80% of the time. The problem is that when creating a prototype and throwing ideas, it seems to you that the game is moving very fast. But when you go to such tasks as adding release graphics, bringing gameplay systems to release status, you begin to feel that you are moving at the speed of a snail. I began to doubt that I could actually manage to finish the game on time ...

Diffidence

If there is one word that I never want to hear again, it is “Indiepocalypse”.


Obviously, we are all doomed, and it is very useful to know when you are straining to complete your first game alone.

Every damn week there is a new article about failed sales on Steam, failed campaigns on Kickstarter, billions of games released weekly for mobile, incredible difficulties in gaining popularity ... As if creating a quality game is not in itself difficult enough. The last thing I want to know is that all my efforts have no meaning and I have no chance of success!

I noticed that when creating the game alone I feel that my work is in fact unreal. I still needed to understand a bunch of technical aspects, for example, how to ensure sufficiently high performance on mobile, quickly create graphics levels, etc. I had the feeling that I was marking time and literally could not manage to finish the game on time. And what depressed him even more was the thought that even if it did happen, no one would notice it and would not be interested in anyone except me, who was sitting alone at the programming room. The game does not exist in any other reality.

Instability

When you work in a regular job, you have a lot of factors affecting your mood - relationships with colleagues, management praise (or lack thereof), a new bonus scheme in the company, etc. When you work alone, you only have the game and the process of creating it. And that's all. So when it seems that things are not going very well, this is very frustrating.


I heard that if you add a picture with a cat, then the audience of readers of any article increases by 500%

I realized that my mood and general state / satisfaction strongly depend on what I do on a particular day and on how the process progresses. Therefore, my mood is very hesitant. I realized that the best way to handle this would be to make my life outside of work balance a little bit. I began to attend the writing circle, which distracted me well and allowed me to think about something other than work.

Despite this, at the stage of two-thirds of the project, I began to worry a lot about what I was going to, because I already spent more time than I planned for the whole game.

Fear of failure

Initially, I planned to spend on the game 3-6 months, but after 9 months it was obvious that there was still a lot of work to do. The problem was that my goals and expectations shifted. I’ve already invested more money into the game because I’ve been working on it longer, so I stopped seeing it as the first attempt to learn from. It turned into something that, as I hoped and even waited, can bring me some money. And if this was not possible, I would be much more upset.

In essence, I kept increasing and increasing the bet on the gaming table, which, of course, could bring me a bigger win, but with the same awesome chances of winning. And I don't like gambling at all!


A waste of part of the savings in creating a video game is, in essence, a gamble.

At this stage, the project was moving very slowly. When you work on a project for a year, the code base becomes so large that any addition, no matter how simple, can affect many other systems. Even remembering how the code fragment that you wrote about a year ago works can be very difficult. Therefore, it is important to document your code - sometimes I read the comments and did not remember how I wrote them. It looked like a version of Marty McFly from the past telling me about the future ...

Also look at the problems helps look at the old screenshots and videos. If before adding new functions to the game you save somewhere a screenshot or video, then with time you will get a visual visualization of the development process of the whole game. Looking at it and realizing how far the game has progressed, you will always feel much better and you will understand how far you have come.


Take a trip back in time to the development of your game and realize how amazing it is.

Conclusion

This story is not over yet. I’ve been working on my Hang Line game for about a year now and it’s still not ready. But recently my motivation has grown a lot. I finally started taking PR steps and sharing the game on twitter, facebook, etc. I recorded the trailer and received a lot of press attention, which greatly influenced me. I felt that the game is something real, and that people like it.

Therefore, my last recommendation is to start sharing your work with the world as early as possible. Evaluating your game with random people provides HUGE assistance.

Do not think about it only in terms of PR. Chat with other developers. Facebook has some great groups, like the Indie Game Dev Group , in which people give honest and useful feedback. Do not be afraid and just contact the developers who released similar to your games, just to ask for advice or recommendations. I had only the most positive feelings from such communication. People who previously did not know about the game came to my rescue, and this greatly influenced the game itself and the motivation.

If interested, you can watch the trailer I recently posted:


And if you want to know how this story ends, subscribe to the newsletter on my website: www.hanglinegame.com

Doing the game alone is incredibly difficult. If you are thinking about starting such a journey, I hope my article will clarify some of the problems. If you are already on the way to creating the game, then perhaps it will be useful to you. Hold on! Whatever you do, follow through and learn from your experience.

Good luck!