TL;DR-level rambly blogpost ahead. Originally written for other game developers.
Treading water doesn’t work in "small" indie gamedev. You need a big success to survive, not only thrive. My next game (this game) will have to do this for me, or I’ll have to leave game development. I don’t want to seem dramatic, just truthful.
It’s now been almost five years since I’ve made the perhaps ill-advised decision to quit my corporate career for a long-held dream. Game development is a pie in the sky scenario for creatives, and like most of those, it’s very difficult to find success in. I’ve been lucky enough to be among the few solo developers who have found some measure of success. But it’s not enough.
It’s very hard to sustain a career making games by yourself. The industry is the epitome of feast or famine, where you’re riding high off the launch of one game, but that has to last you for years.
Very few people can do it. And I know of only one that’s in my genre (RPGs) that has done this as a career with multiple titles to his name, a personal idol of mine, Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software.
Vogel was a pioneer. He started shipping shareware on floppy discs. And he’s almost one of a kind in the games biz. If you are in small gamedev in 2024, you are trying to stay alive in one of the most competitive periods we’ve ever seen for this industry, amidst a massive downturn of fortunes for a lot of established players and the market as a whole. Frankly, it’s one of the best and worst times to make games.
I dove headfirst into this making silly RPGmaker games, so you know I’m not one of the smart ones.
But there was a plan. I knew, even a decade and a half ago, when I had this crazy notion that I wanted to make games, that I needed a hit. Small successes may sustain you for a few years, but not anything long term, especially if you want to grow. For that, you’ll need something massive. I’m talking about a Stardew Valley or Undertale type success.
These are well-known. They are games that made the industry rethink what solodevs are capable of. Many would call them masterpieces.
The fact that you need to create a masterpiece in order to achieve some level of financial security is insane, but that’s the field I’ve decided to go into, and I’m not blaming anyone else.
So I did what everyone suggested. I made a very small game. Then I made a bigger game. Then I made a 30-40 hour RPG with four faction questlines and a ton of characters. I did very well with that one. It sold well over 35,000 copies, it’s reviewed pretty well by people who played it, and I’ve made a small name for myself as “that one guy who makes RPGs with porn in it.”
But it was also deeply flawed, buggy, slapped together with bandaids and chewing gum. I’ve absolutely mangled RPGMaker with so much custom code that it barely resembles anything made by someone who knows what they’re doing. It is the definition of a passionate amatuer’s learning project.
Am I ready to make a masterpiece? No, probably not.
Not to mention the hilarious fact that I am migrating from RPGMaker, which is often seen mostly as a hobbyist engine, to Unreal 5, which has a reputation as a very complex engine for even professional coders, which I am not. I’m a writer. Not a programmer, or an artist, the two skill fields who historically have had the most success in this field. Especially as a solo.
This entire journey has been one long climb up a very dangerous mountain. But I’ve already come so far. So there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that I’ll make the attempt for the peak.
But it’s terrifying, and it’s a tall order.
I guess the takeaway from this rambling is that if you’re at the start of your journey, reflect on this: can you actually succeed where most will fail?
But don’t take that as merely discouragement. It is simply a question of asking yourself if you think you’re up to the task, divorced of your ego. Ego has never helped anyone in this field, but honesty will. And it may save you a lot of trouble.
I wish you luck, and I hope I have some on my side as well.
-ManlyMouseDan