Journey of Solo Game Development: What I Had Learned (Part 2: When Teams Don’t Work)
I was very into a particular multiplayer zombie game back in 2012, and was quite active in their forums, giving suggestions and debating about the game design. Little did I know, that the devs of that game also had their own side project, and they invited me to join their team as a game designer. I was ecstatic.
It turned out that this side-project team was very dysfunctional. The scope was way too large (3rd person massive online multiplayer survival game with base building and wait for it… mechs), and they had only one programmer, two or three artists, and me. They made a functional prototype that allowed people to join the game, building walls and stairs around the map, and shooting each other.
I was having a lot of fun with test play parties and coming up with survival mechanics ideas, until the team decided that the scope was too large (yea), and they wanted to make a different game, a game where you play as a mall cop and try to protect a mall from various adversaries. I volunteered to make a grid-based inventory for them after learning a bit about Unity. I thought, this new project doesn’t sound as cool but still funny AF, so I was still excited about it, until the feature creep came in.
Now they wanted to add survival elements, requiring players to not only drink and eat, but also take dumps, manage body energy, body-part-specific damage model… And all we had working was a asset-flip mall model with no texture and some NPCs that walked around.
Not to mention that the lead programmer was not very pleasant to work with. His belittling and verbal abuse were funny at first, but not so much when I began to feel scared talking to him, knowing that I’ll never be as good of a programmer as him, and my day job only paid half as much as his, etc. So I politely quit the team. The two games they were working on never saw the light of day.
What’s troubling about this experience is that, these team members weren’t just random folks met on the internet. They actually work with each other on a professional job, doing the exact same thing (game-dev), making millions for the company, but still can’t manage to release a small game of their own.
So I went solo and tried to make my own games. I came up with an idea of an open world helicopter game, where you travel from base to base in a sci-fi “floating cities in the sky” setting, trading, aerial dog fighting, kinda like a space game in the sky (still feels like a cool idea, maybe one day I’ll make it happen). I got the helicopter to fly and all, but I had no idea how to make 3D models. So while showing off my project online, I met an artist from Singapore who was thrilled about my idea and wanted to partner with me.
I was very excited to be able to work with someone, but it proved to be a big challenge. He clearly didn’t have the same vision as me, and wanted a different art style. He had no knowledge of game development, and was always criticizing the aesthetics of the game I had at the time. He also demanded features that was very difficult to program, and the design of the sci-fi helos he created didn’t look very good either.
I quickly realized how tedious it was to work with someone with different vision, with no one calling the shots and making final decisions. It was a constant compromise see-saw back and forth, and I began to hate the game I was working on.
So I went solo again. I found another art direction for the helicopter game and was able to make something that resembled a game. I eventually abandoned it, because I was convinced that very few people would find it fun. But you can see the gameplay footage here:
@StasisGame #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #IndieGameDev #indiegames @ColdBeerHD
Journey of Solo Game Development: What I Had Learned (Part 1: Why Go Solo?)
It's quite counter-intuitive that a good game can be made by one person. This unfortunate fellow must wear many hats: programmer, graphics artist, audio artist, level designer, marketing specialist,… https://t.co/9dLg9NjgVy
— 武大逼 (@songqingshu1234) August 5, 2023
