Solo vs team game development

Transcription

What’s up, folks? Welcome to another episode of the UI Buzz podcast or videocast video watching this on YouTube. I’m your host, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwin.com. This episode, I’m gonna talk all about being a solo developer on a game and the wins and the losses that you get there.

So let’s dive into this. So first of all, let’s start with the wins. Right? There’s no committee. So there’s no decision by committee.

You get to make every decision. You get to decide how it’s gonna be implemented, the timelines, the technologies you’re gonna use, all of those things. It’s all up to you. You get to make the shots. You get to live and die by your decisions.

That’s that’s what it comes down to. Now that’s a great thing. Right? Because you can change direction. You can decide to focus on a particular thing and do something else afterwards or shuffle the order of how you work on it.

These are all great and they save a lot of time when you don’t have to debate these things with people. But the downside of this is you are the only person working on it, and therefore the timeline will likely always be longer than you want it to be. I I know this from firsthand experience. Right? Desperately wanna get a game done so I can get playing it and get it out there to folks.

Even just to, like, a semi playable state, and this can lead to frustration because you really wanna get it working. Right? You really wanna see that dream come true. It doesn’t like I say, it doesn’t even have to be complete, but it’s dependent solely on you doing it. So those days that you don’t feel like working on it, guess what?

No progress is made. And if you decide to put it on the back burner, no progress is made. And that’s fine, if you can live with that. But for me, that’s very frustrating because I know that my motivation for working on projects comes and goes. And I like to when I know I’m hitting one of those high motivations for a particular project, I like to get as much work done as I can because I know it’s not gonna last forever.

Or I’m gonna have to switch to another project at some point. And so therefore, I like to ride the crest of those waves when it comes along. However, the downside can be that sometimes, hey, it happens. Right? You sort of not fully burn out, but you burn out on working on a project or you just don’t want to do it for whatever numerous reasons that exist.

Right? And that’s when you have to accept the, you know, this project is gonna sit there until you come back to it. If you come back to it. It’s not the problem with that. Is the longer you leave a project, it doesn’t matter how well you document it and everything else.

When you come back to it, you’ve got that spin up time where you have to refamiliarize yourself with it. I had this recently. I went back to my project hack game, and I’m looking at the blueprints in unreal engine, and I’m thinking to myself, what the hell is all this? Right? Where did I put this thing?

What is that where is this array that something’s pointing to? And that, again, can lead to frustration because you’re now burning some of that creative upside, if you like, Trying to bring yourself back up to speed because, hey, you’re the only one that knows the answers and it’s gonna take a while. Now, I’m not here to tell you which one’s right. I personally like working on projects by myself. However, I also very much enjoy working on projects with other people because it brings in a whole bunch of ideas and solutions to problems that I would never have thought of.

And it’s also just a great community feeling to work on something with other people. So, you know, I want to put these out here just to give you something to think about. But I just wanted to weigh up for you all the pros and cons, especially those folks who’ve never done any game development, and you’re wondering what it’s like. You know, these are the kind of things you have to deal with and some of the decisions you have to make. I recommend that, you know, if you’re new to game development and you wanna get into it, just do it.

Right? Because you have so much to learn and so many things that will go right for you and so many things that will go wrong along that learning curve. And you you wanna get into those because this will help you figure out how you wanna develop games and help you develop that path as you move forward. So either way, my recommendation is just get into it. Right?

Those answers will come to you. For me, I’m on a bit of a creative high right now, for project hacks. So I’m working bad. I solve some problems and It’s a great feeling. Right?

There’s definitely no better feeling than when you solve a problem and something that was causing you so much grief works And it’s also great to celebrate that with other folks, especially if you’re all, you know, working on a project together and you’re all getting those wins. Different parts of the projects coming in like that as wins. And if someone has a problem, you can all focus on that problem with them. Right? Again, another upside for working with other folks.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this whichever path you took. If you want to come and discuss this, great. Reach out to me. Peterwidham.com. There’s a link in the show notes.

Let’s have a conversation about this because it comes up way more than you would think, and I certainly get a lot of people asking me about it. That’s it, folks. Hope this has been helpful. If it has, you know what to do. Other than that, I will speak to you in the next episode.