2026 Is The BEST Year For Solo Devs. Here's How You Do It...

Right now, I am basically a solo developer. Um, and I'm working on what looks like a double A game. I think it does. It's called Twisted Tower. Admittedly, Twisted Tower was a team effort. Now, it's basically just me. Felipe is doing some work, but it's basically just me as a solo developer. In fact, this right here is a notebook of all of the different uh this is just one page of uh tons and tons of bugs uh for the game that I'm just fixing as a solo developer. Let me see if I can find some more. notebook after notebook after notebook of tons and tons of features and requests from play testers for my game Twisted Tower. And I kind of prefer solo development for the most part, especially in 2025 and 2026. I want to talk about why and how to make games as a solo developer effectively in 2026.

Really focus on the first [music] 5 minutes of gameplay. make that thing so tight [music] and rewarding and fun and challenging and [music] create a bunch of setups and a bunch of payoffs. A lot of you are probably thinking, "Well, why don't why don't I just polish the whole thing, Thomas?" [music] Because you can't. I I don't think you can. I haven't been able to. As a solo developer for, let's say, Pinstripe, my first game that I did solo, [music] it's imp it was impossible for me to to polish everything. So, it's a lot easier to just polish what really matters, the front and the back. It doesn't mean you create crap in the middle. It's just that these two parts are the best parts of your game. So, what is a polished introduction? Um, setting up a mystery in your story, telling me why I should care about the character, giving me an idea of the setting. This is important. Letting me know where I am, who I am, what year is it, what season is it. These are all

very important things for the first five minutes of your game. Giving me a goal, a destination. So for Twisted Tower, the top of the tower is the destination. The goal is to shave, not shave, save [laughter] my fiance, Charlotte. All of this I want to establish. And I did I I tried my very best to establish it in the first 30 seconds of the Twisted Tower cut scene. Right away, the player has all of this established. And that was intentional. It was by design. Even things like a menu. A menu is part of your bookends for your demo or for your game. When I open up Hollow Knight, that menu, I I still remember the first time I looked at that menu. It gave a perceived value. It made me feel like I got my money's worth right away. My $15 was spent wisely because of a menu. I don't know why that is, but the same is true with Twisted Tower. It's so funny cuz I did play testing with Twisted Tower. players would say, "Yeah, this game looks like it's worth 20 bucks."

Just because of a menu. Menus are way more important than developers think. So, focus on those bookends, the menu, the intro cutscene, the first 10 minutes of gameplay. Make it rewarding, interesting, fun. Create some setups and payoffs. Also, this is really important. If you're not making a story game and it's purely mechanical, right, and it's purely gameplay focused, let the player know that there is a destination mechanically. So, for example, again, with Twisted Tower, we start the player with just a hammer, and it's kind of tough to kill the enemies with the hammer. Originally, [snorts] the first time they found a workstation to upgrade their weapon, I thought, "Hey, I'll just give the player a free upgrade and let them upgrade their hammer before they've really been challenged." But what play testers asked me for is they said, "Hey, don't let me upgrade this. Let me know that I can, but don't let me upgrade it right now."

This was crucial because it now gave what? The player a destination. They realized in their mind, "Oh, I can get an upgrade for this weapon. I'm going to keep playing." [music] Number two, don't be afraid to use assets. There are so many assets on the Unity asset store. [music] It's insane. So, there's a really good chance that if you want a cohesive look for your game, there's probably something out there that looks pretty similar to what you need for your game. For example, with Twisted Tower, I'd say 80 90% of this game is custom models. Philippe did an incredible job, but because I'm effectively solo now, and I don't want to go in and do all of the 3D art myself, I went on the asset store and looked for something that had a similar vibe to what Filipe had already created. And I found this really cool castle pack and I just created this scene honestly in about four or five hours. just put it together and mixed and matched it with the other Twisted

Tower assets that I have like this trash can, like this tent, the sky boxes, the string lights. It all sort of works together. And obviously, I had to do some asset flipping here. And what asset flipping is is just taking textures, um, recoloring them in Photoshop, tweaking the lighting, tweaking the post-processing so it all sort of works together cohesively. Now, what's particularly cost prohibitive for solo developers is organic models like characters or nature, trees, rocks. This is some for some reason organic models are particularly challenging to create and they're also expensive to hire out. So, for me, I found that if I'm going to make a 3D game in particular, a lot of my character models I'm just going to purchase from an asset store or from Real Illusion. We'll talk about Real Illusion in a second. Ultimately, we come when it comes to using assets, it's really important that you are careful though, okay? You want to make sure that you have the correct license so you can use this character art in your game and

you can use it commercially royalty-free. And this often means you need to pay for it. And that's okay. Time is money. If you have the money to buy an asset, it's most of the time it's better to buy an asset than to make it from scratch over 40 hours of work. Now, when it comes to music, this is a a sort of side note here. I want you to be careful about music licenses. It's probably best to just write your own music or hire out someone to write their music because at the end of the day, you want streamers to play your game. Are they going to have an incentive to play your game if all of the music is licensed for you, but it's not licensed for the streamer. If it's not licensed for the streamer and their channel, they're going to get a copyright strike, and they're not going to be incentivized to play your game. And who else isn't going to be incentivized to play? Other streamers because they're going to see that streamer got a strike. Now, when I say assets, do I mean AI assets? No, I don't mean that. In fact, I'm at the moment

at the moment I am fundamentally opposed to 2D and 3D AI art. Now, that might be selfish of me because I'm an artist, so I don't like people stepping into my field, but it's also I mean, where is this art even coming from? Nobody really knows legally what's going on with 2D and 3D art. Even if it says on their website that the that the models that it's creating are royalty-free, we don't really know. We don't really know what's going on. So, I like to be very very careful. In fact, I just don't use 2D and 3D art. And I don't even take sponsorships. I get a lot of requests for sponsorships um from 2D and 3D art models. In fact, I think I get those are the most sponsorship offers I get and I don't take them cuz I I just I think I just think it's I don't like it. [music] I think it's gross. Code is a different story. We're going to talk about code in a second. And that brings me to magic tools. Use magic tools. What am I talking about? Magic tools are really, I

think, the most advantage you're going to have as a solo developer in 2026. There [snorts] are a few magic tools that are just mind-blowing to me that I've started using. And the first one, and honestly, these tools allow me to accomplish what was accomplished with three developers a couple years ago at my studio when I was working with a team. Now, I'm able to accomplish these things just me. Okay. So, the first magic tool that I wanted to mention is, we talked about it before. It's from Real Illusion. It's called Icone and Character Creator. Okay, Character Creator allows you to create character models that are fully rigged. And I'm not just talking about fingers and arms. I'm talking about facial rigging. One big problem that I found with Twisted Tower is that players, for some reason, players were not fully engaged with the story. They didn't care about the girl, the missing girl. Her name was Charlotte. They didn't care about the protagonist. His name is Vince. They

didn't care. They weren't scared of Mr. Twister. there was something wrong. And what I realized is I I needed cutcenes. And I would lay awake at night thinking, how do I get cut scenes that bring emotion to my characters without facial rigging, without animation, without showing emotion in the character's face. I thought, I'm going to have to spend 10 grand on this stuff. I'm going to have to outsource it and find some studio that's done animations for double A or AAA games. Then I found Real Illusion. Okay, Real Illusion, they they have this thing called I clone and they also have Character Creator. They have a bunch of other tools as well, but I use in particular IC clone and Character Creator. By the way, this segment, this little portion of this video is sponsored by Real Illusion, but I'm not talking about it because it's sponsored. I'm actually talking about it because I I love Real Illusion. I was blown away by what I was able to achieve. In fact, I reached out to Real Illusion and said, "Hey, I've got a segment in a video coming up. Do you guys want to sponsor

it and support Twisted Tower? So, thank you to Real Illusion. There's a link in the description, by the way, if you guys want to check out um Icone and Character Creator and all the other tools that Real Illusion have. And uh there's a discount in the link below for you guys. So, thank you to Real Illusion. But iClone and Character Creator are really, really cool. Um iClone is basically going to let you uh animate your characters and create all these cool, you can actually create entire scenes with a bunch of assets that they have. Um and I did that for Twisted Tower. Everything was basically either bought on the Real Illusions asset store or just came as a default in iClone. And I was able to animate these characters um with pre-built rigs and pre-built mocap templates and animate them and tweak them. But also I was able to take my ZBrush characters. These were created by Bin Morrison Elliot and ZBrush. Bring them into Character Creator and the rig is automatically set up. I'm not just talking about rigging the fingers and hands. I'm talking about the facial rig, which in my opinion is the most not only

the most challenging thing to create, but also the most important thing, especially for cutcenes. Now, it's important to note that with Real Illusion, you can have full IP ownership. So, it's not AI, okay? It's real models that you have full IP ownership of. So, if you create a character in Character Creator, you get the IP ownership. Um, it's portable across platforms, whether it's 3D printing all the way to like mobile game design or like a double A game like my game or an indie game that you're gonna launch in the Steam store like my game Twisted Tower. You have the IP ownership. This is very, very different than AI slop that's going to spit out stuff that we don't even know where the intellectual property belongs. You can also create realistic and stylized characters. Again, you have ZBrush and Blender integration with intuitive workflows and again facial blend shape customization. Now, when it comes to the licensing, just remember it's a one-time flat fee. There's no weird royalties or recurring costs. I would prefer that over, let's say, $10,000 um to hire

somebody or hire a contractor or some recurring fee from a 2D or 3D AI art uh website. When it comes to character workflow, there's one unified rig compatible with all major engines. Again, that's Unity, Unreal, or GDO. There's auto setup tools for shaders, for skeletons, and facial rigs. One thing that I've been using is the Real Illusion asset store, what they're going to call the ecosystem. You can easily customize assets from their asset store and purchase clothing, hair, accessories, animation. Now, you might be thinking, I don't want to buy this stuff. Why not? you know, why why don't we want to pay for assets like this and and have the full IP ownership as opposed to having AI do all this stuff, which again, we don't know where the intellectual property even belongs. One of my favorite things about iClone, this is one of the reasons why I was using it, is something called Aculip. Aculips is incredible. I can take the voice actor voice acting from uh my my voice actress who who plays Charlotte and I

can bring those in to iClone 8 and the lips will automatically sync to the audio and I can tweak those values after the fact and fine-tune it. I could fine-tune her mocap animations. I can bring her hand up even though the rest of her body is mocapped. I can make her eyes twitch and move and blink. It's important to note that Real Illusion is scalable. Okay, so you can have a super high resolution subdivision surface for like cinematic scenes. Um, but you can also decimate your characters and optimize them for game performance. Um, this includes, you know, optimizing the polygons, the bones, the materials, the UV bakes, etc. And finally, again, it works in Unity, GDAU, or Unreal with auto setup. I've used this. It's pretty impressive. Okay, when it comes to code, when it comes to code, I'm about to say something that might get me in trouble. Maybe not. I don't know. Let me know in the comments. So, I'm not going to make a recommendation. I'm not even going to talk about the ethics or the morality of it. I don't know about any of that. But

I do know I do know that co-pilot, in particular, the Claude Sonnet model is wild. It is a gamecher for solo developers. So, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm just going to tell you what it can do. Uh the claude sonnet model, that's what I use for co-pilot is incredible for writing code, writing tools for the Unity editor, debugging problems, or look guys, even if you need to just ask C-Pilot, hey, where is where is the score system in this game? Maybe you forgot what your code even does. Believe me, I after four years of working on Twisted Tower, sometimes I forget where I've implemented a feature. You can ask Copilot and say, "Hey, where is this feature located? how can I tweak this feature? And in a way, it almost acts like real-time documentation. But again, it's great for writing code as well. What took me, you know, let's say 8 hours to do, I'm not joking. Sometimes

I've debugged something and it took 10 minutes. This is the future. I don't again I don't have an ethical understanding of it, but co-pilot inside of Visual Studio is mindblowing. Okay, so if we have Copilot and we have Claude, why learn to code? Well, the people who know how to code with C or C++, those developers are at a significantly exponentially higher advantage than someone who doesn't. So I re I firmly believe that you need to learn to code before using C-pilot, just like you need to learn to let's say work out before you use steroids. It's very important to suffer a little bit and learn to code. That way, when you're telling Copilot what to do, when you're telling Claude what to do, it's so much more effective. [music] Three well-crafted levels are better than 10 boring [music] ones. So, instead of trying to scrape content over the

course of 10 hours, actually cut content and compress it down into a 3hour really fun experience. Like, if you're selling a $15 game, let's say $10 to $20. If you're selling a $10 to $20 game, I'd rather you just have three hours of really interesting content that is really rewarding to the player and really fun than 10 boring hours. Now, believe it or not, when it comes to quality, there's a lot of things that make a game quality. One of the key aspects of quality is actually fun. Okay? If your game is fun, it has a high quality. That's at least my opinion. And so, the way that I do this, a simple way to achieve this is something called funsies. Um, I've talked about funsies before, but funsies are things you can, it's almost like sprinkles on a cupcake. You can just sprinkle funsies into your game. That's breakable boxes, pots that you can throw, um, things knock down when you interact with them. So, for example, there's these things like little stansions. Those are little railings at like a movie theater. I made those things knock over. Uh, in a recent build

of Twisted Tower, those are funsies. Just the world sprinkling with interactivity. That stuff can make the game feel like it's high quality. Oftentimes, just having physics objects in your game or sound triggers, sounds that play as you walk through the levels. These are funsies, little things that interact with the player and make the world feel alive and feel fun. So, instead of making another level for your game, or hey, we need two more hours of content. I would rather you just make the content that you currently have funner, higher quality, more polish, more interactivity. [music] Finally, in 2026, here's what I want you to focus on as a solo developer. [music] Make a high quality demo. That is so crucial for solo developers. And here's why. There's actually a couple reasons. The first reason why is because there's no reason to make a full game if your

demo sucks. I've actually been there and I've had to retroactively fix the first level of a game and spend the majority of my time on that first level because I made some assumptions that the game was fun. But when play play testers revealed that the first the first level wasn't fun. So what you need to do is make your demo. just focus on the demo. And you might not even release the demo and you might not even, you know, sell your de demo to publishers. We'll talk about in a second, but at least you know, you've made the first level, you've made the first 15 minutes, you've tested it with play testers, and play testers say this is fun. And if it's not fun, they could tell you why it's not fun. You could figure out how to make it fun. And then what do you do? Rinse and repeat. So this is really prototyping. At the end of the day, this is prototyping. make something really, really fun and polished. You know what that thing is and then you scale it. You extend that

thing [snorts] into a full game. But figure out what makes that demo fun before you expand it. Now, obviously, you can release a demo and and get wish lists that way. Demos are a great way to get wish lists. I think I got something I I can't remember the exact number, but like 50 to 60,000 wish lists from the Twisted Tower demo. It was that valuable. But what you can also do with a demo is you can actually monetize early. So a lot of you want to go full-time. What you can do is you can take a demo and you can sell it to a publisher and they'll give you money to go full-time with just that demo. Uh you can obviously get investment as well. You can crowdfund your game. If you want to crowdfund it on Kickstarter, you can do that. And you have to you really should have a demo and a trailer of that demo on Kickstarter. And by the way, I've done all of this. So, if you want to learn how to do this, there's a webinar below. It's going to show you how to turn a demo into a paycheck, and you can go full-time. I've gone full-time three different times with just a polished demo. But hey, let's say you don't want to crowdfund. Let's say

you don't want to work with a publisher. That's totally fine. You can monetize early by actually just getting wish lists. I know that sounds weird cuz wish lists aren't money, but they kind of are. Bare minimum, you're going to get something like 5% uh conversion for your wish list. So, at the end of the day, as long as you finish your game, wish lists are basically pre-orders to some degree at like a 5 to 20% conversion. So, in conclusion, I think 2026 is definitely the year for solo developers. The tools are there. I, as for me, you know, I've been doing this for half of my life. I'm just astounded by how easy it is to make indie games as a solo developer. um whether it's Copilot, whether it's Real Illusion. Again, real huge shout out to Real Illusion. Thank you for supporting this channel. By the way, if you want to check out iClone 8, or you want to check out Character Creator or all their other tools, check out the link below. They have a discount code for you guys. Huge thank you to Real Illusion for sponsoring this video. So, check it out below if that sounds interesting to you.

Um or whether it's just the appetite of Steam players right now. The appetite seems to be for indie games and also small tight indie games. Whether it's friend slop or [music] uh stats like games, doesn't matter. The appetite is there for small solo projects. [music] So, let's make 2026 the year for solo developers. Let me know what you think in the comments, guys. I love you. Good luck on your 2026 gamedev journey. Cheers.