I QUIT Solo Game Dev

the moment I started working with a team it was probably 5 years ago I've been a game developer for about half my life the moment I started working with a team it was so much better and so much easier things happened so much faster and I don't know why I didn't do it to begin with I think I was just a little cocky I had rose-colored glasses about being an artist and changing the world and currently I don't I don't really care about that I just want to make games so this video is going to be Me Maybe explaining why you don't have to make games solo I'm not going to blame you if you do we'll talk about why it's a good thing too but I'm going to talk about that I'm not doing solo anymore I'm done with that so the first reason why I no longer do solo Dev is because it's really really lonely now there are ways for it to not be lonely like you can join a Discord server and share your work you can make friends in the industry on social media that's all cool and that's all fun but sitting alone at your computer making everything from scratch writing the music doing the

artwork and the code game design the level design it's so so lonely and you hear about this one of my buddies Daniel dianis his channel is pretty awesome click below if you want to check it out he talks about Game Dev depression why game developers are depressed I think game developers are a strange breed of individuals indie game developers specifically because they are what I've noticed this is true for me I'll speak about me they're they're sort of self-centered in the sense that they think that they can change the world or they can they can prove to everybody that they're great and that they're an artist and they can tell stories they can make great games and they don't need anybody that sort of Pride it's damaging to the psyche I mean you just you can't get away from it I'm sure a few people out there like maybe Toby Fox they just love making games and they do it solo and they're good at it but even even undertale there was contract workers and team members ultimately it leads to just sadness and and that was so true for me when I released my first commercial release and I did it completely solo I did partner with a publisher but didn't

do anything related to the game they just helped me market the game but after that game was launched I remember it was just in time well there goes my hair just just in time a big cloudy foggy rainstorm came in for like 2 weeks and I had just found out we were going to have a kid my daughter and it wasn't bringing in that much money at the time it did well eventually and I I remember laying in bed just miserable because all of that lonely hard work was still lonely it's like I I expected for some reason once I launched it that everyone would clap for me but nobody clapped for me it was just you're still alone so that's the first reason is it's lonely the second reason is is because it's freaking expensive it's a ton of time now let's just say time is money you guys hear me say this a lot time is money I I I truly believe it's money ultimately it's your time and you could be spending it somewhere else and let's say your hourly rate is let's do a tiny

number let's do like 20 bucks an hour if your hourly rate is 20 bucks an hour but nine out of the 10 things you're doing are things you're slow at and surprise surprise if you're doing something you're not a pro at you're going to be slower at it what that means is all of the things you're doing for your game are taking you probably double or maybe even triple the amount of time it could take someone else to do it so if you have some money to spare maybe 300 bucks 400 bucks here or there and I know know a lot of you don't and I get it I totally get it and that's why we'll talk in a bit why solo Dev is is totally fine and it makes sense in maybe your season of life but if you could find contract workers or maybe a friend or people who want to participate with you and maybe split the royalty share that might be the best route to go also we live in an era where there's assets for everything so you don't need to create every asset from scratch a lot of people think about assets as it's an asset and I get that cuz they're called assets but really what doing when you buy a $20 asset is

you're actually buying up a team member's time so if somebody creates a a 2d Sprite asset pack for like maybe Landscapes what you just bought for 20 bucks was perhaps 40 hours of work or for you maybe it's 2 or three months so be thinking of assets as maybe team members so you don't have to go hire out somebody to make 2D Sprites you can actually just go buy a pack on unity and tweak it and you basically partnered up with somebody body in a really kind of strange way but it's true you you've partnered up with an artist the third reason why I don't do solo Dev anymore is because I got to get games done I have to get them done and this is kind of related to the second point if you have a team it's faster it's much faster so instead of your game taking two years maybe it maybe it's only a year for you I think most people are probably spending about a year making their indie games instead of it being a year you could you could crunch it down into 6 months so it's kind of a shorter Point

here but it just speeds things up significantly my current team is about six or seven people got Hector who's doing the sound design he also does Community Management and handles email we've got Felipe he's my first full-time worker but he's he's still a contract worker he just works full-time for me he's my 3D modeler he does all of the 3D models for father brilliant Guy Gordon he's my video editor and he's also a an intern doing some code work for me Chris he's doing some music for me AJ wrote the the code base for father me and I'm doing art Direction and story and also just code I'm doing a lot of code work Adam Adam's doing the level design and Guys these aren't full-time workers these aren't full-time workers and that's a huge misconception for me to shrink my time significantly I don't have to hire any full-time workers well I've got one it's Felipe and he he's been on the team for about 4 months but the majority of the people I work with are just contract workers and so you you pay him a couple

hundred here maybe $1,000 there it does add up but ultimately like the second Point you're saving money but you're also shrinking that time significantly now I understand why all of this is scary and this is where we're going to get into the second portion of this video which is I understand why a lot of you are doing solo Dev and I'm not going to tell you to stop and the reason why is because when you start out it's actually probably a good idea to start making games solo because it's great to learn every aspect of game development so that one day kind of like what I'm doing now you can lead all of the people you need to lead because you know every aspect of what they're doing you may not be the best they're the best and the fastest but you understand it so starting out in the game industry the indie game industry specifically it makes complete sense to do a solo I totally get that I also understand that a lot of you don't have even $100 to spare I get that so finding contract workers and paying them maybe just $100 bucks here to do some sound design

that's a lot of money for you so I understand that as well but once you've gotten to your second game or maybe your third game and you do have maybe a budget of five grand that you can throw around for your game I highly suggest reaching out to people getting to know people on social media on Discord or in my case a lot of the people I work with were once subscribers or are currently subscribers for my channel it's one of the perks of doing YouTube videos so ultimately you know once you're sort of further along in your career that solo Dev mentality it's got to go that's just my opinion I know I'm not 100% correct here and I know what a lot of you are thinking and I'll I'll I'll sort of conclude with this I know what a lot of you are thinking but Thomas Toby Fox he he made undertale and now he's you know multi-millionaire blah blah blah uh but Thomas what about um stardo Valley well statistically that's two people I mean I'm sure there's there's several solo game devs out there does in fact but

that's very few people very very few people out of the thousands and thousands the tens of thousands of indie game developers out there who've done it solo and failed so I've talked about this a lot making Indie Games is like going to Vegas and gambling that's kind of what it's like you're gambling your time and ultimately your money CU I think time is money and gambling away that time and being a solo developer and risking it all to me doesn't make sense considering most indie game developers with their first or second release don't make any money well they make a very little amount of money so ultimately you should be thinking of your time and thinking of your game as gambling and minimizing that risk as much as possible so guys I'm not telling you to to not make game solo I'm just telling you why I'm not going to do it anymore and maybe once you're in that position where you're running your own game studio and you're bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars from your games you'll better understand why you should probably start

working with a team anyways I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you found it helpful subscribe for more videos like this about the indie game industry also leave a like and leave a comment below I love reading your comments