GTA, Starwars, high level graphic games is created by teamwork. Flappy birds is individualism.
Which is better? Do it yourself or join teamwork…
Difference is budget, not number of people. You can be on a huge team with no budget and you’ll still end up with flappy bird.
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For creativity, the formula seems to be smaller the better. Dont forget that minecraft was done by one person!
The problem is very simple: somebody has to be in charge, but who would want to work for this person for no money?
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Ideally you could form a games collective and share skills and time, regardless of budget (well budget would be time).
Otherwise you go with whoever stumps up the most money and can pay you to work on their project. You get to work in games development and not worry about money and they get their project done. Which will hopefully repay their debt.
Is Kickstarter middle ground, where project prototypes can get funded and become real projects?
Games are made by TEAMs that follow a LEADER.
If there’s no leader or no manpower, chances of making somethign happen will be greatly reduced.
So, it is both teamwork and individualism.
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No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojang
Company was founded way before Minecraft was even a thing. Seems Notch was at least paying an artist while in the early stages of minecraft. The game we all know today was built by an ever growing team over many years.
And never forget that Notch started Mojang in 2002 and Mojang was sold in 2014. Until 2010 Mojang didn’t had any big success, and Notch was still working a day job. So while it is a big success story, Notch had to moonlight 8 years for it, and only got the really big money after 12 years.
As to creativity, Minecraft wasn’t that new. Just the game of that ilk that had the most success.
While he might be a good programmer, the most outstanding skill of Notch that helped his success was his luck… IDK about his creativity. He certainly seems to have a lot of business skills though having sold Minecraft and Mojang at the right time.
Oh, and keep Flappy Bird out of it. While that game was made by a single individual, and had a lot of success, as far as I see it nothing about that game is creative. This is a story of pure, one-in-a-million luck and nothing more.
Success is based on deciding on the right constraints and limits that fit your skillset and budget. Even the largest team and budget will not allow you to work without constraints. The lower the headcount and budget, the more constrained you are.
Making the most of what you have is what is important. “Individualism” is most of the time just an excuse for people that have a bad idea but do not want to hear other peoples opinion on it. A lot of people work alone because they are unable to accept other peoples opinion.
In rare cases you find a lone wolf working on a good idea alone because of monetary constraints… people usually only work on their own ideas for free.
But these lone wolves with good ideas oftentimes had A LOT of input from outside to improve on their ideas. That is the most important thing: even when you work on your own thing, ask other people for their opinion, and accept their feedback. Seldom good creativity comes from a single individual without a ton of feedback from outsiders.
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I would like to see an accurate list of games made by solo devs, that either excludes all the cases of significant outsourced or crowdsourced help (e.g. spending 40k $ of kickstarter money on art-contracting is a massive boost for a game that can’t just be replicated by everyone), or mentions these explicitely, along with the total estimated time till completion of the game. I’ve googled a bit but I feel like the articles always conveniently gloss over some of the facts that make such a success story less exciting but more realistic.
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We all like the dishwasher success stories. While at the same time blissfully overlooking the fact that these stories are 90% made up, and even if true, would be stories of pure luck, not hard work.
Reality most of the time is close to the story of Notch’s success: Many years of hard work AND a ton of luck. But that does not make a good story. Most people don’t like to work hard, and don’t want to realize the odds of having such luck. They want to believe they can win the lottery and make millions without having to work for it. That is what this stories primarily aim at.
These stories general tendency of shrinking the dev team to a minimum is just an extension of that. The success of a game sounds much more impressive if it was “built by a single dev!”… compared to “a dev contracting 3 artists, 2 programmers and a sound guy”…
That is another thing. We want heros in our stories. A hero winning a battle helped by a legion of grunts does sound much less impressive than a hero singlehandedly winning a war.
+1 to having compiled such a list. Besides Flappy birds (which MIGHT have really been done by a single guy without outsourced art), I cannot think of any other game that achieved considerable success while being done by just one guy.
What about Tetris?
Nope. Designed by one person. Built by several.
I’ld say your question is quite fuzzy. “What is better” can be a rather wide range of answers depending on whatever you break game development down to in order to answer this, aswell as what goals the developer has.
Personally I’ld say one-man team for a few simple reasons,
- I don’t have enough energy after my job-hours to do much interaction with other people apart from my spouse so having to discuss or argue over game development during my free time is not something I even consider.
- I develop games purely as a hobby and it’s a way for me to disconnect from reality for a while so profit and/or results slide down my priority list quite a bit
- Developing on my own let’s me create the game world exactly as I want with no other people stopping my ideas no matter how awesome or crappy they may be.
- Yes I can be defined as asocial
If your question is more like a “What approach would be best for making an awesomely successful game loved by everyone and let’s me earn a bazillion of dollars in the process”-kind of question I’ld say it probably isn’t important. There are small indie teams that have made lots of money and then there are the bigger teams who have also made lots of money. That, I’ld say is more a question of what kind of work environment you like better and what makes you comfortable, not what would bring most success.
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If you want a game to exude personality, you are better off going it alone.
If you want a game to exude polish, you are better off developing it with a team.
The more people that are involved in a project, the less likely that the project will express an individual personality. This is not to say that the game will be devoid of personality, and certainly not creativity. But it will diminish its expression of an individual personality. Many creative efforts that are commonly tackled by individuals benefit from this application of personal style. (painting, poetry, writing music, writing novels, etc…) Working with a team does not diminish the creativity, in fact it often enhances it. But it also introduces multiple styles, and multiple viewpoints, and a certain degree of individual expression is lost.
Some studios attempt to mitigate this effect by having a strong guiding hand on a project, to make sure that the vision for the title is more consolidated. This is often able to work to a certain degree, but you still lose some individuality from the effort, even with a capable and commanding director at the helm.
The real question you need to ask yourself is how important your individual expression is to both you, and the project you are working on. If that expression is going to be central to the theme of your project, you might have to sacrifice quality on some aspects of your project in order to maintain that personal expression. No one is expert in all fields. At best you can hope to be decent to good at many things, but there simply isn’t enough time and talent to be the best at everything. So going this route requires that you accept that certain parts of your project simply won’t be as good as they could be if you were collaborating with a team.
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Also generally it’s asset that cost the more and need contractors, if you can make a decent horizontal slice, it’s easier to prep it for polished remaster after.
Because the examples he gave are of known commercial games, I’ll assume he means “better” commercially.
And because OP has only 2 posts (and asking this question) I’m going to asume he’s new, hence, don’t start a team. Make flappy birds for now.
Sure in the long run teamwork is more logical, but that’s only true if everyone in the team knows what they’re doing, which usually means paid teamwork, run by people with a lot of experience.
It could be argued that all games are the seed of one persons ideas, or then again that persons ideas are probably derived from and a mix of other peoples ideas.
Then the technology used is never made by that one person, even if they code their own engine, they probably use an off the shelf language and development platform.
Or I would say no modern game is made by just one person…
I will reply to this thread when OP comeback here 
…
The quote you are reaching for is…
“If we see further than other men, it is because we are standing on the shoulders of giants.”
And you are correct, to a certain degree. It is important to remember what enables our achievements, and be grateful for the hard work that went into creating a tool like Unity. (or any other engine you might be using) It is important to maintain a certain degree of humility, which can often be challenging when working on your own projects.
I want to modify my answer. I do think you get a more “pure experience” by having 1 guy in charge. Its 100x better working on your own project doing it how you want then have to compromise and work with another person. Now that I got 2 part time jobs I can pay my bills without even caring if my game does well or flops so it makes it alot more enjoyable. Not only can I take more time on it, but I can actually afford an artist as well.
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Yeah I often wonder how teams of people really work out. Because any person I can think of sure I would enjoy working on a bigger project and being able to get it done BUT I also know that I would burn out quickly. Because some things will be very important to them that are almost meaningless to me and vice-versa. And so each would end up having to at least tolerate things they don’t really agree with. And that basically is like just having a job. I think most people dream of being free from this kind of thing. And for the most part that means being free of other people’s input period.
I sometimes think about all of these Indie teams that came out of AAA devs quitting their jobs. They are excited and make stuff sometimes that does very well. But I think ultimately we’ll see a 15-person team break off into 2 or more smaller teams. And in turn perhaps those will split off into 2 to 3 person teams in time. Not all of course but I think basically after the excitement and newness wears off they will feel about the same as they did at the AAA companies.
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