just thought that if you feel like monthes and monthes away of hard work from your final release, it could be a warm place here to talk about it.
Y’know, like the backstage of your dev, why you are doin it, which technical difficulties made you feel horrible pain, or joy by solving it, or whatever makes your way through the indie gamemaker furnace a hard, but rewarding lifestory …
I’m making my first iPhone game alone, for full managment reasons, and won’t play the one-man army twice. So much work … Rigging, drawing, coding, animating, designing the mechanics, checking if it works on all cases, writing documentation and specs …
That’s heavyweight ambition, as many of us here. But when I check out the progressive results, all this work coming to life, I can’t help but double my motivation.
What about you ?
edit : made a small poll to have an idea about everybody’s crazyness in here :lol:
(“Half-time” could be the evening + night well-known sparetime package)
I’m in the same boat as you - one man army - wish to be game developer.
Real challenge for now is creating art for my game, coding wise Unity makes it quite easy. I wish I had spent more time in the past with 3D modellers and photoshop though, would be so much easier now
How long it will take I have no idea, just cruising along and see what happens.
I’m estimating 3-6 months for me if all goes well. Unfortunately I’m still on a trial with 18 days left and won’t be able to purchase a license until August
My game shouldn’t require too much art, and none of it is particularly detailed. Only thing I’m worried about is sound effects. I’ll probably just get a sound pack or something.
3-6 here too, but mainly because I can currently neither offer full nor half time, only spare time development if at all. went down to near 0 the past weeks
My last 2 Unity iPhone games took 2 month each of sparetime work (mostly a one man show). I’m working now on a bigger one, but split into 1 artist and 1 coder. Probably like 2-3 months for the current one.
Looking at 6 months-ish. That’s evenings after the day job and doing incremental little bits. Mainly a learning Unity exercise at the beginning. Got a lot of fundamental stuff in place over the first month and a half. Going to spend the next three getting the structure and progression right as well as presentation. Month and a half polish and bug fixing after that.
Already planning a nice quick 1 month project to do after that.
I’ve been working on my game for 2 months full time. Hope to get it released in a month or so.
I agree with you Nomad, I’m alone on that project and it’s a pain. I wish I could just code and compose the music as it’s so easier and more insteresting for me than doing the animation or even designing the game (placing waypoints, enemies and such).
For my next game, I’ll sure hire or work with an artist/designer.
Anyone interested?
seems to settle down around 2 month per game here - fulltime. my first one was pretty simple, took only about 3 weeks, but ofcourse learning unity and best tool workflow took its toll.
i also do everything allone, but that is why i left my job as plain programmer and jumped in this business without a safety net. it is really great way of earning money by doing what you want. if i invested hours or even days searching for a bug in my code, well, then i leave it alone and spend a few days on graphics, soundeffects, music, marketing, or even looking through my old commodore collection and search for game ideas that are yet missing on iphone . i then usually come back and find the bug in minutes. i sometimes need a little time off from programming.
I’m working 2-3 days a week depending, as I’m on shared “paternity leave” with my freelance wife in my freelance life. I take care of our new son on the other days, so I can’t get that full speed ahead feeling right now.
I started my current game in mid-Jan and as a one man band, am nearly done. However, it is fairly simple.
I’m from the opposite end of the spectrum from Scrat, coming from art, production and creative management. Normally I schedule, budget and oversee large creative projects, so this is a new experience for me, both in scale and in content
My bug-bear has been coding, debugging, and all the technical bits that come with it. Before I started actually playing in Unity the end of last year, I’d not done a line of code - ever (if you don’t count scripting large FileMaker Pro databases…).
The next one will be quicker, tho!
[Congratulations G.o.D. and good luck! It’s a great big risk to do, no?]
5 months so far for me. I was completely new to Unity, worked 3 months part-time during evenings, since then 2 months semi-full time. Holiday for a couple of weeks, then this week decided to switch from Cheetah3d to Blender for my models though, which slowed me down a bit. Avoid changing software tools if at all possible.
It’s been 3 months since I decided to give it a try full time. I was just a programmer with no game development/art/modeling experience prior to this. So, being in a one man show, it has so far been a process with lots of pain, frustration and some joy…which was expected. I only wish I had found Unity before spending 2+ months trying to learn OpenGL/Cocoa/Obj-C etc and also going through Apple’s documentation back and forth like a mad man.
At the pace it has been working out, I believe my first app would take at least two more months. I think after the initial learning curve, may be I can roll out an app in 2 to 3 months working full time.
Here is a question to you guys: do you work on more than one project simultaneously? for ex - while you are working on project1, you get a great idea for project2 - how do you handle such situations?
I play Ronald Reagan and “stay the course” on the project that I’m working on.
Unless the project currently under way is clearly inappropriate, I finish the one I’ve started after making a good set of notes and writing down all my thoughts on the new one while they are fresh. Otherwise it’s too easy to drop the one I’m working on because it got tough, and move on to the next one. That can become a never ending spiral.
On the other hand, be intelligent and judicious. If you’ve bitten off much more than you can chew, and this new project is short and sweet and you can learn from it, then have hard think before you move on. Make sure you don’t make a habit of it.
I like to have at least a couple going at the same time – that way if you hit a road block on one, you can shift across to the other. Then the old sub-conscious usually kicks in and solves the original problem.
