What are the limits of only one man, a few years, and a small budget??

News & General Discussion
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FOR A 2D VIDEO GAME

Hello everyone, and thank you for taking the time to read this thread.

A little over a year ago, I began to develop a dream for a video game I thought would not only be a great success, but also completely innovative in a genre that seems to lack innovation. (I won’t discuss the genre, or the game, as it is irrelevant.) I began to develop my game design thoroughly, 18 hours a day for a full year (and still am working on it) while researching graphics, learning programming, and finding the tools I will need. Starting in October, I began to learn 3D modeling tools, 2D graphics, and a little bit about everything. By December, I had some amazing 2D graphics created, ready to begin creating the game. A miracle considering how I knew absolutely NOTHING about artwork or graphics design, and within a few months was able to make graphics on par with Diablo 3 (in my opinion, anyways, as I think Diablo3’s graphics aren’t very good compared to what’s possible). The goal of the game was 2.5D (2D, in an Isometric View like Diablo or Ultima Online’s graphics). So now I don’t have to worry about graphics.

This is a point I want to make–

  1. Excluding the CREATION and COST of graphics, sound effects, and music… (Let’s say they are already made, or contracted out and already payed for, or there is no sound to the game and the graphics are @ symbols or ASCII graphics)

  2. Including using the UNITY engine, and any scripts/programs/add-ons one might need to make a 2.5D action-rpg

What are the limitations of only one man, 1-4 years, and a small budget < $100,000, when attempting a 2D video game? Not a 3D game, which I have always assumed was more time-consuming and complex. No, just a 2D game. 2.5D to be precise, but 2D none-the-less.

Short, singleplayer pong games?
Long, singleplayer rpg games?
Simple, multiplayer atari games?
Complex, multiplayer mmorpg’s?

Of course, this is a very small list of examples. I am not asking for answers to the above examples, but attempting to provoke some thought as to the different types of simple/complex games in the world.
What I want to discuss is what you believe is the limitation of only one programmer creating a game using the Unity engine (as well as other add-ons, such as the multiplayer add-on to give 25+ players in the game, or the 2D animation add-on to have easier animating of planes for a 2D game using Unity3D).

One Man.
1-4 years.
A small budget (“small” in terms of video games: Budget < $100,000).
What are the limits to his accomplishment? What type of game could he make? What type of game could he not make? Singleplayer? Multiplayer? Large or Mass Multiplayer? Short? Long? Simple? Complex?

Thank you for this theoretical discussion. I am not asking “What can I do?” but more realistically, what could one man do? I fully understand how big of a task game development is. My actual goal is extremely small and nothing compared to what I actually wanted to accomplish. Unfortunate, but realistic.

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@emergence

I suppose it all depends on that ‘one man’ knows. If that individual has the tools available and knows how to design, model, unwrap, texture, animate, export/import, script (general movement, ect), program (AI, ect), sound and music, special effects, lighting, level creation, tweak/qa, and build, then that individual can do it all. It would just take a while depending on the detail level of the project. It also depends on how much that individual knows and how fast they are at asset creation.

-S

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Check out iTunes App Store. Check out iShoot.
Now factor in the fact that this game made the guy something like $30,000 per day…

Now try to get your head around the fact that this guy knew nothing about programming. Get to grips with the fact that this was this guy’s first ever program… and that he actually wrote this game with a programming “Teach yourself” book by his side, reading and coding at the same time…

Recall the facts again: 1 guy, 0 programs written (games or otherwise), couple of months, no budget, earns $30,000+ per day
Now let’s look at your question again: What can one man accomplish in 4 years if the artwork was already completed and he had < $100,000 budget?

I’d say: “Quite a lot” :stuck_out_tongue:

In my case, my first ever attempt at a game took me 3 weeks from start to finish…
This game was liked enough that a Japanese company took it over and adapted it to their needs, adapting it took nearly a year…
One man, 3 weeks, one team 12 months, same game…

What can one man accomplish? That is a very broad question indeed…

Edit:
P.s., with Unity as your engine, 2D I reckon is harder to do than 3D. I could never understand what 2.5D means, though…

If you mean like the latest StreetFighter or Mortal Combat where the action takes place in 2D in a 3D world where your direction could change but the camera position always makes the game play in 2D… Well, that is just 3D with a locked camera… If you mean an angled top-down view with perspective turned off, that is still a 3D world… I don’t know… I just can’t figure out this whole 2.5D thing.

Just think of it this way: “Unity is a 3D engine that you can make do 2D”. If, on the other hand, you had a 2D ‘engine’ and access to OpenGL and wanted to make a 3D game… THEN you would have to work at creating 3D (what with physics and lighting and all) and 2D would probably be a good way to go… But since you already have a full blown 3D engine, making anything less will require you to spend effort on making your engine do less than it is capable of…

When I started games developing in Delphi I wanted to create my own 3D engine just so I could do 3D stuff… but I quickly realized that 3D is a beast and I gave up and started making a Street Fighter game instead… Now that I have Unity, 3D is my default and anything else is just too much effort for me to worry about :stuck_out_tongue:

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Sevisin is right - how broad a range does this one man have? Working alone or in -very- small teams is really a psychological battle since you have to become so introspective. Introspection is hardly the talent of the many, though, which is probably the real reason most single-man projects fail to even reach a beta release.

Then of course, 1-4 years is a pretty broad range - 4 years is considerably longer than 1 year, obviously.

There is no reason why any one answer to this question would be more correct than any other. In the end, it is all a matter of psychology and pure knowledge of the trade and tools.

MrDude is also on to something. Most of us who have managed to crank something out ourselves, or seen the work of others who have, are likely more prone to have the initial motivation to continue doing so. I will advice against doing any direct comparisons to the most extremely simple games (which unfortunately is a problem with many indies) because you could prototype a decent such game in a matter of days (no names disclosed - general statement).

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That’s an exception to the rule. Right time right place. It’s like telling everyone that someone you know won the Lottery. :wink:

On Topic: If its only coding/scripts you could do a lot in 1-4 years - even learning too from scratch.

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Er…no…he was an engineer at Sun Microsystems. He probably knew just a bit about programming, considering it was his day job…

–Eric

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Lol… Eric… That was not what I read, though… It seems I need to get myself more sources of info cause my facts seem to be a bit off recently.

Callahan:
Granted, he was an exception, but in terms of “What can one man accomplish” saying "Anything from ‘nothing at all’ right up to ‘check out THAT guy’ " was the point I was getting at…

Searching on Google again I found some snippets that aided in my mis-info:

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Sorry in advance, but every time I see this precise statement, I call it a misconception :slight_smile:

Making 2D games is not less time-consuming than making 3D games. A lot of people actually believe that, and it’s really strange. Maybe is it because 3D is technically more complicated than 2D, so it’s considered as complicated to produce, I don’t know … Anyway it’s not true :

Considering I’m comparing the same type of game, with the same user ingame point of view,

For characters :
In 2D :

  1. If you want to make a good game, which means well animated, you’ll have to nicely draw at least 6 frames per second of any animation (even though, 6 fps is considered crappy animation, 12 is better).
  2. multiply this 1) by all the possible viewpoints of the character (except mirrored, but think about isometric games)
  3. multiply this 2) by all the different characters you want to have in your game
  4. multiply this 3) by all the possible actions you want to implement (keeping it relative to each action per character indeed)
  5. Consider that every single frame of these animations cannot be a re-use of another, if you want to stay professional
  6. and finally, consider that if you mess up a pose inside an animation, you have to redraw every other following frames.

There, you end up with a shitload of work if you want to provide something decent :slight_smile:

Compare it now with the 3D character creation workflow :

  1. create a good rig to reuse in all your animations (rig = skeleton setup, with physics, constraints, IKs etc)
  2. create a T-pose model of every character (where you can re-use some body parts between each others, as long as you change textures)
  3. create textures (where laziest devs can reuse some elements, like clothes, and just change the color + add some different details)
  4. animate, where it’s not necessary to put a keyframe on a 12 fps basis for quality. You can achieve very good looking animations with a very few keyframes, if you see where to put them thanks to interpolation. Plus it’s very easy to guess what pose a body member will have, based on a mix of its predecessing keyframe and the overall movement you want to make it achieve.
  5. consider that you can re-use a lot of animations, and then make them look totally different by changing just a few keyframes

For environments, this is approximately the same amount of work, as objects textures don’t really need to differ from POV to POV (3D), so the approach is kinda same as in 2D, texture wise.

Plus a ton of other time saving advantages for 3D games, like :

  • far better industralization process for the production (texture generation/exchange, physics automations, animation time stretching, etc)
  • 3D animation quality scales with hardware, as 2D will be stuck to its original fps (you don’t have to refine your animation when porting to superior hardware)
  • animation blending

Although, 2d is far more art-friendly, I admit.
Or maybe devs didn’t try to put art into 3D gaming yet enough ? :wink:

(p.s : all this post is just my experience speaking, as I tested both 2D and 3D, at different times in my life, in the production of a same game genre, with the same specs)

p.p.s : about the initial question, may I redirect you toward my sig, as I feel I’m a concrete representation of your question’s targetted dev type. It is a topic about a game I started working on solo since january 2009. I produced everything except music, and actually hit a total cost of 20.000 $ (doing it in spare time, will be released at worst this summer, at best in march).

Cheers

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Thank you all!

You’re right about CREATING 2D assets being just as difficult as 3D assets.

I think the implementation though is harder with 3D than 2D.

With 2D, once they’re finished, you’re done completely and only have to worry about animation speed switching the frames.
With 3D, you have to do the same, but then implement cool lighting (which can be a major feature in some games),
I just imagined it would be more difficult.

I am actually doing both. I used 3D models to create 2D images. This was cheaper for me, because I could contract already-made, high quality 3D models from Daz, and render them as 2D images. Some I have to photoshop, some I don’t.

I also developed a really nice (albeit complex on my end) system of being able to equip/unequip items, dye clothes, dye hair, etc.

More complicated or less-- it was my only option. Anything more would have cost too much money. Surprisingly, the quality is extremely high, especially compared to what I was thinking my graphics would be. And with a lot of the graphics, you can’t even tell they are from other vendors. And the job I got as a 2D artist for a professional gaming company has little to nothing to do with Daz models-- so I actually learned how to texture, model, etc. So I got a job accidentally (and a really good one, for me anyways) by telling myself “If you want this done, you have to learn to do it. You have to find a way.”

I spent most of the year developing the game design, also searching for HOW I will do everything. HOW I will program (what language), what engine to use (if any), where to get or make the graphics, the costs, etc. I never in a million years would have thought

  1. I would be so passionate about this. I have never held on to an idea longer than 1 month. I have been non-stop on fire for this game for OVER a year, and still on fire for it. I know I will be until it is done.

  2. That I would have to learn so many DIFFERENT talents. I never thought I’d ever deal with graphics— EVER! What a surprise! I never knew I’d be good at it too. I started molding my own skeleton in Blender, and drawing my own 2D sprites on paper. Thankfully, I got better at it :stuck_out_tongue:

Thank you all for the encouragement. I really enjoy programming, Unity (the week I played with it), Java (which I hear is similar to C#), graphics creation, level design, game design, problem solving, repetitive game testing, etc.

And I am really good at all of it! :slight_smile:

I will have a website up soon, and I’ll attach it to my sig and start showing off some of the graphics and game features before I start.

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The sources were fine, but “not having done iPhone programming” isn’t quite the same as “not having done programming”. :slight_smile:

–Eric

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I know of a guy off the top of my head who is a programming prodigy, has an existing company with a few dozen employees, but his current company was breaking even and almost to the point of loosing money due to the economy and lack of interest in his core product which is bad news for him and his employees, so he set himself a goal when the iPhone store first opened, created a little turret style game, very stunning graphics considering it is all just lines and special effects, not a single image map (gif, png or otherwise) in the game, released his game in like a month, makes enough money from that game and subsequent sequels that he no longer takes any pay from his company and rolls that income back into the company but instead lives off his income from the games he writes for the store. Now he looses no employees and can turn a small profit and works on redoing the core of his company to increase profit. So 1 man, 1 month give or take and enough to forget about his $250,000 annual income from his company.

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So in essence, if I can come up with a SECOND, extremely simple, video game— and it sold really well, I could use that money to hire programmers to help me make my FIRST, very complex video game?

Hehe, :stuck_out_tongue:

That’s kindof what I’m doing as a contract artist (of course, making MUCH less than a successful video game).
But the amount I’ll be making for just a little bit of work-- is enough to fully cover all the cost of what I’ve already spent on the game AND more.

So it’s pretty nifty.

I actually have plans for my game. I am going to

  1. Start a website, to build a community. From what I’ve heard, people really like my ideas and really want to see my game happen.

  2. Once I have a huge community, put it on kickstarter, and hopefully raise enough money to make the game come faster (possibly hire more programmers, for a year, to help me make the game faster)

But most of all…

  1. Sell it first as a small “demo” version of the game. This is a benefit for both player and developer. I get to use all the funds from the sale to spend further on the game- making it better. Players get to see what the game will be about, and invest in it.
    And I’ll do this many times, if it works the first time.

So what I’ll be doing is releasing small, demo versions of the game, over the years, for sale. This will help fund the game to become bigger, and bigger.

Depending on population, donations, and my own investment-- it will rather stay a demo, or eventually become (step by step) a full fledge AAA title released for thousands of people!

If I can make a small, micro-version of the game I want-- it should be able to show everyone what the game is actually about. It can also help playtest the game mechanics, provide those who “donate” with something real (a real game, albeit a small one), and a way to help shape the game into what people want by the feedback given. It’s like a pay to beta test :stuck_out_tongue: lol

Not like I haven’t done that before! (Fileplanet Subscriptions to get access to beta for a game)

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2.5D is just as time consuming as 3D as you still have to make the 3D assets, you are just restricting player movement to certain directions. Like “New Super Mario Brothers” on the DS is a 2.5D side scroller, but all the models and levels are in full 3D. If anything I would think a 2.5D game might be a little more difficult as you have to restrict an axis of movement that is readily explorable by default. This might make things a little more difficult as now you have to write scripts to ensure the player can never break out of your 2D space.

Now as to what one man can do? I would say almost anything. With the right tools, time and determination you can create almost anything you desire. I say almost anything as most of us probably can’t make as much content as some games (eg: WoW, COD etc). Let the sky be your limit and good luck to you!

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I guess it depends on your background, but I’m coming from a purely 2D background and there, 2.5D means basically that you use 3D hardware to draw completely flat 2D graphics, so there is no 3D in sight. Basically that means you use an orthographic projection on the camera (ie no perspective 3D), and then you can rotate objects around the Z axis but not around X or Y. That’s what 2.5D means. However in this 3D age people like to create side-scrolling games which don’t go into or out of the screen but scroll on the X/Y planes only, and may include 3D models and an entirely 3D environment, it’s just that you don’t move into the screen much or at all. Some people think that’s 2.5D also, but to me it’s not. Depends on your background. It is EASIER to make a 2D or 2.5D game, so long as you are not having to model 3D objects. However, if you want lots of 2D animation frames it can take a lot of time to produce the art, especially if it’s not a matter of animating a 3D model and saving off the frames as 2D images. But in general I think a 3D game takes a lot more time to produce. … except that Unity3D makes most things easier so the gap is narrowed.

I’m inspired by the 30,000/day story, thanks for that.

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To your original question (limit of one man, a few years, small budget)–Minecraft just sold a million dollars, and it fits beneath that criteria. Markus has hired people recently, but it started selling well while he was still solo.

So the limits are up to you :slight_smile:

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@Matthew: Minecraft just sold a million premium accounts - amounting to 10 million euros (over 13 million dollars).

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Ditto. That’s incredible. Gives me some hope that I can actually make it big. I was starting to think my project might only ever be my own form of entertainment.

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Restricting stuff to 2d movement is actually really easy to do…Just slap on a configurable joint and lock the XY Rotation, Z movement

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To the people who wants to know about 2.5D. :slight_smile:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5D

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Yeah it all about will power how bad do you want it also take time to create something within your skill set