So four people made the forest and four people are working on Pamela pretty amazing. But then I see that 11 people made we happy few and multiple studios made ark survival evolved. These games are fairly similar open world sandbox but show that larger games can be made with a small amount of people. Whats your ideal team size.
One.
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:)Never underestimate the power of one man
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If it was up too me I’d add an artist and a marketing person (marketer?). So that’s at least three. I’d also like a sound engineer, because I hate doing sound. I’m sure I could come up with a few more ideas if I think about it.
Every job I don’t farm out is one I would have to do myself. And that would end up with a lot of time spent on not making games.
Just one=Me! 
Note: But a Team of 4, is good enough for me!
Four seems like the magic number.
I’m fine with 1 (myself) but… I would also be fine having an artist and an musician though ;). For me 3 would be ideal for a project.
I hate teams, it starts getting complicated when they know what they want and you don’t get it.
So I’m a one person kinda guy, I know what I want, I make what I want, and idc how anyone else likes it, my game, my story, don’t like it, oh well lol.
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WHOLE WORLD WORKING FOR ME!
Ideally 2 to 3 people total. Presentation is important. That may sound odd coming from me. It’s true though. I probably like nice artwork and sounds and such as much as anyone else. I just don’t like it when that seems to be the focus of the “game”. So… one highly skilled artist and possibly one other person to handle sounds, music, ambient atmospheric stuff.
The trick is in finding the right people to work with or you end up with the problems @N1warhead_1 describes. I have tried multiple times over the years to form a team and people are very excited in the beginning. Once they realize it is not all fun and games and requires work and is often quite tedious most people just sort of fade away and drop out. Making games is a lot of fun but it also is work and is tedious at times.
Anyway, I found it is a lot better for me to just hire people to work on art and other things as needed. This way I get what I want and they get paid without being dragged into the boring tedious bits of game dev.
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One programmer, one art person, one sound person. That combination worked for me in college.
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art can be divided into sub categories. one would not work perfectly 
Not sure about @Tomnnn … for me one highly skilled artist means an artist who can do the job on art side … period… same as I can do it on the programming side. Sure they may specialize in 2D or 3D and maybe in characters or terrain… the same as some programmers specialize in event driven programming and others in “realtime” programming and some specialize in utility development or tcp/ip, threading and such… the artist just needs to be able to do all of the art stuff better than I can at my best and I am happy. Even if for no other reason than I don’t need to spend time working on that stuff too.
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its true but a pixel artist may not be able to do vector graphics and a modeler may not handle textures. But in small projects one artist may do especially in 2D
One man with a budget who can just pay the artists to do it. Which is kind of why im bummed out about the asset store flippers. It almost made it a viable solution
Just hire an artist. There are many MANY great artists out there who like making money for their skills. Just have to weed out the ones who charge crazy high prices. Fortunately there are so many available you can probably find one who will create a near AAA model for you for $25 or so.
@Yash987654321 @GarBenjamin I can assure you that the individual I worked with was skilled in all forms of art. 2D, 3D, texturing, rigging, etc. Can use blender or overpriced COTS.
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That is what I’ve seen too. I don’t know where all of these artists have come from! For decades I tried to find them and they were hard to find. Now there seem to be thousands maybe millions of them. lol And I think it is awesome!
I’ll see if I can get a render from something he’s working on to post here. It’s crazy how much my sound and art person grew during the course of our independent study.
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I think 9 is a good number for your immediate team.
For a good game company size i.e multiple teams, the sweet spot is 30-35 people (According to Blizzard co-founder Dave Brevik)
But for a full on indie, 2 or 3 is probably best. One programmer, one artist, and one sound dude, and maybe a marketing/business dude.
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