If you like old school fighters then there might be a niche community who like them, target that niche. Build games (not just one) in that niche and try to grow your audience.
I really enjoyed this read. Especially the bit where “you’ll always be late to the party unless you set your own trends.”
That part about no longer feeling fulfilled spoke to me too. I do think I transitioned from hobbyist to money grubber this year. Though I haven’t released anything, I’ve just done a lot of training. It’s been a rough year. I kind of like easing back and not hoping this becomes a huge business of mine. It did kill the fun, though I don’t think working on games is always fun in-general. It’s some damn hard work sometimes!
Also those games aren’t mine, they’re inspirations of mine. I make content fairly similar though! I fixed the original post for others. Sorry!
I think it’s ruined the fun for me too. All I wanted to do this year is make a game to sell. Instead all I’ve done is training. My skills weren’t up to the task, though I’m really liking where I’m at now. At the end of the day though, I think I might completely agree with you. I don’t believe I have what it takes to pump out a game every single year hoping to make great sales. I don’t have enough ideas that truly interest me to go that far. I recently worked on a jail sandbox game for a few weeks and dumped it because I just wasn’t into it.
I feel the same way about releasing crap as opposed to not releasing at all. Or even if your friends play it. I worked on a miniature online “brawler” for three months this year and connecting online with two others for 5 minutes of fun made me feel great. But man did I realize what a shit game that was afterwards.
I really love that diagram, I ended up saving it to my HDD. I believe many failed projects are useful too. Anything that’s taught me something new is generally useful.
Question: If you don’t have what it takes to make money in a low risk desk job, what makes you think you can make money on your own as a high risk indie?
I suppose I wouldn’t. I’m unsure of my abilities at this point. Never released a game for profit. I hope to keep improving and see what comes from this.
It takes a long time to build a game. If you are not deeply passionate about the game you are developing, you won’t have enough drive to complete it. So you don’t have an option to build something you don’t like just because you think other people might buy it. You need to build the game you want to play, and hope others will also want to play that game.
You might surprise yourself. Nobody knows they can do something until they’ve actually done it. For many people the first time at something is a challenge because you’ve got no prior experience from which to have built confidence*. You build confidence by getting experience under your belt, and everyone has to start somewhere.
This swings both ways. Some people are over-confident at things because they don’t realise how much they don’t know.
Success is about hard work and perseverance. More to the point: hard work is about putting in work even when you “don’t feel like it”. Perseverance is about staying positive and continuing to try in the face of failure. Many success stories involve a dev or an inventor setting out to “make that one last project” after many tries. Its a good idea to be “goal oriented”. Otherwise you’ll spend a lot of time dinking around with a project (sometimes years) and never reaching that “finished” stage.
I’m saying this because you the OP seem interested in making money with your game endeavors. I personally don’t think that’s a bad thing; one can always be an entreprenour. There’s something to be said in favor of “doing what you love and loving what you do” because that is how quality shit gets made. I think many of us on these boards have some belief in that mantra. I’m also saying it because you’ve mentioned having a “passion project”, one you don’t know would sell or not. Well you’re not going to find out by sitting around and only doing work when you feel inspired are ya?
Many people might buy your game. “Retro” is a big thing these days.
I’ve been paring down my project’s feature list. That’s exactly the opposite of what I wanted to do but I’ve found that I will never finish this project unless I set myself to working on it as much as possible and working towards the goal of finishing it by Any Means Necessary^TM
And luck. Many people seem to be under impression that “hard work” guarantees success. This is not the case. Working “smart” is a better idea, but even in this case you also need to be at the right place at the right time doing the right thing. That’s why things like Minecraft or Microsoft do not happen often.
There is such a thing as “making your own luck”, which essentially equates to opening as many opportunities as possible to increase chances of it turning in your favour… You don’t win the lottery by never buying a ticket, there are also safer more logical options that might not give you millions of dollars instantly but accumulate’s over time.
A lot of it is hard work and perseverance, but we seem to focus on nothing but flukes and fringe cases as a metric for success. Many companies grew by slowly building, if you read the back story on companies like CD Projekt Red they really wasn’t lucky or fortunate in any sense of the word.
There’s many ways to be successful (or become more so), some are lucky, some are very underhanded, some are powerful (influential or fiscally), some are hardworking and some are rich out of necessity (others are all of them)…
Ultimatley, you don’t know if you don’t try really… In it to win it and all that (seriously it’s cliche day for me)…
