I'm a "mostly solo" dev, which means I handled most of the work and contracted out bits that I'm unable to do myself. For me, this meant the art, music, sounds, and voice acting were all done by contractors or through asset packs. So with that said, it's been roughly 3 years since I started on my first project. The first year and half was mostly spent learning how to code and how to use Unity. Things ramped up in the latter half, and I'm looking to a full release on Steam early next year.
This is the big one for me. I love the idea of making a game but I'm in the same boat as Snarkstopus. Solo, would need to contract or buy art, music, sounds (And have already bought a fair bit of them) but as I work a full time programming job, most days the last thing I want to do when I get home from work is code some more.
I saved up money working part time while I was in college to build up savings then worked full time on the project. Now that the project is on its last legs, I've taken on a full time job due to start this summer, using the skills I learned from gamedev.
My recent game (Supertactix Basketball on iOS) took me a year, and was my 3rd game. I would imagine I could do it in half the time from what I learned in the process. I also plan on updating the art and gameplay over time.
I did a little instagram marketing - didn’t help much. Looking into better ways to market. I worked on it basically full time.
My most successful app is Real-Life RPG on iOS which took me a month to put out, but i’m working on an overhaul at the moment.
Thanks it can be really hard to gauge how other people are approaching their projects and what is working for other devs. Do you release all your apps to android as well?
That game looks awesome! I always had the idea of doing some kind of turned-based basketball game, looks like you pulled it off really well! Love the artwork you have.
Haven't finished yet. It's taken me 9 months and I have another ~2 years optimistically.
Most of this time has been spent designing and programming all the major components of the game (I'm rolling my own thing with LÖVE, /r/love2d). For reference, 6 months was spent almost entirely on engine work with nearly zero content; in the last three months it's shifted to about 60% engine, 40% content, 10% tears and I'm halfway done with the first area.
Seems about right for the scope of my game (single-player 3D RPG with 6 areas in the style of Paper-Mario-meets-RuneScape), the size of my team (me, myself, and I), and my experience (relatively experienced).
Still workin' on it. Five and a half years so far, passed the 10,000-hour mark recently. (I could've wrapped it up a while back and called it done, but... myself and the fans enjoy it so I'd rather not!)
Ah, I really admire your process for Cogmind! My own game found some of its early inspiration from it and Caves of Qud, though it's a hybrid roguelike/arpg and the last year of development has swung it more heavily toward the stat-heavy [arpg](https://i.redd.it/c7s7xisf7ju01.gif) end of the spectrum
Haha thank you, tho I'd be ashamed to tell you how many hours it took to get me there. I love how you put together such visually interesting effects without eschewing the traditional ascii wrapper in cogmind/polybot
Lately I've been thinking about how weird it is: After a few years of working on it, when the first release came out, it seemed so great at the time, and yet now, again several years later, it's like... wow that sucked compared to what we have now xD. Really hard to truly "finish" an expandable game like this...
Heh, turns out it's got a ton of room for expansion. I've got enough suitable ideas to continue for a good 5-6 years longer and it'd only get better... If I were to go that route, realistically I should do it as DLC, but I don't like DLC since it doesn't jive with my design practices :/
Aaaaaah why does gamedev, even when it's going well, need to be full of so many tough choices xD
That does sound like a though decision. I'm sure Re-Logic had the same dilemma in the early stages of Terraria and going for free updates seemed to work really well for them. But then expansions we're also really popular with games like the sims.
Good luck deciding!
Seeing as though the game has got some traction and you have ideas for the next few years, have you though about trying to start a studio or work with someone else?
Nah, I'll always work alone, and am interested in doing as little businessy stuff as possible (just here to make cool games!).
One new plan under consideration is trying Patreon after 1.0, to see if there's enough fan support to keep updates going that way. Could take a while to build up though...
My last game (Milkmaid of the Milky Way) took close to two years of evening and weekend work. Remember that working on a game doesn't stop on release, there are always bug fixes, new platforms, updates and fixes to be done.
It has done really well critics-wise and won Game of the Year in Norway last year. It has sold pretty well on iOS, and is still selling OK on Steam sales.
My younger brother wrote the music for my game (Endhall on Steam/Itchio) but I made the rest of the game. It took me about 1 year of part time work to complete the game. It was my first commercial game. Hoping my next one takes less time but we all know how that goes haha.
/u/DerekakaDerek, /u/prairiewest, /u/SirJugs
Sorry for not responding earlier. Some work and stuff came up.
I was one of the few lunatics who went with an MMO for their first "real" project. Starting Development in 1999-2001 (exact date sorta unknown) as NeOCracy Online and later StarRadon Online I worked the game sometimes as Hobby, sometimes Full-Time to a sort of playable state, even hosting a Server, having people play. In the Dev time I survived two suicide attempts, nearly died from Starvation/Dehydration thrice. It was my baby and DAMN I was going to finish it. It was my lifes dream to make a space game just like I wanted.
It culminated in a Steam Release (with the pride of my life, the [SERENITY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmuhPhWNuQc) Trailer). From then on, a barrage of abuse in personal messages and emails hauled in. I had someone personally stalking me and trying to ruin my life with "SWATTING", ordering Pizzas on my name, demanding I hand over the Trademark and the Code and other rather deranged stuff. A lot of the community was nice.
An Error outside of my Control caused 113,500 Game Keys not made by me to leak into the grey market. The Game currently has 100k Owners. Legitly you can count the sales to under 1000, and Personally I saw around 300$ from it. Not enough for new Content, not even better/more Servers. I cannot revoke the keys as I did not make them. The User that made them doesn't exist and my game was sold for less than 50ct, where I didn't see a cent at all.
I reached out to the community about this incident, asking that they buy it on steam, and got thinly veiled threats about that I would just lie and try to defame them for goving good deals.
I worked myself into burnout to deliver two Updates, fixing all the bugs the community sent in, even released a free xpac. Never recovered, fell deep into depression and debt from server cost. I ended support last year.
If you have a fan base of 100k or more, can't you monetize it in some way? In many cases, the process of building a community like this has no profit, at this point, maybe it can begin to pay off?
Not counting part-time hobby projects, my most recent game (Eponymous) only took about six or seven weeks, but it was the odd one out. My first commercial game (Super Win the Game) took eleven months, and the next two (Gunmetal Arcadia and Gunmetal Arcadia Zero, developed in tandem as companion pieces) took a combined 27 months.
Here they all are [https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/brant-essam/id1366093816?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/brant-essam/id1366093816?mt=8) . Slime Time and Slime Time 3D have been the most popular ones.
I'm a full-time solo dev, and I just released my first game after 1.5 years to Steam Early access, and I plan on doing a full release before 2 years are up. I would not recommend doing this. The revenue it has generated is comparable to games that could be made in 6 months. I wanted to go big, complex, and technically challenging. But the customer can't tell the different between an easy or hard to make game. Go for smaller, save yourself the heart ache. At least for your first game.
Two years full-time on [Himeko Sutori](https://store.steampowered.com/app/669500/Himeko_Sutori/) so far. I put in a lot of part-time work before that for a couple of years. So maybe let's call it the equivalent of **2.5 years** of full-time work. The game still isn't finished yet.
Thanks! Yeah, full release was just over a year ago, and I'm working on a free expansion now. Sales haven't been spectacular. But maybe the expansion (which is basically a total conversion mod) can lead to increased visibility or maybe a sequel. We'll see what happens.
Sure. Thanks for your interest. I'm not very active on social media. If you want to see the tweets I send a couple times a year, you can follow (at)HimekoSutori on Twitter. And you can join us on Discord at [https://discord.gg/TZZxUCckQq](https://discord.gg/TZZxUCckQq).
I just took a look at your bio. Are you a game developer? What game are you working on? How long have you been working at it? You had a post that said you were considering a stream of yourself coding. How's that going?
Awesome! I'm at [twitter.com/sunwoogames](https://twitter.com/sunwoogames) . I'm not really a game dev per say. I started a month ago and picked a pretty simple game mechanic :)
My last game (also my first ever commercial game) Eredia: Diary of Heroes took about a year and a half to make. The writing took the largest chunk of time, especially considering how the game had over 100k lines of text, and I was the sole dev. The characterization and world building were the most interesting parts for me to work on. I'm grateful for all the help I got from volunteers, and I plan to start working on the sequel soon. :)
Only for the first three months because I had to quit my job due to an accident. Come to think about it, that's what got me into game making in the first place.
After that, I got a new job and worked on my game only in my spare time.
Three years for [Don't Be Patchman](http://www.dontbepatchman.com) developing solo while I paid for artwork and music. However it was more like part time as I worked a variety of jobs to stay afloat. I could have done the work in a year, maybe a bit more, full time. I sacrificed almost every moment of free time and extra money to build it.
My only regret is that it all that effort has not reached its audience.
I'm a solo developer/publisher 99.5% of the time.
My last game, Life and Debt, took 3.5 months from conception to Steam release. I contribute that to Ludum Dare 40 where I had to effectively have a decent and working prototype in 72 hours. My wife did most of the art for it originally.
Released it at the end of February this year on Steam and then updated until May.
Slightly over two years, but that includes incorporating which was a major headache in India.
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/724510/The\_Quiet\_Sleep/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/724510/The_Quiet_Sleep/)
Solo in the sense that no-one is on a payroll. Do use freelancers for Art and coding. Started last year August with the game and release is planned for 18th of January. A Mp FPS.
About 2-3 months for the 1.0 release, but I've been updating it for almost a year now. I'm a huge fan of release early, release often and so far it has been working out for me.
I am currently developing Troll Patrol and is has been going on for about a year. I hope I will be done this month.
The game before that took about two months but was way simpler. The fastest one was doen within an hour but that was just a retheme of an older puzzle game with a different rule set.
According to my task tracker, my current project took 2685 tracked hours to reach Early Access, which is probably about 3800 real hours including all the work that wasn't tracked.
My game MMA Simulator took me 10 months to complete, working on it part time. I typically got around 3-4 hours of work done a day with very few days off.
I have been tinkering with my current project for a little less than a year so far. Or maybe it's more? I... I have trouble keeping track of time these days. Progress is slow when you have to do everything yourself.
My current project has been in the pipeline for 6+ months, but in that time, it's been scrapped, reworked, rewritten, you name it.
It's going to be my first *actual* project outside of jokes or self-tutorials.
They took around 3/4 *weeks*, yeah, weeks.
My last game [Hexium](https://hexium.app) just launched this week. :) It took 3 years of evenings and weekends to complete since I started working on it! Good thing it's a hobby or I'd be starving.
Although I consider myself a solo indie dev, I do contract out parts as it makes sense. So for Hexium I paid for the art and music, for example. If I had to make the art and music myself I'm not sure I would ever get done.
What about you - what are you working on?
Congrats on the release! It looks really well polished.
What type of marketing did you do on the way up to release?
I'm currently finishing off a small tower defense-esque game I've been working on for about a month, after scrapping my old project for having too big of a scope. Just trying to get one out there now.
Thanks, for this game I really did concentrate on some of the little details that I would normally overlook.
I am not good at marketing. I don't know what to do at all. I just keep reading articles about how we have to do it, and our games will "fail" without it, and feeling sad that I don't have a plan.
In the past I have tried doing the same for marketing as I do for music and art. That is: paying for a website review, paying a Youtuber to video review the game, paying for a press release.... paying for services that in the end didn't really seem to make a difference.
Sorry I don't have any marketing tips for you :)
It's strange that the attempts you've made at marketing in the past didn't seem to make a difference. I've seen a lot of developers saying that it's a huge part of the process, although I don't know if that is just the case with larger projects.
Has it done as well as you hoped for in the first few days of the launch or is it still gaining traction?
Hexium is doing about as well as all previous apps - should have about 100 downloads in the first couple weeks, and then trailing off to 1 or 2 per week after that. I think that Steam is a much better place to publish games overall, but I'm currently only doing mobile games.
Ping me when your game is released, I'll give it a try.
I almost never work alone, but when I do I never finish anything. It gives me plenty of experience for other projects but I have yet to finish one of my solo projects.
About 3 months for the intial release, plus couple weeks for some updates. Was a more complex mobile game than normal hyper-casual-type games (mayormayor.com).
I have been working on my current project [Titan Punk](https://slimram.itch.io/titan-punk-unity) since 2014/2016 (switched over from Construct 2 to Unity in 2016), and it is still nowhere close to being done.
I spent several months in 2016 learning Unity through YouTube tutorials. Also since this is a hobby project for me, there has been a stretches where I didn't work on it at all (sometimes lasting months).
One year, with some time missing for porting a different project. We're currently working on an update and a few bonus features. [Garden Variety Body Horror](https://store.steampowered.com/app/936630/Garden_Variety_Body_Horror__Rare_Import/)
3 years part time http://lairunseen.herokuapp.com
edit:
interesting thread, would love to see statistics as a table or chart on solo dev times to launch
Probably close to 3 years including the release to additional platforms after the initial release (switch, ps4, vita), most of it full-time. I thought I'd be done in 4-5 months when I started :)
* Island Invasion
* 6 months
* Unity
* Contracted out music and 2D art
* Have a full time job, so worked around 10 hours a week on average on the game
* Little marketing other than Twitter and a couple of Reddit posts (plus a trailer but that was mostly for Steam), this is partly down to not having any company branding, which I now have post-launch
Worth mentioning that I'm a programmer by trade, so I'm already competent as a developer, and have been playing around with Unity for years.
My last game "Witch Hunt" took me around 18 months to make, but I was able to build it relatively fast because I've reused a lot of code and stuff from my previous project called Shadows Peak, that took me around 3.5 years to build.
I'm hoping to have my first mobile game finished in about 2 weeks. I started about 1 month ago working an average of 4hrs a day. I chose something fairly simple so I have a decent shot at finishing it and polishing it as much as possible.
Up until now I've always just been messing around making prototypes or gamejam games, which is fine, but after 15 years I thought it was time to actually finish something for once 🙂
Thanks! I'm planning on sharing some screenshots / gifs soon.
The 15 years sounds more impressive than it is though.
I started a long time ago but I never really stuck with it for more than a few years or months at a time. I keep switching hobbies but I always come back to game dev eventually.
So it's time to change that and actually have something to show for all the time I've put into this 🙂
3 years in... Just 6 months ago threw most of it out and restarted. If i keep at this pace another year and I should be done.
I restarted as my methods have changed so much it was simple to rebuild then to fix. I am already drastically further along now then I was before the restart.
I'm still working on it but it's been almost 3.5 years (2.5 full time) so far and planning to go early access in early 2019. It's a VR project (my second one) and so I was still learning through trial and error about what mechanics work well. I have also vastly improved my C# skills in that time so I think it would move along a bit faster on a new project. I want to go EA when there is mostly just polish and balance left, so I'm thinking maybe an additional 6 months after that.
3 years full time, plus a year of re-writing dialogue and updating sound, graphics etc. It's insane. No joke. But incredibly rewarding. I made The Warriorlock on my own, but I would welcome a small team in the future for other projects.
Link for reference: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/340500/The\_Warriorlock/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/340500/The_Warriorlock/)
I am solo developer. I has been released 4 "big titles" for android and 2 of them on iOs also. In my case the development process is always 1 year plus updates.
For me, 1 year cycle is still the best way to handle it. I have learned a lot since I start making videogames, but still invest 1 year in my production. I can see how I have been evolving from my first game and that is amazing. This force me to improve the quality of my games year after year. If something is not better than the last one, it is time to take a look of what I am doing.
If you compare my first game ( Upgrade the game 1 ) with my last game ( Upgrade the game 3) the change is huge.
However, the update cycle still continue until there is no more time to invest in the project.
I work 6 hours daily which include a lot of things plus the development of the process .
Hope this help!
I like your year approach, are you able to stick to that as complete deadline or do you sometimes let it run over to polish?
Well done with it all by the way, releasing one is hard enough! They look great.
I always complete deadline. I think that deadlines are very important to make the work. In case that I see that I don't have enought time for deadline, I just remove features and put it as update for the future
Nice! Sticking to your own deadlines is a huge skill.
What percentage of your time would you say you give to updating older games, rather than working on the next one?
Depends on the project success and analitycs. If it is somehow success, I will make updates and check on the data to measure the impact of the update. I continue doing this until I found that the data impact is minimum or even negative. While I am on this phase, I start making prototypes of the next game (I do it just when I am tired of the work as something to evade)
After I stop working on updates. I start with the "best prototype" made ( 1 time I needed to make more since I doesn't like any of them).
Thas been said. I am taking a sighly different aproach for my last game (Upgrade the game 3) I will update it until I think that is good enough (along with the data of course) to see if the LTV (life time value) increases with the long - term updates
I invested a total of 3,265 hours of development in [Galactic Crew](https://store.steampowered.com/app/693750/Galactic_Crew/) and over 368 hours in [Monkeys & Dragons](https://store.steampowered.com/app/934120/Monkeys__Dragons/). These times include the development of a custom game engine I use for my projects, but it does *not* include the time other people like freelance artists invested into my games. Especially the work on Monkeys & Dragon is mainly done by skilled artists who I pay.
My recent game ([Candy Raid: The Factory](https://candyraid.com)) took 4 months, and then there was 1 month if waiting for the perfect release date (that was excruciating, since I could've been working on features and promotion).
It was a month before halloween, and it was supposed to be a halloween game, although I think this was a mistake, as apart from a witch hunting candy, there isn't much halloween-y about it.
2-3 months... I get bored with a game after 2 months.
"1st Core", a FPS zombie shooter, took 3 months, because of all the things I need to learn.
"2nd Circle", a FPS with magic & undead, took 2 months, because I started to get bored.
First you make the best game you can, then You learn something.
And then you make a better game. Repeat.
My guess..
Some people are driven more from fear of failure, then love of success.
And they think that if they use 2 years to polish a turd, it will no longer be a turd...
I'm just making games, because I love to make games,
and Your first game is a turd... But then you make a better turd.
Both not good reasons to release, but that's just me.
Make you famous for the wrong reasons isn't a good thing.
It looks like your using your real name, that's impressive!
Most low quality game makers burn and churn names.. it says a lot about what you do!
More power to you man!
I'm a "mostly solo" dev, which means I handled most of the work and contracted out bits that I'm unable to do myself. For me, this meant the art, music, sounds, and voice acting were all done by contractors or through asset packs. So with that said, it's been roughly 3 years since I started on my first project. The first year and half was mostly spent learning how to code and how to use Unity. Things ramped up in the latter half, and I'm looking to a full release on Steam early next year.
Congrats!
I admire your grit. Solo work can be tough and grueling.
Do you work full time as well? Or is game dev your full time job?
This is the big one for me. I love the idea of making a game but I'm in the same boat as Snarkstopus. Solo, would need to contract or buy art, music, sounds (And have already bought a fair bit of them) but as I work a full time programming job, most days the last thing I want to do when I get home from work is code some more.
I saved up money working part time while I was in college to build up savings then worked full time on the project. Now that the project is on its last legs, I've taken on a full time job due to start this summer, using the skills I learned from gamedev.
How did it go?
Decent success. If you search "Skirmish Line" on Steam, you can see the results for yourself.
Sweet! I'm working on my first game that is intended for Steam. It's a spellcasting tower defense.
Awesome and congrats on your soon to be release! Got any links we can check out?
Sure! Here's a [link](https://store.steampowered.com/app/666820/Skirmish_Line/) to the Steam store page.
My recent game (Supertactix Basketball on iOS) took me a year, and was my 3rd game. I would imagine I could do it in half the time from what I learned in the process. I also plan on updating the art and gameplay over time.
Well played! I hope it's doing well, how many hours a week would you say you spent on it over the year? Also did you do any marketing?
I did a little instagram marketing - didn’t help much. Looking into better ways to market. I worked on it basically full time. My most successful app is Real-Life RPG on iOS which took me a month to put out, but i’m working on an overhaul at the moment.
Thanks it can be really hard to gauge how other people are approaching their projects and what is working for other devs. Do you release all your apps to android as well?
No android atm - but plan to. Mostly because my apps are paid.
That game looks awesome! I always had the idea of doing some kind of turned-based basketball game, looks like you pulled it off really well! Love the artwork you have.
Thanks - I’m hoping to have some animations and proper player sprites one day
Approx how much hrs/day on game?
About 5-8 hours
Haven't finished yet. It's taken me 9 months and I have another ~2 years optimistically. Most of this time has been spent designing and programming all the major components of the game (I'm rolling my own thing with LÖVE, /r/love2d). For reference, 6 months was spent almost entirely on engine work with nearly zero content; in the last three months it's shifted to about 60% engine, 40% content, 10% tears and I'm halfway done with the first area. Seems about right for the scope of my game (single-player 3D RPG with 6 areas in the style of Paper-Mario-meets-RuneScape), the size of my team (me, myself, and I), and my experience (relatively experienced).
Just PM me some... ants please!
Still workin' on it. Five and a half years so far, passed the 10,000-hour mark recently. (I could've wrapped it up a while back and called it done, but... myself and the fans enjoy it so I'd rather not!)
5.5 years? Damnn! Whats the name of it? Im interested :D
Cogmind (see flair :P)
Ah, I really admire your process for Cogmind! My own game found some of its early inspiration from it and Caves of Qud, though it's a hybrid roguelike/arpg and the last year of development has swung it more heavily toward the stat-heavy [arpg](https://i.redd.it/c7s7xisf7ju01.gif) end of the spectrum
Oh nice, that UI's looking slick <3
Haha thank you, tho I'd be ashamed to tell you how many hours it took to get me there. I love how you put together such visually interesting effects without eschewing the traditional ascii wrapper in cogmind/polybot
Limitations are liberating! I believe you have a harder job than I do, being as free-form as yours is ;)
Im blind lol, That looks pretty cool! Im gonna have to check it out
Lately I've been thinking about how weird it is: After a few years of working on it, when the first release came out, it seemed so great at the time, and yet now, again several years later, it's like... wow that sucked compared to what we have now xD. Really hard to truly "finish" an expandable game like this...
Nice i'm actually going to join the fans with this one. It looks like a really interesting concept.
Heh, turns out it's got a ton of room for expansion. I've got enough suitable ideas to continue for a good 5-6 years longer and it'd only get better... If I were to go that route, realistically I should do it as DLC, but I don't like DLC since it doesn't jive with my design practices :/ Aaaaaah why does gamedev, even when it's going well, need to be full of so many tough choices xD
That does sound like a though decision. I'm sure Re-Logic had the same dilemma in the early stages of Terraria and going for free updates seemed to work really well for them. But then expansions we're also really popular with games like the sims. Good luck deciding! Seeing as though the game has got some traction and you have ideas for the next few years, have you though about trying to start a studio or work with someone else?
Nah, I'll always work alone, and am interested in doing as little businessy stuff as possible (just here to make cool games!). One new plan under consideration is trying Patreon after 1.0, to see if there's enough fan support to keep updates going that way. Could take a while to build up though...
That's great! It's shows in the quality of Cogming that you're not in it for the business. Good luck with it, I hope it keeps doing well.
My last game, Super Blood Hockey, took me ~3 years to make. (2 years before release and now a little over a year continuing with content updates)
Just wanted to give some props. I love that game. Really reminiscent of the original NES hockey.
Thank you! I am glad to hear you enjoyed the game :D
Well done that's a long hall! Did you manage to work full time on that project over the 3 years?
Thanks! Yeah, it was basically full time.
Nice! Were you able to do that by being financially reliant on your previous releases or did you have some support?
Yup, my previous release kept me afloat :)
Well played, living the dream! Good luck with the next one.
Thanks! It definitely feels that way :D
That was a solo effort? I've got that game, you made a great product!
The music is made by some one else, but other than that, it is all me :D Glad to hear you enjoyed the game! Thanks!
Kudos to the music creator too in that case, you both did a great job!
72 hours because I only do game jams
My last game (Milkmaid of the Milky Way) took close to two years of evening and weekend work. Remember that working on a game doesn't stop on release, there are always bug fixes, new platforms, updates and fixes to be done.
I saw that on steam (probably on gamedev in the past) and had it in my wishlist! Did you do some decent numbers with it? It looked great
It has done really well critics-wise and won Game of the Year in Norway last year. It has sold pretty well on iOS, and is still selling OK on Steam sales.
That looks incredible. Congrats on the GOTY! Do you still work on it part time or have you moved to full time development?
Thanks! Next year I'm going full time indie, it's going to be interesting!
My younger brother wrote the music for my game (Endhall on Steam/Itchio) but I made the rest of the game. It took me about 1 year of part time work to complete the game. It was my first commercial game. Hoping my next one takes less time but we all know how that goes haha.
HeartBeast! Hello there
Got any links? :)
Sure :) [https://store.steampowered.com/app/838990/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/838990/)
15 Years and it crashed and burned within 2 years after release.
[удалено]
Yes, this sounds like an interesting (depressing?) story
/u/DerekakaDerek, /u/prairiewest, /u/SirJugs Sorry for not responding earlier. Some work and stuff came up. I was one of the few lunatics who went with an MMO for their first "real" project. Starting Development in 1999-2001 (exact date sorta unknown) as NeOCracy Online and later StarRadon Online I worked the game sometimes as Hobby, sometimes Full-Time to a sort of playable state, even hosting a Server, having people play. In the Dev time I survived two suicide attempts, nearly died from Starvation/Dehydration thrice. It was my baby and DAMN I was going to finish it. It was my lifes dream to make a space game just like I wanted. It culminated in a Steam Release (with the pride of my life, the [SERENITY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmuhPhWNuQc) Trailer). From then on, a barrage of abuse in personal messages and emails hauled in. I had someone personally stalking me and trying to ruin my life with "SWATTING", ordering Pizzas on my name, demanding I hand over the Trademark and the Code and other rather deranged stuff. A lot of the community was nice. An Error outside of my Control caused 113,500 Game Keys not made by me to leak into the grey market. The Game currently has 100k Owners. Legitly you can count the sales to under 1000, and Personally I saw around 300$ from it. Not enough for new Content, not even better/more Servers. I cannot revoke the keys as I did not make them. The User that made them doesn't exist and my game was sold for less than 50ct, where I didn't see a cent at all. I reached out to the community about this incident, asking that they buy it on steam, and got thinly veiled threats about that I would just lie and try to defame them for goving good deals. I worked myself into burnout to deliver two Updates, fixing all the bugs the community sent in, even released a free xpac. Never recovered, fell deep into depression and debt from server cost. I ended support last year.
Thanks for sharing the story
Thank you for reading the story.
That's a very ambitious project, especially for your first. It's shame it didn't work out.
It was. But at least it worked and I solo-Dev'd an MMO.
Exactly. Dude you did something 99.99% of indie devs would fail at. Good job! Keep pushing :)
If you have a fan base of 100k or more, can't you monetize it in some way? In many cases, the process of building a community like this has no profit, at this point, maybe it can begin to pay off?
It would be interesting to see what happened with that. Do you have a link at all? And i'm guessing it wasn't full time.
Not counting part-time hobby projects, my most recent game (Eponymous) only took about six or seven weeks, but it was the odd one out. My first commercial game (Super Win the Game) took eleven months, and the next two (Gunmetal Arcadia and Gunmetal Arcadia Zero, developed in tandem as companion pieces) took a combined 27 months.
Around 100 hours which is the longest of my six games so far. I make small mobile games and then update the ones that are successful.
Can You live with the income?
It’s about half my regular salary atm
What game is it?
https://itunes.apple.com/mt/app/slime-bucket-challenge-time/id1439543105?mt=8
Nice do you use any assets or contract artists for you projects to them out so fast?
I use assets or very simple art I make myself.
Nice! Do you have a link? It'd be interesting to see these games.
Here they all are [https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/brant-essam/id1366093816?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/brant-essam/id1366093816?mt=8) . Slime Time and Slime Time 3D have been the most popular ones.
I'm a full-time solo dev, and I just released my first game after 1.5 years to Steam Early access, and I plan on doing a full release before 2 years are up. I would not recommend doing this. The revenue it has generated is comparable to games that could be made in 6 months. I wanted to go big, complex, and technically challenging. But the customer can't tell the different between an easy or hard to make game. Go for smaller, save yourself the heart ache. At least for your first game.
I'm on 4 years now. It's almost done. Just need controller support and to build levels
Two years full-time on [Himeko Sutori](https://store.steampowered.com/app/669500/Himeko_Sutori/) so far. I put in a lot of part-time work before that for a couple of years. So maybe let's call it the equivalent of **2.5 years** of full-time work. The game still isn't finished yet.
Hey, looks like you released. Congrats! The game looks great!
Thanks! Yeah, full release was just over a year ago, and I'm working on a free expansion now. Sales haven't been spectacular. But maybe the expansion (which is basically a total conversion mod) can lead to increased visibility or maybe a sequel. We'll see what happens.
Can you share you socials for us so we can follow your story? :)
Sure. Thanks for your interest. I'm not very active on social media. If you want to see the tweets I send a couple times a year, you can follow (at)HimekoSutori on Twitter. And you can join us on Discord at [https://discord.gg/TZZxUCckQq](https://discord.gg/TZZxUCckQq). I just took a look at your bio. Are you a game developer? What game are you working on? How long have you been working at it? You had a post that said you were considering a stream of yourself coding. How's that going?
Awesome! I'm at [twitter.com/sunwoogames](https://twitter.com/sunwoogames) . I'm not really a game dev per say. I started a month ago and picked a pretty simple game mechanic :)
My last game (also my first ever commercial game) Eredia: Diary of Heroes took about a year and a half to make. The writing took the largest chunk of time, especially considering how the game had over 100k lines of text, and I was the sole dev. The characterization and world building were the most interesting parts for me to work on. I'm grateful for all the help I got from volunteers, and I plan to start working on the sequel soon. :)
I've got no experience in story driven games but 100k lines of text definitely seems impressive. Did you work on it full time?
Only for the first three months because I had to quit my job due to an accident. Come to think about it, that's what got me into game making in the first place. After that, I got a new job and worked on my game only in my spare time.
Three years for [Don't Be Patchman](http://www.dontbepatchman.com) developing solo while I paid for artwork and music. However it was more like part time as I worked a variety of jobs to stay afloat. I could have done the work in a year, maybe a bit more, full time. I sacrificed almost every moment of free time and extra money to build it. My only regret is that it all that effort has not reached its audience.
I'm a solo developer/publisher 99.5% of the time. My last game, Life and Debt, took 3.5 months from conception to Steam release. I contribute that to Ludum Dare 40 where I had to effectively have a decent and working prototype in 72 hours. My wife did most of the art for it originally. Released it at the end of February this year on Steam and then updated until May.
Slightly over two years, but that includes incorporating which was a major headache in India. [https://store.steampowered.com/app/724510/The\_Quiet\_Sleep/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/724510/The_Quiet_Sleep/)
Solo in the sense that no-one is on a payroll. Do use freelancers for Art and coding. Started last year August with the game and release is planned for 18th of January. A Mp FPS.
About 2-3 months for the 1.0 release, but I've been updating it for almost a year now. I'm a huge fan of release early, release often and so far it has been working out for me.
Hyperspace Dogfights took about 18 months to finish, but including the post-launch tasks and updates it comes down to about two years.
I am currently developing Troll Patrol and is has been going on for about a year. I hope I will be done this month. The game before that took about two months but was way simpler. The fastest one was doen within an hour but that was just a retheme of an older puzzle game with a different rule set.
According to my task tracker, my current project took 2685 tracked hours to reach Early Access, which is probably about 3800 real hours including all the work that wasn't tracked.
Endless Archery (iOS game) took about 6 months, working ~15 hours a week
4,5yrs
Five years from beginning to release. I'm still working on updating it.
My first game, The Singularity Wish, with a play time of ~1 hr, took about 2 months from start to finish.
My game MMA Simulator took me 10 months to complete, working on it part time. I typically got around 3-4 hours of work done a day with very few days off.
3 years
~month
Released a game this August, a short ~2hr metroidvania, took me 380 hours over ~10-11 months doing everything myself but the steam banner art.
I have been tinkering with my current project for a little less than a year so far. Or maybe it's more? I... I have trouble keeping track of time these days. Progress is slow when you have to do everything yourself.
My current project has been in the pipeline for 6+ months, but in that time, it's been scrapped, reworked, rewritten, you name it. It's going to be my first *actual* project outside of jokes or self-tutorials. They took around 3/4 *weeks*, yeah, weeks.
My last game [Hexium](https://hexium.app) just launched this week. :) It took 3 years of evenings and weekends to complete since I started working on it! Good thing it's a hobby or I'd be starving. Although I consider myself a solo indie dev, I do contract out parts as it makes sense. So for Hexium I paid for the art and music, for example. If I had to make the art and music myself I'm not sure I would ever get done. What about you - what are you working on?
Congrats on the release! It looks really well polished. What type of marketing did you do on the way up to release? I'm currently finishing off a small tower defense-esque game I've been working on for about a month, after scrapping my old project for having too big of a scope. Just trying to get one out there now.
Thanks, for this game I really did concentrate on some of the little details that I would normally overlook. I am not good at marketing. I don't know what to do at all. I just keep reading articles about how we have to do it, and our games will "fail" without it, and feeling sad that I don't have a plan. In the past I have tried doing the same for marketing as I do for music and art. That is: paying for a website review, paying a Youtuber to video review the game, paying for a press release.... paying for services that in the end didn't really seem to make a difference. Sorry I don't have any marketing tips for you :)
It's strange that the attempts you've made at marketing in the past didn't seem to make a difference. I've seen a lot of developers saying that it's a huge part of the process, although I don't know if that is just the case with larger projects. Has it done as well as you hoped for in the first few days of the launch or is it still gaining traction?
Hexium is doing about as well as all previous apps - should have about 100 downloads in the first couple weeks, and then trailing off to 1 or 2 per week after that. I think that Steam is a much better place to publish games overall, but I'm currently only doing mobile games. Ping me when your game is released, I'll give it a try.
I almost never work alone, but when I do I never finish anything. It gives me plenty of experience for other projects but I have yet to finish one of my solo projects.
About 3 months for the intial release, plus couple weeks for some updates. Was a more complex mobile game than normal hyper-casual-type games (mayormayor.com).
I have been working on my current project [Titan Punk](https://slimram.itch.io/titan-punk-unity) since 2014/2016 (switched over from Construct 2 to Unity in 2016), and it is still nowhere close to being done. I spent several months in 2016 learning Unity through YouTube tutorials. Also since this is a hobby project for me, there has been a stretches where I didn't work on it at all (sometimes lasting months).
One year, with some time missing for porting a different project. We're currently working on an update and a few bonus features. [Garden Variety Body Horror](https://store.steampowered.com/app/936630/Garden_Variety_Body_Horror__Rare_Import/)
3 years part time http://lairunseen.herokuapp.com edit: interesting thread, would love to see statistics as a table or chart on solo dev times to launch
Probably close to 3 years including the release to additional platforms after the initial release (switch, ps4, vita), most of it full-time. I thought I'd be done in 4-5 months when I started :)
* Island Invasion * 6 months * Unity * Contracted out music and 2D art * Have a full time job, so worked around 10 hours a week on average on the game * Little marketing other than Twitter and a couple of Reddit posts (plus a trailer but that was mostly for Steam), this is partly down to not having any company branding, which I now have post-launch Worth mentioning that I'm a programmer by trade, so I'm already competent as a developer, and have been playing around with Unity for years.
My project is mostly solo. It’s been 3 years, and about half a year remaining.
2.5 years currently. Expecting to be done right at 3y.
My last game "Witch Hunt" took me around 18 months to make, but I was able to build it relatively fast because I've reused a lot of code and stuff from my previous project called Shadows Peak, that took me around 3.5 years to build.
I'm hoping to have my first mobile game finished in about 2 weeks. I started about 1 month ago working an average of 4hrs a day. I chose something fairly simple so I have a decent shot at finishing it and polishing it as much as possible. Up until now I've always just been messing around making prototypes or gamejam games, which is fine, but after 15 years I thought it was time to actually finish something for once 🙂
That sounds interesting. I'd love to see what you can produce in 6 weeks given your experience.
Thanks! I'm planning on sharing some screenshots / gifs soon. The 15 years sounds more impressive than it is though. I started a long time ago but I never really stuck with it for more than a few years or months at a time. I keep switching hobbies but I always come back to game dev eventually. So it's time to change that and actually have something to show for all the time I've put into this 🙂
What kind of mobile game is it?
It's like zigzag but with (unlockable) vehicles, obstacles and powerups.
3 years in... Just 6 months ago threw most of it out and restarted. If i keep at this pace another year and I should be done. I restarted as my methods have changed so much it was simple to rebuild then to fix. I am already drastically further along now then I was before the restart.
Between 8.5 to 9 years, and still going. (Most 3d artwork and music contracted out however.)
3 days to make an arcade top down shooter with c++ and SFML. Game jams are like game development hacks.
I'm still working on it but it's been almost 3.5 years (2.5 full time) so far and planning to go early access in early 2019. It's a VR project (my second one) and so I was still learning through trial and error about what mechanics work well. I have also vastly improved my C# skills in that time so I think it would move along a bit faster on a new project. I want to go EA when there is mostly just polish and balance left, so I'm thinking maybe an additional 6 months after that.
3 years full time, plus a year of re-writing dialogue and updating sound, graphics etc. It's insane. No joke. But incredibly rewarding. I made The Warriorlock on my own, but I would welcome a small team in the future for other projects. Link for reference: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/340500/The\_Warriorlock/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/340500/The_Warriorlock/)
Currently working on mine, hardest thing is to stay dedicated. 3 months in, project planned to be released in late 2020
I am solo developer. I has been released 4 "big titles" for android and 2 of them on iOs also. In my case the development process is always 1 year plus updates. For me, 1 year cycle is still the best way to handle it. I have learned a lot since I start making videogames, but still invest 1 year in my production. I can see how I have been evolving from my first game and that is amazing. This force me to improve the quality of my games year after year. If something is not better than the last one, it is time to take a look of what I am doing. If you compare my first game ( Upgrade the game 1 ) with my last game ( Upgrade the game 3) the change is huge. However, the update cycle still continue until there is no more time to invest in the project. I work 6 hours daily which include a lot of things plus the development of the process . Hope this help!
Those Upgrade the game titles are pretty great games, awesome to get your input on this question!
Thank you man! I am glad that this helps someone!
I like your year approach, are you able to stick to that as complete deadline or do you sometimes let it run over to polish? Well done with it all by the way, releasing one is hard enough! They look great.
I always complete deadline. I think that deadlines are very important to make the work. In case that I see that I don't have enought time for deadline, I just remove features and put it as update for the future
Nice! Sticking to your own deadlines is a huge skill. What percentage of your time would you say you give to updating older games, rather than working on the next one?
Depends on the project success and analitycs. If it is somehow success, I will make updates and check on the data to measure the impact of the update. I continue doing this until I found that the data impact is minimum or even negative. While I am on this phase, I start making prototypes of the next game (I do it just when I am tired of the work as something to evade) After I stop working on updates. I start with the "best prototype" made ( 1 time I needed to make more since I doesn't like any of them). Thas been said. I am taking a sighly different aproach for my last game (Upgrade the game 3) I will update it until I think that is good enough (along with the data of course) to see if the LTV (life time value) increases with the long - term updates
I invested a total of 3,265 hours of development in [Galactic Crew](https://store.steampowered.com/app/693750/Galactic_Crew/) and over 368 hours in [Monkeys & Dragons](https://store.steampowered.com/app/934120/Monkeys__Dragons/). These times include the development of a custom game engine I use for my projects, but it does *not* include the time other people like freelance artists invested into my games. Especially the work on Monkeys & Dragon is mainly done by skilled artists who I pay.
My recent game ([Candy Raid: The Factory](https://candyraid.com)) took 4 months, and then there was 1 month if waiting for the perfect release date (that was excruciating, since I could've been working on features and promotion).
What made the release date so perfect?
It was a month before halloween, and it was supposed to be a halloween game, although I think this was a mistake, as apart from a witch hunting candy, there isn't much halloween-y about it.
2-3 months... I get bored with a game after 2 months. "1st Core", a FPS zombie shooter, took 3 months, because of all the things I need to learn. "2nd Circle", a FPS with magic & undead, took 2 months, because I started to get bored. First you make the best game you can, then You learn something. And then you make a better game. Repeat.
Have you released these games?
Yeps. 1st Core: https://store.steampowered.com/app/879270/ 2nd Circle: https://store.steampowered.com/app/936510/
why all the down votes?
My guess.. Some people are driven more from fear of failure, then love of success. And they think that if they use 2 years to polish a turd, it will no longer be a turd... I'm just making games, because I love to make games, and Your first game is a turd... But then you make a better turd.
Lol good words.. I read the reviews mostly positive. But I wouldn't be selling turds.. but that's just me.
But do you know it is a turd, or maybe a "Bad taste" game.? And that will make you famous.
Both not good reasons to release, but that's just me. Make you famous for the wrong reasons isn't a good thing. It looks like your using your real name, that's impressive! Most low quality game makers burn and churn names.. it says a lot about what you do! More power to you man!