Climbing an impossible mountain: the struggles of making a game alone

Making videogames is hard. Making a game by yourself is even harder.

But when most people hear this, they think hard means technically difficult, artistically challenging, hard to stand out etc. All of that is true, but one of the hardest things that people don’t really consider is the loneliness and emotional strain of surviving this journey by yourself.

This article is for developers that are considering embarking on their own solo journey and also for those that are in the thick of it and struggling to ship their first solo project.
 

Taking the Leap by yourself

Have you ever stood at the edge of a steep drop and hesitated about jumping into the water below? Notice how in this situation, people almost always decide to jump in together? One of the hardest things about making a game alone is taking that initial leap by yourself.
 

Holding hands is to avoid the smart arse who pretends to jump then chickens out at the last moment 

It took a long long time for me to decide to start my own project. I had a lot of doubts. Most of my career was spent as a designer so the biggest worry was all the other disciplines I’d have to take on. Could I handle the programming? Could I make good looking art? Could I build something in time?

One article that helped push me over the edge was Fake Grimlock Win Like Stupid.

The following image from that article sums it up pretty well:
 

Venn diagram of how to win in life. The full article is well worth a read.

Basically to have the courage to take the first step you have act stupid, in the sense that you have to not let your brain think of all the reasons your idea won't work and instead just go for it.

When I finally took the decision to quit my job in San Francisco and move back to Europe to start on my own game, my initial plan was quite simple. Make a small mobile game within 3-6 months, make a lot of mistakes, learn from them and give it another go. The idea being that the second time round I’d be faster and better and have a much greater chance at success.

Sounds great in theory right? In practice I’ve spent so long on my first game Hang Line that I haven’t even executed on this plan! But more on that later.

So once you’ve finally taken the leap, the next challenge is deciding on a concept. The awesome thing is that you can literally choose anything because the only person who needs to input into this decision is you. Unfortunately this makes it an absolutely terrifying choice! This brings us neatly to the next challenge in making a game alone.
 

Choice Paralysis

Most days during development I feel like Homer

When you’re working in a team, you rarely make a decision entirely by yourself, especially as a designer. Almost everyone in the team generally has an opinion and if you have a senior position, your job is usually to take those opinions and find a great compromise. As a lead, you’re generally steering your own decisions based upon trusted feedback from your peers.

When you’re by yourself, you don’t have team members to ask for feedback or point out what you’re doing wrong... You have no one. The responsibility is now entirely on you.

This can make it extremely hard to make decisions, and arguably the most important of all is WHAT GAME SHOULD I EVEN MAKE?! Faced with infinite possibilities can be utterly paralyzing.
 

I thought I should include at least one graph in this article to make it look like I know what I'm talking about

One thing I did very early on to help with this was set up a kind of support group. Basically a Slack channel with a few friends that were also doing or had done their own indie projects. We post questions/articles/feedback etc and have a chat on Google hangout once a week. This support group was instrumental in helping me narrow down on a concept, so I didn’t have to entirely trust my own instincts.

One thing I should mention - for the sake of your sanity, please please please pick a concept that you’re truly passionate about! Sure you probably want to make sure it’s financially viable in the market, and it’s something technically achievable etc, but making is a game is friggin crazy hard! Later down the line you’re going to be tired, bored and seriously lacking in motivation. Being energized by working on the coolest thing you can possibly think of is really going to help keep you focussed.

I’d always been interested in climbing and I had an interesting idea for a grappling hook control system, so I started prototyping a game about extreme mountain climbing.
 

It may look basic but you have to start somewhere!

A month or so in, one of the first things I learnt was working by yourself without a team is super lonely.
 

Loneliness

Solo game dev can be as lonely as this, but without the awesome views.

There’s several aspects that impact how alone you feel when working on a project:

Simply not having other team members means there is zero camaraderie or motivation that you would normally get from being invested in a project with others.

If you’re working from home then you are generally going to be alone during the day. When I decided to start my project I actually moved to a new city, mostly to save money. This meant it took time to build up a social life, so there were times where I was literally at home by myself the entire day, sometimes several days in a row! I was going a little crazy. To help with this I made sure to plan my week so that I would get out the house to meet up with other people at least once every day.

I also started to going to a co-working meetup. This is where you sit and work in a room full of random people. I didn’t want to spend the money on renting a full co-working space, but I found a bunch of co-working groups on meetup.com that were free and simply use cafes to work from.
 

I go to this place once a week just to stop myself going insane

Weirdly enough, you also have a greater sense of motivation to get on with work when there’s people around you, even if they have absolutely zero investment in what you’re doing! And as far as motivation goes, you’re going to need all you can get.
 

Lack of Motivation

Not working in a team has a huge impact on motivation. And when you’re working by yourself, there is no one there to tell you off for watching cat videos on youtube. Something I found extremely helpful was using a website called Toggl. This was recommended to me by Ryan Darcey, who also has an awesome blog explaining Toggl and more here: Making Moves.

Toggl - officially the best way to guilt yourself into working more hours

Toggl in its simplest form is a timer that you switch on when you start working and you turn off when you stop, then you write a description of what you did. This creates a sense of needing to keep focused on work whilst the timer is running.

Aside from distractions and moment to moment motivation, there is also your overall satisfaction of working on a project. When making a game, some of the tasks will be fun and creative, others will be boring and crappy. It doesn’t matter – if you’re by yourself you’re doing them ALL. You will experience periods of low motivation and you won’t have a team to pick you up again.

A few months in when my motivation was dropping a bit, something I found super helpful in giving me a boost was getting the game in front of people. Clearly this is super helpful just to get fresh eyes feedback, but it’s also incredibly motivating to watch someone actually enjoying something you made.
 

Even my Dad has played Hang Line and he's 84!!!

I should note that at this point the game looked like this:
 

Swing about, avoid the red things or you die. That was all I had at this point.
 

I.e. complete ass. That doesn’t matter. Don’t be shy. If there’s something to play, let people play it. People won’t have the same perspective as you. Believe it or not, at this stage there were people who played it that asked me where they could download the game – at this point it only had a friggin cube as the player character!!

I also joined an indie developer group in my local area so I could watch other people play aside from friends and family, which is helpful for getting some less biased feedback.

At this point my motivation was pretty good, but I was starting to worry about money a lot...
 

Anxiety

When you working for a company, your project is likely to have a deadline. But if the team misses that deadline, usually you still get a paycheck and things continue. When you’re working on a game by yourself, the saving pot you put aside for your living expenses is basically your deadline. Once it’s dried up, that’s it. This means time and money are constantly on your mind even outside of work.

Decisions like should you go on a trip with your friends? Should you buy a new tv? Should you get a beer instead of a fancy cocktail? Depending on what type of a person you are, it can get very micro very quickly. I found myself stressing about a lot of little decisions simply because I wasn’t used to surviving off my savings.
 

Worry about money too much and you really will be eating instant noodles every day

The best cure for this I found was to do a little bit of planning and assign a reasonable weekly budget to myself based on the overall savings I’d put aside for the project and how long I wanted to spend on it. That way the money is kind of ‘already spent’ so it sort of forces you to not stress so much about small spending decisions. Also, I’m sure you’ve heard this a thousand times but I’m reiterating it because it’s so important – don’t budget for the project, budget for 2X the project. I budgeted for making 2 games and just a single game occupied all my time.

After I’d done some budgeting and planning, I started to crack on with the project with a decent amount of progress. Pretty soon I had the core gameplay feeling pretty good and I was starting to move away from prototyping into production.