I've realized I want to play video games, not make them.

The first half of this article is my personal journey. If you’re not interested, you can skip to Why making video games as a solo developer is an impossible journey

Video games have a very special place in my personal relationship with computers.

Playing the game -> playing with the game

Like many people my age, I started getting interested in computers because of video games. That’s not particularly surprising. What was unusual for me was that my interest in coding also came from games.

During times when we had no internet at home or it was very limited, I would play the same games for hours on end. This naturally led me to learn these games inside and out. Having grown quite bored of playing GTA Vice City, I started installing strange mods. (From an internet cafe.) One of these mods changed the character’s face and clothes to a different model. While poking around the mod files, I suddenly saw this new face and clothes as a .jpg file. It was in a distorted format, but it was definitely that face and those clothes. At that moment, a light bulb went off in my head. If I edited this file in Paint, would it change in the game too? Surprisingly, it actually did. I replaced that face with a photo of my own face, and suddenly I was in the game, albeit in low resolution and a bit too angular.

This incredible discovery led me to wonder what else I could change. To be honest, editing many things wasn’t as easy. I could only change some text. However, this instantly transformed the game from a consumer product into a sandbox for me.

Dreams, dreams…

For all my childhood, I was always immensely interested in computers, and literally everything that can be done with computers, but after the incident above, video games held a special place in my heart.

The idea of making my own video game was crazy. It felt almost like creating your own universe, and since I was not aware of the limitations whatsoever, the limit was, in fact, my imagination.

My ultimate game idea: A life clone! A game where one experiences a whole lifetime with all details! Going to school, starting a business, getting married, becoming president, becoming a rockstar, whatever you can imagine.

My reasoning was simple: we get to experience only one lifetime. But we can enjoy unlimited lifetimes with this game. Well, my idea is up for grabs if you’re up to the challenge.

Rest of the story

For most of the following years, I had dreamt of making a video game, but it never actually went beyond just a dream. I don’t know why, even though I was quite tech-savvy and somewhat experienced in coding for my age, I just never actually followed a course or something to learn making video games. Back then, I was mostly a learn-by-doing kid rather than a study-to-learn kid, and the barriers to enter video game development were just too high to overcome without proper studying.

I was so against the idea of “studying” for fun, I even once decided to make a Lord of the Rings themed card game and started work on the card designs in Photoshop even though I had no idea how to code it. My plan was that I would figure it out once I had the cards and the game design ready. I even showed (off) my cards to my friends and told them that I was working on a Lord of the Rings card game. When reality hit - the fact that I had no idea how to make it an actual game - I just dropped it because of “licensing issues.” LOL

Hope emerges

During my university years, I had the opportunity to attend a 3-day Unity workshop. For the first time, I was actually forced to learn real game development. Oh my. It was easy! Way easier than it was back in the day when I was trying to code with vanilla C# or Java. I was introduced to the concept of game engines for the first time, and it just suddenly clicked. It actually was possible to make a game.

“Real” Projects

Now that I had access to Unity, a huge barrier was removed. But before too long, I realized that did not really matter.

Aside from the learning projects, I’ve attempted to make quite a few games in my life. For the last 10 years or so, with ups and downs, my main focus has been making video games. I’ve started countless projects, most of which died in the prototype stage. Except for one mobile game (which was not successful), I did not manage to publish any projects.

Why making video games as a solo developer is an impossible journey

Well, okay, it’s not really impossible. Apparently, lots of talented people actually achieve making video games by themselves such as Undertale, Stardew Valley etc. But I’ve now come to accept that it is impossible for me.

Why?

It’s multi-disciplinary

Probably the most multi-disciplinary type of project you’ll ever work on. It’s not just coding, and graphics and music. (which is already too much for a single person, by the way.) It’s also UI/UX, it’s also marketing, analytics, art, writing, community management, publishing, potentially funding, etc. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be good at all of these.

“Testing” takes a looong time

I believe most of the creativity comes from iteration. However, there’s no easy way to see if a game idea has product/market fit. So, iterating takes a long time. Even just making a prototype takes a significant amount of time, and even when you have a running prototype, it’s a challenge to find test players. Let’s say you actually develop the game, and it fails; well, you have just lost 1-2 years of time. Yes, you can consider it a learning, but it’s a costly learning.

Marketing is more important than development

I have come to believe that the biggest challenge in the 2020s is reaching an audience. While it seems like we’re in the golden age of online interactivity, that also means that everyone has too many options to choose from. Back in the day, I remember searching for interesting websites to visit, good forums to hang out, or fun games to play. Today, no consumer is actively looking for something to consume.

So, you need to find them. And this is hard. If you don’t already have an organic community, you either need to spend a lot of time, or money on marketing.

It requires artistic vision - no, I don’t mean assets.

I don’t know if you consider video games as art or not, but at least we can agree that they are more art than, say, a SaaS. So, regardless of how talented you are technically, there’s still an indisputable aspect of artistic expression in video games. You can be a 100x engineer, learn how to make the most sophisticated 3D models and music, and still end up making a subpar game if you can’t manage to combine all these skills in a meaningful way. And that requires a certain artistic vision.

Even if video games are art, they are also commercial products

You can’t approach video games from purely artistic perspective, either. If you want to make a successful game, or let’s say, if you want to make a game that some people play, you should also consider what people want. If you’re not a 100% hobbyist, you need to be a bit of a businessman as well. So, on top of everything, this adds another layer of limitations.

Game Design is more intuition than hard skill

Yes, you can read game design books and watch game design videos on YouTube all day, and this will probably make you a better game designer. However, most of the famous game designers have actually made their games without studying game design. I believe game design is not necessarily a hard skill to learn like coding or 3D modeling, but it’s more of an intuition that one develops over their lifetime through all the games they’ve played and all their life experiences.

Do I have it? Maybe, to a degree, but I’m not overflowing with crazy game ideas, and I definitely don’t enjoy thinking about game design.

Conclusion

So, in light of all this, I’ve come to the realization that I actually don’t want to make games. (At least, not video games. Puzzles, mini-games, etc., are still on the table.) What I want is to play video games. I wanted to make video games only because I wanted to play those games and they just did not exist! To this day, this is still mainly what drives me. I want to make games that I want to play, but it’s impossible for me to make them as I want them to be. So, I need to make compromises. But why? Isn’t that against the whole idea of what made me interested in making video games in the first place?

If I want to make video games that I want to play, and if it’s practically not possible to make them, that doesn’t mean I should reduce the scope. It means I should not make video games.