So as you may or may not know, I’ve recently completed an Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development. Or, I should say, I’ve completed another Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development. Each costing approximately 40k of VET-FEE-HELP (aka student loans).

Why would I do the same course twice you might ask? Well I didn’t, not really. They just have the same title. The actual content was completely different between the two and after completing the first one I then tried to use it to get a job. With that being seemingly impossible in my area, I tried to just set myself up as an indie creator. I found that with just an art based skillset I couldn’t even manage that. So upskilling, I decided, was the next step on my path to game dev glory.

The Why

The first Adv. Dip. that I completed was art focused. I learned how to create awesome game art assets which was super fun. The course was mostly focused on creating 3D models and then doing all kinds of things with said 3D models, like texturing, animation, lighting and other arty type things. I even worked on the art team for two fairly large projects during the course of the Diploma. It was awesome, I love doing game art. And afterwards I had a ton of hope that I would be able to take my new skills and apply them usefully in some way toward achieving my dream of making games.

But it didn’t work out that way. And not for a lack of trying. Unfortunately it seems, there is a distinct lack of industry work in Canberra. This, coupled with a number of failed attempts at getting other graduates together to try to make games independently, ended up souring my taste for doing game art pretty thoroughly. One of my attempts at getting an indie team together even went as far as raising $50k in seed funding and renting a commercial property for around a year. But trying to identify what, if anything I got out of that experience has been difficult. (For the record I don’t recommend going that route until you have already established some kind of market presence. We jumped in way too early.)

And so after a fairly depressing couple of post-grad years I decided that I was sick of working as hard as I could to produce great games and letting these sorts of problems bring me down. So I made the (possibly insane) decision that I would upskill myself so that I could handle all the coding duties for my next project in addition to doing the art. I had a couple of friends and acquaintances from my time doing the art course that had also made the choice to go back and learn to code, with widely varying results. I could see that, at least for some artists, learning to code could be a real struggle. But I was confident that for me at least it shouldn’t be any kind of crazy horrible thing. To begin with I had only made the decision to enter the art stream over the code stream due to my previous experience and qualifications with traditional art. But really I could have just as easily gone with code way back then, at least it seemed that way in my mind, since I had a fairly similar background in programming type fields.

How Crazy Was I?

As it turns out, despite having some fairly decent sized fears that I might be making a stupid mistake, going back to learn how to code games was an awesome choice. At least that is how I feel about it at the moment, having just passed the course this week. We will see if I eventually swing back the other way and decide that it was, in fact, a waste of time and/or money, but for the moment I am really happy with the outcome. For one thing, I feel like coding is a much more natural practice for me. Visual art always feels like a huge struggle in contrast, like if I get anything that looks even vaguely decent I am super happy about it. Doing 3D modelling definitely feels more natural than drawing for me personally, but having now gone wholly in the other direction I can confidently say that coding feels even more natural.

Partly I think that is due to the fact that it is a lot more like writing than art is, and writing has always been my goto creative outlet and my secret passion. It’s also because I am a very detail oriented person and a logical thinker. And I think even more so it’s because programming very neatly combines my love of creative pursuits with my love of analytical pursuits. For me, coding games is some kind of perfect venn diagram of my interests and I can’t seem to get enough of it.

But that still leaves the idea of developing video games all by myself and how exactly I am going to figure that all out. Some games are made by teams of hundreds of experienced and talented individuals over the course of many years. So how they hell is one person who has no real industry experience supposed to be able to make one? It’s a very good question indeed. And I have no great answer for it other than the fact that game development is easier now than it ever has been. The quality of available middleware is astounding, especially given the price, which is often either nothing at all, or a small monthly subscription.

The proof however is available here. Now I agree, that project still needs some work. (Work that I probably won’t do, I have to concede to all the feedback I’ve received and say that the game is too niche and it’s too unlikely anyone would pay anything for it. Though if you are interested in seeing it updated let me know.) But at the end of the day, it is still a fully functioning game, it runs well, it runs on multiple platforms, it has some basic audio (which I would expand if I were going to keep working on it) and it has some basic art and some decently performant code.

All of which was made by me. My schedule was all kinds of crazy over the last six months so it’s hard for me to estimate the exact number of hours it took me to take that random sort-objects-for-some-reason idea and turn it into a working game, but I would say it was no more than about 10 days of work at about 8 hours per day. So 80 hours and I can go from vague idea to working game by myself. No relying on anyone else, so no way to be let down. No way that I can make lots of awesome art and game designs and then get left out in the cold with no way to turn them into real things. No way I can code a lot of awesome systems that will always look like garbage to due to ‘programmer art’. If that all sounds a little defensive that would be because it is. I’ve been burned a few times and have grown tired of it. But I hold no grudges, life is life and we all gotta do what we all gotta do.

A Quickie Post Mortem

I did do a full post mortem of the above game project as part of my school assignment. But the teacher feedback I got for that was pretty accurate, in that I focused more on external factors and less on internal ones. In particular I ignored anything specific to the code and data structures of the project itself. I’m honestly not sure how to dissect my code like that. I mean, it all worked. It performed well on three different platforms. I guess I could say now that the loading time on the WebGL version of the game is slower than I would like but that was only implemented for my portfolio assignment and so I didn’t know that when I did the original post mortem. But honestly overall I would say I am pretty stoked by the whole thing.

That said I think I could stand to do some deeper critical reflection on myself and in particular the effectiveness I can achieve as a solo developer. So here goes:

How good of a coder am I really? Well, not the best in the world or anywhere even close. But can I take a game idea from zero to one hundred by myself using middleware like the Unity engine? Yeah I can. Which is really all I got into this for, to be able to see my ideas all the way through from concept to reality. The code I write doesn’t have to be the most performant in the world. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to work well enough to achieve whatever I am looking to achieve with the game idea I am working on. And managing scope is a huge issue for any small team let alone a solo developer, so said ideas are never going to be too hugely complicated or require anything that will take large amounts of time to develop. So yeah I think I’m good enough for those purposes. In fact I am enjoying coding so much that I have started looking for more generic coding work, since there isn’t much of a games industry in Canberra.

Since the assignment was for a programming course, that is what I focused on during this project. As a result the art didn’t get enough attention, nor did the SFX or other audio elements. But art is totally in my wheelhouse so that just came down to a matter of focus. And audio is more about searching endless garbage free audio samples to pick out the few good ones, or spending a few bucks on a decent pack of audio assets (although, crazy person that I am, I am starting to learn music expressly for the purpose of producing my own programmatically layered music tracks for games).

Solo or Small Team?

The real choice for me comes down to this; do I want to be a solo developer or do I want to try again to put together a small development team? This is a hard question to answer. I wouldn’t say that I am totally, irrevocably burned out on the team thing. But I’m not the biggest fan given my past experiences with it. As for the solo thing, well it’s struggle, that’s for sure. I mean, I love being in control of everything, getting to make sure everything is up to my high standards, seeing things slowly come together and knowing that it is all my own hard work paying off is very satisfying. But truth be told I am not some super-motivated entrepreneur type. I like making cool things. But the idea of marketing, business tax, generating industry contacts and all that other ‘businessy’ type stuff bores the hell out of me.

That said I can’t see how bringing on a partner who just handles the business side of things would work for me at all. That is just way too much trust to put in someone when most of the problems with small teams end up coming down to the trust factor anyway. So for now at least, solo it is.

Wow this post managed to be less than 5000 words! Hooray! That means there is a small chance someone might actually read it! If you did actually read this and you found it interesting, keep an eye out for a new post coming soon in the future that will give a short overview of what my new game idea is and why I think it actually has some potential to be something that people would actually pay money for.