Lessons learned after 10000+ hours working on a single game

Thanks for the advice time for me to make a GTA type game.

It really takes a lot of willpower to develop a game for 15 years. Congratulations. Were you able to publish the game? and you went to ukraine? to fight?

10,000 hours? My only question is how did you manage to stick with it for so long?

Don't do it.

That's like the n°1 advice people give to new devs. People probably told you at some point too. You did it anyway. People will keep doing it

That's still valuable experience to share though, thanks

Crazy. Now I wanna see it and hear more

I think the real lesson here, as is often the case, is to plan the project according to your means.

A solo artist shouldn't attempt a crunchy systems-heavy game, unless they can find every module they'll need on the market (Meaning they'll need to implement everything before they start adding content). A solo programmer should be looking ahead for what assets they're going to need, and what's within their means to find/make/buy. All dev should be aware that game systems actually need designing - beyond merely implementing them and calling it a day. Custom engines probably require a math or CS degree, medium or bigger projects should only be attempted with project management skills/experience, and big projects simply require a team.

Catch-all "Don't try this" advice is rarely truly universal, because different people are capable of different things. Everybody is an exception to some of the "rules"

Always keep it simple is my number one rule now.

I always keep shit as simple as possible now, no abstractions, nothing. As I'm programming simple shit, SOMETIMES an abstraction or pattern or something becomes obvious, only then do I start being a bit of a smart arse - and even then, its very cautiously.

I like posts like these. Think you for sharing.

I'm about to release a game that I've worked on for 8 years but the final form of the game is effectively 2 years old, because we rebooted it and it was the best decision.

What I've learned is to have a clear, simple vision, and to not overthink too much, but on the gameplay and technical side. Will it be perfect if you spend 20x more time ? No, and you'd have wasted time in the process. Make cool, simple things and move forward. Don't bite more than you can chew, and don't try to predict the future too much. It's better to make an okay thing now than try to reach perfection: spoiler, you can't.

My first game will be an onion. Its a tap and peel game. Every tap the onion is peeled, but it's on going and never stops.

Hmm, that is why I always tell people here not to create their own engine. Because engines like unreal and unity were made by big teams(hundreds of people) who are very talented professionals and have decades of experience. That is why I always pick the shortcut, because working solo means you must always rely on others work and build upon them in order to create something that people in the current market will find appealing.

Can you explain what you mean by the treat everything as equal rule? I'm not sure I get what you mean.

Btw the contraction for "could have" sounds like "could of" but it's actually spelled "could've".

I'm rolling out my own engine in C++ right now and I'm not having issues. I'm actually having quite a lot of fun and learning a lot along the way. While pre-made engines are great, I still think there's a lot to be gained from a programming perspective from rolling out your own if you are focused on the process, the learning and not necessarily the end result, much like with art. I'd rather do 15 small prototypes than work on one single project.

Still, great dedication on your part and best of luck with your game!

Also don't ignore advice people have been giving you for the past 15 years that making a big game with no experience is a bad idea!

Great advice I just was able to get out of 4 years of useless work in unity with therapy because I always got stuck on something and it really affected my mental health like my last one was getting a free model and spending 6 months trying to understand blender and bones to control it/have it walk in unity and I had 30 other models to do the same process for and it broke me. I actually cried in front of my computer and it affected my job.

Now I just do mostly canvas based small games or CEF displayers that are clone of mobile games for my personal use to avoid the impulse to pay for microtransactions since most mobile games are copy of each other (like a lot of strategy pvp city-builder games are retextured clash of clans cash grab) and a lot of mobile games are also dumb json terminal that just display things where all mechanics happens on a server and the client download assetbundles on the fly. Instead of framing it as my failure to be smart enough to figure out unity and blender and being a failure for not finishing a game I see it as saving money now.

TLDR: My on-topic advice is please please please don't make an open-world survival mmorpg as your first game. Do something much more simply possibly a clone of a simple mobile game you keep playing whenever you are on the bus/have to waste time but your version won't have microtransactions or ads or popup flash sale from the shop so you can build your unity knowledge on successes from many simple games.

“Don't do it. I'm actually not joking, If I had a time machine to 15 years ago, sigh”

Don’t do it like YOU did. 

Most of the pain you got was self inflicted. Eric Barone took a third of what you spent, making everything from scratch and released a successful game.

Hey quick info: It's "could have", not "could of"

I've always wanted to make my own online RPG but thankfully I didn't even tried. I knew it would be impossible to make it on my own and instead just took the ideas I had (mostly skills and combat) and translated into a card game. Way more achievable and actually got it funded in Kickstarter. Prototyping a game and actually making it into a final product are two completely different things, and I see many putting so much effort I to trying new ideas and pile on more and more systems that will make it polishing into a finished product way more challenging than expected. KISS is fundamental, especially for a first project. Find your core gameplay loop and focus on that

On the first year of my gamedev journey as a hobbyist I already new that, just from my observation from other hobbyist, the reason I never published a game yet, but I joined a couples of Gamedev jam and gamedev competitions.

Why waste my time creating a game that I think it wont sell :) until such time I came up with good game idea that I think will sell, Ill do it.

ATM Im on creating my own engine, coz I love software development and graphic tech, I like it bcoz it makes my brain ticks at 60fps :) but my day job is still in software application but non gamedev related.

Cheers and stay strong over there.

Number 3 really got me. My game had a first person element and some flying drone gameplay. I got feedback that the first person part wasn't all that great, so I nixed it and took a gamble and made the entire game a flying drone type game. Probably should have done the opposite and made the first person part work.

Well I have way more than 10k hours on videogames in 15 years, at least you got something to be proud of. But regrets are useless really, we just pave our paths the way we see fit, there is no right or wrong, and we will all share the same disappearance into the void at the end of the road anyways.

ironically, my life is so garbage, that even with a time machine, anything else I would choose by mere statistics will either be the same level of pain, or even worse 💀💀💀

I feel you. Worked on a project for like 6-7 years, 4 of which were basically working on it every day for at least a few hours. Easily burned ~5K hours on it.

I have nothing to show for it... except: Knowledge.

I know how to plan systems better, how to avoid scope creep, how to troubleshoot bugs, how to actually document the things needed to be done and what's been completed. I spent those years learning how to make a game, rather than actually making a game.

Working on a new project now after getting the hang of Unity and I have about 50% of the progress of the last game when I quit the project and it's been done in maybe a month. Everything just flows now.

I don't get stuck on systems. I don't get to a point where I'm lost at what to work on next. I just open the planning doc, find the item at the top of the list and just go.

It's really amazing, I'm actually insanely confident about finishing the project because compared to the last one it's been an absolute breeze and literally every feature I've planned is getting implemented lightning quick.

My #1 concern at this point is marketing but I'm going to do what successful Kickstarter campaigns seem to do and actually just make damn near the entire game before even considering putting the word out there because the only thing worse than a failed project is a failed project that everyone knows about and is disappointed in.

Thank you for the help in Ukraine.

I have to say don’t give up on your 10k hour baby. You should improve your copy on the Steam page and take your KISS principle but on to your marketing. The game looks good but just sketchy if that makes sense. That and Steam sales once it’s improved.

Wow someone nearly as old as me doing this. I predate your time starting when IBM 360, UNIVAC 9200, and Spectra 70 were all valid computers, so I guess I'm about 50 years into programming. My son got the idea in HS for a fairly cool game. I was just getting ready to retire early from my first career and wanted something more fun than what I'd been doing, but I love coding.

We started with Irrlicht/Bullet physics and after a year had semi-functional mechanics and hideous graphics. We punted and started over with Unity 4, got further, it looked nicer and Unity was downright fun (so vastly easier than UE). Unfortunately, since we had space levels, Unity couldn't cut it with the size levels we needed. We jumped ship after a couple of years to UE4. Then spent the rest of the time between now and then doing everything over (multiple times). All mechanics we needed are done, stuff looks nice, but we are nowhere near release. In fact, we started last year to cut out the initial parts of the game as an Intro game to the series and just a few weeks ago, finally finished the highly revised more simplistic screen play for it.

This entire time has been wasted mostly on UE changing so frequently, deprecating stuff that would have been fine and adding stuff that isn't production ready, yet suddenly you "need". That's where we are now, probably close to 15 years down the road though actually only about 10 on UE, and what we had to show for it, until all my C++ broke thanks to 5.4.1, was several roughed in levels, most of the models necessary, all of the mechanics but many not fully compatible with UE5s latest gee whiz features. In other words, still nowhere and a 100GB project that won't even start at the moment (and will take probably 2 weeks to figure why 5.4 messed up my compiles).

From our experience, your #2 (in both categories) seems to be the wisdom. Our game does everything, and to do that, takes years, then smoothing it even more years. Good flight mechanics probably run a year or two when you're a 2 person team, Vehicles, ground, even sound, all are measured in years to do things right. Picking a simple genre probably is the great advice, because none of us can afford to hire like Rockstar. The other number 2, KISS, is sort of the same, don't overextend and try to have so many mechanics that it can't be done (doesn't help that my son is a perfectionist about games).

It seems to me that the problem is that it's pretty easy to get to 50 or 60% of what I think of as a AAA game, but going beyond that is darned near hopeless. It takes so long to do it, that you can't keep up with how the industry changes... that is to say, you have to do a bite-size game if you want to finish it with a small team or solo. Sadly, some of us are so uninterested in bite-size games that if we are stuck with that, we probably will do something more fun.

I am pretty much soloing just a VN for Unity and it takes 10 hours a day almost everyday for about four years now.

Granted I have done a ton of custom code, but I refused scope creep. It's just THAT MUCH WORK to do it right.

4 points out of 10k hours? My man didn't learn much.

to endure doing 1 project for that long, I can only say that you have a talent at patience and hard work. I can't even do half of that time.

I dont understand the confidence in telling other people they are not as brilliant as they think they are. It is such an odd phenomenon of lack of confidence and absurdly too much confidence present at the same time.

I disagree. If you're really committed to a project and you've thoroughly thought it through/know what your vision is for the game and how you will implement it, you should spend as much time as the game needs. And, avoiding difficulty is probably even worse advice, if you only do what's easy, your games are just going to be cut-paste what 10000000 other lazy developers were making with slightly different graphics etc.

I guess in your case, you didn't have much of a vision so you were switching things around & reworking vital components to the point where you were just burning through time. If you would have stuck with your initial idea, how long would that have taken you?

Last game I made was a text based MUD that ran on telnet... I rolled everything, message services, in game chat, game email, you name it, I even made my own DB of sorts (using tie against flat files). Of course I didn't do it to sell, I did it because I was bored AF at work and had nothing assigned and needed to look busy.

I think that making a game engine can be overwhelming, and you can burn out very quickly, since game dev is already complex and brings its own burnout phases.

Cool. I'm gonna go make starfield 2 ;)

Great advice. Especially positive points 2 and 3. Can't tell you how breezy dev goes by following them like a religion. Even coming back to code weeks later it's quick to get back into it.

10000 is the amount one supposedly needs to become an expert on a topic. So good job on that. You learned a lot a long the way. Still more the most people will ever do.

The route you went down is also what got me a AAA engine building job. So thats one route you could go with all this work…. If the game industry was not imploding for the next year or 2. Just one idea.

What do you mean by "Treat everything as equal."? Can you elaborate?

The promotional stuff for your game looks like dog ass stop talking about it right now when I actually get inside it looks and feels really good. Also I can't leave the first little dome it says click to leave and I can't regardless I as someone whos been working on a game for multiple years can tell the disgusting amount of work thats gone into this good job man

Congrats on working on the same project for 15 years. Regardless that shows lots of determination.

2 Treat everything as equal. AKA - don't make exceptions, no matter how much sense they appear to make, inevitably it will bite you in the ass later

Could you elaborate more on this? You mean like in game mechanics, in class hierarchy? Or something im missing?

Also, since you have been around for more than a decade. Could you give your input on unreal engine, and how it got so much better in recent years? Didnt you feel tempted to use it even though that would be the 4th change of plans in your system? As of 2024, which engine would you choose now if you were starting, or perhaps what framework/language?

Just curious. Are you going to finally stop work on it, or continue the project?

So a multiplayer game shouldn't have been my first project then?

rule no. 1 KISS your team members on the forehead next time you see them and be thankful you’re not in it alone

Awesome post dude, honest and to the point. I'm struggling with getting my tiny indie game of the ground, it was tough just making a small game, can't imagine making an open world game

Do you need some playtesters?

what game genre were you making?

I think I probably won't go into game dev, but just out of sheer curiosity, what would those easier game genres a single person can manage be?

Just want to say, not quite my type of game but the art, graphics and camera movement grabbed me

"Fail fast" is one of the toughest and most important lessons to learn as a game dev

"dont do it" sigh. i want to make a genshin/diablo style openworld RPG with different parties/atk setups w a postapoc scify cyberpunk theme/story so bad 😭 i have a google doc full of ideas that'll never cone to fruition.. maybe someday i will make it big and it will be real

2 years into my game. I refuse to give up! It's the only game I want to make. But yea I agree lol.

If only every AAA developer could read this.

Here's what I learned after trying to make a game:

• Learn investing and plow all of your money into a Roth IRA

• Keep investing consistently

• 10 years later: profit

• Move to ocean-front condo and enjoy life.

• Fuck trying to make a game.

sigh... Im still working on my game I started 12 years ago... havnt loaded it last week... was pushing for steam next fest but its too tight and the artist I was looking to commission for steam art just never did it. No money upfront so whatever, but also wtf. tell me you cant do it. I should have been more aggressive with asking for updates. I spent that money on new 3d assets instead.. which set my schedule way back again.. yay scope creep.

could of been worse I could of chosen a MMORPGGGGGH

I mean, RuneScape was made by 2 guys.

They were pretty cool guys though. develops engine in Java and doesn't afraid of anything

I can give another tip - make your assumptions executable.

If you do make an exception for something, which you are 100% sure works because x y z, don't forget about x y and z... until you have made them executable in your code (e. g. at the very least assertions or test cases).

Then one month later when you get this other idea and add something that breaks your assumptions that you've since forgotten about... bang

Good advice. Stick to a plan, stick to tools you're confident with, and don't scope creep.

if youre having fun and getting code practice then thats fine, but at a certain point you realize you need a complete plan before putting anything to code, for a big project. i was designing a robust tick-based risk style game, inspired by Same-time Risk and Civilization. i basically stopped the project for 5 years because i couldnt decide how units would engage while both are in motion. attacking into each other, or attacking a tile with units moving out another way. its sounds dumb, but the design constraints got the best of me. ive weighed out so many alternate systems. it was just last week i solved the design question (probably), and its simple. in a fit of momentum i then wrote down a list of mechanics im gonna brutally simplify, so i can start the prototype.

if your game spans primitive to advanced technology it makes designing harder and may water-down the mechanics. its also harder in terms of art/assets.

theres a lot of games out there. many dont get going or they die off in 4-8 years. i would rather make one or two masterpieces, than brag about cranking out a new game every week. in the internet age the world craves quality. go big or go home.

Idgaf I tried Unity in the beginning but performance and memory usage were shit for my game, while not allowing huge worlds due to 32-bit float positions. Currently developing my own engine with C/OpenGL/Direct3D and my own physics engine. Been working on this for 5 years now, on and off. At times it can be tedious and frustrating but at the end it's incredibly rewarding and I love learning a lot of things.

How long is 10,000 hours in roughly amount of years / hours per day.

Theres a good GDC talk from '17 i think, one of the devs from "Thumper" talks about similar things. They at one point decided to make their own engine, took them 7 years after that before release. Take away was, GOD NO DONT, just use an existing one, lol. Highly recommend the talk, should be on youtube.... (for reference im about 7 years deep on my own thing, not even with my own engine, lol. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckm8_SEIXQM

I did a project a while ago that was a live vr game mixed with theatrics. A class of game dev students came with their teacher to watch the show (it was about 15 min long) and I wasn't expecting it but I got asked to come down and maybe give the students some advice.

During the show a bug happened and the live tracking on part of the actor stopped and made their avatars leg kinda just flip out for a while.

All I could think to tell them was 'don't waste time coding everything from scratch' I said to just use assets and copy chunks of code and amend it to work for your purpose. The most important thing is getting your game done and start small and keep it simple. Unless you have a team, you'll waste years making a game that 99% of the time devs never finish.

Their faces kinda dropped and I got asked why is it bad to code from scratch n stuff. Then they asked why did the game bug out but I ran out of time to explain anything.

I was pretty embarrassed but I hope atleast one of them listened to that advice.

I see people go full steam ahead into thinking they're geniuses coding their own game engine so they can feel legit when they make their own game in it and they created all assets from scratch and coded everything from scratch with minimal tutorial or reference help. And ultimately, the only people who might be impressed are other devs just like them, while they're secretly hoping their own game engine and game is better than theirs lmao

I try not to think of any time spent coding as wasted, unless it's really all boilerplate. Even if it's a complete rewrite from scratch, or switching from one sdk/platform/etc to another, building something usually leads to improving your skills, no matter how experienced you already are.

KISS is a nice rule to keep in mind, but you need to make a whole lot of mistakes before you can even identify what simplicity means in a given context, and how to apply it.

why dont do it?

Wow, a lot of admiration for your effort and further still sharing it. Thanks for the post!

I wanted to create starfield 2😔

I think another good one to add is that your time is never wasted. Even if nothing comes from your game, you most definitely improved your skills

Im wondering where you get your recourses from, going to war, providing for a family while working g on a game.

Hey man - I downloaded your demo.

Your audio is completely fucked and really hurt my ears. As a sound designer who already struggles with tinnitus, I take this stuff extremely seriously and am begging you to pull your game from Steam until this is fixed.

The opening sound is FAR too loud, and the gain staging is terrible overall.

Additionally, you've got the music and SFX sliders mixed up in the main menu so there is no way to reduce the volume.

I always try to give up and coming devs the benefit of the doubt but I think it is just flatly unacceptable for you to come here complaining when the volume of your game is so loud it is physically hurting people. These are easy adjustments to make and I am completely flabbergasted that you didn't get this robustly playtested during its decade and a half of development.

Good on you for helping out my country, appreciate that - now please fix your shit.

About rule one,is that to not start gamedev in general or dont work on 1 game for an outrageous amount of time?