Also it got sued from maybe a 1000 ppl xD
I wonder what was the download size of it?
I am 1 like away from getting the empathic badge!!!
I didn’t get it…thats a server bug…
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Oh I didn’t know it was sued by people, I’m gonna search around to see how it ended up.
Download size was a few hundreds MB maximum I think, it’s physically impossible for it to have been bigger.
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I liked another reply of yours, you should have the badge.
Oh wait no, it’s the opposite lol, I forgot what badge it was my bad.
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There was a LOTS of assets in the game lol,and he didn’t gave em credit at all( how it would be even possible xD)
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Maybe there were 2000 uncompressed and unused 4K Textures that made the game size bigger lol
(Obvious irony)
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The real game was taken down,I am sure it was over 30 gigs,the only one that we can see is the copycats…
Whatever I am sure that guy made $1000s xD
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God, definitely 99% Assets and 1% Scripts.
He may have made 1000s, it’s to see if he lost them through lawsuits or he managed to keep something though.
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Lol.I think the game only had a player controller xD the 99.98% was non commercial assets
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Where to start:
With a couple of lessons on Brackey’s on YouTube in the Godot series - he has one on 2D and a couple of 3D. He has stopped again.
Then go onto Udemy looking for specific courses on Godot. Mind you the courses on Udemy with Godot don’t really TEACH you what to do but they do TELL you what to do. Lots of people have the ability to code really well but very few people teach well.
Regards.
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Uh, thanks I guess, even though I wasn’t looking for advice on how to make my “first games” and more for other people’s opinions on being a solo dev, even because I’m not really a “beginner beginner” (in 10 days it’ll be a year since I joined the forum, woah time flies!).
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Funny about the concept of ‘asset flip’ because theres an entire industry making money from game developers. I looked at Unreal templates for example … £500 could go very quickly on components, art, sound etc. Then you have to pay to publish on steam (a ray of hope), but they have more than 18,000 games to compete with (sigh, a dark cloud).
Not as bad as the reasons i quit developing over a decade ago 
I dont know, how do you even get paid?
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Yes it is hard. You are not alone in that. Sometimes it also feels a bit hit and miss. A bit like playing basketball with blindfolds on.
Personally, I also miss having a team around me, seeing things progressing by other people, having feedback from genuinely interested people that know what they are talking about, sharing ideas, exploring avenues together. I suppose also being a part of something bigger, sharing common goals and pursuing a shared vision. I do miss that stuff. Doing it in a game dev environment could be amazing.
I shall not list all the negatives about teams though, the politics, the often dumb decisions etc. It certainly was not a walk in the park or all angels and bliss.
The hardest thing is that I have always been a bit of a perfectionist. This is certainly a good trait in many things, but it also has its negatives. So many times I have spent far too long perfecting something that nobody really cares about or will ever care about. It amazes me how many black holes there are you can get lost in. And making the game in the first place is really only half the job.
And then I see games made in a game jam, or on sale for 1.99, that make my games look like a child did it. Yes it is hard, yes there are probably easier ways to make a living, but to be honest, right now I wouldn’t change it for a thing. I am probably at my most content sitting here at my desk, scratching my head about whether the NPC should do this or do that, or if my building looks right or not, or if it needs some animation.
I just wish I could find more time to devote to it, that there were more hours in a day, or days in a week. You start exploring an idea, you start making progress, you start coding or creating the art, and before you know it, three months have passed!
I really want to do a game jam. Perhaps I can squeeze one in over xmas.
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i support the idea of finding a team! for nothing else, you can see how to improve your workflow from people who are more specialized in different areas and you’ll have a whole support system of fellow devs to ask for help 
jams are also a great way to meet people and improve your skills. they’re ROUGH but if you keep your scale low and find a team you gel with it’s a magical experience. just make sure to rest, eat, and sleep. creating is fun but boy it can be tough.
what also helps me is keeping my scale small and setting out very detailed lists on what i want to do for solo stuff- e.g a list for map assets to make, a list for mechanics, a list for UI, a list for levels, et cetera.
also, in regards to the assets- make it ugly first! i find having something ugly but workable makes it much easier to do assets. placeholders are your friends and it’s probably better than committing to a design from the start only to realize 40 hours in you don’t actually like it that much.
good luck, though! you’ve got this. this isn’t a race, so just work on what you can and don’t stress yourself out too much. solo dev IS hard, so don’t make it harder on yourself than it needs to be!
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There are two types of markets here:
- Infrastructure set up to publish and sell games. Steam is clearly the biggest one, but Google and Apple with their respective shops are the same thing. So is itch.io, crazygames or whatever there is outside. How much they get and what they offer in exchange (beside market access) was pretty much up to them until recently. The EU forced Google and Apple to open up a bit and reduce their 30% fee. Let’s see, when Steam will get that letter.
- Asset markets. This is a weird one, as it is a bit more complex. For one, they are a great way to make a living as a game developer or artists solo or in small teams, without actually publishing games themselves. It is the B2B sector of the game dev industry. You can focus on isolated problems, solve them and sell your solution. Prices are significantly higher and more flexible, because there is no direct comparison (as with games) and also, as you sell to other developers, they themselves expect a bigger revenue with whatever they are working on. This is normal B2B. I pay you 200,-$ for some assets, I expect to make 20.000$ with my game. So you’re assets are worth it in my context.
This market grows enormously because game dev is becoming more accessible and the companies owning the markets (Epic, Unity, Google, Itch, even Roblox, etc) are also pushing it in this.
The sad or even dark thing about this: Game dev is a big gamble, right? There is no guarantee for successfully selling a game. There is no bullet proof marketing strategy. It is, for the most part, luck - as with everything in entertainment. Which is great for the people selling assets, but not for the people buying them.
And here we are only speaking about people actually finishing games. The asset market is also very strong on selling the idea of easily making a game. “All I need are a few assets and some code, game done!”. I don’t mean to be rude, but this is also something this thread is about: game dev is not easy for many reasons. Ability and knowledge being some, staying motivated is another. Being able to economically afford working on a game for months or years without income is another. And if you buy assets, you are maybe burning money off your runway.
So maybe selling assets could be the answer for many newcomers. If you struggle to make a whole game but love making easy to use and smart systems / or modular UIs / or cute pixel art / or 3D models, you might be better off selling those on the big platforms and have a steady income doing so.
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Personally, I love jams. They force me to work in a smaller scope and put something out the door I may not be completely happy with.
Before I tried jams, I worked on one project for months and it never went anywhere. I participated in my first jam and had a playable game made in two days. Could it have been better? Of course. The goal of jams, at least in my opinion, is to experiment and build your skills, not to spend countless hours trying to polish something.
It does take a while before you can get the hang of things. I’ve now done 11 solo jams, and I look back on my first few and cringe a bit. The first didn’t even have any audio! Things really started to click around my fifth jam, and I’ve learned something from every game I’ve made.
Try joining longer jams like the 9-day Godot Wild Jam, focusing on a smaller scope, and intentionally limiting the length of time you work on your game. Don’t feel bad if things don’t turn out exactly how you wanted them to. It is hard, and it does take time, but you’ll get better and learn more with every attempt.
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That’s to be expected. And your title is misleading, it should be “Solo game jams are HARD”. But that’s nitpicking. 
With the right people, yes. With a dysfunctional team however you’re better off solo.
No that’s not you nor an only-you problem. You put yourself under immense pressure working on a game jam. Those aren’t fun UNLESS you’re already proficient with what you try to accomplish. The worst thing to do in a game jam (72 hours or less) is to try something you’ve never done before. You simply have no time to learn new concepts, new styles, new designs during the frantic, tiring development cycle of a game jam.
Programming is mentally exhausting. There’s an age-old adage that a programmer can get at most 6 hours a day of productive work done in a typical office environment - on average and over a long period of time. Even crunching has been proven to have diminishing returns quickly, going negative after just (if I recall correctly) 3-4 days of consecutive 10+ hour days.
Yeah, that’s maybe the problem. Like most, we all dream of making that one cool game. Those are typically overdesigned (cool) and underspecified (broad, no clear vision or end goal, more like a “dream”).
Consider how long it takes developers to make a game. Take any game that closely resembles yours, look in the credits, and count the number of unique development-centric roles (programming, design, art - exclude publishers, managers, testers). You can then take the time it took to develop the game - use the first announce date and double the time since then until release if there’s no clear “start”. Then multiply by number of people working on it. This is the number of months/years you would have to spend AT LEAST (since you’re unlikely to be equally proficient in all roles) to make a game of that complexity.
Then that 6-month hype game will reveal there were perhaps eight man-years put into the making of it. Take Stardew Valley, I think that was over 10 years in active development, mostly solo. An experienced team of five to seven could have made it in two years.
You can only cut significant time by relying heavily on pre-existing work - both code and assets.
Thus, whatever you do, assess how long it would actually take to make it. This forces you to scale down, respectively to design the thing in a way that it can scale up.
Another important lesson to learn is that not every game is created equal. There are games that are much easier and straightforward to make than others. Just as the market rewards certain games more than others. Both combined may give you an idea why there is so many of X but so few of Y kind of games.
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well I didn’t think structure the post correctly, I wanted to talk about other things but it ended up being mostly about jams.
I agree with most of what you said.
It’s my fault we got on the jam discussion. In this context though, it’s the easiest way to try out working on teams, and try out multiple teams without being tied into anything.
In the professional world, good teams require good hiring practices. Knowing who to hire results from working with people who you don’t want to work with. Everyone makes bad hires. When you don’t have control of creating your team, you are relying on other people to make that decision for you.
When it comes to a passion project like a game, it is REALLY hard to motivate someone to be on your team and share your creative vision, unless you are truly being collaborative. That means compromising a lot - which can create great things. But if you want control, the only way to maintain it is to employ people. (Which for most of us on here is outside our financial ability to do.)
Your team can also be made up of temporary guns for hire. A tile set here, a song there. But it requires you to know what you want and be able to elicit that from other people. I was reviewing art assets for a client today (for a game I’m working on) and I commented that it looks like the guy is using AI, because versions 1 and 2 were wildly different in very specific ways that scream “I put the first image into AI and told it to change one thing (the transparency), and it changed like 5; but kept the basic look.” (You get what you pay for.)
A note on the time they that you and @pauldrewett have mentioned. I want to highlight what @CodeSmile said:
This is is SO TRUE. One of the first thing I did at any company I was at, was tell people that we only plan for 6 productive hours of coding a day, and that’s IF meetings are kept to almost nothing. Standing weekly meetings eat into that time, not into the other 2 hours a day people are assumed to be working. Because over a 4 week period you have to take into account sick days, vacations, bathroom breaks, talking while getting coffee, all hands meetings, taking the team to lunch, etc.
Crunching, as @CodeSmile put it, is what we used to call in the video game industry a death march. I had a friend who worked on EA Sports titles, and they put a new one every year, so they worked on an 80-hour/week death march all year long. And replaced 90% of the burnt out developers every year with people who were excited to be working on video games. He was one of the people who moved off sports titles after a year.
As a solo dev, it’s important to maintain a pace long-term. That means doing half an hour a day will get your farther in the long term than 12-hour days every week or two. Because some days you will work more or less, but overall that time adds up.
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Hey look! just like this I scrapped Da Great Block Of Cheese for the godot wild jam!
we scrap more games a week then our WPM!
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I hear you! I have the same issue. For me the main problem is the artwork/music. An option is to pay someone which I don’t have the funds
And it’s hard to find someone who’d like to invest solely on these parts.
But I see a lot of good reply here already. Also very useful for me!