Looking for "should I quit my job" feedback

I know you're being disingenuous but realistically the next big game is going to be an MMO. Whether you're the lucky guy who makes it is obviously where the delusion comes in.

That said OP is one-manning this and from his description it doesn't seem like he has his sights set that high.

Its a smash-like

Thanks. I probably won't quit at least for the next six months (while working part time on the game), but after that all bets are off. My living expenses are pretty low as is (I've been putting it all into Link) so I think I'm good there. Do you think my analysis is crazy?

Everyone has expenses. Do you mean get passive income first?

Nope, this is a single player strategy/top-down game.

Hedge your bets and keep your job until you're at a point where you can see it going somewhere. Going all in on things isn't what makes a start-up successful. In fact, i remember reading a study that suggested more start ups are successful if the founders don't quit their day job to go all in.

sell your linkies and quit your job. like is too short to wagecuck your best years. take time off and work on your project full time.

nope unless you have absolutly no social life, high work ethic
50k sold units as indie game dev, very unlikely since you will most likely develope for one platform only without marketing budget.

>Nope, this is a single player strategy/top-down game.
tell me more, i am doing something similiar in unity.

is nobody going to say it?
>50k link

you already made it

>Software developer, 3 years exp
>I have a killer idea
>I estimate will take me 2 years to complete

Have you ever estimated 2 years out in your entire career? When you estimate 2 weeks out, how often do you actually end up with accurate estimates? Have you ever managed a project of that size?

Unless you are making a flappy bird clone, this is an incredibly risky idea. Your estimates are probably going to be wrong.

That said, if no one took risks the world would be shitty and gay. So I'd say go for it, but drop all your expectations about the outcome

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When I make it I want to make my masterwork too. A Mad-Max-esque post apocalyptic open worlder that is more focuessed on cooperation than killing each other.
You can learn a bunch of skills through minigames like welding, fuel refining, armor construction, etc, and the idea is that you pool your skills with other players in your outlier settlement in order to build and upgrade vehicles. Anything from motorbikes up to huge barges/trucks (if you can find the metal for it). The resources and time spent to make and maintain a decent functioning vehicle would be significant, which would make you actually invested in keeping it going. Break down a few miles out of settlement? It would be worthwhile walking back into town, getting someone else with a winch, bringing your wreck back and fixing it.
The hostile forces would include NPC monsters and simply the world itself in the forms of weather/sandstorms and stuff, as well as other settlements and people who have chosen to live the outlaw life as raiders of various styles and races.
Want to live a peaceful life as a welder? Stay in town and level up the minigame. Want to strike out into the desert in a vain search for valuable crystals, fuel, water? Better get a crew together of a few decent drivers, shooters and mechanics. Want to be a raider and attack other settlements? Good luck living an outlaw life with a bounty on your head.
It's called Junkers and it will be released about 2025 and I will definitely include an NPC in a blue plaid shirt as a nod to how it was all possible.

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Current plan is to treat this as a side project for the next half-year or so at which point it'll hopefully be something more concrete. Right now it's just a bunch of prototypes and handwritten notes. So maybe I am on track with that approach?

Tempting, but no way am I going to sell my Link.

Maybe. But I don't want to rely on one moonshot.

The 50k estimate comes from looking at SteamSpy sales of other indie games of similar scope and development team sizes, and then estimating 50% below their average:
steamspy.com/app/250520
steamspy.com/app/294100
steamspy.com/app/423580
steamspy.com/app/427520

That being said, the above are the relatively successful ones. There are less successful titles out there. I think my idea is "good" because there aren't many in its genre, I have good gameplay ideas about it, and I have a unique-ish artstyle.

I plan on marketing to Let's Players as it seems like they are the best way to gain exposure. I was planning on spending at least 10k on paid let's Plays, if that sounds reasonable.

Well, it's not a tycoon game. I have no social life outside of occasional outings with friends. I am willing to put in 12 hour days, weekends included into this; I am passionate about this game. It sometimes consumes my mind entirely.

You have a good point, nothing of this scale. I'd say my estimates of projects at work are usually close enough but sometimes take additional time.

Say this doesn't work out. My Plan B is to resume wagecucking with my resume saying that I spent the past two years working on and publishing my own product. Not exactly as good as two years of actual corporate work, but better than nothing?

That sounds nice and all but surely you can see how ridiculously daunting of a project this will be for an indie dev?

how good the experience looks depends on how you market it. it looks very good to startup type shops because you took a risk and basically gave yourself a startup type experience. if you want to return to a corporate job later, it wouldn't necessarily detract from you depending on how you present it. if you want to work in e.g. C#, or whatever your corporate job does, try to keep those skills relevant and keep up with the news and trends

that sounds epic

give it diablo 2 style customization please, with a focus on skill based ARPG elements. Tired of shooters

sounds like kenshi. You should start building it and have early access beta players help you refine it.

>Biggest unknown: Me underestimating how much effort this will take.
It'll take three times as long and even then you'll only be able to finish it if you let yourself get addicted to amphetamines. It is truly insane how hard it is to pull off anything like a full-feature game as a one-man team.

Look at the time it took for one-man studios to make shit like Cave Story, Stardew Valley, Undertale. You're probably looking at 4 years minimum for a 2D pixel art game with 10 hours of solid gameplay.

Like serious, I cannot overstate this. If you realistically want to be to market in 2 years, you should legitimately think of a game that you THINK could get done in about 6 months. Then it'll actually take you 2 years and you'll be on schedule. Of course even then, unless you win the publicity lottery having a major streamer pick up your game on a whim, your game can be perfectly awesome and still just end up in the backwaters of Steam with 72 downloads, 7 net 'positive' ratings and zero reviews, three years in from release. Which is the norm for a handmade one-man indie game, not the exception.

this is excellent advice 10/10

What genre game.

OP I'm you one year into the future

Don't do it

Developing games is much harder than it seems and savings deplete fast

Nevermind i read the thread

Most people end up regretting the things they didn't do, not the things they did.

I’d say just do as much work as you can on it and save as much money as you can for the next 1 year. It’ll be kind of like a countdown and will be satisfying as fuck when you reach it. Plus you’ll be better prepared, already have a head start on the game, and crypto might have taken off by then.

Also I think you should be fine with the idea hat you may not make a lot of money with the game, just doing something you want to do and hopefully earning a living off it is probably where you’ll land. But who knows. Maybe try to find a few investors if you don’t want to wait

Tell me more fren. What kind of game? What's your background like?

Sobering advice. I most certainly will not quit for the next half year or so, and will work on the game on the side until it is more concrete.

Have you worked on game development? What do you think about marketing to Let's Players to gain more publicity? I am willing to spend money marketing.

This is what kills me. I am obsessed with this game and I feel I'll regret it for the rest of my life if I don't do this.

>Say this doesn't work out. My Plan B is to resume wagecucking with my resume saying that I spent the past two years working on and publishing my own product. Not exactly as good as two years of actual corporate work, but better than nothing?

In the shops where you work with smart people and get paid really good money, ITS BETTER to have an actual published project than two years of corporate wagecucking at your Initech.

The question is - are you absolutely sure you can do it? Have you tried at least making Pong/Breakout/Bejeweled to a presentable commercial level?

I have absolutely no fucking financial security and I'm quitting my job. I'm gonna take a new job as a security guard. Pays less but I'll have time to myself to study for CCNA and Security+ certs, and I won't have to be at that fucking call center another fucking minute.

I'll probably go with this route, thanks (hopefully half a year though, not a full year)

>are you absolutely sure you can do it?
There are no technical roadblocks. I have not done the "publish a small game first" thing, but I have shipped software in my wagecuck job.

You've given me an idea though, maybe I can spend a month or so to publish a small bit of my game as its own standalone title early on, just to gain that experience? Maybe I'll try to set a goal to do that this year?

How long can you get by with no income? How much do you have in savings?

Is there no way to study and stay at your current job? Likely I'll be doing that with my game for the foreseeable future.

I'd at least give it a year desu. If you have a stable, reasonable job, i wouldn't walk out on it

I got about 10k. And no, staying at my current job is soul draining and would mean studying after I'm off work which just won't happen.
So I'm going to either subsist off the 10k or take a very low stress job while waiting for LINK to moon and then using network security certs as my backup career plan.

I'm from an academic background but I grew extremely tired of the environment and pressure there to the point that I couldn't take it anymore, so I fucked off back to my parents home and started freelancing. Built a good network of clients and now I can support myself fine, and due to being an autist with no social life I dedicate most of my free time to my game but I never had a "real" job, and if the game doesn't turn out well I'll be proper fucked.

Always had dreams of making games, and made a few shitty stuff during HS, so I was really hyped about starting a serious project initially, made a few small games beforehand to test my capabilities and everything seemed fine, but the effort that goes into a serious project is insane.

I described my ideas about my game yesterday on /agdg/ here >It's mostly AI related. I'm trying to make NPCs that organize themselves in groups with their own hierarchies, prioritize their own interests and act according to their personality traits and the information available to them. The goal is to make convincing narratives emerge out of such behavior.

>I'm also trying to make almost every aspect of the game easily editable (e.g. movesets, AI traits/memories, maps, textures, tilesets) with dedicated tools when necessary, with saves organized such that they can be composed of entirely different assets, allowing the game to be easily extended by its users and the extensions to coexist without interfering with each other.

>I've been working on this for a long time and have made good progress on a lot of aspects but I'm still not too sure about its feasibility, and I'm lagging on the assets front, so I don't expect to finish it within a few years at least.

I also wasted a lot of time while making the switch from academia to freelancing and working on this game, but I was really burnt-out so maybe it was inevitable.

the one in the blue car is a common scenario

guys taking care of some thugs used up cum dumpster and future child.

>2 years
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy

user, I...

If you’re a software dev just quit your office job and do contract work remotely as you build your game.

I’m a PM in tech and I do this

make a kickstarter. not only might it get you some fans, publicity or even hype if youre lucky but then the suckers can pay for the game too. do some shitty buy in like "if you donate $____ you get your name in the game!!" or something

Obviously I'm not you so I'm not sure, but if you really think can't study after work than so be it. But 10k doesn't seem like it'd be enough. Maybe work half a year more to build up your savings?

Interesting, how "out there" was the AI? I am implementing Dave Mark's ideas about Utility AI for my game, so I'm curious about your AI.

What aspects of your game do you think you underestimated, time-wise?

I'm implementing something similar for NPC actions since I intend to have movesets be editable, so things like behavioral trees are out of the question. But having movesets be easily editable is a pretty intense task on its own, and requires a file syntax with basic programming features such as conditionals and variable declarations.

The real out there part is the communication between "sentient" AI, modeling it such that Player-NPC and NPC-NPC interactions are the same and human-readable when necessary, and making an AI that actually makes decisions based on the information it has available. I have accomplished very little towards this goal so far and still am not too sure about its feasibility or whether I can get it to work in a game-like way.

So that editability is to facilitate ease of modding for players? Seems like a noble goal, there's lots of games out there that owe half of their success to mod.

>making an AI that actually makes decisions based on the information it has available

Not sure what you mean, definition of game AI is agents that take in information about the world to make decisions. You could achieve this with very straightforward if-else logic. Or do you mean something esoteric where you're trying to model human memory and cognition?

If you want to learn more about utility AI highly recommend Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI.

Editability makes my job easier too e.g. map creation tools, tileset generators. It also just makes more sense to me than trying to hide data or embedding it in inaccessible ways.
>Or do you mean something esoteric where you're trying to model human memory and cognition
That is very much what I'm trying to go for but again it's not something I've made much progress towards, so I might end up having to scale back my goals significantly

I want to make my game run on toasters as well so I spent a lot of time implementing/coming up with custom data structures to optimize things and developing tools to analyze performance etc. Honestly there's a very good chance that I'll look back on all this and wonder what the fuck I was thinking aiming so high. But I try to be optimistic lmao. I wouldn't last so long if I didn't genuinely enjoy working on this and had freelance gigs on the side.

Yea that does sound pretty far out especially if you don't have a concrete approach yet. But if you do find a way to model, or at least believably fake human cognition and gamify that would make for some interesting gameplay.

What do you actually do in the game?

>What do you actually do in the game?
That'll honestly depend on how much I can get the AI working

If I can get it working 100% it'll be exploring and interacting with the "society" these things create, siding with groups of NPCs, rising through the hierarchy of these groups or creating your own group

If I can't it'll be a simple sidescroller with an overworld and freeroam and scripted NPC interactions, if I actually do finish it that is.

I found a couple shirts similar to the Slow Your Roll ones but nothing exact.