Tooling is important
I started trying to make games in late 2020. I really thought I could ship a small 3D game in like a year or less. A year seemed like a long time. I did ship Wild Trails to iOS in 2023 but that was a free game so, in terms of a commercial success, no luck over here.
When I tell people I am working on a game. I think they think I am making something like flappy bird or vampire survivors- something not complicated and a low fidelity art style. I would honestly put Wild Trails in that category. I fundamentally think that kind of game is just not worth making. The conventional wisdom on the indie dev internet spaces is to make small, polished, games that explore a few mechanics and to ship that as a paid game on steam. I think that is great and I am happy for the people who can make a living doing that. I don’t have anything against that strategy, I just don’t play those kinds of games so I don’t find them compelling. I also think that multiple pulls at the Steam slot machine is not a worth while strategy for someone with a full time job like me. If I make something, I want it to reach a degree of success that lets me increase the scope and teamsize of my next game in addition to letting me go fulltime.
Additionally, I am not convinced that small, quickly produced, premium, games are going to hold up in the long run as a market. The “friend-slop” genre is an example of a recent trend of games made by small teams with quick turnaround times. I think there will be an indie team that poisons the well at some point and we already see droves of games published to steam everyday. I think consumers are going to feel fatigue at some point or Valve will intervene at some point to avoid becoming similar to the iOS market where margins are small and ad-driven.
The Everything Engine
Unity is what I would call an “everything engine.” You can make any kind of game with it and it doesn’t have opinions about you’re games behaviors, entities, or win conditions. This makes sense from Unity’s perspective given its this mass market thing. It makes less sense on an individual basis where you only care about shipping one kind of game. For people like me who are primarily focused on making first or 3rd person action games, I would appreciate more tooling focused on that. I have not worked on a Call of Duty but I would assume the concept of a “player” and a “weapon” are in the engine at a more deep level than a prefab if that makes sense.
As I write this, I am 26.. almost 27 in May. I am just now coming to the realization that having a game engine does most of the hard part for you: rendering, physics, input, etc... What you have to do before you start making your game, is create a first person shooter as a whole system on top of that. I underestimated how much work goes into a Call of Duty character rig: Animations, IK blending, procedural recoil, etc.. You also have to remember that it has to have pretty unique elements for most guns in your game. I started my current project I have been working on since Aug 2024. In the last two years, I have been trying to do all of that animation work, level design, netcode, and game design myself. I really wish I had approached this differently.
I struggle with vision. I over estimate what I can do in a timeframe and I underestimate what I don’t know. I just spent the last month learning about blender’s modifiers, UVs, and trim sheets. It seems insane to me that I was trying to skip over that step prior to this because so many parts of 3d modeling and level design become easier when you place constraints on yourself, control the asset pipeline, and make high quality tooling for yourself. For example I wrote this script that spawns prefabs in a grid in Unity using a pixel map. Creating a pixel map and then spawning objects is so much faster than placing them by hand and I can’t believe I wasted time (months) and money buying assets and then placing them by hand.
A little Lord of the Rings fact you might not know is that J.R.R. Tolkien actually created the entire world of LOTR prior to writing a single book. He had atlases, mythologies, and histories all put together prior to writing a single novel. Put differently: his focus was on making the world, his stories were just set in it. I think thats part of what makes his work so compelling. I have heard similar things from the team at Embark Game Studios where they say they just spend their first year working on tools inside and outside of Unreal Engine. This wasn’t a single person either, it was a team of people making tools. So given I am working on this first project by myself, I think that is really powerful to think about. Like, what was I doing my first year of game development? Forget that! What was I doing on my first year of this project? Not making tools. There are other examples of this like Teardown where they spent years working on a voxel engine with features other engines didn’t have and then decided to find a game that fit for that engine.