Game Dev

Sustainable Solo Dev Biz WITHOUT Hits!

Making a living from publishing indie games is a very tough business. It's an industry where 95% of games don't even make $100, so if you do want this to be your job you need to be very skilled, very knowledgeable and very dedicated.

One dev started an interesting discussion about this topic on Reddit, how can you create a sustainable game development business as a solo dev without ever making a hit game?

Personally I can very much relate to this topic because this has been my story. I started making Steam games in 2013 and I made a living from nothing but indie game dev for several years (I only started making money from my YouTube channel in 2020) and in all that time I never had what you would call a "hit". I covered my Game Dev Journey in this video. I've had some games that did well, like Game Corp DX, and some that flopped hard. Throughout all that I kept surviving with a sustainable indie dev business.

One excellent very famous talk on exactly this topic is the one from 2016 by Jake Birkett titled "How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit". If you haven't seen it yet then I highly recommend you give it a watch if you're interested in the topic of sustainable indie game development.

The discussion on that Reddit thread is very interesting. Someone suggests how contract work is the "easiest" way to achieve sustainability. That way you have guaranteed income by basically becoming a freelancer, where the hard part is finding clients.

Another dev suggests finding a niche genre and building one good quality game per year. I belive this is a great strategy because it allows you to carry your audience from game to game while also boosting your own skills since you're always working on the same genre. Jeff Vogel is an example of this, another great talk.

Or perhaps just remember how "indie dev" doesn't technically mean just making games, you can make a sustainable business as an Asset developer, making either visual assets or tools for other developers to use. That's also a viable career path.

And in general my best tip for this topic is quite simple, the biggest multiplier on difficulty is your own cost of living. For me I was able to run a sustainable business because I live in Portugal where I can have a good life with just $2000 per month, (which means a game only needs a relatively small amount to turn a profit) whereas on some places like San Francisco that amount wouldn't even cover rent. So if you can live cheaper then this sustainable indie dev business challenge becomes a lot easier.

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Tech

"I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back"

For me, vibe coding feels like a mostly negative thing that hurts more than it helps. It leads to a ton of technical debt and messy code as projects grow.

However I can definitely see how it's a very good thing for people who aren't programmers like myself. How this new tool gives them the ability to build things that were previously impossible for them to build.

One dev wrote about their interesting experience on Hacker News. They used to code a tiny bit back in school many years ago but never quite enjoyed it. After a career in finance they got interested in how compound interest works, but how all the online calculators suck.

Using vibe coding (and $100 in Opus 4.5 API costs) they managed to build a very complex website with all kinds of interesting calculators!

However the little experience this dev had with programming was quite helpful, it allowed them to understand architecture and UX combined of course with the actual domain expertise, so the only thing missing in this equation was the code which AI helped with.

The end result is here https://calquio.com it's a very capable website that has 80 calculators across 7 categories. Built with Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, and more.

Gaming

Xbox Developer Direct Showcase

The latest Xbox Developer Direct Showcase just happened! A bunch of interesting games were shown.

The big one that people have been asking for years is Fable which got a pretty detailed overview. The game is all about choices and consequences in a fairy tale huge (and detailed) open world. The combat looks really awesome and satisfying! Great spells like turning people into chickens or firing massive fireballs. Then you can buy a house, make some money, buy a business, romance a villager, and see how your actions affect the world. It's looking great!

Forza Horizon 6 also got a super detailed overview video. This one is set in Japan! You start out as just a simple tourist with a basic car and you move up from race to race from car to car until you get to some awesome exotics! The locations are really varied, Japan has a bit of everything! Urban areas, forest areas, desert areas, all in multiple seasons that look gorgeous! I can't wait to explore this city. Oh and it will have more than 550 cars at launch!

Beast of Reincarnation was another game in the showcase, and very surprisingly this one is being developed by Game Freak, the Pokemon developers! I definitely did not expect that! The game looks quite awesome, it's a one-person one-dog action RPG all about fast paced action where you battle huge unique monsters and robots in a fantasy world. Lost of awesome abilities and effects (and of course cute dogs!)

And finally we got Kiln from Double Fine, it's an online multiplayer party pottery brawler! Definitely a unique concept. You create your pottery character by hand, and using that unique shape you go into combat with and against your friends across several modes. In one of them you fight to gather water, then dump that water in a kiln to win. The game is definitely very cute and interesting!

Fun

UV Maps explained in one image

3D modeling is very complex, and one confusing part for beginners (at least to me when I was starting) is figuring out how do you map a flat 2D texture onto a 3D object. The answer is UV mapping.

This is how you can take a 2D texture and basically wrap it around in 3D, each part of the texture will cover a specific polygon in 3D.

It can be tricky to understand it from words alone, so one super clever trick to understanding it is to just look at a wrapper of something like a chocolate Santa Claus. This visualization makes it so much easier to understand how that 2D to 3D mapping works.

And if you want to learn something even deeper then check out the main reply to the post, someone talking about how you could make this UV map massively more efficient by reusing a bunch of parts. Funnily enough this is the same mindset that made the original Super Mario Bros possible, due to memory limitations they could not have tons of sprites, so the clouds are just repainted grass.