Never make working solo the goal

Gamedev is very hard, and doing it solo is 10x harder. Even a normal gamedev working in a team cannot hold any work life balance once they wear more than one hat, and because there is always a deadline and a sprint they drop into 50-60+ hour weeks out of nowhere. Solo there is no such thing as counting hours, the work turns into 24/7, because there is nobody to think about the game in your place and the game does not move without you. That pace is hard and wearing not only on you but on the people around you.

I cannot remember working less than 10 hours a day for a very long time now. It does not have to be active work either, the game and everything around it sits in your head permanently. Even the pro tips I write here I can only squeeze in while doing cardio. To create time you end up doing two jobs at once. Especially as launch gets close, however small the game is, you suddenly find yourself getting up in the morning and going straight to the PC and falling asleep at the keyboard at night, for the whole launch. Sometimes that can run longer than 1 month.

On mobile I had a big team, and at one point I had to take myself out of the development cycle just to manage it, which is where the real failure started. As the team grows you deal with people, not with the game, and office politics starts turning whether you want it or not. If a team of 4 ships 2 protos a month you assume 20 people will ship 10, and the company could barely ship 3 protos a month with 20. Part of that came from my own incompetence at management back then and part of it from the sluggishness a big team brings, but the lesson I actually took was how incredibly productivity drops as the team grows.

After that I had to shrink the company and carried on solo on mobile for a while longer. Before long I saw that on my own I was getting more done than that team did. Sometimes a small, surgical team finishes a 20 person job much faster.

On the PC side I am completely on my own right now. I run everything myself, from writing code to marketing, and I once worked out that replacing me would take at least 8 people. With 9 of 12 years spent fully solo, on building and selling products, I saw this: in a lot of areas I am better off doing the work myself. Being exposed to different areas over and over forced me to learn, and every job taught me an incredible amount. If you have even a little curiosity you can reach mastery in more than one domain.

The biggest thing you gain is knowing what the work in those areas is worth, where its shortcuts are and what it will cost you. A designer who has never written code cannot tell whether a feature takes two days or two months, so the line they draw is always in the wrong place. When you do it yourself you know the cost up front. But to get to that point you have to pay a genuinely heavy price, and you need a mountain behind you to lean on.

So what does a team give you? The people who say “build a team” usually mean splitting the work and covering your gaps, and they are right. The pace I described above is unavoidable solo, but in a team the load is shared, so you still have a life outside work. Besides, a good team always slaps a good solo, because however good you are you have a ceiling, and that ceiling is set by your mental health, your physical health and how many hours there are in your day. The second thing a team gives you is objection. When someone is next to you, you have to defend the decision you made, and a decision you cannot defend you cancel yourself. The best thing that happens to a game is almost always a disagreement, and when everyone is on the same side the game gets genuinely bad. In a team you cannot carry a bad idea to the end, because somebody asks about it on the second day. On your own you can walk with the same idea for two months without noticing it is bad.

But a team falls into the same blindness once enough time passes. I see it up close because I support teams. They reached their decisions through their own iterative process, so they tend to be blind to the results of those decisions, and they even get defensive. That is why an outside eye always matters. Players do not care how the decisions were made, they care about the result they see and play. The way to get that is playtest facing outward. Give the build to someone who does not know you and explain nothing, and do not ask “did you like it”, because everyone says yes to your face. Ask “where did you stop”.

Where you really need a team is art direction, narrative and creative direction, the areas where you cannot judge yourself. Bad code simply does not run, but in the other areas it can take a very long time to notice. If you have not been through these stages before, sometimes you never notice at all. Working as a team heads off these structural problems in the early stages. Even when everyone is on the same side, the game still passes through the filter of each person’s own mastery, and you gather collective knowledge faster. But this is the craft side. A team can tell you your work is bad, it cannot tell you where someone who knows nothing about your game will stop. Also, if you are not good on the art side and you are working with a good artist who suits you, you enjoy the work far more, and the same goes for designers. Especially when team members can lighten each other’s work, it is as good as it gets.

To work solo and actually keep yourself going you need at least 5-6 years in the industry, a tolerance for a permanently high and wearing pace, an understanding of the commercial side and, most of all, you need to pay a price. I paid mine with 2 failed studios and by giving up plenty in my private life. Learning failure in its different layers before success arrives is what keeps you from getting drunk on it.

Finishing one game is one thing, being able to follow it up is another. There are people who make serious money with their first game, of course, but sustainability is a completely different job. It is far easier with a team.