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Take my cynical pov with a pinch of salt... I left (indie?) gamedev to get a normal job, and have been much better off both mentally and financially. In addition to what hesdeadjim said, I'd also like to add don't blindly accept the common gamedev maxims. For example, "Make the game YOU want to play" is repeated as good advice, but I haven't found it to be very useful. First off, if I'm working as the sole developer and have total control over design decisions, it's easier to follow that advice than if I'm working with multiple people who all play different genres of games. A lot of the time people will only use gamedev-jargon to back up their design decisions (immersion, positive feedback, vertical slices, etc), which are hard to argue about because they're so subjective and ill-defined. Also, keep in mind how many times Level 1 gets tested. At a certain point, no matter how excited I am about the game, I'm going to get sick of playing it. From that point on, I'm no longer developing a game I want to play. I'm developing a game I should want to play but don't (I think this adds a lot to burnout). Maybe start the project as a game you want to play, but make peace with the fact that it's ultimately not for you to enjoy playing. It's for the players. You're very likely going to be sick of the game by the time it ships. "Make it juicy" and "avoid premature optimizations" are more maxims with limited use, and are even contradictory in a lot of instances. For juice/polish: Focus on the core gameplay mechanics. Once those are set in stone, make them juicy if you want/have the time. A juicy boring game is still a boring game. For performance/optimization: If a core part of your game is having 10,000 enemies on the screen at once, you're going to have to make design decisions based on performance at the very beginning of development. Kinda related: I've shipped a game where at the beginning of development, I suggested using Multiple Render Targets (we were doing deferred rendering with the XNA Framework) to speed up the rendering (instead of rendering everything, switching render targets, rendering everything again, switching render targets, repeat...) but the lead dev took the "avoid premature optimizations" maxim to heart, and we ended up with a significantly hobbled final product on PS4s and lower-end PCs. I guess I could have gone into "crunch mode" and rewrote the entire rendering pipeline to make up for poor decisions at the start of the project, but I wasn't willing to do that. It was my dream to make games from the age of probably 13 to ~28. I'm 35 now, and am not all that interested in games any more. I enjoy doing "gamedev" as a hobby, because I've realized my preferred method of "playing" is to program little toys I can tinker with for a few hours and then abandon. I also have MDD, so YMMV. Best of luck, though. |