Hey! My name is Almar, I’m a solo game developer. After working for almost 10 years as a game programmer on games I’d rather forget, I got burned out and left gamedev entirely. Five years later I felt I hadn’t tried everything I wanted to do with videogames, so I became a solodev and here we are!
The original pitch for REPUNK was “GTA 3 on Mars”. A seemingly “simple” idea that evolved into something more complex - I didn’t want to have violence or simply replicate GTA’s style of gameplay, so I started designing how a human civilization might develop on Mars (and when!).
From there it organically grew up into something way too difficult to achieve on my own, so I decided to reduce the scope and tell a story that takes place many years later - a relaxed adventure where you explore the remnants of the first human “city” on Mars, and figure out what happened to them.
It is still an “open world” game in a sense and you do drive around, but it’s much closer to an off-road walking simulator. It has multiple endings and paths for you to choose, and quite a lot of lore hinting at what the original world was meant to be. One day I’d like to go back and still make that original idea.
I worked on REPUNK for 2 years and 2 months, so it was a long path to release (it released on Steam the 17th of June, 2024).
It was the first time I worked solo on everything - specially on a project of this size. As for the development itself, I had to “pivot” multiple times, trying to find what the game needed to be; a couple times I started from scratch.
I am very happy about the whole process and how the game turned out to be, but I must confess that if I started the game right now, I would have done everything differently (and definitely won’t be using Unity any more).
I decided to use Unity, because I thought it would allow me to work faster, get access to many plugins and ready-to-use-assets and most importantly: I thought porting to consoles would be trivial, and using an established engine would make it easier for publishers to be interested in it. Sadly none of the points above turned out to be true, but I learned a lot while making it.
Not knowing what I didn’t know! After almost 10 years working as a game developer, I thought I knew how to make games. This is true, but I had no idea about everything else that goes into making games on your own: marketing, localization, QA, trailers, publishing… I really had no idea how many things I didn’t know back when I started. I don’t regret any of it, but making games is definitely way more complex than just “making a game” (specially for indies).
Yes! Iterate as fast as you can. This doesn’t mean to try to work as fast as you can, but to get the game out of your head in the shortest amount of time possible, and as soon as it’s half playable - give it to people. Seriously. The fun only begins when people start reacting to it - the mindset shifts a lot from “this is the game I want to make” to “these are the things I need to do so people have fun”.
It’s liberating in a way knowing that you won’t be working on features (or bugs ugh) you think you have to fix, but rather improve the game based on what people report. Obviously one has to carefully assess whether all feedback makes sense (and is doable!) but it helps a lot, both your game and your spirit.
And also, prototype everything separately. I know this sounds like overkill, but aesthetics and gameplay should go in separate pipelines. I changed the whole aesthetic for the game (including every single 3D model, textures and shaders; even at one point I moved from Unity built-in to HDRP and back…) multiple times, as well as the gameplay loop. Every major change took me from 3 to 6 months - just to have something “running” back again, not even a finished game.
Art and gameplay need to be super tight and work together - but reworking either your art or the features on the final game has an exponential cost in time. Prototype each separately and as soon as you have both working, mix them together for the final game and just follow a regular “production” pipeline afterwards (ie. work adding and refining content, not starting over).
- If you are reading this and want to make games - don’t despair!
Starting a career in gamedev right now seems impossible: even studios who are earning billions keep shrinking; tens of thousands of games are published every year. Competition seems impossible to overcome.
But… There are billions of players right now, everywhere, looking for cool new games. Many of them will definitely vibe to your style and your games. You don’t need to sell millions of copies to survive (although that would be awesome, won’t deny that!) - just find your audience. It’s tricky, I know, but it’s very much doable. You aren’t a corporation - you don’t need to sell as one to keep running.
Be nimble, be yourself, and you will be OK. Just prepare your mind to endure the process: launching a single game that would sustain your career is something super difficult. This could very much be you (nice to meet you, future titan of gamedev!), but it’s also adding a risk that is too great to overlook. I personally don’t like betting everything I have on a single thing that might not work out.
Accepting that you are doing this in the long run will make things way easier (and better) for you. See this as an artist: you aren’t making “a game”, but a “body of work”, a catalogue of awesome games that only you can make. And I know you will make it.
-Almar
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2677690/REPUNK/
❤️
