#solo development

Hey guys, what’s up?

So been working on a new prototype for a looter shooter since I’ve been pretty into ARPGs like Diablo, as well as other looter shooters such as Borderlands.

I’ve been contacted about an interesting opportunity about a potential job using Unreal Engine to create simulations, so I am using this instead of my regular Unity. This will mainly be as a portfolio piece, but I wanted to still upload here to share what I’ve been doing.

So development with UE4 is a little slower than Unity since I am learning the framework, as well as relearning C++ since I haven’t used it much since graduating.

Here are the features I’ve added so far:

Sprinting

Basic ammo

Interaction System

I’d like to introduce one of the 12 main characters in the game I have begun to create called NOVA. This is Astrid, descendant of Taurus. 

How to Become a Solo Developer Without Starving Yourself

If you’re reading this, then chances are you want to become a solo game developer. Perhaps you dream of being the next Notch and making millions off of a single game. Maybe you’ve found the passion and drive to create your magnum opus. Or at the very least, you’re interested in what being a solo dev would entail. While it can be exciting to imagine long nights furiously debugging and coding…

I just read a blog on Gamasutra about remote teams. I work from home extensively (and have been doing so entirely recently); I found this accurate and pointed out some interesting tools to me.

BUT I have to respond to this brief mention at the end: "If you have a really big project, get source control."

I agree with this so long as "really big project" is defined as "a project that exists."

Git is a hard to wrap your head around at first, but it's free and once you grok it, you'll find what I did: it's an indispensable tool for not just a collaborative project, but for solo projects as well. The ability to locally branch your work; switch between branches; temporarily stash changes while trying something else; and do all these things without having to worry about ever losing work... these all things that are huge value-adds that even a one-man software project benefits hugely from.

All this is aside from the fact that you need to have an offsite backup of all your development work; source control also gives you this, along with a full history of your work. To me that's a first-order benefit of source control that's almost too obvious to mention, but apparently some indie teams actually do miss how important this is.