Should GameDevs make more projects?

[u/nutexproductions]

I’ve been looking at game devs which were making games in the flash era, and noticed a very common occurance.

Many of them made a shitload of projects, for example Cactus (dev behind hotline Miami) made around 20 projects in just about 2 years.

Even Edmund McMillen did a shitload of projects, granted he said it himself that it was for money.

Because of which this question arose to me, even after making around 8 projects now, should i just keep making more and really short polished prototypes and share them.

Or should I make something bigger? What is your guys opinion on this, and if so when do you know when to make a bigger project?

[u/mxldevs]

Well the idea is you pump out 20 products and hope some of them make money. In the worst case, 20 of them make $100 each and now you're up $2000, instead of trying to find a big hit that can make $2000 on its own.

Many of the games I played on kongregate, the author made one or two games and that was it. Of course, there were the ones making a lot more, but it's not like the majority of gamedevs were just pumping out games every month.

[u/nutexproductions → u/mxldevs]

The thing I’m seeing though is that some of them did end up making great games when they put time and effort into a bigger project after that many small ones ends up in a great polished game.

Which is where my question comes from

[u/mxldevs → u/nutexproductions]

Small games still provide insight that can be applied towards larger games. It could simply be a proof of concept that was good enough to be packaged as its own mini-game.

This is why we tell new gamedevs to go work on stupid small things instead of jumping in on their dream game only to then come back in 3 years asking "so when do I market my game?" and "How do I get an audience?"

[u/TangerineSliceGames]

I've made over 75 games, starting when I was 9 years old. It was a great exercise in scoping and trying out a lot of different ideas. You learn breadth by making a lot of small games, and, on the other hand, learn a lot of depth by creating a few large games; I'm working on my first commercial title now, and I've learned so much by going deep into just one game. The answer largely depends on what experience you want out of your game dev journey, given that there are ways to earn money with either approach.

[u/thedaian]

The common advice is to make multiple small games before making a bigger project. 

There isn't really a specific number of games you need to make, though. The path from "multiple small games" to "bigger game" looks different for everyone. If you have a big game in mind, you create smaller games that contains pieces of that big game. Otherwise, maybe you turn the small game that had the most success into a big game. Or one day, you just.... Start working on the big game.

[u/destinedd]

You learn more and can always make them bigger. In a world where AI is accelerating everything making something with a multi year cycle is scary.

[u/TricksMalarkey]

I think the era of simple cheap games is untenable now, or at least in 98% of cases.

First, the number of games released makes visibility really difficult. On Steam alone, there's ~700 games released each week, and this is through a quality-first application process. And anything you release is not just in competition with those 700, but you're competing against the entire catalogue on any given platform.

In the Flash era, websites hosted maybe a few hundred games. By the time you filtered genres, you'd at least have a shot of having your game show up to someone, somewhere in the list.

Second, the casual market is fractured 3 ways, between iOS, Android, and web/PC. This might seem trivial, maybe even beneficial, but it's kind of detrimental to the fast turnaround pipeline. Each of these has different design requirements (PC allows more complex interactions through hotkeys, mobile is touch only), but also different pipeline requirements. Having to adapt, test, bugfix on 3 platforms would take about 4x longer than the development of the simple game.

Third, it's a little work for you to make something quick and easily, go through the testing phase to get it working well enough to release. Now that you've done the hard part of establishing a concept, it's trivial for the Shovelware makers to copy your design, put actual money to advertising it, and displace you in the algorithms.

I'm not saying don't make small things. But it needs to be big enough to weather the conditions you're publishing it in.

[u/fsk]

I'm thinking the sweet spot is something you think will take 3-12 months. Of course "what you can finish in 6 months" increases as you get more experience. Longer than a year, now you aren't releasing often enough. Smaller than 3 months, now you're only making superficial simple games.

[u/themode7]

Don't turn this into hypercasual games the market is already full of that ..

Quality > QUANTITY

[u/nutexproductions → u/themode7]

Yes exactly, I don’t want to do quantity over quality.

But at the same time, many of those people when you go through the names of newgrounds or kongregate did so many small games.

Granted again it was for money, but also the skills you get from making small dumb shit in such quantity have to go into many skills, which makes me wonder

Should we make more games instead of looking at one project for few months

[u/themode7 → u/nutexproductions]

If you are into learning sure why not but if you vibe coding you probably wouldn't learn much .. aiside from that one could for examlle develop infinite games from fairly simple mechanics or even create a platform that create games .