If you want to see more of the nitty gritty, there are tons of devlog series on YouTube where you can watch people put together a game from scratch. GMTK’s series is pretty good, though keep in mind that he started with an audience so he had some advantages along the way!

Sacred Forest is another fun series I’ve been following, and ThinMatrix’s channel is popular and has already made a few games. Miziziziz also has a few series but I recommend his 4 devs 1 art kit jam series because it shows how a lot of small games can be made quickly

Look at the gource utility commit visualization history of some open source games.

The process of making a game on your own involves failing to make the first 10 games you try to make on your own.

Ultimately, it sounds like you already have a good handle on everything that goes into it, and are just hoping to hear it’s not actually as hard as you think it is… it is hard. Know that going in, and assess if you will be able to do it. But give yourself a bit of benefit, getting most of the way tends to increase your resiliance to the final hurdles.

Just like anything else, one chunk at a time.

You can start with a story and build the game off of that, or you can start with the gameplay and build up from there.

Sometimes you just have to start, and see where it goes. Pick an engine and start building something, don’t be afraid to throw it all out and start over from what you’ve learned so far. Make a game that has some of the elements you want to use and try it out, then throw it out and make a different game with other bits. Start small and work up.

The biggest problem is thinking it has to be perfect to move on to the next part.

You can commission art, or you can buy some models and just use those.

You can also just build everything from the ground up, but it would be hard to do that for your first project.

I recommend reading about Daisuke Amaya (a.k.a Studio Pixel) and his creation, Cave Story.

He made the game in the course of five years and moved to a less intensive and low pay job to work on the game. The man made the art, soundtrack, the program he used to compose and render the said soundtrack and the fucking game engine. He’s also called “The father of indie games”

https://www.cavestory.org

One thing I’ll throw out there is while there are rare cases where a solo dev really does everything themselves, when you see a really ambitious looking result from a supposedly solo dev, it’s very likely they either contracted things out, bought/found assets, or had on and off help from people. It’s only solo in the sense it’s their vision and they get to put things together/make all the final calls on the game.

Making stuff solo is hard. I’m doing it right now and I’m purposely trying to use a lot of stock assets for art and music because the game alone is already a massive task by itself. Don’t be afraid to use what’s out there. If your game feels good to play most people will never worry about whether you hand built every blade of grass. In other words, go for as small a scope as you can, and don’t be afraid to cut corners.

Either you learn how to make the assets, use free ones, buy them or commission someone.

Hard to believe, because it’s such a high quality product. But every asset used in Diarrhea 4 was free. Apart from the fart noises. Those were made entirely by me.

Narrow scope.

I was a pro game developer for 19 years, more or less. After my last job ended, I self-published an indie game. To this day, it’s not made enough money to trigger a single payout. I failed. So it’s fair to take my advice with a grain of salt, if not a whole block. But here’s my two cents anyway.

Start by sketching and writing. Think of verbs; games are all about doing things, even if it’s just advancing through a conversation. Your protagonist is a cat, so cats run, jump, explore, play. Think of why the protagonist is doing things. Where do the missions come from? And in this case it’s hard not to look at Stray. There’s almost always something that’s come before, even if it’s not super high-profile like Stray. Think about what you want to do different.

Art will come from you, if you go it alone and can’t or don’t want to buy art assets. Blender and GIMP are hard to learn, but free and powerful.

Your engine is almost certainly going to be Unreal, Unity, or Godot. Each has strengths and weaknesses, including the cost of use. You have to factor it all in.

I do think you’re right that you’ll learn more by making things than doing tutorials, but be aware if you start spinning your wheels on something. You’ll benefit from both.

A gamedev I know who has a currently running online MMO says:

"Don’t overthink it. When I learned gamedev I learned how to display something on the screen, I learned how to move things on a screen, how to play sound effects and music, and then rolled it all together to make a simple pong game. If you can make that you can scale up from there. Buy an asset pack off of itch.io for whatever genre you want to make. "

For context this guy made his engine from scratch.

Hey, I’m also a software developer, and I dabble in game dev.

You eat an elephant one bite at a time. You’re probably already familiar with Agile, and that’s a good way to organize your project. Start small, get one thing working, and then you can iteratively add features.

If you’re interested in game design, you may want to do some reading on the subject. The Onion model for game design is highly effective. You start with a core feature, finish that feature, then add new layers by adding new features. You complete each feature before you start on the next, and this way you always have a working game. It’s fairly similar to Vertical Slices in Agile development.

As far as choosing an engine, I’ll make it easy for you and just recommend Godot. It’s FOSS and widely used in particular by solo devs. I’ve also dabbled with Unity and Unreal, which will be the other major free (but proprietary) options. Unity has less ramp-up time than Unreal, but it also has a history of screwing with its users. You’re probably familiar with vendor-lock, and that’s what you’ll be getting into if you try either of those.

You may already have the skills to build your own engine. Don’t. You’ll pull your hair out on all the edge cases and abstractions, and an off-the-shelf engine already has that figured out for you.

As far as learning to use the software, I guess that depends on your learning style. There’s books, videos, and official documentation on the web for whatever engine you decide to use. I’d recommend you use the same approach as learning any other new stack or library. For me, that often means going to the documentation’s Getting Started page and just playing around.

As you mentioned, tutorial hell is real. Don’t get me wrong, tutorials are a great way to learn the engine’s features that you aren’t already aware of. But don’t be afraid to go off-script and just play around. Sooner or later you’ll have to make your own sausage anyway.

Since you already know how to code, you’ve got a huge leg up on most beginners. The hardest part about making games is creating assets and scripting features. As far as assets go, you can certainly make them yourself, or you can outsource that work with third-party assets. While you’re learning, I’ll recommend Kenney - they’re highly regarded in the game dev community, and all of their assets are CC0 licensed so you’re free to use them even without attribution.

Good luck!

It’s essentially the “how do you eat an elephant?” question, isn’t it? Hint, if you’re not familiar with the reference, the answer is “one bite at a time.”

I’m not a game developer (yet), but would like to try it, so I’ve done a little reading about the topic. There are a couple things I’ve seen advocated that have made a lot of sense to me:

1. Don’t start with your dream game. Start with either tiny games to test specific aspects of your bigger game, or first practice developing clones of many relatively simple classic games, like pac-man, etc. This is a good resource I’ve found to help guide the latter approach: https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/challenge/

2. Don’t spend a lot of time on either programming or creating art before you playtest the heck out of your game, preferably with many people. This is what I’ve seen advocated in a popular game design textbook: https://www.gamedesignworkshop.com/ - this makes sense since the same kind of advice applies to any kind of software development and design - verify that your potential audience is actually interested in what you are trying to make before spending a ton of effort making it. I’ve seen very similar advice given in the context of solo app development and even business startups.

Good luck and have fun!

How? Blood, sweat and tears mostly.

Usually it’s recommended not to start with your “dream game”. Pick an engine (I like Godot), grab some Kenney art assets, and get to work on a pong or snake clone. This can be using written tutorials, videos, or hard mode, read the docs and piece it together.

Trying to learn a language, learn an engine, learn the art pipeline, learn game dev concepts AND dream up a new game concept with custom assets simultaneously is trying to boil the ocean. Start small: add a start menu, add a scene. Make jpg appear and move using player input, add an obstacle, add a death scene/restart. Iterate from there.

If you can’t hash out the idea then so you have a right to even try and make a game?

This is the most important thing I see here, because the answer is always ‘yes’. Of course you have the right. Start where you’re at and figure out what you need as you go along. Your first attempt might not work, but what you learn from it will be invaluable.

As far as art goes, you can either find someone who is excited to work on it with you in their spare time (difficult to find), or pay an artist whose style you like to create art for you (possibly expensive). If you do the latter, it’s best to wait until you have a clear idea of what you’ll need so you don’t end up paying for assets you won’t use.

One thing you can do right now is create a design document. This is basically just a long, detailed description of what you would like your game to be: specific mechanics and systems you want to include, what the gameplay loop will be, the audiovisual style, everything. Include images mood-board style for your future artist(s). This document will give you an idea of the assets you’ll need, as well as what you’ll need to learn as far as coding. It doesn’t have to be followed to the letter, but it’s a good place to start.

By starvation.

I am not even kidding, see indie game the movie.

Games are art and making art in this works comes with the sacrifice of not being able to afford anything until you by chance become popular.