2020 was quite an exciting year that I can only hope has solidified the building blocks of a foundation to build from. A lot of work has been done on one project that was the main focus for the year. While so much more is left to be done it has been quite the journey so far.

2019

In 2019 I had started my desire to get into game development with Hello World. Being so passionate about gaming my entire life I had enough of just playing them. I finally wanted to start down the path of success in building one.

2019 was not the first time I had a desire to start work on making a game. Every attempt before then usually only lasted a couple of weeks. While this attempt was much longer trying to learn quite a few basics. Nothing ended getting done on the game front other than some basic thoughts on making a game.

I had plans to work with several people around me that also wanted to make a game. I ended up being the only one who seemed to want it enough to put a lot of time in trying to understand a lot of basic things like some c++, world-building, animation, effects, advertisement, and many other topics.

That year also had quite a basic project to get things going. Which was going to be making a discord bot. That would help fill some basic needs and desires in a discord community for the future games we were going to develop.

At the end of 2019, I ended up going off on my own and coming with a game that was entirely different than anything talk with some others I was hoping to make one with.

2020

In 2020 I had enough of never getting anywhere in making a game. I knew from doing a fair amount of research it was going to take several years to pull off what I wanted. I also knew I’d have to work on it during the late hours of the night, times when I wanted nothing to do with game development and make quite a lot of personal sacrifices to come up with the time.

2020 was quite a harsh year for so many people including myself. Outside of a couple of weeks here or there I made sure to put some kind of effort into my game at least weekly. I used what was consider a very unproductive and hard year for so many and turned it into getting a lot of stuff done in my game.

I set myself quite an aggressive schedule that was grueling to keep up with. Many times I would finish one giant task and I had to jump into the next with very little sleep just to try to stay on pace. While I did my best to post about it on Enjar and those posts have been reblogged on Enjargames. That was not always the case.

At some point during the year, I wrote down what was in my mind into an actual plan. While it has been written in some form or another in several places I eventually settled on creating a roadmap on Trello.

The further I started to understand what I needed to do and found my rhythm the more detailed my roadmap become. It sounds silly that checking off that I had completed one of the eight things I had estimable for myself on that roadmap for just creating a zone kept me going but it did.

There were several occasions where I hit the wall and quite hard. I just either could not understand what I needed to do or nothing would work in the way I wanted. Other times I just did not have any creative energy left in my soul to create another zone, come up with an item's name, or even think about future things I needed to start learning that day.

At one point I even shuffled around my roadmap as I was falling behind. If I recall I had one task I was over a month off on finishing and had not even started it. Another one months out I rescheduled for a later date. I then went onto the next task and ended up completing it early enough so I circled back around and started knocking out like I was using a hammer what I had been struggling with.

While there are two weeks left in the year at the time I started writing this post. I’ll be about a month ahead of schedule. I’m even going to be a bit easy on myself and enjoy these last few days of the year. I’ll still be doing a little I just won’t be forcing myself as I have been.

Year 1 Accomplishment For My First Major Project

I almost can’t believe I started this project on January first and the time is fast approaching for this year to be done. So much learning and failure throughout the year of 2020. It’s quite shocking how much I was able to get done.

A lot of things started quite basic. I spent so much time in my first zone following guides online and failing several times. Over time I found my voice as it were and started plowing forward. While a lot of time was spent looking up information, troubleshooting bugs, and swearing. So much was completed as well.

I knew for certain one way I would accomplish things was do the unspeakable and share my experience online on my other account-- Enjar. It all started with Unknown WIP. The moment I pressed the publish button for that post I knew there was no going back.

And no going back it was. In total 20 zones were made in 2020. Some of them even have monsters to kill and loot tables with different items in them. In others, I have not gotten around to that yet and it’s listed for things to get done in 2021 on my road map. While not all of it is as bug-free as I like and some things I have even disabled and will be reworking in 2021 and beyond. These were all quite an accomplishment to get done for being a solo game developer.

That can be seen in the below posts talking about each of the different zones.

While world-building is quite fun in a game and I’ve quite enjoyed that a lot with a fair amount more to do. That is not the only thing that makes up a game. That is just where a large amount of my time was spent in 2020. You can spend many hours giving the player just 1 minute of run time. Many of those maps take 10 to 15 minutes before you take into account killing monsters and other stuff.

A game also requires the ability to a portal to another zone at least in mine. While I have some of the basics in there is quite a lot of stuff involved in zone changes. Some of which I’ll hopefully be addressing in 2021 and beyond like saving zone states and character data.

Speaking of characters you need a character selection screen, passive skill tree, player attacks, objects they can interact with, items they can loot, animations, NPCs they can interact with for things like questing and the list goes on and on. That was all quite a lot to stubble though in 2020.

I knew going into it many of the things I was working on were not going to be perfect or even close to being final. That is why part of 2021 will be spent overhauling quite a few different elements of what I have already done. You can read and think about how you are going to do something forever. Doing them is a whole another story sometimes you just got get through the process so you have that opportunity and experience to do them better later on.

I also spent quite a large amount of time working on lighting. The quest for the lighting I want is far from over. Rebuilding lighting is also quite a time-intensive step. I have some zones that took half an hour and others over 6 hours just to rebuild the lighting once at lower settings. I’m not willing to put up the expense for a render farm and I know the final lighting results could take days for my current system to compute when the time comes per zone.

We all have played games that felt like zero effort was put into optimization. While I’m not working with high-resolution textures and meshes that is also something I put some effort into in 2020. Some zones had some really bad fps and I accomplished improving them greatly such as the work I did in my Insanity realm optimization.

There are also some quite terrifying moments of game development. When you have worked on a lot of stuff and decide it’s time to compile and export the game and see how bad things are. I’ve learned every time I want to do so they could take me over a day of troubleshooting just to get them to work. I have at least seen the Build Successful text a few times.

While this does cover quite a large bulk of what I accomplished in 2020 as far as working on my game goes. Not everything made it into a post and some things I’m keeping to myself for now. For the most part, there is a checkmark somewhere on my roadmap and maybe even a link out to a blog post as well. I have also learned part of the battle is just staying motivated to keep going forward.

Cost

Games are not cheap to make. They can cost you a lot of money and time. For now, I’m at least trying to keep my expenses as cheap as possible. With 2020 being 2020 it was time I put the most into making my game.

In total so far I have spent $411.21. Which for the first year I have to say seems quite reasonable. I purchased several developer Humble Bundles, some stuff out of the Unreal Engine store, along with paying for several software licenses. Finally, I ended up buying some extra storage as making a game and having backups takes up quite a lot of space for what I’m doing.

There is also just no getting around it the cost of time. From my best estimate, I spent around 2,511 hours in the first year learning and working on my game. Even if I undercut what a “game developer” hourly rate is supposed to be in my area that is quite a sizeable chunk of change worth of time. All the different hats I wore to do what I’ve done so far would not have been cheap to hire out.

I’m hoping in 2021 I can keep my budget for making this game rather in check as well. As I’m a realist giving myself a release date of Q4 2023 for this game. This sounds like a long time till you realize my game has and 30k files and I have quite a ways to go. While a lot of that has to do with Unreal Engine itself and the end player won’t have that many files in their game. It’s quite a lot.

Beyond Just One Project

There is a lot of things I want to do. Perhaps in 2021, I’ll start working on some of them as well. Other things will have to wait till my big main project is complete. I do not want to spread myself too thin like I’ve seen so many who seem to start up a new project every other week that they will never finish.

Running a Hive witness is still something on the list to do one day. It was not in the budget for 2020 to do so. Perhaps Hive will have a nice price increase in 2021 and I’ll fund it that way. If not I expect I will after I have some games up and running.

My main project is going to take years and be quite a massive thing to keep going and working on. It is tempting to want to make a simpler and easier to make a game in the shorter term as well. That would give me a better understanding of how to do complex things on a smaller scale that I have yet to work out. Along with giving myself some opportunity to raise funds to ensure my larger project has the cash when I start entering more expensive cycles towards the end.

I also have not completely abandoned the idea of wanting to make a discord bot. I think it is a nice little side project. It should also be quite cheap to run per month.

There is also the fact I’m not building my dream game today. Far too many seem to want to start with this insane idea that they are going to build their all-time dream game day one. I don’t see that being an attainable goal as a solo indie developer. I also see it costing a couple of million dollars at the very least to hire out the team and cover costs. While I don’t expect it to take hundreds of employees and 10 years like some games do. It’s still going to require a lot and I’m far from being ready for such an undertaking.

Final Thoughts

For what 2020 was I wanted to make the most of it for what could have been done when it comes to some of my goals in life. So many just sat around, did nothing, got fat, and complained about things on the internet. I have a feeling 2021 going to be a long year as well and it turns out I have so much more to work on my game. Cheers to building the future you want in life.

Information

Screenshot were taken and content was written by @Enjar of @Enjargames. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 4.

Project 1 roadmap

EnjarGames End Of Year Statement