A couple blog posts ago I spitballed some vague ideas of a game I wanted to make in RPG Maker 2003. After a bit of testing I unfortunately decided that RPG Maker is TOO limited for my tastes game-design-wise and even though I said I wouldn’t use shiny graphics as a crutch, I was doing exactly that because, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t design the game to be more interesting than a glorified Pac-Man combined with an especially-grindy early Dragon Warrior/Quest RPG system.
More importantly, game design JUST isn’t something I’m interested in—I think what I really want is to design art assets for programmers, level designers and other game devs to then turn into a game that is BOTH fun and pretty to look at. I want to make the game pretty while someone with far more motivation and math/logic skills makes the actual game. At least I developed an immense respect for solo game devs after trying and failing so often to even make a Pong clone by my lonesome—personally, I think game development takes even MORE time and sacrifice than even traditional frame-by-frame 2D animation and anyone that is not discouraged by that reality and finishes a game anyway, especially without a decent-sized team to delegate tasks to, is super-human to me.
The good news is that I’m just going to shift my focus instead to drastically improving my 3D art and animation skills and continuing to work on my portfolio so I can actually get an industry job with my skills. Specifically, I am currently working on a nice 3D version of Stinkums the cat here:
I’m going to finally start working again tomorrow, so I need to start budgeting my time again to avoid burnout and I feel continuing to get my 3D skills to a better level and making more small-but-highly-polished cartoons is a better use of my “personal projects” time right now. One thing at a time…
TheMiamiDeSantos
yo dude that's cool, i did imagine that making an actual good game all by yourself would be harder than be a one man studio and do a whole cartoon all by yourself. I remember when i was a teen i was waiting for a dude make a pokemon cursed black exe game, he was doing everything by himself i think he never finished it, years and one dude couldn't do a b/w gameboy game, so it must be hard as shit do to a good game
jthrash
Yeah, I’ve made plenty of cartoons by myself since I was about 15, but clearly doing even the most basic of games requires a decent-sized team, AND being willing to stick to a single project for at least 3 years. Still, I feel a lot of the best games these days are made by teams that are not TOO big, I’m even more impressed when a so-called “triple A” game made by hundreds of people and a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t turn into a confused, buggy mess.
It’s also kind of a matter of accessibility. Not everybody can play challenging video games, not everybody gets the appeal of old-school RPGs like the ones made in RPG Maker, but it’s the easiest thing in the world to put aside one minute to watch a quick, funny cartoon.