I'm considering becoming a full time indie game developer within the next two years. I plan to perform most of the work myself. I work as a programmer and would likely use Unity to create a 2D side scrolling game. I've been working on my artistic skills for the last 6 years, so I plan to create the art as well.

The main concern I have is the possibility of getting in over my head. What I need to know is what's a feasible scope of game for one person to complete in 12-15 months? Are their any examples of indie 2D side scrolling games created by one developer within that time frame?

One bit of advice I learned several years ago is to grow into this gradually.

Estimate what you can do in one month. Then set a date of 30 days away. Build your project for 30 days. When you get to the end of 30 days, stop.

Evaluate what you did in 30 days. DO NOT CONTINUE THAT PROJECT. It is done.

Based on your experience, estimate what you can do in one month. Then set another date for 30 days away. Build for 30 days. After 30 days, stop.

Again, evaluate what you did in 30 days. Do not continue that project. It is done.

Repeat this for about six months.

Now you will have a solid understanding of what you can do in a given amount of time. Now you can start yet another project. It is okay to plan this one a little bigger, maybe have aspirations for it to be four or six months big, but only plan out for the first month. Plan out that single month knowing what the last six months have taught you, then build for one month. Then build another one-month plan, build it out for a single month. Repeat.

For more than two years I was on a team that was building products for a major online store. Each programming team would launch a new set of online objects about every month, so we would have releases every two weeks. At any given time each programmer would have two projects in various states of completion. One might be in design while another is being polished. One might be in main development while the other is in final verification and testing. Since there was exactly one person of each discipline on the team, and we were responsible for our own estimates, we very quickly learned how much we could accomplish.

After a few months each of us were adept at estimating exactly how long a feature would take. At the end of two years, because were working with a stable code base doing variations on the same task every two weeks, we could typically estimate within a few hours how long a particular task would take.

It is the best way I know to learn how much you can accomplish in a given length of time.

Going off famous two-man indie games according to Wikipedia:

* Braid took about 1 year to reach feature completion, but 3 years until it was released.

* Super Meat Boy took 3 months to prototype and 2 years to release.

So, smaller scope than those?

frob +1, and my two cents:

I'm currently doing my full-time indie business venture, so I have some advice.

The most important aspect is, that you have to be able to ship. You have to ship games! This may sound silly, but for 5 to 6 years I've been planning my indie adventure (always putting some money aside for it) and I only shipped 2 complete games in this period of my life during the last year. I kind-of feel like it wasn't enough practice, but oh well, at least one can learn from mistakes...

I'm not talking about making a cool prototype, and I'm certainly not talking about tech and features. I'm talking about full, feature complete products, which can be found by gamers online (or in any kind-of store) and can be installed (if it is not a browser game :wink: ) on their device (be it desktop pc or an android phone) and can be played. The number of started projects does not count at all!!! For this plan of yours to succeed you need to be able to have a grasp about the whole process. All the way from planning the project, production/development to marketing and releasing it (and further supporting it for that matter). I know a shitload of people who went for it the other way around, so they went head on never completing anything before, but I know of no one who succeeded this way :( .

If you have never ever completed and put a game on a store (like itch.io, Steam, google play etc...), stop right now and do it!!! This should be the number one thing your learn/experience before trying anything bigger. Otherwise you are most probably doomed to fail. You have to go into this with a mind-set that you can deliver, that you can make the full thing from A to Z.

Now about this project you are going to complete: it can be small, heck it should be a small one. As frob mentioned, a month of practice helps an immense amount regarding your estimation and management skills. Create (and maybe even sell) a game in less than a month. If you can't do it, try it again and again until you have the whole skill set figured out. My first project with this goal was Memorynth. I made it when I realized the same thing (pretty late by the way :( ). I planned it would take around 2 weeks of full-time work (80 hours) from creating the project files, the design documentation and my estimation excel tables, to uploading it to itch.io and posting about it's release on forums. It took almost 3 weeks of full-time work (110 hours) so it wasn't a bad result, but only due to cutting my scope down until I was sure I can deliver in a month. I wholeheartedly suggest you try the same thing. You can always increase the scope of the project, if you feel it is necessary. Decreasing it is much harder especially when you are late for a given goal or milestone.

You need to learn and practice all the aspects of game development before you try to do it for a living. Do not try to figure this out while you are doing it, or you risk spending a lot of money on nothing.

Hope this helps, br.

What is your backup plan, in case your project doesn't make any money?

Game development is a risky business investment, and chances are the first few projects you produce won't break even unless you're extremely lucky or a marketing genius. This being the case, do you have something to fall back on financially to keep you afloat during the bad times until you reach the good times?

What is your backup plan, in case your project doesn't make any money?

Game development is a risky business investment, and chances are the first few projects you produce won't break even unless you're extremely lucky or a marketing genius. This being the case, do you have something to fall back on financially to keep you afloat during the bad times until you reach the good times?

^ this ^

For a while the holy grail was get you game on steam but even that is probably not what it used to be. I remember watching the film about indie games and the Super Meat Boy guys were saying most of their sales would come from when they were on the front page of steam after initial release. I get the feel that green light will have broken that now as there is a tsunami of crap on steam now, most indie. So unless you have a unique breakout game it will be hard to rise above the rest

I'm considering becoming a full time indie game developer within the next two years.

Well you have 2 years to learn. Unless you mean in 2 years you want to be profitable enough with your game to go full-time. Or do you have money saved up to start full-time in 2 years?

There are a lot of games out there. You have to be unique. You will need art and programming that doesn't just look like garbage. I would check out "indie game the movie" just for entertainment. It's totally doable. I was good enough to program after 2 years to do any type of 2D game for sure. You just have to dive in and start solving the basic problems 1 by 1. There are game engines now as well (Unity, Unreal), though doing full-time indie they will take some of your profit.

At the end of they day any dream is possible with hard work. However many people just dream and are lazy. Just don't be lazy. It takes a lot of time. Lets say it would take me 1000 hours to make a complete 2d game with art and programming. 1000/40 = 25 weeks. I don't know how well that number is as I don't have a GDD in front of me to plan out a game and scope it, but just using that as a decent number you can see how much dedication is at hand.

Going off famous two-man indie games according to Wikipedia:

* Braid took about 1 year to reach feature completion, but 3 years until it was released.

* Super Meat Boy took 3 months to prototype and 2 years to release.

So, smaller scope than those?

Yeah. It would have to be smaller. I don't know if I could work on a game for over two years on my own.

If I did try attempt making a game of the same scope as the ones you mentioned, you think people would be willing to buy games in 'episodes'? By this I mean breaking up a larger game into pieces that could be sold as updates. That way, the time between starting and completing something would be significantly reduced.

What is your backup plan, in case your project doesn't make any money?

Game development is a risky business investment, and chances are the first few projects you produce won't break even unless you're extremely lucky or a marketing genius. This being the case, do you have something to fall back on financially to keep you afloat during the bad times until you reach the good times?

I have a decent safety net. Assuming I could complete a game withing 1-2 years,I wouldn't be in the desperate situation you see in some indie game postmortems, even if it doesn't sell.

I get the feel that green light will have broken that now as there is a tsunami of crap on steam now, most indie.

That's not relevant. It doesn't hurt anyone for those extra games to be on there because they're rarely making it to the front page at all.

Also, this makes the fallacious assumption that 'my' work is losing out due to 'other' people's crap; but obviously every developer thinks their work is deserving and the other stuff is not. So now we get a pattern where someone release ssomething that everyone else thinks is crap, but complain that other people's crap is what stopped it selling.

Formerly, only good stuff was on there, so it sold pretty well. Those developers did well because their games were good; not because of the absence of bad games on there.