Almost every time I see a halfway polished “solo developer” game, they did not do all the work themselves. Especially, they usually hire out the music, maybe other sounds, and much of the artwork. Sometimes they also have freelancers doing marketing and such. Sometimes even some paid help writing the software.
I highlight this not to bring those developers down, but because I think it’s important people understand how these things actually come to be, so they aren’t discouraged to try themselves by thinking they ought to actually be doing 100% of the work solo. That’s pretty rare.
I depends on the background. I'm 2 years into solo developing a game and all programming, artwork and animation is my own. I had to invest into quite some learning to make it possible, but I figured it's a worthwhile investment.
I do work with a composer, though.
Point being, it depends on which skills you bring to the table, which ones you are willing to learn and which ones are worth collaborating on.
I still think the term Solo-developer is justified in any case. The one who soley carries the burden of bringing the game from idea to the finish line is the solo developer, IMHO.
If a project is far more work than one person can do (as this train simulator obviously is), the term solo developer is no more justified than it would have been if Steve Jobs claimed to have solo-developed the iPhone, even if he could have justified saying he "brought the iPhone from idea to the finish line."
I don't know about this particular developer but I don't think there is anything "obviously" out of scope. I've worked in the animation industry and creating hard surface models with this quality is not really that hard for a skilled artist. As such I still stand by the opinion that it could be a solo effort depending on the developers background/skill.
So you need the solo developer not to contract out or buy in existing music, graphics, 3D assets, animations, marketing, or you won't call them a solo developer.
Right, so do you also need them to create the 3D engine or are they allowed that off the shelf? Oh, they need to make it themselves. You're strict!
Ok, so they're allowed to write for a platform? Oh, no they're not, that's relying on other people's code.
And writing in an existing language? Tsk tsk tsk. Got to invent the programming language yourself, otherwise you need to list the entire GCC/LLVM team as your collaborators on the game.
They have to create their own silicon too, it's cheating to rely other people's chips, how can you call yourself "solo"?
Are they allowed to sell it on Steam or do they need to build their own store and payment networks? Heck, should they get themselves accredited as a payment network. Oh, and as a bank.
And presumably, if the game needs to be translated to any language other than the developer's own, they have to do that translation themselves, right? Not rely on experts in that language. Can't really be a "solo" dev that way, can you?
And so on.
Building a game involves effort, and millions of decisions. Is the gameplay right? Is the story right? Are the graphics right? Design the characters, the levels, the world. Make the game run. Make the game available?
I can accept that solo developers will sometimes make the graphics/music/"assets" themselves, sometimes buy off the shelf, sometimes pay others. But unless they hire that person full time to collaborate on the game... they're still the solo developer.
They will definitely lean on existing 3D engines, libraries, plugins, font engines... and that reminds me, I've almost never seen a game developer design their own fonts. These reusable components can be used in games, and some are even intended to (e.g. engine plugins). But do they define the game experience? Generally, no. That's on the game developer.
So if Bethesda fires all its developers and then gets its next game made by hiring those same developers as independent contractors, then Bethesda would be a solo developer?
The perception of what a polymath is is changing incredibly fast, as both the floor and ceiling for being passable or outstanding in any field is rising exponentially. For the last 50-oddish years, it's been the case that being proficient with a single piece of software can make you an invaluable asset in industry; understanding the concepts behind the software and the problems it solves even moreso. Rather recently, we've reached a point where software ergonomics, freely available education and information, and even AI assistance in development or usage have lowered this floor in terms of cost, knowledge, effort, and skill. For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.
The domains of different crafts are ever-expanding, including all of their history and all new developments, of which new developments seem to be coming at an ever-increasing pace as populations grow, internet access grows, and the free time of populations spent doing things other than merely surviving grows. There is a larger and broader base of knowledge necessary for a person to be considered competent in the current state of anything, and the number of disciplines is also increasing. Two decades ago, having a person specializing in frontend development for a specific web browser would have been unthinkable.
All of this work is built upon the backs of other people. Game engines, 3d modeling and texturing and animating, language design and implementation, audio software and sound design, graphics libraries, runtime optimizations, operating system APIs, networking improvements, distribution networks, etc. etc.. To think that any one person could possibly create everything they use to then create these final products, no matter the scale they are, is ignorant.
> For example, it's trivially easier today to create a 3d animation than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago, and the visual quality of it would be similarly disproportionately better.
True, but this also means that the bar has risen for animations in general, so while you might be able to create animations today as an amateur that is even better than the animations just five years ago, it still won't come close to what professionals can actually achieve today.
Your very last point speaks a lot to me though, almost every effort people are amazed by have at least two people involved, indirectly or directly, and attempting things like this on your own would be a fool's errand.
Solo developer just means they developed the game themselves, not made it all themselves. I'm not sure how you could write what you wrote without that occurring to you.
Absolutely not obvious to me, especially since I have heard a lot of solo dev stories that insist it was purely a 1-person project. And it’s true in some cases.
In that case, please, define "developed the game" for us. Is doing all the programming "developing" the game? Is coming up with the game design and hiring programmers "developing" the game?
What if you hire voice actors for each of the characters? And level designers? And animators? At what point does it stop being a solo project? Only when outside investors get involved? Or does it only stop being "solo" if those investors demand board seats? Or can it _still_ be considered "solo" even then?
Should they avoid doing that because it’s working really well at putting their opponents in a bad spot, while costing them almost nothing?
Those ships are bearing goods from (or taking goods to) countries that are hosting US forces attacking them. They’re valid targets, and blockading their shipping… I mean, the US does that to countries that haven’t even helped attack us, seems insane to suggest it’s somehow a foul to do that to countries that are helping attack you.
> A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
Yeah, between military (active, dependents, retired, et c), elected officials who get government-paid healthcare (in any level of government), government workers (all levels, city, county, state, federal), and school workers (primary, secondary, public colleges and universities), and Medicare (old people), and Medicaid plus CHIP (poor people), and probably some others I’m forgetting, the US engages in as much government per-capita healthcare spending as some peer states do on their national healthcare schemes… but without covering everyone. However, the government does already cover a huge proportion of the population, including some of the most expensive (old people), at least partially. And that’s not counting government spending on contractors that take some of that money and pay for their workers’ healthcare with it.
It’s just split up across thousands of different budgets, instead of one.
> The tailings from the mining operations are referred to as “chat” and were deposited into massive piles of small rock. We would play in these “chat piles” as a kid. Probably exposing ourselves to heavy amounts of lead and zinc dust.
I spent countless hours as a kid swimming in flooded coal mining strip pits, collecting fossils from those exact sorts of piles you mention (there's some cool shit there! They dig up so many layers so you get stuff separated by tens or hundreds of millions of years all accessible on the surface, shell fossils were extremely abundant and there were some sections full of fossil ferns of the same species more often associated with Illinois) and if I biked a couple miles down an arrow-straight road from our house, I could see an operating coal power plant in the distance, pumping nastiness into the air.
> It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.
Especially when the area is extremely flat. Town I lived in (near, but not, Galena), the only places it was possible to snow-sled were man-made, with the only publicly-accessible one being the banks of the sole road overpass for miles around (I wanna say it went over railroad tracks? But it might have been another highway, regardless it had a remarkably long ramp-up to the actual part where it crossed over the other thing, and that left plenty of space for sledding) or if you happened to own land with coal mining strip-pits that still had the huge tailings/overburden pile, like you mention, and had the brush cleared from part of it.
Those kinds of things are practically the only hills of any kind in some counties in the region. Just outside any of those towns you can look down grid-straight rural roads that disappear into the horizon, and it's not hard to find them. It is flat. (Joplin area, slightly less so) Like, it's flat for Kansas. Many other parts of the state are, relatively speaking, blessed with great altitudinal diversity. Not that part.
It's a bit more south-of-Springfield than SE Kansas (or even Joplin) but the film Winter's Bone kinda felt like visiting home. All those familiar, scraggly trees. They really nail the feel of (a particular, more rural-leaning experience of) the area (I think it was actually filmed in Southern Missouri, so that makes sense, but the cinematographic "eye" of the movie really conveys it, too)
(Incidentally, if there's one thing to do in the very-flat part of Kansas that anyone who finds themselves remotely nearby should detour for, it's the Kansas Cosmosphere, somewhat West of the part otherwise under discussion but still the ultra-flat zone. It might be my favorite space exploration museum, and yes, I've been to most of the big ones in the US. It's shockingly good for being so far from basically anything else worth traveling for. If you have kids, hit the nearby Sedgwick County zoo, too, it's nothing special but it's alright and as long as you're there, why not. Area also has a state park built around some sand dunes left by retreating glaciers, which is kinda neat, though the park's a bit weak mostly due to just about everything outdoors being a really ugly in the region and the key feature of the park covering only a small area, and I make that judgement as someone who still feels weirdly at-peace and like things are correct when I visit, but like objectively it's really goddamn ugly, you gotta search to find anything natural that's as pleasant to look at as just your average view out a window many places, and if you turn around to look the other way you're probably back to ugly)
There used to be a big chat pile called Snowball on the north side of Joplin near the old Eagle-Picher smelter. I once saw someone fly off the top of that in a hang glider.
My grandfather on my mom's side was a miner in the lead mines. Or so I've been told; I don't remember him as he died when I was a baby. My grandmother lived near Snowball in what is best called a shack. No indoor plumbing; had to use a outhouse. She did have a telephone, although it was a party-line; you had to check the line was clear before using it.
So, yeah, that move Winter's Bone captured the feel of the area and the effects of systemic poverty really well.
I really appreciate you highlighting exactly how exceptionally flat Kansas is. I've never thought of a place as flat for Kansas, now I'll pay more attention when driving through it. I was already startled by how far horizons seem in Kansas.
Lots of the central-eastern portion of the state is the beautiful Flint Hills area, which is obviously… hilly. Much of I-70 (the main route across the state east-west) features long horizons but lots of low hills in the distance. The West, central, and southwestern parts have the slowly but consistently rolling, low hills of something like the film The Wind or the famous painting Christina’s World (the one with the girl on late summer or early fall green-and-tan grass, looking away from the viewer toward a white farmhouse up a low hill). They’re all much flatter than much of the country, but they’re not flat flat. They’re not Central Nevada flat.
South-central and southeastern Kansas are about that flat. Though with somewhat more trees.
[edit] I mean the remake of The Wind from a few years ago. I’ve never seen the original Lillian Gish film.
[edit edit] Further, those kinds of super-long views like you mentioned are actually kind of hard to come by on the really flat parts of Kansas. You need a little elevation (for the spot you're at) to get over obstructions like bushes, trees, barns, corn, et c, and that's what delivers those impressively-long views that vanish at the horizon in other parts of the state. That's why you need to find one of the (many) very-straight rural roads in the really flat parts of KS to see the "flat all the way to the horizon" effect. Or stand on the roof of a barn or something like that.
I once experimented with beeswax candles as my only after-dark light source. This meant no hyper-stimulating screen activities whatsoever, too. TV, phone, video games, browsing the web? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. Just dim, warm light from actual flames.
Cured my lifelong “night owl” “trait” in a couple days. Shockingly effective.
Turned out to be hard to keep up and still, like, exist with other people, and you’d probably need to relax it a little in Winter unless your job lets you work reduced hours to kinda “hibernate” (otherwise when would you do anything that’s not work but requires light or electronics?) but it sure worked.
That's so cool. And +1 to Beeswax candles. I have a dream we will orient ourselves with greater agency and autonomy and after traditional careers die if we get a UBI and still choose to work we would orient ourselves around the sun naturally and have time in the day for social lives.
I picked beeswax because the petroleum-based ones smell terrible, and I found some that weren't much more expensive than unscented soy. They have a nice smell!
But burning non-petroleum candles a couple hours each evening (and I found it took two tapers to have enough to comfortably read by) is pretty expensive. Plus burning anything isn't great for air quality, even if it smells OK. One person doing it in a full-sized house, alight, maybe. Three or more people in a house carrying around pairs of candles every night? You might start to notice the air quality and your shelves or walls getting a bit sooty.
If I wanted to do it longer term I'd probably build a few shaded (it actually hurts to look directly at even something as dim as a single candle flame, let alone a slightly-brighter bulb, when your eyes are adjusted to low light; I didn't come up with a solution for this with my candles, in the ~3 weeks I was using them) nightlight-level-output battery powered lamps. Most of the lamps or lanterns you can buy have built-in LEDs these days (so, limited ability to modify them) and their dimmest setting is way brighter than two actual candles, plus you'd want a candle-warmth color temp and lots of them are cool sunlight-temp. So I think building a few would be the best option.
Standard modern nighttime lighting started seeming insanely bright after a few days of doing the candle thing. It really takes very little light to navigate your house and do many tasks safely and comfortably, if you let your eyes adjust and don't have some kind of serious vision problems, and if you've got a few people awake in your house doing things after dark it's easy to have hundreds of times as much illumination active as anyone really needs. I also kinda liked carrying my light with me, rather than flipping switches from room to room.
I use the candles for a meditative gazing practice called trataka. Gazing at fire has never hurt me (edit: even at low light conditions), but usually feels calming, giving me more creativity as well. Also to optimize cost, I discovered beeswax tea light candles which are reasonably priced, between $0.30-$0.50/candle and I'd put them in these tiny single lanterns that you can carry around that make it more practical to use these for indoor light. I also found that having a incense burner device (theres ones where you use the beeswax candle under a metal mesh, as the source of heat (And now light too!) with my favorite resins like myrrh for scents also really helped set a great mood & regulate the nervous system for transition. I also would use these digital yellow candles that operate off of AA batteries and you can set on a schedule with a remote, they were so good and before I moved they would jsut automatically set the mood and light core areas with just enough light and brightness for night time. I suggest them! The brand I got was Aignis Flameless LED Candles (on Amazon). Get the orange and not white/blue.
>Standard modern nighttime lighting started seeming insanely bright after a few days of doing the candle thing. It really takes very little light to navigate your house and do many tasks safely and comfortably
Yes agreed. It's so nice once you get used to this, and I think this is how our ancestors lived for millions of years followed by candles, incandescent and then horrifyingly today's blue lights.
Did you notice blue in specific feel incredibly unnerving and painful to look at at night even in low light output after adjusting to night time settings?
Knowing how things work, knowing what should be possible and where “there be dragons”, and having a pretty well-developed “sixth sense” for all kinds of things is proving just as valuable with LLM-heavy programming as it did before.
… but I am almost certain I’d never have developed those in the first place if I hadn’t spent 25ish years programming on a bunch of different platforms and setting up servers and networks and all that, without LLMs.
I dunno how you make another “me”, now, while before lots and lots of programmers naturally ended up as someone with skills and knowledge like mine, and those skills seem super useful when writing code with LLMs.
> Individual gains from llm seem much larger than net productivity increases. I think a major source of this discrepency is people creating more work for their coworkers at the speed of slop. Especially the people with no idea.
Lots of companies (nearly all, I’d wager) of any size were leaving bare-minimum a 2x software development speed increase on the table before LLMs, having nothing whatsoever to do with how fast anyone was typing or thinking up code, and everything to do with how they organized and supported development work, and with your basic ordinary corporate dysfunction.
My company, I’d say it was more like 4x or 5x they could have achieved before LLMs, by fixing processes and reducing how often management steps on their own dicks.
All the people I’m seeing with crazy-high LLM productivity at my company? They’ve been given enormous autonomy to basically go do WTF ever they want, and people are jumping to get them anything they need (and most of what they’re doing is prototyping, for that matter). So right off the bat, if they’re competent, they should see a notable multiplier on productivity even if they weren’t using LLMs. Not that those aren’t helping, too, but if you don’t change processes they’re not all that effective, because the problem wasn’t speed of code-writing (and if you can change processes, you already could have sped up development a lot before LLMs…)
In my place I see currently a governance panel effort mandating around LLM agent skills usage, it is so much shit show that I expect productivity is going to fall to 0.5x pre-agents. But not pre-LLM as autocompletion was really helpful in the trenches. The tool in wrong governing hands and you get sand into cogs thrown.
Yeah, “ackshually it’s a republic” is usually a case of midbrow “incorrecting” (political scientists regularly use “democracy” to label a basket of political systems that include democratic republics, it’s not just normal vulgar usage, the “pros” use it that way, too, all the time)… buuuuut this time it might be a hair worth splitting.
I highlight this not to bring those developers down, but because I think it’s important people understand how these things actually come to be, so they aren’t discouraged to try themselves by thinking they ought to actually be doing 100% of the work solo. That’s pretty rare.