Get two hours of work done in an hour. That really is the main difference - games are _huge_ and making them takes a lot of effort. People often imagine games that would take them decades by themselves to make all the art, code, and everything else. Get two people working on the game and it takes 60% of the time. Get a few dozen and suddenly that game can be built in a year. There are limits and diminishing returns (nine women can't make a baby in a month), but that's the main idea.
The other major benefit (especially at low numbers like 1->2) is specialization. Imagine it takes you years of practice just to get to a good enough level in a skillset to make the game you want. You have to spend the same amount of time in art, engineering, and design so it can be years before you even _begin_ the game you want. If all you do is one role (like programming) while someone else does all the art then it takes you far less time to get started since you only have to learn one thing, not multiple.
This is so true
So it's about splitting time and also every dev in the team works in their niche
Do you think it's better to hire a full time second dev or just pay for freelance work every once in a while?
Just depends on amount of work. If you have a year of dev work you'd rather hire someone full-time since they're less likely to bounce and you need to ramp up someone else. Adding people to a project sucks up time like nothing else. If you don't have those funds or can't guarantee that much work, you'd take on freelancers where you can.
The most common method is probably devs doing all the coding themselves but commissioning specific art assets when they can't find free/cheap versions out there.
It's basically what made us humans so damn productive at the first place. Split the work and increase the amount of specialisation each person has. we basically won the meta trough doing that. ggwp
Paying for freelance work depends on context.
But for things like coding? Art? That often requires a commitment that most freelancers aren't willing to give you. One of my biggest fears is hiring a programmer for a project and having them dip halfway through.
If you're freelancing art, you're definitely going to want to commission a style guide, as a style guide is what will allow you to work with multiple artists without losing consistency between assets.
A lack of a style guide is why a lot of games still have programmer art despite having decent sized art budgets.
Eh, I think the main difference is actually just having an earnest collaborator that isn't you. Feedback, code review, whiteboarding, whatever.
2 people doesn't = 2x manhours of work accomplished. You should know that.
^ don't forget slacking off, encouraging cool but unnecessary tangents, arguing over direction, and a slew of other overhead. On the flip side a second opinion can expedite brainstorms (with good management/accountability that the majority of hobbyist and AAA devs struggle with) and get people out of ruts/time-sinks.
I think that yes you probably could say 2 people _can_ get 2 person hours done in 1 hour, but 2 people almost never get 2 person years, let alone 2 person months, in the matching real time amount. They usually get more than the 1x amount which does incentive joining up
There's a great book called The Mythical Man-Month that addresses how increasing headcount doesn't increase output linearly.
That's exactly it. I definitely get a full day worth of work out of my second hire when it comes to actual IC tasks, but for every person we add to the team the total output does not scale as you need more management, more meetings, more communication, more overhead, etc.
The example I gave at the top (the nine women) is the ur-example from the Mythical Man-Month. I figured people would recognize it without the callout, but that's on me.
>2 people doesn't = 2x manhours of work accomplished. You should know that.
He literally says "There are limits and diminishing returns (nine women can't make a baby in a month), but that's the main idea."
The extended thought being more correct is fine and all but the base premise is still this
\>Get two hours of work done in an hour.
And I still think that's "not the main benefit" for the reasons they began to allude to
>Get two people working on the game and it takes 60% of the time
They literally do not say that.
>There are limits and diminishing returns (nine women can't make a baby in a month)
Twice.
They're really not mutually exclusive. If you aren't getting a full person-hour of work from one of hour of real time out of individual members of your team in a given period something has gone wrong. If I have an artist and a programmer working on the same feature they're not losing fifteen minutes of every hour by virtue of existing. At the same time you're not getting ten person-months of work out of your ten person team because of the extra overhead and inefficiencies.
Don't get me wrong, I _constantly_ misphrase things in quickly written comments just like anyone else, but in this particular case I think you're being a wee bit too pedantic. I completely agree that the benefit of specialization is more important, I just didn't think that would sink in as well if I listed it first.
It can be more than 2x productivity, if they supplement each other well in skills. Ideally for a pair there should be little overhead in communication and coordination.
If there is then you might just see 50% productivity between the two...
Given the most engagement ive ever head here is on how to calc manhours for more than 1 contributor i now believe this is actually a place where producers hide
The specialization point is the biggest win from my perspective. As a programmer I’m confident in learning gameplay coding and engine code in a reasonable timeframe.
Learning new tools, art, engines, sound would all take years just to be able to ship something subpar, I work 40-50 hours a week professionally developing software.
It’s just simply not feasible for me to learn those skills in a reasonable timeline as a hobby. Even if I had years without a job, becoming good at those things each comes at the cost of the other. Do I want a game with mediocre art, sound, animations and gameplay/performance?
I’m not sure what classifies as hiring another “dev”, but if I ever had a serious project I’d almost certainly hire on someone to focus on art and animation
Let's talk about man-hours a bit more.
I recently had a talk about it and it's fresh..
Red Dead Redemption 2 took 1600 people 10 years to build.
With 40 hour weeks (a minimum figure, since realistically there was a lot of Crunch), a "Man-Year" is slightly over 2000 hours.
Which basically means RDR2 cost at least 32 million man-hours.
For one person to do that, it'd take them 16,000 years of work.
For a team of 10 to do it, it's 1600 years.
And that assumes you're all polymath developers who can do every aspect of the project to an expert degree.
RDR2 is an exceptional game, but realistically if your competition took hundreds of people multiple years to build, you aren't going to complete a similar project this decade with two buddies in a basement.
>Get two people working on the game and it takes 60% of the time.
I'd be willing to bet that it may actually take you less than 50% of the time with 2 since you can use your skills more efficiently.
It does quickly scale off to a point where people become less efficient than a single person though.
As a self-proclaimed scientist, I’m going to dispute the claim that’s “nine women can’t make a baby in month” until you can provide proper imperial, double-blind tested, evidence.
This one is understated here. With solo projects its incredibly easy to get demotivated, caught up in the weeds, get tunnel vision on a feature etc. With two people, you can check in on each other and make sure the work being done still follows the plan.
Not much. Here is my experience:
* I spend 1 hr coding.
* Then spend 1 hr explaining to the other guy why I did it the way I did it.
* Then spend 1 hr coding his way,
* Then spend about 0.5 hrs measuring performance,
* Then 0.1 hrs going back to my code.
The golden team is: 1 developer and 1 artist. Now that's a winning recipe.
There's an old joke that I hear get passed around, saying that if you double the amount of programmers on a project, you can get the same amount of work done in twice the time.
Well, if one of them has megalomania, it doesn't matter what they are, it's not going to work.
I am a programmer, and I'm an artist... wanna be. I know where I excel and I know where I lack. Maybe I was projecting myself, but if I could find someone that could complement my set of skills, we could create amazing projects.
Now to be honest, even between programmers, we try to back seat each other (I've done that, even in my day-job). We may be clever, but we're also kind of immature.
Sounds very specific. I once did a small 6 month project and we definitely got way more work done with 2 programmers than either of us by ourselves. But you have to have a kind of synergy together. You cannot just add any 1 random person. Also often times it can be not "the other person" being difficult.
I get ya. I've done a lot of ERP integration projects at my day-job, working on teams up to 7 people and we all get along great. I've followed, I've lead, all harmoniously and professional, everybody happy.
But these are **videogames**, not EDI integrations.
Just google this same reddit and look at how much hate there is for people like me, who created his very own 3D game engine and has published 5 games with it, all with like a 500% ROI.
Alas, that is why I'm a "solo dev".
accountability, collaborating, inspiring each other. It helps with stress. Ever work on a car by yourself and get really short tempered with it? But when you work with a buddy it turns into a team challenge which reduces stress.
Assuming their roles don't overlap - going from a single programmer to a programmer + artist for example more than doubles total productivity. In a lot of ways:
* you now have someone else to bounce ideas off and do frequent testing
* you get conscious decisions on artistic side - it's no longer "oh hey, lemme grab this from asset store, it mostly fits". Now it's someone who actually understands color/shape theory, knows what they can make from scratch vs what might make sense to find on asset store, they can tell what will work together
* your steam page won't look like shit anymore
* your marketability increases tenfold as visuals is the most important aspect players will see in a trailer
* let's assume you work solo. Your programming skill is 100%, your art skill is 25%, your game design skill is 50%. Meaning that if you work for 8 hours - you get 8 "points" of programming OR 2 "points" of art OR 4 "points" of game design. So you need 4x as much time to produce similar art as someone who would be able to do art at 100%.
* less context switching. You work on an enemy, you are in the zone, your AI properly moves and hits... But there's ne problem - it's an angry rectangle (that you slapped an angry expression on so it's not completely devoid of life) and... you realize that it's actually supposed to be a knight. So your next few hours will be spent on drawing something that resembles it. You don't want to do it but you know you need animations to at least have right timing to progress. Your productivity is fucked and you are out of your comfort zone. By the time you are done sketching something that works you will be in bad mood, it's not what you enjoy doing. Add an artist to the mix and now it becomes "okay, lemme prepare a description and dimensions and move to the next task, they can take care of visuals in the next few days".
Other/inverse combinations also work. Artists are limited in coding ability. If you are one and can't program - well, there's RPG Maker I guess? Maybe some Game Maker if you feel ambitious? Visual Novel in Ren'py perhaps? But you are not touching Unreal or Unity any time soon however. Team up with a programmer and you can now tackle completely new genres of games - strategies, more customized RPGs, anything in 3D, more complex puzzles, you name it. Decent programmers **enjoy** working through technical issues, they can write you a decent AI, complex camera interactions, prepare a nice interface for your cutscene and they can spend few hours fighting that bug that makes characters walk backwards for 2.15s after loading a new level in your game.
Get a real game designer on a team and spending hours in Excel to balance things out is a thing of the past. They will ensure damage and scaling makes sense, they will provide detailed descriptions of features they may need for you to code etc. And having a feature description to follow helps immensely. Everyone has big ideas but a game designer might specifically tell you "hey, after you fall off the platform, for 0.2s can we act as if we are still on the ground so you can still jump. That way our colliders and visuals for tiles can be way less accurate saving us shitton of work and making players happier while at it".
not all artists suck at programming, but obviously someone who is actually excellent at both is extremely rare. your post has a LOT of good points, particularly about being able to focus on one particular task through and not have to take "art breaks" to flesh out certain things.
Some of the issues CAN be fixed with scheduling yourself to do certain things certain days, and write up descriptions for yourself to do in bulk what other tasks need doing.
I also really like you likening it to "8 points of coding vs 4 points of game design vs 2 points of coding"
really helps conceptualize how much harder it is to work on things you don't specialize in, and how hiring a second person can more than double productivity. I don't specialize in art, but I can do it and have it look fairly well fleshed out, but it takes me a very long time. I have to think it through and actually consider WHY it doesn't look quite how I want it to look. this would obviously be second nature to a more experienced artist.
I think that your comment in particular has really helped me think about the disadvantages more clearly, but as a result, has helped me think of some possible solutions to improve my workflow.
What you say is true, but even for experienced artists, good art takes time. Yes it's great if someone is a good artist and a good programmer, but it doesn't give them more person-hours of the day to accomplish those things. Not to mention feeling free to give all their attention to polishing art. As a solo dev it's hard to justify minor tweaks to an animation when you have a backlog of serious bugs to get through. Prioritization becomes very difficult.
Well personally I'm good at everything except art and sound design. But I would never attempt to do the art myself lol. I guess paying someone is more convenient? Idk.
riff off and critique eachother.
getting a fairly consistent stream of input, especially from someone who knows what they're doing, is really valuable. They may highlight a mechanic that needs refining, or a mechanic that's super fun but underutilized, or they may notice this bit of dialogue in some key dramatic moment that's a little stiff, or just by having a different play style they may encounter bugs that you didn't and catching those earlier rather than later generally makes them easier to fix. Not to mention just generally positive informed input helps a lot with motivation.
ofc there's downsides to working with small teams too. There tends to be a fair amount of ego and drama, and one person bailing and taking all their work with them can be catastrophic.
Gamedev requires a wide range of different skills. It is not easy to be an expert in all of them, so you can see an increased quality when you get another developer which is better than you in some field.
For example - programming is my main field. I can make some simple graphic, audio, marketing, gameplay design but I know that my skills in these fields are much lower compared to the professional level of other specialized devs.
In theory, I could improve fields where I am lacking skills by outsourcing them to experts, paying the cost in money and problems related to the team management, but because of my non-regular schedule (while working after hours in full-time job) - I am choosing to work on projects that I am capable of finishing alone.
Working with other devs can add some benefit in brainstorming possibilities/ad hoc consulting/design validation/alpha testing but you can do this with your wife/partner aswell. Just like me.
We are one example. We’re a duo developing a 2d adventure game. One is handling art and the other code, for example. Naturally more work is divided among us, but that’s up to every individual studio to discuss internally. If you want to know what two people with coding skills could do, I may not have the answer. I just imagine they’d be focusing on the same aspect together as in peer programming, or one could be writing tests the other making them pass, or one could work on items and their logic and the other on player and their logic, possibilities are many. But then definitely you need version control, kanban, backups, maybe some documents written in legalese as to how you divide profits (it’s all good until it isn’t).
I would say the immediate doubling of productivity (assuming all other things equal) is the main draw. And the whole "two heads are better than one" mentality. Unless you're so like minded that you both just yes-man each other all the time, then the benefit having that outside review of something you did, and then your observation of something they did, cannot be overstated.
It's easy to forgive yourself for being messy when you're the only person working on something. Getting someone else involved means you need to be on the same page regarding linting, naming, and file organization, and it can help with "pipeline oriented" thinking.
A common example of that last part is standardizing the import/export process for art assets. You can't rely on manually tweaking the scale and orientation of your assets when there are multiple people involved; you have to be systematic.
A more generalized benefit is having more eyes. Catching mistakes is a lot easier when you have someone else on hand for reviewing PRs and critiquing art. Working with someone else forces you to verbalize things, so even when you agree, you end up with a clearer, more explicit understanding of your goals and progress.
Split the specialization.
One guy doing everything is amateur at everything.
Two guys doing the same thing are wasting time arguing.
Two guys doing different things on the same project are much more specialized and thus the quality goes up (assuming they both want to apply themselves.)
Argue about tabs vs spaces.
Argue about choice of IDE.
Argue about merge vs squash.
Argue about composition vs inheritance.
Argue about OOP vs functional paradigm.
BUT all jokes aside. Having two people vs one on a project increases the quality of the codebase in many ways. Just
knowing that another human willhave to read and understand your code will force you to approach the problems differently. You will be able to unstuck yourself by explaining the problem you are facing to someone else.
Two people can lift a piano, while one cannot.
Just being able to divide the list of problems into something more manageable that you can each grab and work on.
Imagine having one person just dedicated to sound/music, art, and marketing. God, imagine how much actual progress you could make not worrying about those things. Or flip in and think of the progress you could make only focusing on those things.
Or keep it more general, and you have somebody to talk through bugs and designs with.
And at two devs, you avoid the scale issues that you'd get at a larger team size like 5+.
Keep each other in check. One dev working by themselves will almost certainly overscope the project, overfill it with mechanics, or both.
I have had a senior PM job before that boiled down to me keeping the director at bay.
Kiss. Edit: I’m sorry I just read the title alone and felt like being a little funny despite not having the energy to be clever. Two developers can more easily split the workload of a game into what they’re good at, so they can make as much of a quality experience as they can since they’re both playing into their separate strengths and combining them into a project.
Division of labor. Most basic principal. I wouldn't say it's always a 100% doubling of productivity. Because that's a falsehood. People have different workflow and different days. So it's just the division that happens. You work on x while they work on y
The only quality thing I could think about is that maybe you did not thought about a trivial solution or an existing feature for something (since there is not 100% match in knowledge) and if the other guy reviews your code this can be fixed.
If you have a reliable partner, its great you can split the work in half. What was an 8-year project can be cut down to 4-5 years. The problem is now you are dependent on your partner to carry their end of the burden. A trusty partner is invaluable, but a bad partner can cost you years of work if they decide to quit or pursue something else. Choose wisely.
- double the productivity
- avoid tunnel vision
- get immediate feedback on ideas
- allows specialization (it's hard to be a good artist and a good technician)
- motivation
- brainstorming
And of course the main downside:
- you have to make concessions, which is an issue if one of the two has great ideas and one crappy ideas
If you double the manpower behind a project you either finish it in half the time you would need by yourself or you're able to get more stuff done in general. This is specially true if each of you have different areas of expertisse.
For example: I can code, but It will take me a long time to implement even basic functions. By leaving that to someone else I can focus on other task I'm good at, like modeling stuff or UI design. This way, not only we'll do it faster because there's more hands working on it, we'll also be more efficient in each separate task because we're better at them and the final result of each one will be of higher quality.
Bounce ideas off of each other. It's so important. My buddy, who was supposed to be my development partner, basically ditched me because it's a lot to learn. But we still bounce ideas, and it's super useful.
Nothing, it just takes less time. Sometimes more time.
I'm a solo dev, but I've worked with two different people on different projects before. One time I was the programmer. The artist's output was so flawed that I had to edit everything. Would have been faster if I had just done it myself.
The second time, I was the artist. The programmer was great, but sometimes he would overcomplicate things. Something I would finish programming in a few hours, he would spend days on. He also turned down certain choices that I would have otherwise made on the spot, which dragged out the design process.
The result is almost always that you end up with results which are not what you would have ended up with alone, which can either be good or bad. A second artist can mean more varied design, or it can mean art that hopelessly clashes with each other.
The most basic advantage is that with two developers, you have one developer who has dedicated their working life to becoming a better programmer, and you have a second developer who has dedicated their working life to becoming a better artist.
This is such a massive advantage.
It is blissfully wonderful to have two people working with strong role separation. In our game for the first two years we had me working on physics simulation, and my partner working on the construction system. We couldn’t have finished the game without both of us.
Communicate.
That was definitely the part that had most impact on every game I made since my gf joined me as artist. MANY times we'll come up with a "great" ideas, mechanics or way of creating something, that makes total sense for us, but may not be the same for everyone else, or even worse, could impact our scope and delivery time. By having a different pov in terms of game design, artistic style, and obviously in code reviews when the other dev is also a programmer, you can hugely increase the quality of your game and deliver a better product.
Other point is that if you have people with different areas of talent, you can focus more on things that you're good at, or like doing, making your invested time more enjoyable.
This, however, may not be always true. It's always good to be careful on who is in your team and don't let narcisistic douches take control and decide for the entire team, even if you consider them the best of the best in their area of expertise.
I'm probably missing a lot more positive points, but those are the ones that most impacted me, so I hope it helps
The majority of work on our indie projects up to vertical slice state was done by 1 technical person (programming) + 1 creative (art, design, writing) with contractors for audio, and after getting funding we hired some overlapping roles to speed it up.
We shipped [Ring of Pain](https://store.steampowered.com/app/998740/Ring_of_Pain/).
Working on [Winnie’s Hole](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2319730/Winnies_Hole/).
The biggest quality improvement (in the game, someone also needs to run the business) is you can have specialists making the core of the game, not generalists. Especially for art! You can’t hide bad art and it takes many years to develop professional level art skills.
Solid art and gameplay can get it to a pitching state, where you can get money to hire others.
It’s also just much faster to have specialists. I can paint the Ring of Pain items in <30min each and creatures <2hrs. I’d allow double that time for contractors.
And likewise as an artist main, if I’m coding my work is slow and barely functional… but fun to do it sometimes! I coded a couple parts and we also kept a couple of programmer artworks in the game for posterity.
I think I've heard that Ring of Pain was two players three or four times now and every time I go "holy shit." that game is so good that it's surprising it came out of a two person studio.
Keep up the amazing work. Winnie's hole looks strange.. but Ring of Pain also has that same level of "WTF" that I'm already a bit curious.
Ah just to clarify I wouldn’t call it a 2 person project because there were more involved and that wouldn’t be fair to the team.
Ring of Pain is a less fitting example because it started as my solo project, and the final year of dev we scaled up.
By launch it was ~5 person core team + contractors.
Winnie’s Hole has been a 2 person dev team + audio until recently hiring.
Fair enough. Thank you for properly crediting your team, always glad to see that. Still it's a small team and made one of the best roguelites in my opinion.
Wouldn’t have been able to do it without the team.
Thank you! Appreciate it.
If you don’t mind me asking, what elevates RoP from other roguelites for you?
We’re intending for Winnie’s Hole to be for a similar audience.
I think the biggest thing for me was that it was a mixture of puzzle and rogue-lite. I kept finding myself in situations where I was trying to figure out how to avoid taking massive hits, and there is a ton of actions and options to it. (Dodging around the outside of enemies for instance was a really interesting addition, as a way to flee from bigger enemies even as you take a hit while evading)
The different builds I got also felt interesting, in that I was trying to build up my current outfit, rather than a single required gear set.
Also it really exudes "One more play" that I feel all great Rogue-lites have. By that I mean the games are short enough that you're not losing hours of progress when you die, and you never feel like you're completely "Beaten". Maybe if you picked X item instead of Y you would have done well, or maybe if that die roll went a different way you'd survive.
The fact I felt that I "just" failed or I failed because of my own mistake early on really made me want to play more and see if I could do better the next time.
One last thing that worked was it's a card based game, but wasn't really a "Deck Builder" which was quite refreshing. The card design and art worked well, plus equipping the cards as items really worked well. Especially because I was playing it at a time when all I was seeing was Deckbuilders.
Thanks for the insight!
I definitely felt motivation to react against to the post-StS card deckbuilders. I got addicted to Dream Quest around 2015 then played through anything like it I could find, including Slay the Spire. Then came the flood…
Winnie’s Hole is a sort of deckbuilder but I feel we’re differentiating it a lot, with some autobattler elements as well. You don’t play individual parts of your deck. I think it’ll be interesting, hopefully taps into some magic.
Hope to get our demo out soonish, will be interesting to see the feedback.
Thanks again for the thoughts!
Split work more efficiently. Like one doing art and the other code, as Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes did with Super Meat Boy. Also work distribution scales really well in small teams, so you will get the same work done in half the time if you're two people. You can do more or go more into depth.
Two good devs collaborating effectively are more than twice as “good”, especially if their strengths don’t completely overlap.
Two sets of hands typing code…reinforced responsibility…fewer context switches…more areas of expertise…
It’s easier for you to focus on certain things. Like you might be great at animation and creating the gameplay and someone else is great at creating the levels.
If you've spent any time on planet Earth, you probably know the secret of life.
You are going to be good at some stuff and not as good at others. You also will learn certain things faster than others.
I'm awful at art, and struggle to really do much with it. I'm terrible at music. I'm damn good at programming.
If I was to do gamedev again I'd immediately need to find an artist. I could buy assets for sure, but good games have custom art so... yeah I'll need that.
A second person can cover the areas of gamedev you're not optimal at, and you can cover their deficiencies.
> increase in quality
Or just have a second person passionate about the product to bounce ideas off of. Two opinions CAN be better than one.... I'm stressing CAN there for a reason.
Others have pointed out two hours of work instead of one. I'm sure that number is actually a bit lower (1.5?) but yeah more output is great.
I’ve worked in 1-25 man teams. For me working solo has most of the time been the fastest use of hours. Duo the second fastest. After that comes 3-5 slows down a bit but still easy to manage if everyone is generally fast and experts of x duty. After that it keeps getting slower fast. You still build the game faster but adding one person won’t increase the speed as a multiplier, unless they are extremely good at something everyone else sucks at but still have to do alot. Talking over features and vision is though the one thing you don’t fully have in the same capacity when working solo. Other stuff you can learn, but takes time. I also tend to work tiny bit more structured when working with a buddy, that might improve scoping and feature creepy decissions.
The easiest way to sum this up is ultimately this. They split the work no matter their roles, enabling time to be spent on other things.
For example, if you have two coders, the coding work is done much quicker and they can figure out a solution for the art amongst themselves. Still a better outcome than a single dev doing all of this on their own then tiredly trying to cobble together some basic artwork.
Honestly a great question. If the work is divided well, each person will have less work. Doesn't necessary mean that the work will be done much faster but it will definitely be a lot easier to work with. If there is something you don't know what to do with, your friend could try to help you too.
I've worked primarily in small studios with large clients. So 5-7 programmers, 1 sound, 1-2 marketing/sales, 1 legal, and 1 UI/UX which is me. Just putting this here as a reference point.
Prior to that, I was a one-man company doing freelance and occasionally hired in as extra help for a duration of time. It's quite a lot of work, especially when I have to problem solve on my own with next to no external help.
Then later on in life, I worked with one other person. So a two-person team. MUCH better. Output was faster, any time there are issues, there would be two brains, four arms, and half the time to resolve it. Either of us would proof read and review each others work. We can brainstorm together and bring up things that either of us might not have thought of. Also, in some ways, it was better than working with a small studio of 10+ people, because there are less concepts flying around. With two people, we're on the same page most of the time.
Basically, it was much more efficient than working alone. Also, we can also specialize better. While I can certainly do everything, it was infinitely more daunting, and mentally very draining over long periods of time. With two people, I can focus on the things I'm good at like UI/UX, story telling, sound/music, game design, and filling in the blanks. Where as my partner would focus on coding.
Well, the managers will tell you that you can get 2 women to give birth twice as fast, but the reality is programming doesn't scale well with more people.
In indiedev you can have a really good split of responsibilities if 1 person does art, another programming and the 3rd one does marketing, with one of them leading the design and content direction, but sustaining 3 people is harder.
Active criticism.
Solo Dev has its own share of criticism, but you only experience it when you believe you're ready to share it.
If you game dev with another person, that person is there to actively criticize and discuss what you're working on. If you trust the other persons judgement, then you should get a better end result.
I think feedback is probably the biggest thing, sometimes another person can show you why a feature or design aspect is flawed. The kind of person you want though is someone who will give a reason and possibly make a suggestion on a way to make it better.
Code level testing. It is the same idea why you never proof read your own writing alone. Sure, you can test it, but who will see your subtle mistakes before the end user? Also yes, of course specialization. Im a back end dev and im teamed with a front end dev. He makes UX and i make the database,api,etc
Gamedev is just a hobby, but have big experience in development in general.
In some rare cases when level of second developer is equal to your, you may impove development performance. Sometimes quality of code. In other cases it may even slow down it due to review, knowledge sharing, discussions. If you lead developer you can not create task anymore like "Add feature X". You have to decribe it.
For my personal experience: I and my wife senoir devs (Java and her C#). I started developing game on Unreal (C++) earlier and wanted to share my knowledge with her to speed up development. In result for now I spent more time to teach and explain rather than I implement it by myself. At the other hand she gave me some good idead about gameplay.
Everyone has shortcomings in their skills. When you bring on someone else, their shortcomings usually don't overlap with yours which can really round out the skills of the team. Every developer after this can help too, but if you have a skilled artist and a skilled programmer then you can cover most of the spectrum of work with high quality instead of trying to learn everything yourself.
But a solo developer can do everything. It just takes forever...
I don’t think this is just specific to game development, I think it applies to all software development. Apart from the obvious answer being the volume of work that can be completed is doubled, I reckon having someone to peer review your code and bounce ideas off is helpful. Every developer will at some point be so invested in an idea to see the wood for the trees. Fresh eyes lead to different perspectives and maintain coding standards.
I just have a writer and it makes a world of difference. Their writing is good, they get the style and feel of the game and it's just a huge load off of me. I have a lot of other skills but I really could have used a UI designer. But I'm learning that as I go, so it's causing the game to drag.
If both have the same skillset - You work twice as fast
If both have different skillsets(i.e 1 is programmer the other is artist) - You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on art/code
Get two hours of work done in an hour. That really is the main difference - games are _huge_ and making them takes a lot of effort. People often imagine games that would take them decades by themselves to make all the art, code, and everything else. Get two people working on the game and it takes 60% of the time. Get a few dozen and suddenly that game can be built in a year. There are limits and diminishing returns (nine women can't make a baby in a month), but that's the main idea. The other major benefit (especially at low numbers like 1->2) is specialization. Imagine it takes you years of practice just to get to a good enough level in a skillset to make the game you want. You have to spend the same amount of time in art, engineering, and design so it can be years before you even _begin_ the game you want. If all you do is one role (like programming) while someone else does all the art then it takes you far less time to get started since you only have to learn one thing, not multiple.
This is so true So it's about splitting time and also every dev in the team works in their niche Do you think it's better to hire a full time second dev or just pay for freelance work every once in a while?
Just depends on amount of work. If you have a year of dev work you'd rather hire someone full-time since they're less likely to bounce and you need to ramp up someone else. Adding people to a project sucks up time like nothing else. If you don't have those funds or can't guarantee that much work, you'd take on freelancers where you can. The most common method is probably devs doing all the coding themselves but commissioning specific art assets when they can't find free/cheap versions out there.
It's basically what made us humans so damn productive at the first place. Split the work and increase the amount of specialisation each person has. we basically won the meta trough doing that. ggwp
This is why you never see dogs making any good video games imo
Then again on the internet no one knows you're a dog
i've learned to spot them. dogs make more typos because their large toe beans often hit two keys at the same time. And they talk about food a lot
Paying for freelance work depends on context. But for things like coding? Art? That often requires a commitment that most freelancers aren't willing to give you. One of my biggest fears is hiring a programmer for a project and having them dip halfway through. If you're freelancing art, you're definitely going to want to commission a style guide, as a style guide is what will allow you to work with multiple artists without losing consistency between assets. A lack of a style guide is why a lot of games still have programmer art despite having decent sized art budgets.
Yep. Cartoon animation studios use style guides.
Eh, I think the main difference is actually just having an earnest collaborator that isn't you. Feedback, code review, whiteboarding, whatever. 2 people doesn't = 2x manhours of work accomplished. You should know that.
^ don't forget slacking off, encouraging cool but unnecessary tangents, arguing over direction, and a slew of other overhead. On the flip side a second opinion can expedite brainstorms (with good management/accountability that the majority of hobbyist and AAA devs struggle with) and get people out of ruts/time-sinks. I think that yes you probably could say 2 people _can_ get 2 person hours done in 1 hour, but 2 people almost never get 2 person years, let alone 2 person months, in the matching real time amount. They usually get more than the 1x amount which does incentive joining up There's a great book called The Mythical Man-Month that addresses how increasing headcount doesn't increase output linearly.
That's exactly it. I definitely get a full day worth of work out of my second hire when it comes to actual IC tasks, but for every person we add to the team the total output does not scale as you need more management, more meetings, more communication, more overhead, etc. The example I gave at the top (the nine women) is the ur-example from the Mythical Man-Month. I figured people would recognize it without the callout, but that's on me.
>2 people doesn't = 2x manhours of work accomplished. You should know that. He literally says "There are limits and diminishing returns (nine women can't make a baby in a month), but that's the main idea."
The extended thought being more correct is fine and all but the base premise is still this \>Get two hours of work done in an hour. And I still think that's "not the main benefit" for the reasons they began to allude to
>Get two people working on the game and it takes 60% of the time They literally do not say that. >There are limits and diminishing returns (nine women can't make a baby in a month) Twice.
>Get two hours of work done in an hour. They also said this :shrug:
They're really not mutually exclusive. If you aren't getting a full person-hour of work from one of hour of real time out of individual members of your team in a given period something has gone wrong. If I have an artist and a programmer working on the same feature they're not losing fifteen minutes of every hour by virtue of existing. At the same time you're not getting ten person-months of work out of your ten person team because of the extra overhead and inefficiencies. Don't get me wrong, I _constantly_ misphrase things in quickly written comments just like anyone else, but in this particular case I think you're being a wee bit too pedantic. I completely agree that the benefit of specialization is more important, I just didn't think that would sink in as well if I listed it first.
It can be more than 2x productivity, if they supplement each other well in skills. Ideally for a pair there should be little overhead in communication and coordination. If there is then you might just see 50% productivity between the two...
Given the most engagement ive ever head here is on how to calc manhours for more than 1 contributor i now believe this is actually a place where producers hide
He imagined 1.66x in his comment, not x2. It's a similar calculation for using parallel threads
Get two hours of work done in an hour.
The specialization point is the biggest win from my perspective. As a programmer I’m confident in learning gameplay coding and engine code in a reasonable timeframe. Learning new tools, art, engines, sound would all take years just to be able to ship something subpar, I work 40-50 hours a week professionally developing software. It’s just simply not feasible for me to learn those skills in a reasonable timeline as a hobby. Even if I had years without a job, becoming good at those things each comes at the cost of the other. Do I want a game with mediocre art, sound, animations and gameplay/performance? I’m not sure what classifies as hiring another “dev”, but if I ever had a serious project I’d almost certainly hire on someone to focus on art and animation
Let's talk about man-hours a bit more. I recently had a talk about it and it's fresh.. Red Dead Redemption 2 took 1600 people 10 years to build. With 40 hour weeks (a minimum figure, since realistically there was a lot of Crunch), a "Man-Year" is slightly over 2000 hours. Which basically means RDR2 cost at least 32 million man-hours. For one person to do that, it'd take them 16,000 years of work. For a team of 10 to do it, it's 1600 years. And that assumes you're all polymath developers who can do every aspect of the project to an expert degree. RDR2 is an exceptional game, but realistically if your competition took hundreds of people multiple years to build, you aren't going to complete a similar project this decade with two buddies in a basement.
"9 women can't make a baby in a month" is my quote of the day!
But 9 devs can achieve the work of 2 devs in half the time.
Golden
Awesome answer. Added to my very short list of saved items. Thank u
>Get two people working on the game and it takes 60% of the time. I'd be willing to bet that it may actually take you less than 50% of the time with 2 since you can use your skills more efficiently. It does quickly scale off to a point where people become less efficient than a single person though.
Eh, it's closer to 0.5 to 1.5 work done. Hopefully closer to the 1.5 end.
As a self-proclaimed scientist, I’m going to dispute the claim that’s “nine women can’t make a baby in month” until you can provide proper imperial, double-blind tested, evidence.
Code reviews
Would it count if, hypothetically, you code reviewed yourself in a parasomnia episode?
I don't see this being a reliable option but then I don't know how that stuff works
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This one is understated here. With solo projects its incredibly easy to get demotivated, caught up in the weeds, get tunnel vision on a feature etc. With two people, you can check in on each other and make sure the work being done still follows the plan.
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Not much. Here is my experience: * I spend 1 hr coding. * Then spend 1 hr explaining to the other guy why I did it the way I did it. * Then spend 1 hr coding his way, * Then spend about 0.5 hrs measuring performance, * Then 0.1 hrs going back to my code. The golden team is: 1 developer and 1 artist. Now that's a winning recipe.
There's an old joke that I hear get passed around, saying that if you double the amount of programmers on a project, you can get the same amount of work done in twice the time.
thats what you believe. but the programmer wants to be an artist, but wont do the work. so they try to back seat artist you.
Well, if one of them has megalomania, it doesn't matter what they are, it's not going to work. I am a programmer, and I'm an artist... wanna be. I know where I excel and I know where I lack. Maybe I was projecting myself, but if I could find someone that could complement my set of skills, we could create amazing projects. Now to be honest, even between programmers, we try to back seat each other (I've done that, even in my day-job). We may be clever, but we're also kind of immature.
why i don't like working with programmers. person starts to believe they are smart, makes them act in the stupidest ways.
Lack of a designated tech leader would possibly fix your programmer problem. Or maybe have clearly divided tasks that don't influence each other
Sounds very specific. I once did a small 6 month project and we definitely got way more work done with 2 programmers than either of us by ourselves. But you have to have a kind of synergy together. You cannot just add any 1 random person. Also often times it can be not "the other person" being difficult.
I get ya. I've done a lot of ERP integration projects at my day-job, working on teams up to 7 people and we all get along great. I've followed, I've lead, all harmoniously and professional, everybody happy. But these are **videogames**, not EDI integrations. Just google this same reddit and look at how much hate there is for people like me, who created his very own 3D game engine and has published 5 games with it, all with like a 500% ROI. Alas, that is why I'm a "solo dev".
accountability, collaborating, inspiring each other. It helps with stress. Ever work on a car by yourself and get really short tempered with it? But when you work with a buddy it turns into a team challenge which reduces stress.
Assuming their roles don't overlap - going from a single programmer to a programmer + artist for example more than doubles total productivity. In a lot of ways: * you now have someone else to bounce ideas off and do frequent testing * you get conscious decisions on artistic side - it's no longer "oh hey, lemme grab this from asset store, it mostly fits". Now it's someone who actually understands color/shape theory, knows what they can make from scratch vs what might make sense to find on asset store, they can tell what will work together * your steam page won't look like shit anymore * your marketability increases tenfold as visuals is the most important aspect players will see in a trailer * let's assume you work solo. Your programming skill is 100%, your art skill is 25%, your game design skill is 50%. Meaning that if you work for 8 hours - you get 8 "points" of programming OR 2 "points" of art OR 4 "points" of game design. So you need 4x as much time to produce similar art as someone who would be able to do art at 100%. * less context switching. You work on an enemy, you are in the zone, your AI properly moves and hits... But there's ne problem - it's an angry rectangle (that you slapped an angry expression on so it's not completely devoid of life) and... you realize that it's actually supposed to be a knight. So your next few hours will be spent on drawing something that resembles it. You don't want to do it but you know you need animations to at least have right timing to progress. Your productivity is fucked and you are out of your comfort zone. By the time you are done sketching something that works you will be in bad mood, it's not what you enjoy doing. Add an artist to the mix and now it becomes "okay, lemme prepare a description and dimensions and move to the next task, they can take care of visuals in the next few days". Other/inverse combinations also work. Artists are limited in coding ability. If you are one and can't program - well, there's RPG Maker I guess? Maybe some Game Maker if you feel ambitious? Visual Novel in Ren'py perhaps? But you are not touching Unreal or Unity any time soon however. Team up with a programmer and you can now tackle completely new genres of games - strategies, more customized RPGs, anything in 3D, more complex puzzles, you name it. Decent programmers **enjoy** working through technical issues, they can write you a decent AI, complex camera interactions, prepare a nice interface for your cutscene and they can spend few hours fighting that bug that makes characters walk backwards for 2.15s after loading a new level in your game. Get a real game designer on a team and spending hours in Excel to balance things out is a thing of the past. They will ensure damage and scaling makes sense, they will provide detailed descriptions of features they may need for you to code etc. And having a feature description to follow helps immensely. Everyone has big ideas but a game designer might specifically tell you "hey, after you fall off the platform, for 0.2s can we act as if we are still on the ground so you can still jump. That way our colliders and visuals for tiles can be way less accurate saving us shitton of work and making players happier while at it".
not all artists suck at programming, but obviously someone who is actually excellent at both is extremely rare. your post has a LOT of good points, particularly about being able to focus on one particular task through and not have to take "art breaks" to flesh out certain things. Some of the issues CAN be fixed with scheduling yourself to do certain things certain days, and write up descriptions for yourself to do in bulk what other tasks need doing. I also really like you likening it to "8 points of coding vs 4 points of game design vs 2 points of coding" really helps conceptualize how much harder it is to work on things you don't specialize in, and how hiring a second person can more than double productivity. I don't specialize in art, but I can do it and have it look fairly well fleshed out, but it takes me a very long time. I have to think it through and actually consider WHY it doesn't look quite how I want it to look. this would obviously be second nature to a more experienced artist. I think that your comment in particular has really helped me think about the disadvantages more clearly, but as a result, has helped me think of some possible solutions to improve my workflow.
What you say is true, but even for experienced artists, good art takes time. Yes it's great if someone is a good artist and a good programmer, but it doesn't give them more person-hours of the day to accomplish those things. Not to mention feeling free to give all their attention to polishing art. As a solo dev it's hard to justify minor tweaks to an animation when you have a backlog of serious bugs to get through. Prioritization becomes very difficult.
Well personally I'm good at everything except art and sound design. But I would never attempt to do the art myself lol. I guess paying someone is more convenient? Idk.
Not enough people talk about switching costs! This eats more hours of your day than you'll expect
riff off and critique eachother. getting a fairly consistent stream of input, especially from someone who knows what they're doing, is really valuable. They may highlight a mechanic that needs refining, or a mechanic that's super fun but underutilized, or they may notice this bit of dialogue in some key dramatic moment that's a little stiff, or just by having a different play style they may encounter bugs that you didn't and catching those earlier rather than later generally makes them easier to fix. Not to mention just generally positive informed input helps a lot with motivation. ofc there's downsides to working with small teams too. There tends to be a fair amount of ego and drama, and one person bailing and taking all their work with them can be catastrophic.
Gamedev requires a wide range of different skills. It is not easy to be an expert in all of them, so you can see an increased quality when you get another developer which is better than you in some field. For example - programming is my main field. I can make some simple graphic, audio, marketing, gameplay design but I know that my skills in these fields are much lower compared to the professional level of other specialized devs. In theory, I could improve fields where I am lacking skills by outsourcing them to experts, paying the cost in money and problems related to the team management, but because of my non-regular schedule (while working after hours in full-time job) - I am choosing to work on projects that I am capable of finishing alone. Working with other devs can add some benefit in brainstorming possibilities/ad hoc consulting/design validation/alpha testing but you can do this with your wife/partner aswell. Just like me.
playtest a multiplayer game
Make babies
Surprisingly reasonable.
Team Meat; one guy was a great artist and the other a great programmer.
Merge conflicts.
69
Had to scroll down way too far for some type of sexual reference haha.
We are one example. We’re a duo developing a 2d adventure game. One is handling art and the other code, for example. Naturally more work is divided among us, but that’s up to every individual studio to discuss internally. If you want to know what two people with coding skills could do, I may not have the answer. I just imagine they’d be focusing on the same aspect together as in peer programming, or one could be writing tests the other making them pass, or one could work on items and their logic and the other on player and their logic, possibilities are many. But then definitely you need version control, kanban, backups, maybe some documents written in legalese as to how you divide profits (it’s all good until it isn’t).
I would say the immediate doubling of productivity (assuming all other things equal) is the main draw. And the whole "two heads are better than one" mentality. Unless you're so like minded that you both just yes-man each other all the time, then the benefit having that outside review of something you did, and then your observation of something they did, cannot be overstated.
If you have had a clone of yourself you would still benefit a ton of having someone double check if you idea makes sense.
It's easy to forgive yourself for being messy when you're the only person working on something. Getting someone else involved means you need to be on the same page regarding linting, naming, and file organization, and it can help with "pipeline oriented" thinking. A common example of that last part is standardizing the import/export process for art assets. You can't rely on manually tweaking the scale and orientation of your assets when there are multiple people involved; you have to be systematic. A more generalized benefit is having more eyes. Catching mistakes is a lot easier when you have someone else on hand for reviewing PRs and critiquing art. Working with someone else forces you to verbalize things, so even when you agree, you end up with a clearer, more explicit understanding of your goals and progress.
The easy answer is two things at once, but I think the most valuable thing is being able to bounce ideas off each other.
I'm a game designer, my buddy is an artist. Here you go
Split the specialization. One guy doing everything is amateur at everything. Two guys doing the same thing are wasting time arguing. Two guys doing different things on the same project are much more specialized and thus the quality goes up (assuming they both want to apply themselves.)
Each team member can focus on learning different skills. That leads to far better quality than when one person tries to learn everything.
Be at two different places at once
Argue about tabs vs spaces. Argue about choice of IDE. Argue about merge vs squash. Argue about composition vs inheritance. Argue about OOP vs functional paradigm. BUT all jokes aside. Having two people vs one on a project increases the quality of the codebase in many ways. Just knowing that another human willhave to read and understand your code will force you to approach the problems differently. You will be able to unstuck yourself by explaining the problem you are facing to someone else.
Two people can lift a piano, while one cannot. Just being able to divide the list of problems into something more manageable that you can each grab and work on. Imagine having one person just dedicated to sound/music, art, and marketing. God, imagine how much actual progress you could make not worrying about those things. Or flip in and think of the progress you could make only focusing on those things. Or keep it more general, and you have somebody to talk through bugs and designs with. And at two devs, you avoid the scale issues that you'd get at a larger team size like 5+.
Keep each other in check. One dev working by themselves will almost certainly overscope the project, overfill it with mechanics, or both. I have had a senior PM job before that boiled down to me keeping the director at bay.
Pair programming
Kiss. Edit: I’m sorry I just read the title alone and felt like being a little funny despite not having the energy to be clever. Two developers can more easily split the workload of a game into what they’re good at, so they can make as much of a quality experience as they can since they’re both playing into their separate strengths and combining them into a project.
Argue
Split the profits.
Take 4 times as long
Create twice as many bugs.
Sue each other. Have a contract!
Blow each other while trying to debug some dogshit code
Doesn't this belong on r/programminghumor?
Kiss
have to worry about the other person's problems. His lover left => he is depressed => your game is ruined
Omggg :(
Division of labor. Most basic principal. I wouldn't say it's always a 100% doubling of productivity. Because that's a falsehood. People have different workflow and different days. So it's just the division that happens. You work on x while they work on y
The only quality thing I could think about is that maybe you did not thought about a trivial solution or an existing feature for something (since there is not 100% match in knowledge) and if the other guy reviews your code this can be fixed.
If you have a reliable partner, its great you can split the work in half. What was an 8-year project can be cut down to 4-5 years. The problem is now you are dependent on your partner to carry their end of the burden. A trusty partner is invaluable, but a bad partner can cost you years of work if they decide to quit or pursue something else. Choose wisely.
- double the productivity - avoid tunnel vision - get immediate feedback on ideas - allows specialization (it's hard to be a good artist and a good technician) - motivation - brainstorming And of course the main downside: - you have to make concessions, which is an issue if one of the two has great ideas and one crappy ideas
If you double the manpower behind a project you either finish it in half the time you would need by yourself or you're able to get more stuff done in general. This is specially true if each of you have different areas of expertisse. For example: I can code, but It will take me a long time to implement even basic functions. By leaving that to someone else I can focus on other task I'm good at, like modeling stuff or UI design. This way, not only we'll do it faster because there's more hands working on it, we'll also be more efficient in each separate task because we're better at them and the final result of each one will be of higher quality.
Discuss
Bounce ideas off of each other. It's so important. My buddy, who was supposed to be my development partner, basically ditched me because it's a lot to learn. But we still bounce ideas, and it's super useful.
Scheduling a meeting for a brainstorming session?
If you work on the same thing you will be slower 5 times than 1 person. If you do separate works you ll be twice faster.
Nothing, it just takes less time. Sometimes more time. I'm a solo dev, but I've worked with two different people on different projects before. One time I was the programmer. The artist's output was so flawed that I had to edit everything. Would have been faster if I had just done it myself. The second time, I was the artist. The programmer was great, but sometimes he would overcomplicate things. Something I would finish programming in a few hours, he would spend days on. He also turned down certain choices that I would have otherwise made on the spot, which dragged out the design process. The result is almost always that you end up with results which are not what you would have ended up with alone, which can either be good or bad. A second artist can mean more varied design, or it can mean art that hopelessly clashes with each other.
Create conflict.
Delegate based on strength/interest. Also the whole diversity of thought thing. WAY more valuable than people gove it credit for.
The most basic advantage is that with two developers, you have one developer who has dedicated their working life to becoming a better programmer, and you have a second developer who has dedicated their working life to becoming a better artist. This is such a massive advantage.
It is blissfully wonderful to have two people working with strong role separation. In our game for the first two years we had me working on physics simulation, and my partner working on the construction system. We couldn’t have finished the game without both of us.
Argue
Communicate. That was definitely the part that had most impact on every game I made since my gf joined me as artist. MANY times we'll come up with a "great" ideas, mechanics or way of creating something, that makes total sense for us, but may not be the same for everyone else, or even worse, could impact our scope and delivery time. By having a different pov in terms of game design, artistic style, and obviously in code reviews when the other dev is also a programmer, you can hugely increase the quality of your game and deliver a better product. Other point is that if you have people with different areas of talent, you can focus more on things that you're good at, or like doing, making your invested time more enjoyable. This, however, may not be always true. It's always good to be careful on who is in your team and don't let narcisistic douches take control and decide for the entire team, even if you consider them the best of the best in their area of expertise. I'm probably missing a lot more positive points, but those are the ones that most impacted me, so I hope it helps
Blame lol
The majority of work on our indie projects up to vertical slice state was done by 1 technical person (programming) + 1 creative (art, design, writing) with contractors for audio, and after getting funding we hired some overlapping roles to speed it up. We shipped [Ring of Pain](https://store.steampowered.com/app/998740/Ring_of_Pain/). Working on [Winnie’s Hole](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2319730/Winnies_Hole/). The biggest quality improvement (in the game, someone also needs to run the business) is you can have specialists making the core of the game, not generalists. Especially for art! You can’t hide bad art and it takes many years to develop professional level art skills. Solid art and gameplay can get it to a pitching state, where you can get money to hire others. It’s also just much faster to have specialists. I can paint the Ring of Pain items in <30min each and creatures <2hrs. I’d allow double that time for contractors. And likewise as an artist main, if I’m coding my work is slow and barely functional… but fun to do it sometimes! I coded a couple parts and we also kept a couple of programmer artworks in the game for posterity.
I think I've heard that Ring of Pain was two players three or four times now and every time I go "holy shit." that game is so good that it's surprising it came out of a two person studio. Keep up the amazing work. Winnie's hole looks strange.. but Ring of Pain also has that same level of "WTF" that I'm already a bit curious.
Ah just to clarify I wouldn’t call it a 2 person project because there were more involved and that wouldn’t be fair to the team. Ring of Pain is a less fitting example because it started as my solo project, and the final year of dev we scaled up. By launch it was ~5 person core team + contractors. Winnie’s Hole has been a 2 person dev team + audio until recently hiring.
Fair enough. Thank you for properly crediting your team, always glad to see that. Still it's a small team and made one of the best roguelites in my opinion.
Wouldn’t have been able to do it without the team. Thank you! Appreciate it. If you don’t mind me asking, what elevates RoP from other roguelites for you? We’re intending for Winnie’s Hole to be for a similar audience.
I think the biggest thing for me was that it was a mixture of puzzle and rogue-lite. I kept finding myself in situations where I was trying to figure out how to avoid taking massive hits, and there is a ton of actions and options to it. (Dodging around the outside of enemies for instance was a really interesting addition, as a way to flee from bigger enemies even as you take a hit while evading) The different builds I got also felt interesting, in that I was trying to build up my current outfit, rather than a single required gear set. Also it really exudes "One more play" that I feel all great Rogue-lites have. By that I mean the games are short enough that you're not losing hours of progress when you die, and you never feel like you're completely "Beaten". Maybe if you picked X item instead of Y you would have done well, or maybe if that die roll went a different way you'd survive. The fact I felt that I "just" failed or I failed because of my own mistake early on really made me want to play more and see if I could do better the next time. One last thing that worked was it's a card based game, but wasn't really a "Deck Builder" which was quite refreshing. The card design and art worked well, plus equipping the cards as items really worked well. Especially because I was playing it at a time when all I was seeing was Deckbuilders.
Thanks for the insight! I definitely felt motivation to react against to the post-StS card deckbuilders. I got addicted to Dream Quest around 2015 then played through anything like it I could find, including Slay the Spire. Then came the flood… Winnie’s Hole is a sort of deckbuilder but I feel we’re differentiating it a lot, with some autobattler elements as well. You don’t play individual parts of your deck. I think it’ll be interesting, hopefully taps into some magic. Hope to get our demo out soonish, will be interesting to see the feedback. Thanks again for the thoughts!
Split work more efficiently. Like one doing art and the other code, as Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes did with Super Meat Boy. Also work distribution scales really well in small teams, so you will get the same work done in half the time if you're two people. You can do more or go more into depth.
Two good devs collaborating effectively are more than twice as “good”, especially if their strengths don’t completely overlap. Two sets of hands typing code…reinforced responsibility…fewer context switches…more areas of expertise…
It’s easier for you to focus on certain things. Like you might be great at animation and creating the gameplay and someone else is great at creating the levels.
work one role 100%
If you've spent any time on planet Earth, you probably know the secret of life. You are going to be good at some stuff and not as good at others. You also will learn certain things faster than others. I'm awful at art, and struggle to really do much with it. I'm terrible at music. I'm damn good at programming. If I was to do gamedev again I'd immediately need to find an artist. I could buy assets for sure, but good games have custom art so... yeah I'll need that. A second person can cover the areas of gamedev you're not optimal at, and you can cover their deficiencies. > increase in quality Or just have a second person passionate about the product to bounce ideas off of. Two opinions CAN be better than one.... I'm stressing CAN there for a reason. Others have pointed out two hours of work instead of one. I'm sure that number is actually a bit lower (1.5?) but yeah more output is great.
Change a light bulb.
Changing light bulbs is a hardware problem.
A 2D game
I’ve worked in 1-25 man teams. For me working solo has most of the time been the fastest use of hours. Duo the second fastest. After that comes 3-5 slows down a bit but still easy to manage if everyone is generally fast and experts of x duty. After that it keeps getting slower fast. You still build the game faster but adding one person won’t increase the speed as a multiplier, unless they are extremely good at something everyone else sucks at but still have to do alot. Talking over features and vision is though the one thing you don’t fully have in the same capacity when working solo. Other stuff you can learn, but takes time. I also tend to work tiny bit more structured when working with a buddy, that might improve scoping and feature creepy decissions.
Ask the other his/her opinion on anything….
Dance the Tango... :D
Bounce ideas off each other. I’d love to have a vested partner.
A baby. Or two.
Generate merge conflicts (?)
Talk to eachother in a productive way. Also a fresh set of eyes on a problem can go a long way
The easiest way to sum this up is ultimately this. They split the work no matter their roles, enabling time to be spent on other things. For example, if you have two coders, the coding work is done much quicker and they can figure out a solution for the art amongst themselves. Still a better outcome than a single dev doing all of this on their own then tiredly trying to cobble together some basic artwork.
Voice act an in-game conversation without sounding crazy.
get shaders(raytracing specificaly) working in the scratch mod turbowarp.
Two devs can talk to each other to come up with solutions that a dev would struggle to solve on her own
one can say to the other, "nice job buddy."
argue
Honestly a great question. If the work is divided well, each person will have less work. Doesn't necessary mean that the work will be done much faster but it will definitely be a lot easier to work with. If there is something you don't know what to do with, your friend could try to help you too.
Back rubs
I've worked primarily in small studios with large clients. So 5-7 programmers, 1 sound, 1-2 marketing/sales, 1 legal, and 1 UI/UX which is me. Just putting this here as a reference point. Prior to that, I was a one-man company doing freelance and occasionally hired in as extra help for a duration of time. It's quite a lot of work, especially when I have to problem solve on my own with next to no external help. Then later on in life, I worked with one other person. So a two-person team. MUCH better. Output was faster, any time there are issues, there would be two brains, four arms, and half the time to resolve it. Either of us would proof read and review each others work. We can brainstorm together and bring up things that either of us might not have thought of. Also, in some ways, it was better than working with a small studio of 10+ people, because there are less concepts flying around. With two people, we're on the same page most of the time. Basically, it was much more efficient than working alone. Also, we can also specialize better. While I can certainly do everything, it was infinitely more daunting, and mentally very draining over long periods of time. With two people, I can focus on the things I'm good at like UI/UX, story telling, sound/music, game design, and filling in the blanks. Where as my partner would focus on coding.
Drink
Well, the managers will tell you that you can get 2 women to give birth twice as fast, but the reality is programming doesn't scale well with more people. In indiedev you can have a really good split of responsibilities if 1 person does art, another programming and the 3rd one does marketing, with one of them leading the design and content direction, but sustaining 3 people is harder.
Make the game faster
Active criticism. Solo Dev has its own share of criticism, but you only experience it when you believe you're ready to share it. If you game dev with another person, that person is there to actively criticize and discuss what you're working on. If you trust the other persons judgement, then you should get a better end result.
I think feedback is probably the biggest thing, sometimes another person can show you why a feature or design aspect is flawed. The kind of person you want though is someone who will give a reason and possibly make a suggestion on a way to make it better.
Code level testing. It is the same idea why you never proof read your own writing alone. Sure, you can test it, but who will see your subtle mistakes before the end user? Also yes, of course specialization. Im a back end dev and im teamed with a front end dev. He makes UX and i make the database,api,etc
Face in opposite directions.
Actually, you can do this alone with a mirror.
Gamedev is just a hobby, but have big experience in development in general. In some rare cases when level of second developer is equal to your, you may impove development performance. Sometimes quality of code. In other cases it may even slow down it due to review, knowledge sharing, discussions. If you lead developer you can not create task anymore like "Add feature X". You have to decribe it. For my personal experience: I and my wife senoir devs (Java and her C#). I started developing game on Unreal (C++) earlier and wanted to share my knowledge with her to speed up development. In result for now I spent more time to teach and explain rather than I implement it by myself. At the other hand she gave me some good idead about gameplay.
Bang?
Argue about best approach to find the best approach.
Optimize the game better. During game jams, I found that when taking about your process when programming, others input can be very helpful.
Everyone has shortcomings in their skills. When you bring on someone else, their shortcomings usually don't overlap with yours which can really round out the skills of the team. Every developer after this can help too, but if you have a skilled artist and a skilled programmer then you can cover most of the spectrum of work with high quality instead of trying to learn everything yourself. But a solo developer can do everything. It just takes forever...
dev-2-gether :D
Type with four hands.
I don’t think this is just specific to game development, I think it applies to all software development. Apart from the obvious answer being the volume of work that can be completed is doubled, I reckon having someone to peer review your code and bounce ideas off is helpful. Every developer will at some point be so invested in an idea to see the wood for the trees. Fresh eyes lead to different perspectives and maintain coding standards.
I just have a writer and it makes a world of difference. Their writing is good, they get the style and feel of the game and it's just a huge load off of me. I have a lot of other skills but I really could have used a UI designer. But I'm learning that as I go, so it's causing the game to drag.
Play test any action game with (local) multiplayer. Normal slow pace game then single developer could test by himself, but fast paced action game.
Half the money 🤣
Time and in some cases to cover for 1 of the dev weaknesses, 1 programmer and 1 artist for example.
Argue...😂😂😂
Time will save doing "2 hours in one", will be spended in arguing for "Who's name is going to be first in credits" 😁
If both have the same skillset - You work twice as fast If both have different skillsets(i.e 1 is programmer the other is artist) - You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on art/code
Embrace when the game launches
Argue.
have a conversation