Two and a Half Years in GameDev

Nice read. Makes me excited to build a video game company/be surrounded by creatively driven people.

I've been developing a city builder game "Metropolis 1998" [1] for over 3 years. My life has been constantly pulled in two or more different directions (e.g. creativity/artistic expression vs. logic/software). Most of the time the environments that allow these forces to thrive are incompatible with each other.

Since working on my game, I've been in a happy place where I get to go full throttle on both of those. I've created my own engine and I am designing the game, directing the art, handling sound design, marketing, UI, UX, environment design, etc, etc.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

My Steam page is perpetually far behind the current state of development: https://x.com/YesboxStudios

I feel that a childhood dream of the author came true, and it is a success, but the prose of reality in a large studio is discouraging.

“Early access… usually happens just 1–2 years before release.”

I had a good laugh at this. So many titles have taken money and silently failed or seem to figure they can stay in early access indefinitely. On the plus side early access seems useful to smaller devs that are close to finishing but need a bit more cash and free QA. But is also a bit of a scam the way is it’s used for many others unfortunately. Find a genre with a passionate fanbase, make a prototype, collect some cash and fade away.

Any way, not to suggest it’s a bad writeup as I enjoyed reading about the author's experiences.