How hard is it to make a video game by oneself?

Depends.
>What kind of game
>What engine
>What scripts
>What art
>What music
>Does your game need writing
>Are you competent or skilled in any of the above?
>Do you have assets already?
Just from these questions you can vary from a few hours to several years. Even longer if you want something good.

it can be easy but you will probably need a lot of knowledge and experience to make it be easy
SO YEAH ITS FUCKING HARD

You have to get good or outsource multiple things to make a good 2d game, it's not even worth it

depends on the complexity. but very hard usually.

>writing
>drawing
>modeling
>animation
>music
>sound design
>level design
>programming

It can take whatever time you want it to take. If you have an idea you really wanna see made just start doing it, dont worry about the details until you actually face them. Watch tutorials on youtube, learn as you go, you'll learn a fuck ton this way and it doesnt feel daunting

Agreed on this except for that last part. It will feel daunting, especially if it's your first step into this sort of thing. As you learn more, you'll also realize just how little you actually do. It also makes you understand why some games are just plain awful.

Its not as daunting as heading into it thinking about how hard it is to do. If you get on the self improvement train and really enjoy doing it you will never stop, even when it gets a bit uncomfortable

Cave Story

THIS is the most powerful trainer in Unova?!

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curly BACED

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chocolate dragon wife

Full version of this

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depends, I'm a brainlet for example, so making the first version with the most BASIC gameplay took me like a year

Depends on the genre of game
Arcade games and the like are much easier because you can design them to get more mileage out of fewer assets
Platformers, kinda pushing it. RPGs, don't even bother

I thought RPGs were easier

Thanks. though I don't really find this artist's work all that erotic.

An RPG devoid of content or intricate, interwoven systems is fucking boring, and both of those take a lot of time and effort to create. Content in particular is always the most time-consuming part, and RPGs need a lot of it
You can churn out RPGmaker schlock pretty quickly, yes, but I was presuming OP wanted to make something noteworthy

Yeah, it's what sort of stalling my SRPG game. I refuse to use the "maker" for them (all the base assets look like shit), and it's just getting everything right. That being said, when it is done, I can assure you there is not a single other SRPG on the market similar to it.

>am autistic enough to know the ins and outs of multiple programming languages with high levels of proficiency in them
>decent enough at writing and structuring a narrative that I can crank out a fun script if I give myself the time to sketch it all out and not rush it
Oh man that's cool I really should make a vi...

>literally ZERO (0) NADA ZIP ZILCH artistic talent in ANY fucking capacity. Literally cannot out-draw 1st grade students my shit is stickman tier
>same fucking thing for music.

O...oh...yeah....

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As much as it has become a meme, start doing pixel art, dude. I'm still terrible but once you get the ball rolling it doesn't take much to make something decent. This is after only a week of practice.

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How long would it take to go from zero knowledge on how to make games to making a short shoot em up?

45 minutes. It's literally one of the first free classes offered by Unity and Godot.

what about unreal engine? or is that not recommended now a day

Nah, like, if I wanted to go for a pixel style it'd have to be BLEEDING with artistic talent. Not just me trying to match middle schooler grade pixel art tier. It'd really have to be it's own style and look stunning, which I am not capable of.

And even putting that aside, music is also a big thing. A thing I have no talent in as well

Oh shit. My touhou ripoff I came up with actually has a chance of being real.

Never know until you try.
>Music
Yeah, for that I can't offer anything. The Soundbible can only help so much

youtube.com/watch?v=Jz5HnDRQ-ig
You can possibly start here. Basically you just need to look. But starting a shmup isn't hard. Keeping it interesting is.

How did Tobyfox do it bros?
The madman can just do it all by himself (at least the first game and ch1? ch.2 he has a legit team I believe)

I mean you need to be able to
>program
>do VERY catchy music
>draw
>write

How did he do it bros

Years and years and years and YEARS of practice, along with stockpiled assets.

>How did Tobyfox do it bros?
weaponized autism

He even has a small team now and deltarune is taking forever.

It all really depends on how much you limit the scope of your game. You could spend decades coming up with new features and more levels, but if you set some rules and understand that the game will have a limited scope, then you can make a small game with simplistic graphics relatively quickly

fuck that shit
make your graphics out of squares
lots of them with color blending and shit so your game doesn't look boring

what is the ideal alternative console and game for someone who hates pokemon, hates nintendo, hates fairies, hates fantasy and wants something 100% anti-pokemon?

stardew valley's art, music, coding, and design were done ENTIRELY by one person

there are 8,760 hours available per year. That's 5,840 hours per year if you sleep 8 hours a day. Just start working

he had more help than people give him credit for

where's the design?

I made a short puzzle game, tested and balancing it multiple times, and still someone still managed to find one exploit and blow the entire game apart from gameplay perspective.

Biggest issue is trying to have any kind of scope will probably wind up out of it.
I've started on so many projects and came up with a lot of content and ideas and started foundation stuff only to realize halfway through doing a first level that my scope is ridiculously huge for me to do on my own and that then leads to me losing motivation.

Honestly, anything that could lead to loss of motivation kills it pretty hard.

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A person on Yea Forums, no less.
Think about it. The guy who made Stardew Valley was once exactly like (you)

Sounds like you need to narrow down starting out. You have a foundation, jah? Begin with an alpha build. No noises, no music. Just the gameplay on its own. The maps and story on its own. If it works, then you start exploring what you need next.

Do what you can. That's the most important step.

I had an idea for this in mind and it's something I always wanted to do but never made the jump.

I'm in a similar spot (can code/write, cannot draw/compose) so I always thought to myself, why not make a good "chapter 1" (essentially a demo of the first section/leg) of my game and use 100% generic assets. As in, the main character, background, actual character assets, music is stock royalty free, etc etc everything is just generic shit I can get for free off the web, the idea being to just focus on coding a good game with a good starting story and fun characters and not worrying about the finalized look of the assets.

Then and ONLY then when everything is good I would actually commit some money to hiring someone (well, two someones) to do said art assets/music for the game and only if I felt confident it was a good game worth putting an investment into, then just let loose and see how people react and use momentum money (if any happens) to actually push on and fund the remainder of the game.

Truth is it sounds okay as a concept in theory but I'm sure it'd fall apart, not to mention as a creator I would assume I'd start to feel de-motivated creating a game with just stock assets and not seeing much of anything come to life besides just dialogue and cutscenes with stock sprites/backgrounds, despite having in my mind an idea of what the actual finished assets will be like. Losing that motivation midway would suck

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That was my aim back then. But even that vertical slice attempt wound up ballooning in scope real fast. I got hung up on trying to make a spike pit look decent then life got ahead of me.
That was back in 2017 apparently. If I went back to it at this point I'd probably restructure like, all my code since I've since done a lot more professional development and know my shit back then was probably really poorly structured.

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If you want a prime example of your concept, look to Vestaria Saga. Made by Kaga, the father of Fire Emblem. First game was basically stock assets (and is ugly as hell), but there's a market out there.

depends on the type of game.
3D action game? probably never
indie pixel shit? few years
visual novel? few month to a few years, shit like renpy is easy to use and its what DDLC and shit used. you just need a good script and lots of art

Easier than getting a team together, with one person there's no disagreement or unreliable team members failing to get their work done

Shut the fuck up zoomer

files.catbox.moe/144jtt.png

depends

Didn't he work a bit on homestuck? He must've learned some tricks, and anyone who made it out of that mess alive can achieve anything

>writing: do some zanzibarts dialogue, you don't actually need story writing
>drawing: assets store
>modeling: assets store
>animation: assets store
>music: assets store
>sound design: assets store
>level design: assets store (helper editor)
>programming: assets store (helper script)
See, it's not that hard

>to know the ins and outs of multiple programming languages with high levels of proficiency in them
The only people I have ever heard saying this kind of shit were dumb CS students who has no fucking idea what they are talking about.

Also there is a plethora of ways to make a game with little to no art involved.
Sounds to me like you're LARPing at best and making retarded excuses at worst.