What this is and why I am doing it
Thoughts on working solo from home vs applying to a studio
This won't be nearly as organised as the other posts this spring, but more like a collection of thoughts I've been having for a few months.
Partially, this has been inspired by the fact that I have essentially been working on 2 games by myself for the past few weeks, and both games are progressing at a slow, but steady pace and overall are nearing completion.
Setting aside the choice of engine to work on, both Unreal and Unity have asset stores that offer a wide variety of products that range from textures and models, to full VFX or environment systems. Most of these things aren't free and can even be rather pricey, but (at least in Unreal) they can be modified and/or used in any type of commercial product without any extra royalties, beside any money I already spent to acquire them. This means that when creating a game by myself, I am able to compensate my lack of artistic skills, by using pre-made models and just adapting them to whatever role I need to.
I do understand that it won't be easy to work alone - both due to motivational, but also financial and technical challenges that result out of this approach.
On the other hand, I still haven't fully figured out what I want to do in the industry - how to sell myself to whatever studio I would want to work in. Becoming a programmer was always a means to an end for me, rather then something that I want to do for years at a time. This resulted in my not having any real interest in the subjects of Game Physics or Graphics, or even more general topics like Data Structures and AI (to some extent). After thinking about it, I figured the only specialization that I can work towards and have any real interest in, is gameplay programming, not in the least bit because of my original goal of being a game designer. The main issue with this choice of specialization, is that I'm pretty sure it's not a very easy one to get into straight from college - even with ~4 years of working in a pseudo-game studio under my belt.
So what else is there for me to do in the industry? I'm not an artist or a good leader, I'm fairly decent at world-building (coming up with a general setting for a story), but that alone isn't much to go on. I really like playing games and talking about them, but YouTube is already full of game channels and I don't think that the industry needs any more paid testers than they already have access to as well as the thousands of fans they can get to test their games. For free.
If professional uncertainty wasn't enough, I still don't consider myself a good teammate and have a pretty strong bias against working in the US - where the vast majority of game companies are - or anywhere else that is far away from my family really, which limits me to Europe (including Russia) and Montreal (or the east coast of Canada in general I guess), which is still more of a last resort. Not that I am complaining about this location restriction: there are plenty of studios in Europe, so I'm sure I can find one that works on projects I'd be interested in.
The problem is whether they would be interested in me.
One of the main reasons I've been sighting when talking about working solo is that if I can ship a few games - even if they are not a wild success like Stardew Valley - I can still put that on my resume/portfolio as a demonstration that I have some skills to bring to the team.
Then again, releasing a feature-complete game onto the market and smugly dropping a Steam link into the resume is the easy part - the hard part is actually making the thing.