Making your own Horse Game – Part Three: Scope and Focus
In this series, we’ve previously looked at how to take your first steps as a game creator and how to start involving other people in your projects as playtesters, team members and eventually buyers.
Let’s assume now, that you already have a bit of experience in this field, be it as a hobbyist or as a professional. Perhaps you’ve completed a bunch of small projects and are starting to feel more confident as a creator. Perhaps you’re ready to move on from being a hobbyist and have saved some time or money to create a first “full” game, something worth selling.
Or perhaps you are – like me – a game creator of some experience who finally wants to tackle their passion project, who finally wants to make “the thing” that you believe is missing: the good horse game.
Scopes and Budgets
A lot of us have plenty of ideas for what our “perfect horse game” might look like. Fans without insight into the industry may tell you they “just” want a game where the horses and environments look like those in Red Dead Redemption 2, but you also have stable management, horse breeding, training and and and and.
To showcase how unrealistic this demand is, let’s have a quick look at some budgets: While no official budget information is available from Rockstar, estimates based on team sizes and development time place the production cost of Red Dead Redemption 2 somewhere around 100-200 Million US Dollars, with an additional marketing budget of at least as much.
By comparison: Windstorm: Ari’s Arrival had a total budget of one million Euros (about 1.3 million USD). A game like the 2018 My Riding Stables on the other hand has a budget of less than 100 000 Euros.
Even if you calculate your own time’s worth at less than what an industry professional would make, these numbers can give you a very rough idea of what is possible in which ball park. Raising funds via investors and publishers or going the crowdfunding route is always an option of course, but anyone who thinks about giving you money will want to have proof that a) you have the skill and experience to create the game you promise and b) that a market for this exists.
Sometimes, indie developers will be very transparent about their budgets and timelines. Connecting with industry people, reading dev blogs and postmortems, or watching talks from conferences that are available online can all help you gather more data points.
Red Dead Redemption 2: Budget around 100-120M USD
Windstorm: Ari’s Arrival: Budget around 1.3M USD
My Riding Stables 2018: Budget around 0.1M USD
The Dream Project(s)
Passion and ambition are great for game development. To a degree, they are necessary if you want to be and stay in this industry. But passion can also blind you to your project’s faults, and wanting to do the best thing ever can lead to creative blockages and unbearable self-imposed pressure.
Trying to make your absolute dream project, the one thing that defines you as a creator, the thing that you hope may make you rich and famous, is a great way to get overwhelmed and burned out, even if you already have assembled some game development expertise.
Between my game development and my forays into novel writing, I have come to realize that downgrading your project from “the dream project” to “a thing I want to do” can be incredibly helpful. Your project does not need to be everything.
Your project will not define you as a creator, because you can finish it and then make something else. Allow yourself to work on a horse game, rather than the horse game.
There will always be ways to extend your work and keep at it, once you have something completed and realize you’re not done with it after all.
Instead of making a long list about all the features your one game is going to have when you finish it a decade from now, make a list of all the games that you would like to make in your life, and realize that not all of it fits into one project anyway, so you may just as well keep them small and feasible.
Practicing What I Preach
In case you’re one of the people who follows my own development a bit more closely, you may already have noticed that I don’t properly practice what I preach. My own horse game may not be as overambitious as someone’s hyper-realistic MMORPG with real life genetics and twenty equestrian disciplines, but I still catch myself in wanting my #horsegame to be… well, to be a lot of things.
I’ve been meaning to write an article like this for a while, but it is especially relevant now because I don’t only tell these things to my readers, but also to myself. Despite some experience in game dev and generally knowing all the above, I still get hung up on wanting to make “the perfect horse game” (or at least: the perfect horse game for me), and that pressure that I put on myself has completely halted my progress.
I don’t believe that my own struggles with this process make the advice less valid. On the contrary: this is the advice that I give myself, even if I don’t always manage to follow it. I’m pretty sure I’d be better off if I did.
Closing Words
To anyone already dabbling in game creation, this article series may come off as a bit shallow. It’s impossible after all, to summarize everything worth knowing to get started in this industry, even with three big posts. My aim with this series is to give absolute beginners some idea of where to start. Multiple people from this community have told me that they are so unsatisfied by what the industry offers us that they want to take matters into their own hands. And if a beginner’s guide like this can help anyone in any way in finding their own path into game development to make their own horse game, I will be more than happy.
And if you do get started, don’t forget to tell me about your games. I will always be here to report on your progress, and I am sure TMQ’s readers would absolutely love to see whatever you’re working on. Even if it’s just a tiny first step into the right direction.
When getting into game development, it makes sense to take the first steps by yourself, to practice game creation without relying on others at first. But the moment will come when other other people become relevant: possible team mates, playtesters and eventually the public. Let’s look at some basic guidelines for how to involve other people in your passion projects.