Everyone has their own process, but I think it’s fine to just start with a simple idea that’s not yet a game, jump in, and experiment around, especially if you’re just starting out. I’m not an expert by any means, but I managed to release a small game of my own recently, and all I had at the start was a test where I could knock over a box by throwing a ball. Everything else that eventually became the game were ideas that I had later while playing around and showing it to other people.

Either you learn how to make the assets, use free ones, buy them or commission someone.

Hard to believe, because it’s such a high quality product. But every asset used in Diarrhea 4 was free. Apart from the fart noises. Those were made entirely by me.

Just like anything else, one chunk at a time.

You can start with a story and build the game off of that, or you can start with the gameplay and build up from there.

Sometimes you just have to start, and see where it goes. Pick an engine and start building something, don’t be afraid to throw it all out and start over from what you’ve learned so far. Make a game that has some of the elements you want to use and try it out, then throw it out and make a different game with other bits. Start small and work up.

The biggest problem is thinking it has to be perfect to move on to the next part.

You can commission art, or you can buy some models and just use those.

You can also just build everything from the ground up, but it would be hard to do that for your first project.

Most solo devs don’t do everything. They download packages of meshes (3d objects) to… Not reinvent the wheel.

You can, in most game dev studios, develop game logic, maps, textures, meshes, characters etc.

People can buy them, use them, modify them, etc.

That’s not to say none do. Just… The same ones don’t.

Then there’s the issue of like… Youre building in Unreal, and you want a portal that when you enter, you shrink my 10%. Okay that’s… That’s not in the engine. So. Yeah. The wheel you’re reinventing here is pretty big.

Idk if this fully elucidates. I’m in mobile and at work, hope this makes sense.

I was a pro game developer for 19 years, more or less. After my last job ended, I self-published an indie game. To this day, it’s not made enough money to trigger a single payout. I failed. So it’s fair to take my advice with a grain of salt, if not a whole block. But here’s my two cents anyway.

Start by sketching and writing. Think of verbs; games are all about doing things, even if it’s just advancing through a conversation. Your protagonist is a cat, so cats run, jump, explore, play. Think of why the protagonist is doing things. Where do the missions come from? And in this case it’s hard not to look at Stray. There’s almost always something that’s come before, even if it’s not super high-profile like Stray. Think about what you want to do different.

Art will come from you, if you go it alone and can’t or don’t want to buy art assets. Blender and GIMP are hard to learn, but free and powerful.

Your engine is almost certainly going to be Unreal, Unity, or Godot. Each has strengths and weaknesses, including the cost of use. You have to factor it all in.

I do think you’re right that you’ll learn more by making things than doing tutorials, but be aware if you start spinning your wheels on something. You’ll benefit from both.

Just ask the guy who made Axiom Berge, Thomas Happy. Or Stardew Valley creator, Eric Barone.

I recommend reading about Daisuke Amaya (a.k.a Studio Pixel) and his creation, Cave Story.

He made the game in the course of five years and moved to a less intensive and low pay job to work on the game. The man made the art, soundtrack, the program he used to compose and render the said soundtrack and the fucking game engine. He’s also called “The father of indie games”

https://www.cavestory.org

A gamedev I know who has a currently running online MMO says:

"Don’t overthink it. When I learned gamedev I learned how to display something on the screen, I learned how to move things on a screen, how to play sound effects and music, and then rolled it all together to make a simple pong game. If you can make that you can scale up from there. Buy an asset pack off of itch.io for whatever genre you want to make. "

For context this guy made his engine from scratch.

Hrm… I suppose I spent 15 years making other people’s games first. >_< More seriously, just start with small stuff. Make a simple 2D game with a something like the Love framework or Pico8. Then try to scale up a bit or use something a bit more powerful. If you are really want to make a game solo, then the best thing you can do is learn to control your scope. You’ll never be able to be good at every part of making games, so figure out what parts you want to work on and figure out how to make a game around those skills.

You also don’t have to make do it alone. You can hire out art, programming, sound, music, writing… really anything. Most “solo” devs do that to some extent. Also try and seek out your local gamedev community. Asking online is fine, but you’ll get more out of an in person conversation with someone who’s done it before.

Lastly, game jams. There are smaller game jams going on all the time, but the big one is the global game jam in January. I’ve always liked that one because there are always new people. In my experience, fresh gamedevs are always perfectly welcome. You’ll have someone else on the team that can rough out the structure for you, then you just need to apply what you already know as a software developer to fill in some blanks. People also like to do role bending at jams too. Programmers will try making art, artists will try making music, and sound people will try programming. Jam games are usually bad, so nobody will expect anything you make to be any good, but people generally have a blast doing it anyway. :) I like to rope people into making NES games every year because even as experienced game devs they are so sure they can’t write C code, let alone for something 40 years old, certainly not in 48 hours! They do just fine once they dig in. :D -> https://www.slembcke.net/nes/

The process of making a game on your own involves failing to make the first 10 games you try to make on your own.

Ultimately, it sounds like you already have a good handle on everything that goes into it, and are just hoping to hear it’s not actually as hard as you think it is… it is hard. Know that going in, and assess if you will be able to do it. But give yourself a bit of benefit, getting most of the way tends to increase your resiliance to the final hurdles.

It’s essentially the “how do you eat an elephant?” question, isn’t it? Hint, if you’re not familiar with the reference, the answer is “one bite at a time.”

I’m not a game developer (yet), but would like to try it, so I’ve done a little reading about the topic. There are a couple things I’ve seen advocated that have made a lot of sense to me:

1. Don’t start with your dream game. Start with either tiny games to test specific aspects of your bigger game, or first practice developing clones of many relatively simple classic games, like pac-man, etc. This is a good resource I’ve found to help guide the latter approach: https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/challenge/

2. Don’t spend a lot of time on either programming or creating art before you playtest the heck out of your game, preferably with many people. This is what I’ve seen advocated in a popular game design textbook: https://www.gamedesignworkshop.com/ - this makes sense since the same kind of advice applies to any kind of software development and design - verify that your potential audience is actually interested in what you are trying to make before spending a ton of effort making it. I’ve seen very similar advice given in the context of solo app development and even business startups.

Good luck and have fun!

Look at the gource utility commit visualization history of some open source games.

By starvation.

I am not even kidding, see indie game the movie.

Games are art and making art in this works comes with the sacrifice of not being able to afford anything until you by chance become popular.

Narrow scope.

If you want to see more of the nitty gritty, there are tons of devlog series on YouTube where you can watch people put together a game from scratch. GMTK’s series is pretty good, though keep in mind that he started with an audience so he had some advantages along the way!

Sacred Forest is another fun series I’ve been following, and ThinMatrix’s channel is popular and has already made a few games. Miziziziz also has a few series but I recommend his 4 devs 1 art kit jam series because it shows how a lot of small games can be made quickly