In order to start your own business, you must have a product that you're going to sell and make money of. A solid LITTLE game idea and a viable plan how you'll turn it into that final product.

In the private business case versus the employment case, the challenges you'll meet will be fundamentally different. You'll have to talk to many different people alone, in order to get things made/published/marketed/done, whereas as a rather smaller cog in a machine you'll be shielded from a lot of communication.

It might be difficult to start working in a real building with real people on real things (that somebody else came up with) for real money, to a person with social problems. It's hard for everyone and it usually involves relocation to a bigger city It's true.

I've got plenty of colleagues who aren't social at all (one might call plenty of them asocial) but at work, we all get along pretty well and the work isn't impeded. Think a noisy cafe place, but with cutting edge workstations, ergonomic seats and desks, and help at hand to get immediately un-stuck, and actually much less noise because the people are quite quiet Nobody will be bothering you about your personal life at work once they find out you don't want to be bothered.

I think you started just fine, good luck and keep asking, keep reading! Keep creating things and keep making mistakes And finish something, anything.

On 1/30/2019 at 2:37 PM, algorithmic_brain said:

Or am I forcing myself a lot by trying to do everything by myself? I am planing to code 4 hours a day. 2 hours for tool development, 2 hours for doing game development by using these tools. I have 4 years. Do you think it is a bad schedule?

The problem that i see nowadays with this is, say you spend the next years writing your own engine and tools, and at the end you make a 3D jump'n'run like Mario 64. This should be possible, and personally i've gone through this myself and i have learned from it. Fine.

But nowadays you can achieve the same goal much faster using Unity, UE4 etc. You might not learn all the details about how an engine works, but you learn other things like making a game in more detail because you have much time for that.

The question also is: What will be more useful for business later? A small hobby engine that can never compete with the big ones, or experience in using the tools that everyone else uses too?

But you also say you want to make tools for the game industry, so you do not want to make games in the first place, right?

In that case, a similar problem comes up: You spend years on engine and tools just to catch up with state of the art, and you might never get there, because Unity and UE already have all those tools and they improve them with a large team and also they are buying new stuff to add it as well.

In the future such 'stuff' may be AI driven character animation library, or AI driven procedural content creation tools. Who knows?

So if you want to sell tools for game industry, you likely have to work on something like this. Something that does not yet exist. Nobody needs another basic physics engine or another state of the art renderer. You'd need to address open problems. Pick one, work on it for years, and with luck you get something working before all the others and they might be interested. Chances are surely tiny. I do not want to sound demotivating - i do exactly this, at big risk.

That said, i have the impression you want to do a bit of everything but you have no clear idea yet on what to focus on. Games or tools? You can do it all, investing much time, learning a lot... i propose you continue with this, but to make a living out of it, at some point you need to break out of this, have an idea, a good one. So start thinking about it already.  ... and be ready for plan B which has nothing to do with games as well.

49 minutes ago, JoeJ said:

In the future such 'stuff' may be AI driven character animation library, or AI driven procedural content creation tools. Who knows?

So if you want to sell tools for game industry, you likely have to work on something like this. Something that does not yet exist. Nobody needs another basic physics engine or another state of the art renderer. You'd need to address open problems.

 

I really like this direction of thinking. How about a randomized humanoid character generation tool/library? Something like MakeHuman, but as a library that you can integrate into your game that auto-generates randomized monsters or humans based on certain parameters. This way, each monster or character will have a randomized height, skeletal structure, all slightly different faces. It looks like Autodesk either already has one or is working on one, I'm guessing it probably exports DAE asset files like MakeHuman. It really would be nice not to have to deal with character assets at all, just have a library that generates the necessary meshes on the fly when the level loads.

On 1/30/2019 at 2:37 PM, algorithmic_brain said:

Or am I forcing myself a lot by trying to do everything by myself? I am planing to code 4 hours a day. 2 hours for tool development, 2 hours for doing game development by using these tools. I have 4 years. Do you think it is a bad schedule?

You can not force yourself, get a second hobby also when you staring to much.

Combine at least the 4 hours you get for one thing, get busy until you accomplished something.

4 hours is not much, i have to stop programming 1 or 2 hours in advance so i wont have to undo any changes and am sure of the changes made.

Work for 2 or 3 weeks 12 hours a day, and then do something else for best results, once you get going you cant stop, else you have to re-settle.

Re-settling : where was i, what did i do yesterday/last week/last month ?

Phone,doorbel or whatever makes you lose focus and need to re-settle again.

Programming goes without thinking.

Sounds like you have enough reason to not use unity or unreal.

Once you have something you can build upon it.

Just dont buy a PS4 and get discouraged.

40 minutes ago, algorithmic_brain said:

I want to do all of them. If I schedule my time properly I can create a sustainable business.

You'd be the only programmer i know who is able to predict dev times properly... it always takes longer than expected, and time is finite. (4 hrs a day is not so much either)

43 minutes ago, algorithmic_brain said:

Even if it is not gonna be as good as Unity, the journey is still gonna be instructive and it will be a good preparation for writing actual tool that would make the difference.

Yes. However, usually people still make their custom engines to learn and to have a portfolio to get hired, which makes total sense.

But your goal is NOT to get hired but to become independent, so it makes less sense: You now have lots of competition, and they have more mature engines, more time to work on content, better tools.

... just keep it in mind. I don't want to discourage from your plans, and i respect people still working on custom stuff. The U engines shall not dominate all indie gaming!  

(You can just select text from left to right and a 'quote' bubble appears to click on for proper quotes)

The first game will probably not sell much no matter how good it is, because brand recognition takes years to build, but if you live cheap and have a stable part time job, it doesn't matter as long as you have creative freedom and can keep trying without the risk of bankrupcy.