Ask HN: Any solo game developers here?
I own Planimeter. We publish Planimeter Game Engine 2D, which was previously called Grid Engine 9.[1]<p>I spend a lot of time thinking about how independent developers can better spend their time. A lot of developers get caught up in design documents, or thinking about how they want to make a game, but not seriously understanding how many hours a week you need to commit to a project and over how many years.<p>As a rule of thumb, about 20 hours a week over a period of multiple years dedicated to a single project seems to bisect game developers into categories of those who are productive and those who aren&#x27;t.<p>We have had conversations with different developers in communities, like LÖVE&#x27;s, for instance:<p>Surprisingly, many developers aren&#x27;t interested in serious commercial efforts. A lot of them fixate over matters that don&#x27;t make significant product impact. As an example, there&#x27;s some sort of &quot;ECS&quot; fad going on right now. Years ago there was some sort of &quot;push&#x2F;pop game state&quot; fad.<p>Professional game engines aren&#x27;t built this way, so I have no idea where these fads originate from.<p>We are a group of former Source Engine contractors, game technology developers, and designers. We have written some articles on embedding Lua, multiplayer game networking, and introducing a CSS 2.1 compositor into game engines, among other things.<p>I&#x27;m interested in having conversations with other game developers, and as a like to have, we love talking with those who have written significant pieces of software in the open source community.<p>As a crude ballpark, a measure of &quot;significant&quot; might be any repository with over 75 stars, or development of a technique that is novel in game software, etc.[2]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Planimeter&#x2F;game-engine-2d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Planimeter&#x2F;game-engine-2d</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;andrewmcwattersandco&#x2F;github-statistics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;andrewmcwattersandco&#x2F;github-statistics</a>