on solo dev

am i still qualified to talk about this? i haven't really been "solo" in a while - i've worked with the musician tommy tone for over a decade now, and recently em reed and alex degen have both worked with me as part of larger projects. but i was a solo dev for a while and what i mean by that is this: that i was making games where i didn't have to talk to anyone.

i specify this because the idea of solo game development has become a kind of charged topic. i think this is due to a confusion between two distinct settings: that of funded commercial game development, where a single person handling everything is extremely rare, and that of unfunded hobbyist game development, where it is extremely common. adding to the mix up is that the idea of making a game yourself is thought to confer extra glamour, respect, monetary reward. it very well might, in the setting of commercial game development. i do not think this is particularly true for the other kind. i've never had the impression, when telling some bored acquaintance that i make computer games as a hobby, that it sounds any more impressive or less seedy when it's something i'm doing by myself.

anyway, i also wanted to start with some limited definition of what i mean by solo dev because there's also an idea that "solo" is some kind of unreachable metaphysical end-point, which would involve not just making the game but also perhaps the engine for the game, the language which runs the engine... mining your own silicon, creating the universe which produces the silicon... even aside from this ultimate horizon people might insist that at the very least, surely we know enough about game development now to realise it's impossible for something to make it all the way to public release without at least one person playtesting it (ha, ha, ha).

i believe part of this comes from a well meaning urge to critique a supposed capitalist emphasis on individualism. i should say i'm firstly not sure how much it's worth taking that emphasis at face value - couldn't you say as well that individualism is exactly what's impossible under a system where everyone's fighting for the same resource in the same way, facing impoverishment or death for ever deviating too far from the archetype of the Business Man? from memory this is something like oscar wilde's argument in the soul of man under socialism, with the pleasant implication that a formally equal society would be one where everyone had the resources to become as individually weird as possible - a universe of hyper-dandies, each beavering away on their own anno 2000 iterations of The Yellow Book.... these grander objections aside, i think all that's needed for a word to be usable is for it to act usefully as a distinction in some context. does "solo" really mean nothing but a PR emphasis?

i think the strangest thing to me about the solo development discussion is that nobody seems to have much curiosity about exactly what it means as a mode of work - that is to say, specifically for the context where it might most meaningfully be applied. let's put aside the vague idea that making something yourself necessarily makes it more personal, grounded, authentic etc - an opinion which rarely survives first contact with the terrifying impersonality of the itchio new releases page. we might still say that the conditions by which a thing is made are then reflected in all kinds of ways in the content, the emphases, the sensibility of the thing itself. what solo dev means to me is that you don't have to tell anybody anything. you don't have to explain what you're doing or why, don't have to articulate what's funny or corny. your project folder can remain as discombobulated as possible. you can, for a while, work in the happy illusion that your various private idiocies are not causing anyone else harm (that part comes after the game releases).

i'm not saying all collaborative work has to involve mechanisms of formal triage and debate. the last decade or so i was mostly not working on solo things, but they still didn't involve much direct discussion - usually i feel happiest starting off something myself and then building some space in advance for someone else to fill in, in ways i don't really want to dictate to them. the same qualities that make me good at working on things by myself also make me a mediocre collaborator, and i think would leave me deeply unsuited, maybe evil, in some more formal team structure. it's surely true to say this stuff is more of a spectrum than a binary - but does that mean your specific position on that spectrum says nothing about the specificity of the work itself? the good things, the bad things, the things it does or doesn't take for granted, the revealing oddities of structure that come from abandoning the idea of balance? the kinds of friction produced when tools that assume commercial team structures make it into individual hands, and vice versa?

one final thing: again, i think that lingering in the background of this stuff is the idea that solo = individualism = capitalism and teamwork = collectivity = democratic socialism, or something. but surely part of the interest of art itself is that it flickers, excuse me, dialectically between these two poles: the totality of the historical moment and the individual work refracting it, the collective materials of art (history, imagery, language, tools) and the individual consciousness that registers and changes them before sending them back to exist as one part of some wider moment. all work is read both ways, through both lenses, and part of aesthetic sensation itself is our own uncertainty around just where each begins and the other ends. i assume in advance that collective work, like solo work, has its own tendencies and qualities; what remains in both is to discover what they are, what they mean, rather than simply assuming a collectivity it's our job to produce.