122 Indie Devs Told Me Why They Don't Finish Their Games

What can we learn from their answers?

The struggle to finish a game is very real. It’s a topic often discussed in the indie game community, but I still feel the topic needs to be explored.

I’ve struggled with this same problem on my own game dev journey. I’ve made some progress, but I want to make more. I want to understand this problem so I can help other developers, and also myself, to use better approaches.

Yesterday I sent out a 4-question survey to ask my students what was preventing them from finishing their games. I got 122 responses in under 24 hours. Let’s talk about the results.

Question #1

For the first question, I asked if they felt they had the skills required to finish an indie game.

As you can see 53% felt like they had the skills required, while 22% said they didn’t and 24% were unsure. This data makes sense considering who I asked. Most of my students are already programmers, even if they are new to gamedev. They have already developed the primary skill needed to finish a game: programming.

Question #2

For the second question, I asked how interested they were in making games on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 was not interested and 5 was very interested:

No surprises here. Nearly all of them want to make games.

Question #3

For the third question, I asked if their game making skillset aligned with the kinds of games they wanted to make. I asked this because some people may still be learning the required skills they need to make the kinds of games they are interested in. For example, if you want to make a multiplayer game but still need to learn how to write networking code. Here are their responses:

Only 19.7% said they didn’t have the skills needed to make the kinds of games they were interested in. However, 46.7% felt they would still need to outsource some parts of production.

Making games requires a large skillset; art, music, programming, sound design, etc. There are so many hats that game makers need to fill. It is reasonable to assume that small teams would supplement certain parts of production.

Question #4

For the fourth and final question, I asked about the main obstacles holding them back from completing their games. This question allowed multiple responses. Here are the responses they gave:

Lack of creativity and money are on the low end, while lack of discipline and lack of time are higher up.

Lack of planning surprised me; it seems there are quite a few devs that feel they need more planning. Maybe this is tied to planning their code to prevent getting stuck later in development?

I was also surprised to see scope creep so low; it was around the middle, but I was expecting it to be much higher.

Bonus Responses

The options in question #4 were preselected by me. However, I did allow students to add their own responses. Here are a few that I found interesting:

“Lack of energy.”

“I’m constantly learning new and better ways to do what I need. In most cases I end up starting all over again.”

“I get my games to the point where they need art but I’m not an artist and can’t afford one.”

“I find a similar game already released and lose motivation.”

“The start is easy, but the complexity of the project grows and grows. At some point it is overwhelming to continue.” (I can relate with this one)

“I’m very tired after my full-time job.”

There are so many different obstacles out there that can prevent us from finishing our games. Making games is hard.

While there is no single solution, I believe that good project management practices can be applied to mitigate a lot of these issues and potentially push us over the tipping point, allowing us to finish our games.

However, I haven’t been able to find any project management methodologies designed specifically to help solo developers or small teams complete their games. It’s something I’d like to explore in a future post.

Thanks for reading,
Ben