I'd love to make a video game, but I value my time at $9.25 an hour, which is currently Canadian minimum wage. I'm not going to work for less unless it fulfils some other need, and I doubt video games will ever be need fulfilling for me.
what can I learn from this article?
That is, what I can read there: You have to create images and sounds and if you can't you have to buy them. And no matter what you do, in the end you still have to pay your rent (what will be more as $1,000).
> "You have to create images and sounds and if you can't you have to buy them."
As a hobbyist game developer, this idea is probably the most key thing to game development (for a hacker) - and gets a bit more nuanced.
There's a very real cost-benefit to the type of game you're making vs. the cost of content.
For example, in a first-person shooter content costs a lot more than, say, SimCity. That one wall you had to model, texture, and light? In the player's field of vision for may 2 seconds tops. The amount of labor required to generate all of your artistic assets is pretty prohibitive - which is why we don't see many shooters coming out of small shops, and shooters tend to be mass-market affairs so that they stand a shot at recouping the investment.
On the other hand, games like SimCity have significantly less content development going on. That one building? Replicated hundreds of times over in a single game, players keep coming back and seeing it, but never get bored. Each piece of content goes further and has considerably more lasting power than it does in an action game.
This is something many amateur devs disregard to their peril - the very structure of your game needs to account for your low-budget status. The alternative is to try and execute a shooter on a budget, and then compromise on the quality of the content (or worse, use bad design to gloss it over: e.g. making players traverse a level backwards).
