Is it possible to make a commercial fighting game as a solo developer on a shoestring budget? Well, maybe.
This blogpost was born as a Twi(X)tter reply to a user who asked me about this, after I broke down how my latest (non-fighting) game managed to recoup its shoestring budget in around two months of shelf time on Steam (and with a Switch port coming soon in 2024, courtesy of Flynn’s Arcade and RAWRLAB Games).
Well, one of the replies to that Xitter thread (pardon me, I won’t ever manage to just call it X) was the following, asking me the titular question:
Is it possible to make a commercial fighting game as a solo developer on a shoestring budget?
The answer, the one real answer is it depends. But take a seat, because I’ll drive you through the factors that make this hard to discuss in general terms.
So, without thinking too much about it, I started replying — ending up with a thread that easily overcame the 10 posts threshold. Which, well, is a lot to keep up with, even with a thread unroller.
Thus, I’ve decided to put together this summary here, for your use and comfort! The original thread, in case you are interested, can be found here.
The woes of a solo developer
What you need for a commercial fighting game as a solo developer is either becoming a Renaissance-style dev who can do (almost) everything or a way to cut down costs with a clever use of Internet resources. It’s truly a “pick your poison” process.
There are several itemized costs in the list of “needs”. I’ll try to split them for ease of discussion:
- Art (which includes character art, character models, animation, background and general visual assets)
- Programming (including netcode)
- Music
- Sound effects
- Voice acting
- Marketing (not discussed in this blogpost, sorry!)
The two most critical categories, in my personal opinion, are Art and Programming. Let me explain you why it’s so, from my personal experience and point of view.
Art
The art style MUST be consistent. This is where kit-bashing assets from asset stores and free resources won’t cut it, because all characters need to look like they are coming from the same hand.
Animations too are critical. Ideally, if you are producing a fighting game as a solo dev, you NEED to be able to produce your characters yourself, whether as 3D models or 2D assets. This is one part that is extremely hard to outsource.
Good and consistent art costs a lot and rightfully so (please, don’t suggest using AI art for this—it will cut costs, but in the opinion of this writer it is an unethical approach and will cause your potential players to complain about your game on socials, or—worse — completely ignore it because of the AI assets — especially for a commercial game. If ethics and customer feedback aren’t your cup of tea, know that — as of the time of writing this post — AI generators are good at producing single frames, but not consistent at keeping the details over several frames, which is a no-go for 2D games).
As an example of the hurdles you might face, look at how many individual sprites Evil Ryu has in the Gameboy Advance version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 (source):
Notice how many single sprites of animation for one single character. One such spritesheet can easily cost thousands of dollars to commission to an independent artist and will take a sizeable time to be completed.
Now, imagine doing it for around ten characters. Costs are already going in the “taking a loan” direction, which ideally doesn’t fit the “low budget” goal we were talking about. So, here you really need to learn some skills or prepare yourself to pay a hefty amount of money.
Character art is where a fighting game lives or dies, before your players even give it a chance while browsing an online store. It’s your visiting card, botching that can condemn your game to oblivion. It’s EXPENSIVE, and rightly so!
Programming
Programming is the other bottleneck. A good programmer will cost you ~20,000$ (yes, that’s a twenty-thousand dollars bill there, no typo) or more per year for the duration of the whole project, depending on how complex it is. Notice that I’m lowballing this figure: the actual amount you’ll be asked for might be significantly higher, more in the 35,000$~100,000$ range, depending on where your prospective developer lives (assuming an average Western country here, for simplicity). This is really a skill you NEED to pick up if you want to go solo. No ifs and buts.
You either learn to use an engine or a framework, or you need someone who does that for you. While not the hardest cookies to bite, fighting games are hard. Good luck implementing determinism and GGPO without any previous experience. [On a related note, if you are interested in learning more about what “determinism” means in the context of fighting games, you might read the article below. It lists the common pitfalls inexperienced developers fall into (Hi, it’s me! I was the inexperienced developer that fell into most of them!)]
As engines go, there’s now a lot of choice (Unity, Godot, Unreal…), so you might not need to spend much on developer tools — but learning how to use them? That requires time. Even going for fighting game specific engines and frameworks, such as IKEMEN Go, Universal Fighting Engine 2 and Castagne will require you to spend a hefty amount of resources to understand how they “tick”.
To further hammer in the point, programmers are hard to find for such projects, good programmers even more so. I know of one single person that codes IKEMEN games on commission for commercial projects (good ol’Kamekaze), so you might want to contact him for a quotation. But, again, don’t expect to pay peanuts.
Play with your limits
So, if you want to go solo, Art and Programming must be mastered to a certain extent. You need to learn to use your limits to define your scope and game feel. Use your boundaries as way to feed creativity, not the opposite.
As a personal example, the reasons why I settled for a low poly count for Schwarzerblitz (circa 2000 polys per character) were the following:
- I was bad with Blender
- my engine of choice, irrlicht, didn’t like animated models with more than 10k tris, when I turned shadows on.
Instead of scrapping the project, I adapted it to the hand I was dealt.
Music
Now, if you have Art and Programming down, THEN you can actually manage to produce a fighting game on a relatively contained budget. Music, good music, costs money, but there are some very good artists that have indie rates of around 100$ per minute of finished music.
By talking with them, you can actually manage to get a ~8–10 tracks soundtrack for around 1000$, which isn’t bad at all. If this is still too high for your pockets, you can — again — pay with time. There are countless good repositories of permissively licensed music.
FreeMusicArchive, CCMixter, even SoundCloud if you know which search options to use. I’ve put together a whole soundtrack just by means of CC-BY licensed music, but it required a lot of time to look for suitable tracks.
Alternatively, you can buy Royalty Free Music packages for some 100s of $. This option is still relatively cheap and a good compromise, especially if you use a pack that isn’t very mainstream — the less it is used around, the less your players will notice it’s RFM.
Fun fact, but after I used some CC-BY tracks in Schwarzerblitz, I’ve noticed some YT commenters on said tracks commenting with “Schwarzerblitz led me here”. I took care of listing all songs I used in the credits and game jukebox, so I’m glad that helped some of my players to find out about a good composer!
Sound Effects
I’ll keep it short, as this is by far the field I’m less expert in. As sound effects go, there are also several free resources, like FreeSound.org, and several paid packs too (normally for ~tens of dollars). SFX design is one of the fields I’m abysmal in, so I’ll gladly spend hours scouring online sound archives instead of trying it myself.
Voice Acting
Voice actors is another cost item that is relatively affordable. Some VAs have indie rates of the order of 1~5$ per sentence spoken. Which means that, for an FG with some pain grunts and 5–15 extra voice lines, you could afford getting each character voiced for 30~100$ each.
In conclusion
All in all, as a solo dev it is indeed doable to make a commercial fighting game with a budget of a ~2000–3000$ or less, as long as you know WHERE to cut corners and you are able to do A LOT on your own. Plus, it will take anything between one and five years, most likely.
What you don’t pay with money, you pay with time. And that time should be considered a cost too. With a couple back of the envelope calculations, making games solo will probably never recoup the full “time cost”. Which begs the question: is it worth it?
That is ultimately something I can’t answer for you. Schwarzerblitz required 5 years of continuous development in my free time, with two big hiatuses, but for me (and my mental health), it was very much worth it. I must have spent ~3000 hours of development on it.
And yet, I would do that again — just not with the expectation of being able to go on par with it.
Further food for thought
ARF Game Studio, a small South-American game development studio that created Bearsus and Stick Fighter, did it on a very small budget and managed to recoup their development costs in three months thanks to their ad-supported model and no pay2win mechanics. For small games like those, this is an interesting avenue but probably not suitable for all indie fighting games out there!
Let me know if this short blog post was any helpful and if you have any specific questions in the comments! Alternatively, you can reach out for me at my usual Twi(X)tter account @AndreaDProjects!
