A AAA first-person shooter title is honestly completely out of bounds for a small team of 5, let alone one person. Take a look at how other indie development teams have succeeded, what their games look like and include, and what they do not include. Photo-realism gets very expensive do to the amount of time it takes to model and animate, as well as the need for full-time specialists. Programming is also expensive and time-consuming. UI is also something that a game requires but you wouldn’t normally think about. Logos, title screens, the ability to save your game, sound design, music, animation state machine, setting up the ability for having a settings menu just to change the video settings and save it. Think of all the different elements a game needs to have and its quite easy to see how the costs add up.
Unless you have ridiculously good friendships with talented people who have large amounts of savings, it’s easy to see how game development costs have skyrocketed. Think about each team member you’ll need, if each person requires a relatively medium-low income of $50,000 and the game takes 1 year (which itself is a vast underestimation, more like 2-4+), and you have one environment artist, one programmer, one character modeler, one animator, one level designer, that’s already 250,000 for just one year without including health insurance/dental/vacation/computers/software/a server for backing up data/etc. and thats with omitting sound design, a UI specialist, a website content manager/web developer/community manager/etc. so people even know your game exists. Then not to mention, this is without including additional government taxes, license fees, possibly a lawyer, etc.
Ideas are super-easy to come up with, and while it’s a good practice to keep notes of all your crazy ideas as you never know which one might turn into something down the road, you also have to think realistically when starting a project. Just because UE4 can achieve photorealism doesn’t mean one person can make a photo-realistic game compared to a team of 50-200.
I’d honestly just try to recreate a game of pong in UE4 or something similar in nature if I were you, so at least you have the experience in what would seem like a very simple thing to implement takes time to develop and polish. Look at what small teams are making, stardew valley is a great example of a project by one person that still took years for him to develop. Minecraft came out at the perfect time/had a great idea, but wasn’t even developed by one person through it’s cycle and relied on money from early-access sales before early-access really was even a thing. Rimworld is also another good example of a small one-man game project (but he had alot of experience as a game developer working at large studios before he even started it), and even that has gone on to hire additional members.
Games are expensive, because time is expensive and people require income gained from time spent working in order to live. Most indie games know they can’t make AAA graphics on a large scale realistically, so they either stylize the hell out of their art direction, use procedural generation in their design, or have relatively small arena-sized games where they don’t need 100,000 art assets. In that notion, if you made your game take place on Mars you’d need like 2-4 materials for the red sand, a few rock models, a character, and that’s about it. If your game takes place in freaking new york city, that’s about 100x the amount of work.
Take the most simplest game idea you can come up with, then slash it down to the bare bones. Out of all the different fields, if you currently are just a designer without practical skills, the most useful skill for you to get would be programming. You don’t need AAA graphics to make an interesting game or game prototype. Rimworld used circles and boxes for their prototypes, Valve Software used whiteboxing for their levels until the end. If you make a fun and successful prototype, you can always polish it after to have better graphics, just don’t expect grand theft auto, fallout, or call of duty with a team of 5.
Anywho keep in mind your grand game ideas don’t have to be the first game you ever made and released. A lot of companies got started making “simple”/casual games, ports of games, and even bad games before they were able to make their first successful medium-large game.
I also feel like you might be kind of young, if so maybe you should look into working on a mod team or mods, make some levels for a game, etc. which can be a fun and educational experience that directly feeds into game development. If you did want to work on a large AAA game, then I’d recommend finding a career path that would match it. Programming is a great skill to learn for game designers, and most importantly still, it’s a skill that will allow you to have well paying jobs outside of the game industry to fall back on/live with job security.
Anywho that’s my two cents, take with it what you will!
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On top of my game ides i have mod ideas, mostly for Minecraft(this is where i clash, do i learn Java first or do i learn C++ first)
i do have ideas for mods for the Codemasters F1 games(mostly involves tryna bring old carsand tracks into the newer games so players can play with F1 history, but that endevour all on it own is a task, researching all the old cars, finding fottage of what the cars sounded like, etc, boiled down a mod like that would be too much)
I would do Doom(1993) mods but honestly i like Doom as it is, the only Doom modding i would do is level design which when i try to create a anti-symetric level, my ocd is the first thing that pops into me head(ALERT: THE LEVEL IS NOT SYMETRICAL, PLEASE FIX THE MAP, have that repeating in ya head litterally every five seconds, thats how bad my ocd hates anti symetry)
so starting with mods i agree would be a great starting point, but no matter what it is, mod or game, my ideas are BIG, the only small mod i would make is a mod for Minecraft that removes that completely bad Cooldown Delay(i hate that feature, what was Monang thinking)
