A great thread indeed! Very nice and realistic one!
I am in the same state as you used to be… But playing with the engines (Unity and now ue4) and after playing some big games like Skyrim or Witcher to see how others do their work I realised that I will never be close to that. But guess what, I’m fine with that and I plan to make my 3rd person open world RPG the way I want it to be.
I don’t have voice actors? No problem, many players wouldn’t mind from an inde developer to just have only subtitles.
I don’t have audio sounds? No problem, I’ll use the free assets, they’ll do.
Basically, I think that we need to realise that we are 1 person who is developing a whole game and we must realise that from the start, from when the idea comes in mind.
So I plan my game with the resources I have.
One day I was playing gothic 3, where I entered a house and I noticed that for ME the one person developer, artist, etc. to make a house like this which has bottles, a fireplace, clothes, chairs, tables, etc is too much, because I won’t have to make only one house, but at least 50 as it’s an open world rpg and I will have to fill my landscape… Not to mention, the npc’s, their armors, the weapons I have to make and the variety of them…
But still nevertheless, I’d love to do and I love doing or if you’d like, bringing to life the idea that I firstly had in mind.
I know it will take at least a year till it’s finished as I’m not able to stay focused on it because I have a family and a job…
I do not want to practice on a small project, just to learn some things. I want to learn upon a project I love and thus I will learn what really interests me as I’ll be going the way to make what I love and not learn something that I will not really need for my game. In final analysis that’s why I occupy myself with game development engines, to make MY game and not learn an engine for fun…