A reminder for all your starters out there, including the OP. Please try not to look at SEQUELS to popular games when starting out. Like Bloons TD 5. Go have a look at Bloons Tower Defense (the original) and the second version. If you go look at versions 1 and 2 ... (and then any after 2) you can see how that the key to getting this thing done (which was done by 1-2 people originally, plus 0-2 people doing art and sound stuff) was that they did a SMALL, but complete game. They added features and improved graphics with every version - but the first version they made had 1 map, les than 10 monkey types, less than 4 upgrades, etc. Version 2 nearly doubled it. And now at version 5 it is nearly doubled again. The original creator would have taken more than twice as long to build Bloons TD 5 as Bloons TD (1) - and by that time he would have given up and we would never have heard of that game.

Don't try to make your first "finished" game have every option, every variation, be polished to the nth degree. Just try to make it clean, simple and fun.

Good luck.

Don't try to make your first "finished" game have every option, every variation, be polished to the nth degree. Just try to make it clean, simple and fun.

Upvote for that too.

A smaller, polished project is in general much better than an expansive unpolished one. Its better to really enjoy a 4-hour game than to slog through 12-20 hours of uninspired, unpolished drek. Because polish takes so much longer than simply birthing the content, you have to remember that the more content you have, the bigger backlog of polish work you're building up, and it builds up faster than the rate at which you're birthing the content -- for every 1 hour of content you create in X days, you're adding 3-10 X the days you'll spend polishing your content, and it can very quickly get out of hand.

Finally, fight the urge to think that more is better -- design is as much about what you take away or leave out as it is what you add.

Adding to everything already mentioned, my advice would be to break your goals in 'blocks' and really think about what you want to achieve. It helps me to have a list of goals which I can actually achieve and feel good about when I finish one.

What helped me was making a very simple game, but functional and 80/20 bug free and expand it step by step. This way you keep learning towards your goal and have the constant fun of achieving new things with relatively small tasks.

Is it even possible for a one man team to make games like those? And if possible, about how long would it take your average person (with no day job) to make something like that?

don't know about your average person, but once you become a skilled programmer i can tell you what it would be like.

i've never done a mobile app, so i'd need to get up to speed on the hardware capabilities and APIs - say 2-4 weeks for both.

tower defense - rapid prototype in a day or two, alpha in a month easy. maybe pubic beta in two months. release in 3-4 months, depending on how far you go on scope and quality.

once you learned to write game apps and worked with a number of platforms and APIs, a new hardware platform or API is no biggie. same as with all software.

I've just started on this very voyage myself so can hopefully provide a little bit of input. I'm currently writing a simple game for android, which will be my first published game on any platform, and am doing everything myself. That is coding, artwork & music (though have used some useful free sound libraries for SFX, try soundjay and freesound).

I started about 3 months ago with only a limited knowledge of Java specifically, but a functional knowledge of general programming concepts. From there it probably took about 3 weeks to learn enough Java to get a functional prototype, a further 2 to learn enough android to port it and since then it has all been about making it look and sound like an actual videogame.

As others have said on this thread, when working on your own, adding the polish is the hardest bit. I've spent a good few days just on my background image and I have very little in the way of animation! (That could be because I'm a better coder than I am illustrator though). I hope to be finished within the month.

I'm also going to directly quote this because I think it is the most relevant point of the thread.

Please try not to look at SEQUELS to popular games when starting out. Like Bloons TD 5. Go have a look at Bloons Tower Defense (the original) and the second version. If you go look at versions 1 and 2 ... (and then any after 2) you can see how that the key to getting this thing done (which was done by 1-2 people originally, plus 0-2 people doing art and sound stuff) was that they did a SMALL, but complete game.

Don't overstretch yourself, and set small manageable goals. If you want to make a tower defense game, build something simple and functional with just one tower to start. Code it in such a way that you can extend it easily. The worst thing I've found about working solo is the shear length of the todo list. So take pride in each time you get a new tower to fire at the enemy, and if you get something new that works well stop and play it for 15mins or so and be happy you got that far.