No Man's Sky.

It's not precisely the game I dreamed of building, but it's so damn close I can almost taste it... All those years of Sean O'Neil, Ysaneya, myself, and many others building procedural planet after procedural planet, and none of us had the vision and drive to actually build that.

On the one hand, I'm sad I wasn't involved in building it. On the other, I'm overjoyed that somebody went and built it anyway

You should check out shores of hazeron. It's got every feature no man's sky does (Plus way... Way more), but it's made by a programmer who can't do art at all. All assets are procedurally generated, except the player characters (Which you create).

Still working on it, so I won't say (especially due to my popularity level here).

I was semi-ready to release a demo when I joined the site. Now I am actually further behind than when I started though due to poor choice of (now defunct) engines and some other big 'real life' issues.

My game is OK in scope. As for art, I learned to do it myself. I may not be 'pro' but it is better than I ever expected to do and does not take me all that long to make stuff. I don't have any firm release date and don't care as much about getting it out by a certain time, but it will definitely get released eventually.

As for your art...I doubt your art problems could not be addressed. Of course to get it to AAA ZOMG X-TREME levels you will need a budget of many millions, but I'm sure you could get something going once you learned more. And indeed before you learn in depth how the art pipeline works it is kind of futile to try and make a game, especially solo.

Now I am actually further behind than when I started though due to poor choice of (now defunct) engines

Welcome to the club! I started again from scratch after backing the losing horse that was xna and xbox live indie games for xbox 360.

I now target directx 11, a bit more future proof.

For anyone who hasn't realised yet: http://yourgameideaistoobig.com

$1800 ¯\(º_o)/¯

I'm not ambitious enough...

You should check out shores of hazeron. It's got every feature no man's sky does (Plus way... Way more), but it's made by a programmer who can't do art at all

It's not... "pretty". I don't have a better qualifier for my feelings than that.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, for some people aesthetics are one of the most important elements of a game. I happen to be one of those people.

Back in the late 90's I had an idea for a JRPG style game (to be set on a scale map of a terraformed Venus) that I was going to do myself and it probably would've collapsed at some point under what whatever complexity I had in mind for it if it weren't for that I lost (misplaced, deleted, or formatted over) all the code fairly early on.

For several months while unemployed in the early 2000's I had every intention of seeing through a project that was supposed to allow players to play any card game they wanted as if they sat down with their buddies at a kitchen table with a deck of cards. That collapsed when I was faced with connecting players. I can't quite seem to get up the enthusiasm to look into whatever modern day solutions might be available.

My current project will probably never amount to a game for public release as I find myself going off on various tangents and I decided to just stop caring about what direction I go and instead to just enjoy programming what I feel like.

I ran my game idea through the web site ...

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Estimate: $1,434,102

You could hire a team to make it for that price.
Or you could make it yourself in about 29.0 years

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I have to disagree on the time frame and cost.

I had a pre-alpha version of the biomes management, resources management, player skill trees, weapons and tools implementation, inventory management, skill based crafting trees, and a few other items in less than 2 weeks without using any kind of game engine or libraries.

If I ever bothered to pick up and work on my code base again, the only major issues would be networking, system optimization and 2D art.

Edit: "Procedural generation for endless replayability!" adds about $800,000 to the cost

Edit: "Procedural generation for endless replayability!" adds about $800,000 to the cost

I think that's one of those things that doesn't always benefit from economies of scale.

Turns out procedural generation is very expensive for publisher-driven projects where you have to meet the specifications of the project, and indies can get away with shipping procedural stuff that is merely interesting, or that they happened on accidentally.

I have to disagree on the time frame and cost.

It is a joke website... designed to give out decent advice to beginners after you get your lols.

I have a bit of an alternative viewpoint, based on nothing solid whatsoever. Henry Ford said it best: "If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.". My view is that sometimes people manage to create things only because they didn't realise that it was impossible. Of course many more people fail for exactly that reason, but it can be very educational to test your limits. The more vision you have, coupled with solid work ethic and enough free time to put the effort in, and the more of an idea you have as to how to approach each different aspect of what you're trying to do, the more of a wildcard you probably become. I think though if you're posting in the beginner's forum and asking for advice about where to even start, you don't fit into the wildcard category.