I am a game producer (project manager) in the video game industry for 15 years but also now learning how to do my own games on the side. I think your biggest pitfall was focusing on the look of the game before the gameplay itself. Once you have a base idea, just "Whitebox" it. No importing 3D models, animations, textures, etc... Just use the mannequins and simple shapes and focus on your core game loop. Do small iterations. This means setting a goal for the day, for example "implement simple AI enemies that will attack me". and put all your effort into that. Then assess what you have and set your next goal for the next day. Once you have your core loop and gameplay. spend time playtesting yourself, and maybe 1-2 other friends to see what can be improved. Once you have a fun game that is working, then you can focus on the UI and then the look of the game. Anyway, I wish you the best of luck and look forward to more videos!
Thanks for the advice, this helped me get my head around my project. I was getting bogged down in thinking about how I could possibly make everything look the way I wanted (while having little game dev experience) to the point where I wasn't getting anything done at all.
going from "I gave myself 2 weeks to make a really simple concept" to "I spent $80 on physics and weather plugins instead of implementing gameplay" is the quintessential solo game dev experience
I've been learning Unreal Engine game dev, never done any of this before. I made my first game, similar to the above following a Gorka Games tutorial on youtube. Took me about 11 days, about 1 to 2 hours per day. But I didn't buy anything to make it work, just used the free assets from Unreal Engine Library. Same exact style of game, same kind of health bar, same 'wave spawner' system where you fight enemies in waves. I'm not an experienced game dev by any means, but I think basic level design (putting down trees, landscape, etc) is the easiest part of the whole thing. Basically just point and click to paint stuff down or resize things. It's the actual game mechanics that take much longer, where you add code behind the scenes. I'm only using blueprints (no direct C++) and it's been great so far. I'm now 33 days into learning Unreal Engine and I'm working on my 2nd game by following a tutorial. But it's more of an adventure game similar to Tomb Raider. On a side note, Metahumans look fantastic, but they are not optimized at all. Once I added my 3rd metahuman into my 2nd game the level editor became almost unusable. I had to turn down the LOD on all metahumans to '1' (lowest setting) just so I could keep using the editor. And I'm doing it with 64gb memory, RTX 3090, and AMD Ryzen 9 5900x... I won't be using metahumans in the future, just not optimized enough.
i dont have a lot of money but as a solo dev as soon as i start trying to add something to my game i check the marketplace and see if its already been done. Then if yes see if it has good reviews and is easy to implement for newbies, and then figure out if i can afford it :)
Hello Jack, I'd highly recommend creating small projects if you want to make games and keep the process fun. Take the game you're showing us now, for example. Turning that into a full game could be a 3-year journey if you already know the scope and story of the game, but realistically, we're talking about 5 years. There are many things people forget when it comes to games, but one good example is picking up items. Implementing the action of a character picking up an item is not hard, but what's difficult is getting the game to understand every situation that can happen and still perform the task correctly. What should happen if you get attacked at the same time you pick up an item? What happens if you cancel picking up the item, and so on. Try making a game that is single-based, in a close environment, and with simple mechanics. That will give you the chance to succeed but also push yourself to create more advanced projects in the future.
As someone who has been developing games for nearly 5 years, my biggest bit of advice would be to focus on the core systems before anything else. Example core systems being, (attacking, taking damage, dodging, health, enemy movement, ai movement). Polish and design can always come later.
I think that applies to creating anything. I'm studying graphic design and doing my fair share of web development on the side and this approach is the best when it comes to designing anything consistently. You go in with a simple, small idea, sketch it out in any medium that you want to (be it a drawing on a piece of paper, some notes in a notepad or some rough code), then you make it function well and at the very end you can make it look good. Ofc thats just one approach but I think it can help anyone getting started in creating. And if you want to really learn to make videogames you just need to make a lot of small ones, GMTK has a great series focusing more on his thinking than programming when it comes to creating a videogame.
It truly comforted me seeing you struggle just like I did in the beginning. I don't mean that in a bad way, UE5 is just such a comprehensive program to learn, that it can get you discouraged real quick if you don't focus on learning things relevant to what you want to create. The basics are easy, but I found myself in the deep waters very early on into my journey, not understanding a single bit of how the program works on a macro level. Because isolating the program micro levels is quite easy, but it's the fact that all these sections need to work together, is what makes it hard. I'm still learning and I know it's going to take a lot more learning before I find myself truly comfortable with UE5, but great to see that we started out the same way.
@@JFrenchman oh yeah i know that so many stories of games being developed for years but due to management time being wasted as well as crunch....and the problem is its pushing out the talented devs to strike out with indie companies, Rocksteady for example is a shell of its former self along with Bioware
Being a game dev over 10+ years. I would like that every single person who stated "making games is easy", "that's not working, you're just playing a game" (or any other comment understimating game developers) to watch this. It is HARD WORK to make games. I felt your struggle, same thing happen to me years ago, but over time, you will know how to save and manage your time better. Keep on going, once you get that satisfaction of seeing your game working, and other people enjoying it, is addictive.
Yes, I just started few days ago and have to say it's very hard, if you are making solo game you not only have to learn programming, you also have to learn how to make assets For 2d (know how to paint) and for 3d know how to do 3d modeling, texture making and also know how the game engine works. And If you are creating your own game engine than that's another level of difficulty. These things individually takes months to learn or even years.
@@gamerz000. yes it can be super time consuming I love art so for me it was a must learn but yk there are hundreds of thousands of ready templaes for your first project dont try to reinvent the wheel , unless you really want to ofc you can , anyways best of luck fellow GameDev
@@arcanep no i guess I won't need it, I am making low poly 3D game and i am just making a city builder game in which we are a person in the city (the Ruler) and I want to do it all by myself so I can learn more. But Thanks for the recommendation.
I so get this. Even my wife who knows exactly how hard what we do is... I can feel her rolling her eyes when I say I have a ton of work to do. Like, everything we've done to be a part of game creation, almost ruined games for us, or for many... did ruin video games for them.
agreed - I almost wish he hadn't shown the bit at the end, and just stopped at the end of the two weeks. I know, give people hope and all that, but you really need to hammer home the fact that game making IS HARD.
As somebody who is working in the 3d industry for 20 years now, and in the gaming industry for about 4, this resonates a lot. A lot of banging your head around stuff until you figure it out. Really love your dedication man.
This is something that I can't help but admire. As someone who has tried to get back into programming and learning it only to give up after a few days, I can relate to the frustrations and glimpses of hope you get when actually managing to make something work as you imagined. I also love how you show the "mistakes" and how your attention can only hold for so long until something else grasps it away. I truly hope you continue with this and actually start producing great games, since you have a creative mindset and a vision what you are aiming towards.
Start smaller. Give yourself projects you can actually complete. Plenty of excellent 2d games. Try game maker studio. Don’t do visual code, do the actual code and quickly move into scripts and inheritance. Give yourself goals you CAN achieve and start small. Then you will actually learn and you’ll love it. It’s the difference between trying to make something AAA and just giving up vs making some meh games that feel complete which help stepping stones to greater projects.
Oh from someone who does programming for a living gaining control over yourself is the key. Like you do stupid misstakes when you got tiltet in a competitive video game, programming can overwhelm you with frustration if something doesn't work. If you want to get better you need to replace frustration with curiosity. Collect things that work. Try braking those pieces and understand them. Ask yourself why something doesn't behave like you want it to and experiment around a lot. Keeping your attention at programming is like running. You need to build your stamina slowly over time. Gladly my job involves a lot of other timeconsuming tasks, because i still couldn't maintain ~40h of pure programming a week. It's really time consuming to become a decent programmer. Good education can give you a jumpstart, but you need to start grinding and embracing it at some point.
@@JackSather Have you tried to buy into Unreal Sensei's Masterclass? I bought into his Masterclass 2 years ago and I'm not sorry, he has really good tutorials starting from scratch
As a professional game designer who has worked on AAA Games, the parts where you go "why isnt this working?!" then realize its a button press hit home lol. Keep it up man, love the video.
@@weirdthings9583 For the most part the one the publisher is providing. EA has Frostbite, Ubisoft has Ubisoft Anvil, and Blizzard used to write the engine alongside the game so Diablo 3 or WoW all have a tailored engine for what the game needs. Today many tailor Unreal for 3D and Unity for 2D made games.
The youtube dilemma is so STRONG. TH-cam needs to implement a STUDY MODE, where in your account you have your STUDY DESK, there you choose a very specific topic you want to study for X amount of time that you input and then youtube helps you by only showing you suggestion of videos related to the topic you want to study for that amount of time.
I just stumbled across this video and your channel. THANK YOU for documenting this journey. It's the first time I have felt genuinely seen in the journey we all share called "Solo Game Dev with ADHD" (you mention not being diagnosed, but the constant distractions and other problems you run into are my experience to a tee). Seeing the joy on your face when you figure something out and show off what you finished with is the type of payoff that myself, and a lot of people, are striving for.
I just love your humility and authenticity in showing your process. It's so helpful to see all the pitfalls that people can fall into, and to also realize that that's kind of a normal thing. We're not going to pick up a new craft knowing what the perfect workflow is. It takes time to realize what tasks take priority and what tasks need to be delayed.
whenever i play indie games like dredge or something i always think ‘man, i wish i made this’ i hope u can make this work. and think ‘man, im glad i made this’
Bro, you are the GOAT man. You really helped me through my Game Dev course at University. The way you explain things makes it super easy to understand.
I love this video, as someone who just opened unreal engine yesterday to start my adventure on making things within the video game world, even for people have no experience it still a teaching point for people to learn what to priorities to achieve their end goals, as even reading through the comments, where experienced people also have their input on your starting experience, not only does that show you were you went wrong but also shows others what to focus on
Hi Jack, I was a senior game designer at Square Enix for 7 years. I worked on Final fantasy 15, 16 and kingdom hearts 3. Honestly for a newcomer, you did really good man. You created more game in 2 weeks than i did in a month when i first started (and I was unemployed 😂). Good gob my dude. My only critique is that you didnt add any taxi's, and the game is not called crazy taxi, and the game is not crazy taxi. If you add those simple elements, you might have some gold on your hands.
After starting this journey myself for new years I started to lose motivation recently and this video helped respark that drive to keep going. Thank you
Man, I really really appreciate this video. I have been trying to learn game dev in the same exact way, I feel like I just watched a video of myself. Except for one key difference, you kept with it. I've hit all these different levels of frustration and given up and revisited over and over. Sometimes I get so discouraged I start thinking I'm the only one that runs into these problems and that I'm incapable. Oddly enough I found your video "Getting distracted" but it was exactly what I needed to see at this moment. I forget we all learn and experience the same difficulties and I need to power through and continue to learn. Thank you for the gentle reminder that we all struggle in the same ways but gotta push through to see progress. Thank you for your time, your humor, and your complete honesty. Great video and i'll be subscribing for more to follow you along this journey!
Don’t give up my friend. I’m going to be 50 this year and I’m still playing games on my rigged pc. When I was 20 something l always wanted to make games but that time it was difficult. I always had mad imagination and visionary about what games I would make. But unfortunately never had that opportunity. But you keep going forward 👍🏼
So pleased you watched and enjoyed my video! Really interested in your journey too, good luck with it all, I’m just starting to take a look at UE5 to see if I can incorporate it into VR and/or games in the future.
TBH, I love that simple concept of a Norse hero, fighting his/her way through mobs of enemies to reach the next menhir with glowing runes, that provides respite even if just briefly. I think you nailed the visual atmosphere in the end, with the blizzard limiting your view distance creating a dramatic tension at all times. If I was in your shoes, having gotten that far, I'd honestly just keep working on what you already have and not give up. The hardest part is coming up with an original concept/world/story, the technical stuff like polished animations, you can work out when you get more experienced in the programs you work with.
Hell yeah, welcome to the game dev journey! Even after using UE for 8+ years, I'm still constantly learning the tools- it's a software that encompasses a whole umbrella of jobs so it can definitely become a bit overwhelming. If you ever need any assistance with the learning journey, feel free to throw me or any other UE devs a message, the community is very open to helping each other. Great video!
I have wanted to make a game for years and recently started trying too, but it was getting frustrating and it felt like i was doing everything wrong, I was just scrolling randomly on youtube today and found this, i am not even joking this video helped me out so much, from the tips you gave to the funny parts in this video, they all helped me by calming down my frustration, I successfully have made my first game and it turned out pretty well, this is the first of your videos i have seen but I am definitely going to follow and keep watching, I wish you, and everyone reading this, success, whether its making games or playing them.
I started into Unreal like 2 weeks ago, with the mission of making my own game and god I can relate to this video. Excited to see how you progress, and appreciate you sharing the roadblocks and solutions. The biggest lesson I’ve learnt so far is to stay focused on one aspect at a time, which is super hard when you keep finding shiny videos on how to do “cool” things in UE. I’ve now made myself just save videos and not watch them until I’m finished with what I’m working on before getting distracted 😅
Try doing something on your own based on what you've learnt.You'll enjoy a lot more and it will cement what you've learnt.Then move on to the next tutorial.After watching a general game dev tutorial on UE watch small small tutorials and come up with your own small projects to try out.This way you'll avoid tutorial hell.I remember while trying to learn blender i watched tutorial after tutorial and blindly copying what I saw i didn't make anything my self i didn't learn and following someone do a whole model was really boring.
As someone who uses youtube a lot for things like study music, that part about getting sucked down the youtube distraction tunnel was the most relatable thing ever
I didn't thought you would go down this route but damn is it a dream of mine too. Good luck on the road and I hope you will make some unique and great games in the long run!
If you really want to, there's no better time than to start now and you could even e-mail Jack. As said, it's a passion thing, hell, the team could exchange so much knowledge out of passion itself that you could learn new things and teach new things. A true collaborative experience! And if you do decide to start learning, best of luck and remember, you can do this, no matter who says what!
Even if he can just have fun with it, it would be fun to follow along with the journey. And him having a large audience and captivating personality, will make it worthwhile, whether he finishes it or not. Also he shouldn't worry too much, about the horse and cart thing. Even a AAA game studio such as Bethesda can't get that one right. You thought I was talking about their workflow with Starfield right? Where they just started making all the different systems, hoping it would eventually turn into a streamlined game. It did not. BUT I was actually referring to the intro to Skyrim and the glitchy horse+cart. I'm 36 myself and have been wanting to make games for many years. Started learning unreal many years ago, when UE4 had a subscription model. But I stopped doing it for many years, due to multiple reasons, including mental and physical health issues. I'm really wanting to get back on that horse now and these kinds of videos are very inspirational. Its my dream to create something. Not even to make money or for clout or anything. I just want to make something I like to play myself, and others might enjoy as well.
@@JackSathersuper awesome, to also see all your pitfalls was super interesting. I can relate am in the middle of learning it. I bought myself a course in unreal 5 which will take you in ten days from noob to be able to use the entire engine, make you familiar with all it's lingo, basics and then some. It is a filmmaker course. But it also learned me the in and outs of the engine itself. I can confidently say that I could make a game in 2 weeks just from this course alone. It goes into every detail in bitesize chunks so you don't need to sit through 5 hours of footage. It breaks it down day by day in 30-60 min sections and after ten days you actually know unreal 5. It also updates everytime a new feature is added and you get lifetime acces to it. I bought it at a discount, but believe me this course is the real deal. It's called boudless resourse in case you want to know. I am not sponsored but this resource literally changed my life. I hope this helps you out in some way shape or form. Just felt I had to share it with you since it has helped me tremendously...
I got a question, not to detract or take away credit from this man here at all but where are the TH-cam guys who are educated in making actual games that aren’t big or mainstream? From the first few minutes it seems like this is just some guy who loves videos games trying to make a game.
While i greatly applaud the effort, the problem is you’re basically trying to do / learn everything all at once. Most solo devs started with a foundational experience in one craft of game making and then ‘winged it’ for the rest, slowly learning everything else. I’ve been in the industry 15 years and i still barely can make my own games, coding especially haha
That's the case with the people who start out in directly in the industry. I am a back-end developer/systems designer by trade, but in reality I can do some devops, front-end stuff, desktop apps, machine learning because I had to because I did not land a job directly. Most people in my team severely lacks the understand of other parts of the development cycle. Lacking the knowledge is easy problem to fix, but usually people learn to rely on other people which is called having a skill in teamwork. Well, I never learned that fully. Been solo for so long, started a job solo, got raise after raise while being solo, hired other people and made the project modular enough that I can stay solo. Now I am about to turn 30 and decided to make a video game for the first time in my life. I am for sure making use of my profession using my coding skills both in C++ and Blueprint in UE. I am for sure using my understanding of front-end and UI/UX experience. I am for sure using my very little skill in 3D modelling because when I was 20, I needed money and had to learn Blender, haha. I find myself jumping between these skills and losing a lot of time in one sense, but gaining precious knowledge in other sense. The thing is that nowadays, the video game engines are just advanced enough to make it easier for us. Is asset flipping bad? Maybe yes. But you can use those assets to make the prototype of your game and focus on learning other parts and maybe you can get a 3D designer to help you in the future. When one focuses on the good aspects of it, one realizes that it has never been this easy. Still difficult, but the easiest so far.
I've been coding in Godot for a few months now and at a base level it's extremely user friendly and intuitive on the other hand I still know very little of the obvious infinite depth of coding techniques but am quickly learning the basics.
@@mistermelancholy7698yah! Godot’s great, i’ve been experimenting with it as well, gscript’s super easy to learn too, my problem is just ‘sticking with it’ i get too distracted with another game idea haha
This is honestly very inspiring. I've played games all my life and have always wondered about making my own game but fearing that it was just writing lines of code all day. Seeing you with the same passion and going out and chasing it is awesome. Love the video!
I love this video specifically because I just started a project to make my own game in my spare time, coming at it from literally the same place as you did. I.e. having art oriented hobbies, being in love with video games and thinking that I have lots of cool ideas to make my own, and simply having a desire to finally do so. The difference, though, is that I began more or less at the ground level: picking Unity as my engine, trying to learn some code, writing a design document to figure out what I want to make specifically, and trying to put the gameplay pieces and game systems together before worrying about any of the art or assets. So far it worked relatively decent. I still get tired of the tedium, I also get distracted as hell, but I rarely stumble into a problem that I have literally zero idea how to resolve. Also, I'm not making it a 14-day challenge for myself and I'm actually not expecting to get anywhere with this until sometime next year, but that's beside the point, lol.
As someone who did youtube and makes games now, it's so fulfilling and I'm glad to see a youtuber trying it out! Making games is all about learning from the failures and trying again, and you did exactly that! There are probably people looking at the final game like "Damn I wish I could make that", and you should be proud to have made it. Also UDS is amazing. Best of luck on your journey! I've been in Unreal for about a year and a half and i'm starting to feel like a real dev lol
A few of the biggest tips I can give as a senior developer. 1. Learn and use revision control. At least the basics. And commit to it every time you get something working. Work atomically as we call it. Small changes that you get working and commit because you can revert back to it if something goes wrong. 2. Learn to actually use the basic tools of unreal. Get a good grasp of typical workflows. 3. Blueprints alone will not be a good choice for building a game unless it’s little more than a walking simulator. Blueprints are in fact code, minus some syntax. 4. Watch GDC videos. If you want to see how things are done from both graphics and gameplay perspective, these are some of the best videos around. Most describe theory instead of just providing a tutorial. Two great ones are the Tsushima grass one and Spider-Man web swinging mechanic.
My favorite thing about this video was not the obvious frustrations and what feels like constant failure, but your persistence through it. So many people would find it easier to just scrap all this, forget the video and just go back to what you know. But after 2 full weeks of trying to learn something incredibly difficult, realizing you didn't really have much to show, but still felt the drive to give it a couple more days and make something you are proud of is what I find so inspiring. I actually saw your Godot video first (distracted my recommended videos) and I am a fan. Keep it up man I hope to see more updates whether its Godot or Unreal or whatever else.
Broooooo!!!! I'm so excited! I started learning UE4 about 4 years ago as a hobby during COVID. Since I found your channel, all the videos on awesome game ideas (coughs in Bannerlords video), I thought, "I need to make one of his ideas a reality!" Time for me to put the work in and get good enough to make it happen.
It takes a special kind of sadist to know how easy it is to get distracted and then proceed to list a bunch of really cool/fun videos to watch in the middle of their own! I'm just lucky Young Frankenstein isn't available on streaming or I'd have been lost for another 2 hours. Seriously, though, great video. Funny as hell as it genuinely reflects my own experiences trying to learn new tools like Unreal Engine through online resources (especially the constant starting from scratch). There is indeed value in "failure" so long as you let yourself learn from it, which I agree is an important take away.
Jack, DO NOT compare yourself to others! As you may know very well, the videos you watch that show how to do things, or the guys who make a playable experience or game in X amount of days, they don't show all of the struggle!! It's not always what it seems! You are an inspiration to me because I have been down this same road as well but I was not as committed as you are. You're the freakin man, keep it up.
The attention thing rings home so much to me. I set out to just do something new and end up spending the day regretfully wasting it, and then wishing I had done better. I'm so happy that you managed to overcome that!
This is the part of dev that no one seems to really show: the INTENSE procrastination, tutorial overload, and distractions. There are some that harp on the fact that you really won't get much done, but this really shows just how much work and time and effort it takes to do like the simplest things. Ironically, this was the most encouraging video I've found so far that made me feel not so stupid for feeling so stupid. Thanks!
I love that you also talked about the problems that you stumbled on in game and life, not many people talk about this, and they tryna make it seem like they didn t put that effort into making something. cuz now everyone shows only the succes. and it also helps others, they can also learn from your mistakes, or simphatize with with like see that they have those problems, struggles too. it isn t just them(cuz that s how social media makes us think cuz they show only the succes). so Thank You!
Hey! I would say I'm an intermediate 3D artist, I've been modelling for a few years but I have a lot of concepts to learn yet. In my time learning 3D, something important I've learned is what failure means. Failure is not the opposite of succeeding at something, failure only happens when you stop trying. Every time you make a mistake, every time you have to scrap everything and restart, every time you get a weird issue that you spend hours trying to fix, only for the solution to be turning on or off one tick box, is the process of improving. There is a way around every obstacle, even if it means starting over. The path forward is never blocked unless you stop trying! You never failed in this video because you came back and kept trying, and you learned so much in doing so 😄 (Also the constant youtube tutorials is so real lol I have so many playlists for Autodesk Maya, Substance Painter, Zbrush, etc.)
This has been my experience with every single project of mine, ever since learning blender. Having a giant dream, trying to make just the minimum viable product and then three weeks later 12h/day banging my head on the keyboard and getting distracted by TH-cam/downloading way too many assets I'll never use, I restart five times and keep adding stuff until it breaks, then overshoot my deadline by another two weeks, and then settle for even less than I originally thought would be the worst case scenario. It's the life of a CG artist, and it's very similar to a game dev, except I never have to deal with programing.
This is one of the best videos I have seen so far on youtube regarding game development. The struggles are real. I also wanted to create my own game but never got to do it. I hate myself every day for it but this video has given me some hope. Finally I will start making my own game Thanks for sharing your experience. Kudos to you. Dont stop now, its only the beginning...
I'm not a game dev, but I went through a similar character arc with music production (i.e. starting with zero experience), and I have to say that satisfaction of finally achieving a workable result is SO real. I related to this so damn much. Great job man!
THIS IS SO COMFORTING! Even as a game designer (but never worked in engine) i am so overwhelmed trying to learn unreal or unity, as most things come so naturally to devs and digital artists I feel so dumb. thank you for giving me the comfort that not everyone can just pick up something like this and learn it instantly!
The amount of stress and pure suffering I had to go through to fix problems that appeared out of nowhere is accurately portrayed in this video and that gives me so much motivation. You'll get better with time, just stay persistent and don't give up.
This really shows how essential it is to know programming pretty well lol. I remember before going to college for it, the tutorials are literally impossible to follow. Since they’re teaching you about the engine, you have no clue about core coding concepts or terminology. You don’t understand how anything works, and in order to do so, you’d need to go down a massive rabbit hole which involves learning syntax, different libraries, loops, algorithms, etc. You can only really get so far clicking buttons, let alone understand what that button is or any relationships. If you’re struggling that’s super normal, I suggest just learning a basic programming language like Java, C, python, etc. it’ll help way more than you think. Also, you can’t find relative information on google because you don’t get the theory or terminology behind some of these properties. It helps when you know what that “button” you clicked does, and how the script actually works behind it.
I don't make video games but I make board games, and this is one of the most important things to nail down. At the start you should spend 90% on mechanics and maybe 10% on visuals. Just enough to not have an eye bleed while testing. You never know when visuals or even your entire theme might change. Then as you progress and things get more established that ratio can shift until by the end its 90% visuals and 10% mechanics. It's hard because beautiful visuals are motivating and get you excited more easily than fixing the umpteenth bug etc. but it saves a lot of time and money, especially if things change mid project. **That said, I found this inspiring and anyone starting their journey is cause for celebration!
Great video. As a former professional game Artist 3d/generalist, your decision to give Blender a whirl is awesome. Your idea in filming yourself for animations is spot-on, and a technique used by professional animators for decades. When I was learning 3d animation (before TH-cam, working on a Pentium 66MHz PC and an SGI Onyx) we always had mirrors at our desks to learn facial animation and were literally throwing ourselves on the floors to nail the movement of a death animation. Keep up the work and don't be afraid to get into the meat of traditional modeling and animation. It is becoming a lost art among indy devs. Creating your own assets will give you freedom in design and your game a consistency in visual style you will never get from purchased assets alone. Rock. On.
@@aldunlop4622 That's pretty much the way it was. We didn't have reality capture to digital twin the models (photogrammtery) or grab the motions (motion/performance capture -outside of ROTO). We created morph targets (the non-fancified way of saying shape keys or blend shapes) by hand. No sculpting. Pre-TH-cam and GUI-based social media (FB, X, IG), our Bible was the Animator's Survival Kit, a physical book written by Richard Williams, the Animation Director for "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Great times (Oops, time to yell at those kids to get off my lawn).
i feel like the most important thing you need to do is to reward yourself for your 'small' wins. Period. A lot of us dont do that and end up getting depressed/discouraged when in actuality, doing something like making a floor is a HUGE step forward because having a floor means you need physics and something the floor is standing on (the character). Besides learning any type of coding/making a game is going to take ALOT of time. You will truly never feel satisfied with yourself because thats just how we are as humans. Anyways im only 19 mins into the video and im loving it!!!! Hopefully you keep going. Im here to support you!!!
It is really captivating ( to the point that it's entangling) to hear and see your excitement about doing such a bold move. Whatever you do, do it with a spark of passion( You, mister, definitely have it. ) Good luck , work hard, and (most importantly) have fun while doing so.
Absolutely loved Yahtzee’s dev diaries where he tried to make a game a month and gave us updates on the development process. Never expected to see a spiritual successor come from you, but I’m 100% down for it! Godspeed! ^^
Learn by failing, that's the best way. We all (at least the ones of us that stuck to this path in life) went thru exactly what you went thru in this video at one point or another. This video is kinda nostalgia invoking to me.
I haven't shipped any games yet (even though I'm pretty good at Blender if I do say so myself) so take this comment with a grain of salt, but my #1 recommendation is: just team up with at least 1 other dev that can complement your deficiencies. Yes, solo devs are amazing and there's great success stories, but for every successful solo dev there's a million who failed. Making games is hard, so I highly recommend to team up. In this regard, I feel artists have an advantage as (assuming they're good enough) they can present some cool concept art and even actual tangible usable 3D assets that a potential coder might go like "huh, that looks neat enough, I might join this guy", 'least that's what I'm hoping to achieve. I did work with an indie dev team before and it was... Bad lol, because the team leader turned out to be a 15 year old who had no clear vision on what to do, really bad managerial skills and he himself contributed in no way to the project: crappy writing, bad concept art, no code, no music, just sweet fa. This isn't deterring me from trying to work with other devs, but if you're gonna team up make sure you make your due diligence, and know that even then you likely won't get good people to work with on your first try. Gamedevving takes perseverance, and gamedev hunting takes perseverance too. Lastly, don't be "that guy", and in the wannabe gamedev world "that guy" is the ideas guy: a guy who has only ideas but no actual talent to bring to the table. If you wanna be a dev and are lacking skills, I recommend looking into learning sites like Udemy, I joined some Blender courses there and have gotten pretty good at it since, but I wouldn't have made it without that initial push that eased me into 3D art. YT tutorials are good for a need-to-know basis, but Udemy courses give a more wholistic view of a discipline or software, now there are some stinkers too so you have to be careful to grab only the highest rated courses. I recommend GameDev dot tv as a channel there on Udemy, no I'm not getting paid to recommend them (I wish I was), I'm just recommending content creators who I have personally ascertained are worth investing into. Oh, speaking of investing, Udemy courses have pretty nutty standard prices so make sure you always, ALWAYS wait for a sale to grab courses at like 10 eurodollars a pop. It's easy to fall into a buying spree but not actually study all the courses you buy, so just buy a single course when starting, maybe two, then stop: complete the courses you have, then buy more if you feel like it
This video convinced me to finally start my game dev journey and I have been learning unreal from the ground up for the last 2 weeks , would be really awesome to see a part 2 either building further on what you made or with the knowledge you have now see what you could do in another 2 weeks .
Your video game concept is so great, the Viking, glowing tombstone and Valhalla end lol. Thank you for this video, I found it because I’m looking to make my own game, so thank you, it inspired me and showed me quite a lot
Thanks for taking us along on your game dev journey! This was a super fun watch. I’m a board game designer but am also learning about video game design. And one thing I have noticed in video game development is the focus on the visuals over the mechanics of the game. When I prototype my board game ideas, I will make a super quick paper prototype and play it myself to see if it’s even fun. If it is, I’ll then get others to play it and see what they think. I won’t even think about making it look good until I know there’s potential in the gameplay. So my biggest advice from the board game design world is to focus on the gameplay first, and once you have a game that plays well, then you can add all the visuals to make it come to life. All the best in your adventures! 🙌
Not as a game developer but as a 3D artist and animator: Disappearing textures are often a result of insufficient memory allocation for textures. The defaults can quickly become full if using extremely high resolution textures and/or algorithms that combine textures (such as layering the terrain texture over the rock object texture) which often creates yet another texture file besides the ones being combined. In some cases the software will attempt to store textures, especially textures with "baked in" effects like shadows or ambient occlusion or combined layers in memory locations it can not access because it is outside of the texture cache range. What it retrieves from this inaccessible memory is all zeros resulting in pure black or sometimes pure white textures or completely transparent textures depending on how it interprets the pixel data. I don't know if Unreal provides a way to increase texture cache or not, but the other way around the issue is to reduce the resolution of the base texture files. In some software the resolution reduction is done as the file is loaded into cache so you don't need to actually alter the original file. This is an experienced guess. I know nothing about Unreal, but most 3D software use similar procedures to render an image to the screen.
r.streaming.PoolSize xxxx maybe ? That's what i used when my textures started flickering in the viewport. xxxx being the number of megabytes of VRAM you want to allocate.
I love this so much. I've been exploring the possibility of getting into game development, and the fact that you did this in 2 weeks is amazing. You've given me the push to just go with it and try it out
Watching your struggle is so relatable. I have ADD myself, and it's not easy finishing a project. It is impressive that you have the drive to keep going despite the difficulties. I hope I can get some inspiration from you to do my own thing. Thank you!
Very well done. *People don't realize how within their grasp game building is today because the technology has advanced so much, you don't even need to know a software language.* I'm familiar enough with 3D CAD and enough basic tutorials on C++, C# and JAVA that I know if I genuinely set a schedule and stick with it, I can build the game I mapped out on paper a couple years ago.
Mr Jack Sather I must say this is one of my favorites of your videos. I would absolutely love if you did a series where you documented the progress of your skills with unreal engine. I wish there was more stuff like this on TH-cam because it’s inspiring and entertaining. Plus you’re also getting better while giving us good content. Hope this comment can at least give you some ideas! Love your videos
THANK YOU for this! I'm going through a similar experience and it is VALIDATING to understand that I'm not insane, things sometimes just don't seem to work for some reason that you would have to know before it happens to prevent! Unreal is INSANELY powerful and just as complex.
hats off to you jack sather i think you have generally done well to create what you have within the time you had, i have recently start game dev and im still no closer to even create a game i wanted to and im about 3 weeks in so well done
Jack, thank you for putting this video together. You are not alone in your learning process. I find almost everything you described to be true. No help from google, the squirrel moments (that can last hours), the fixation of the smallest detail and the overflow of asset collection. Excellent job of not being defeated. I guess the real game was your journey into this project and being able to conquer the level boss, having a final product!
Seeing you struggle day in and day out through the process in the video really does make me feel good, not because I like to see people suffer (Maybe just a little), But because I do the exact same thing but worse, I feel as though morale is very important to not just game development, but modding as well. Things breaking for no good reason can make or break morale and that's why there probably wasn't as many indie devs making a name for themselves years prior. I wish to make a game myself one day, but modding is already difficult enough for me as it is but making an entire game where things can go wrong? My perfectionist self would implode in anger and sadness. tldr I'm glad more people can dive into game development with no experience, learn from countless mistakes, and keep on going, cause lord knows I couldn't.
16 days? Honestly amazing how far all this has come. I needed 3 months to grasp 3D modelling and getting my stuff into idtech3 engine like 20 years ago.Tutorials were available but few and the tools were by far not as advanced.
Your resilience for suffering that straight is impressive. Enough to say you've gone far my friend. Keep it up. Learning Tip 1 - Virtual Textures is a cool feature but there's a lot of unspoken things about it. First of all, there's a great deal of optimization [number of layered textures, tiling textures' resolution, colorspace and a ton] involve to make it run smoothly . I would advice if you'll be using VT, make sure your landscape material doesn't have a lot of fancy blends like World-Align/Tri-Planars or any gimicky masking. Just start with a very basic landscape setup keep it to 3 material textures. Learning Tip 2 - Prioritize more task that is actually about making a game. Go to unreal engine learning place and make your first interactive mini-map. Jumpstart your blueprint fundamentals instead. It's boring but theres just no way out of it. As far as your 1st week goes, you're only doing visual stuff and not really working on gameplay. If you really want to somehow integrate great environments for your game, don't create an open world map. Create a small island instead. You're being bogged down by details that you don't need. Do you really want to game, or do you just want to do speed level designs? Learning Tip 3 - Learn to embrace the shitty look. While making a game, you shouldn't be distracted by how much sandboxy your map/level/environment look like. The visual stuff (while it can be technical as well) is actually the easiest task in a game project on a general scale. Game Developers learn to work with shitty UVs. Disgusting tiling. AND horrendous flat gray terrain and environments. They know that the priority is the game, not the environment Learning Tip 4 - Rabbitholing is not entirely bad. You only need to make sure your rabbitholing to the right priority. Environment prettifying is every beginner unreal developers' procrastination. If you noticed yourself running around your map in circles orbiting the camera around as if there's much to see, then your already procrastinating. For example, how about rabbitholing on your first enemy AI? Or how does your enemy take damage OR how do you take damage? How about the pick up system? How about the push and pull? Should I include jumping in the game? These are the best thing to rabbithole into. Once you got 2 or three things of these somehow sorted out, then slowly make the environment around it because now you have a reason why it needs a realistic environment or a so-so environment.
This video is so relatable I also started with that castle tutorial for Unreal. You had more experience with stuff I haven't messed with yet but I was so happy to finally finish my own version of that castle scene I spent way too long over downloading and finding the right assets and just making it way more complicated than it needed to be but in the end I think that I learned a lot more by just letting my imagination go wild🙂
Never seen your channel before, but you absolutely earned a subscriber. Your presentation style is incredibly genuine. Wish you nothing but success for both this cannel and your future studio. You might have even inspired me to get into Unreal as well. I've had a couple game ideas floating around in my head for years, thank you for outlining this process in so much detail. Perhaps I can avoid a few of those early setbacks. Cheers!
i felt this entire video deeply lol... from the same exact distraction videos to how you consume information -me these last six months learning blender. so i decided to learn unreal today, with the launch of 5.4 and just discovered your channel through this video. i'm sticking around for the journey.
YES - go for it! EXCELLENT video - takeaways are: Start small, make a schedule for breaks, prioritize essential that are immediately needed. (example : make a mannequin, get it to swing a sword or shoot a gun, then costume it, then make a place for it to do it's thing, then shape the place into a game level...big gulps there but this makes sense. Thanks!
Love this I have a transport company, and taking steps to start dev'ing a game. Loved games since I was a kid, no experience just pure love of the games
This is the most relatable game development video I’ve ever seen! Like every 2 minutes I keep finding myself nodding and saying “me too!” with the biggest smile on my face.
Hey Jack! I'm a 3D Environment artist at Hazelight (kinda new, haven't shipped anything yet but working on Hazelight's unreleased title) and I just wanted to say that this video was so incredibly inspiring! This is the first I'm seeing from you. I happened to stumble upon your channel just now, and I felt genuinely proud of you at the end this video. Amazing job! Your dedication should not be taken for granted! Keep going man, you're gonna go far
i went to school for game design/ game dev. I graduated, couldnt find a job, kind of gave up for a bit and moved home. but after watching this, it is rekindling something inside me to keep trying
Great video. Thank you. I'm 44 and decided following my lifelong dream starts now, and began my solo dev journey this week. Built a studio and have the tools and a deep, deep lack of knowledge. See you on the other side.
I'm not making a game but I just stumbled across this video and had to comment. You've got such a great style man. Really good explanations and the pace of it keeps it interesting. Above all I loved how you not only explain the journey you went on but also lessons learned, including tech-wise and process-wise, like not wasting too much time obsessing over details early on, and to ensure you're learning the content and not just following instructions blindly. Some really smart wisdom in there and a lot of this advice would apply wider than just this topic actually. Great work and best of luck mate, you seem like a really good guy
My laptop is a really slow potato so i started with scratch for my first games and so far given the limits of it i'm happy with what i make. Watching you struggle getting distracted,frustrated is every beginners experience.
Wow...Such a huge life lesson. I "suffer" from the same ADHD issues. I search for tutorials and end up in rabbit holes, focus too much on the end result while trying to learn something new, and also choosing what parts of a video I "need" to watch to figure something out. So frustrating!! Your video has given me incentive to finish my project that I started 2 years ago.
Starting over can make you faster the next time, I had a 3D modeling professor in art school literally recommend starting over when you’re stuck. Make sure you’re saving your Blender file as v1, v2, v3 every 10 minutes (and turn on autosaves) so that when you make mistakes, or the software crashes, you can go back to a previous version of the file that works (much the same as you would do with big photoshop files) This might’ve saved you when your textures stopped working. Command S is your friend. Procreate really spoils you for auto saving so you don’t have to think about it
I'm really happy I found this only 2 months after you posted it. I was playing ESO and looking for a video to listen to and about 5 minutes into this I turned off ESO to give it my full attention lol. I want to work in game design but with life as an accidental gen x bastard adult I can't actually try. -LMFAO true story But my experience is just hobby based. Drawing, creation kit. I remember my mother putting the controller in my hand and I remember learning that when I pressed this purple circle on this thing she gave me that something happened on the on that bright box in front of me and that was it. idk why I didn't try to do this a decade ago. Good on you for starting so young. I'm too old and stuck in life to actually do this but it's gonna be awesome to keep up with watching you do it. :D:D GL
I fell into depression five years ago. Decided to shut myself in my room for about a year and half. During this time I learned Coding, Unreal and Blender. Even though I have nothing but small demos to show for it, I enjoyed the process of learning all these things so much. It saved my life
I am a game producer (project manager) in the video game industry for 15 years but also now learning how to do my own games on the side. I think your biggest pitfall was focusing on the look of the game before the gameplay itself. Once you have a base idea, just "Whitebox" it. No importing 3D models, animations, textures, etc... Just use the mannequins and simple shapes and focus on your core game loop. Do small iterations. This means setting a goal for the day, for example "implement simple AI enemies that will attack me". and put all your effort into that. Then assess what you have and set your next goal for the next day. Once you have your core loop and gameplay. spend time playtesting yourself, and maybe 1-2 other friends to see what can be improved. Once you have a fun game that is working, then you can focus on the UI and then the look of the game. Anyway, I wish you the best of luck and look forward to more videos!
i'm a 3d artist and a C++ programmer.
if i work alone do i have a bit of chance of making smth work?
@@Elias01056 Anyone has a chance to make something work so long they keep with it and keep their priorities in order.
@@michaelvallierii7945 indeed. it takes years tho
What friends are for. You have discord?
Thanks for the advice, this helped me get my head around my project. I was getting bogged down in thinking about how I could possibly make everything look the way I wanted (while having little game dev experience) to the point where I wasn't getting anything done at all.
going from "I gave myself 2 weeks to make a really simple concept" to "I spent $80 on physics and weather plugins instead of implementing gameplay" is the quintessential solo game dev experience
I've been learning Unreal Engine game dev, never done any of this before. I made my first game, similar to the above following a Gorka Games tutorial on youtube. Took me about 11 days, about 1 to 2 hours per day. But I didn't buy anything to make it work, just used the free assets from Unreal Engine Library. Same exact style of game, same kind of health bar, same 'wave spawner' system where you fight enemies in waves.
I'm not an experienced game dev by any means, but I think basic level design (putting down trees, landscape, etc) is the easiest part of the whole thing. Basically just point and click to paint stuff down or resize things. It's the actual game mechanics that take much longer, where you add code behind the scenes. I'm only using blueprints (no direct C++) and it's been great so far.
I'm now 33 days into learning Unreal Engine and I'm working on my 2nd game by following a tutorial. But it's more of an adventure game similar to Tomb Raider.
On a side note, Metahumans look fantastic, but they are not optimized at all. Once I added my 3rd metahuman into my 2nd game the level editor became almost unusable. I had to turn down the LOD on all metahumans to '1' (lowest setting) just so I could keep using the editor. And I'm doing it with 64gb memory, RTX 3090, and AMD Ryzen 9 5900x... I won't be using metahumans in the future, just not optimized enough.
You ain't wrong lol
that's depends on you have more time or more money lol
Yep, that's the must have experience for all solo devs, also download a million animation and assets you dont use
i dont have a lot of money but as a solo dev as soon as i start trying to add something to my game i check the marketplace and see if its already been done. Then if yes see if it has good reviews and is easy to implement for newbies, and then figure out if i can afford it :)
Hello Jack,
I'd highly recommend creating small projects if you want to make games and keep the process fun. Take the game you're showing us now, for example. Turning that into a full game could be a 3-year journey if you already know the scope and story of the game, but realistically, we're talking about 5 years.
There are many things people forget when it comes to games, but one good example is picking up items. Implementing the action of a character picking up an item is not hard, but what's difficult is getting the game to understand every situation that can happen and still perform the task correctly. What should happen if you get attacked at the same time you pick up an item? What happens if you cancel picking up the item, and so on.
Try making a game that is single-based, in a close environment, and with simple mechanics. That will give you the chance to succeed but also push yourself to create more advanced projects in the future.
As someone who has been developing games for nearly 5 years, my biggest bit of advice would be to focus on the core systems before anything else. Example core systems being, (attacking, taking damage, dodging, health, enemy movement, ai movement). Polish and design can always come later.
Thank you!! This is the kind of tips i’m looking for
I think that applies to creating anything. I'm studying graphic design and doing my fair share of web development on the side and this approach is the best when it comes to designing anything consistently. You go in with a simple, small idea, sketch it out in any medium that you want to (be it a drawing on a piece of paper, some notes in a notepad or some rough code), then you make it function well and at the very end you can make it look good.
Ofc thats just one approach but I think it can help anyone getting started in creating.
And if you want to really learn to make videogames you just need to make a lot of small ones, GMTK has a great series focusing more on his thinking than programming when it comes to creating a videogame.
As someone who’s been in the industry for more than 20 years, I second that advice. Also, looking forward to seeing you progress!
Spitting straight facts. You can always build upon an idea or system even if the initial system is miniscule.
This is basically what I came here to say. Gameplay first, art later, like way later.
"until I got distracted literally 7 seconds in and watched a 2 hour long podcast" classic.
happens everyday lol
The only solution I found for that is using Pomodoro, a cycle of 25 min of work and 5 min doing whatever I want.
Currently me rn
"heh, rookie mistake" as i watch this video and look at the comments instead of getting sh*t done.
"Oh, do you mean side tracked.? I used to be addicted to tangents. My poor characters, started out strong, and yet rarely survived to the fininish.
It truly comforted me seeing you struggle just like I did in the beginning. I don't mean that in a bad way, UE5 is just such a comprehensive program to learn, that it can get you discouraged real quick if you don't focus on learning things relevant to what you want to create.
The basics are easy, but I found myself in the deep waters very early on into my journey, not understanding a single bit of how the program works on a macro level. Because isolating the program micro levels is quite easy, but it's the fact that all these sections need to work together, is what makes it hard.
I'm still learning and I know it's going to take a lot more learning before I find myself truly comfortable with UE5, but great to see that we started out the same way.
Careful EA or Ubisoft might try and hire you as the way things are going you might be the most experienced person they have.
True for EA minus Respawn.
Yeah, I have the feeling they hire people who have just finished an online course.
Lol
The quality of their games isn't dictated by the quality of their develops, it's dictated by the poor management of the companies.
@@JFrenchman oh yeah i know that so many stories of games being developed for years but due to management time being wasted as well as crunch....and the problem is its pushing out the talented devs to strike out with indie companies, Rocksteady for example is a shell of its former self along with Bioware
Being a game dev over 10+ years. I would like that every single person who stated "making games is easy", "that's not working, you're just playing a game" (or any other comment understimating game developers) to watch this. It is HARD WORK to make games. I felt your struggle, same thing happen to me years ago, but over time, you will know how to save and manage your time better. Keep on going, once you get that satisfaction of seeing your game working, and other people enjoying it, is addictive.
Yes, I just started few days ago and have to say it's very hard, if you are making solo game you not only have to learn programming, you also have to learn how to make assets
For 2d (know how to paint) and for 3d know how to do 3d modeling, texture making and also know how the game engine works.
And If you are creating your own game engine than that's another level of difficulty.
These things individually takes months to learn or even years.
@@gamerz000. yes it can be super time consuming I love art so for me it was a must learn but yk there are hundreds of thousands of ready templaes for your first project dont try to reinvent the wheel , unless you really want to ofc you can , anyways best of luck fellow GameDev
@@arcanep no i guess I won't need it, I am making low poly 3D game and i am just making a city builder game in which we are a person in the city (the Ruler) and I want to do it all by myself so I can learn more.
But Thanks for the recommendation.
I so get this. Even my wife who knows exactly how hard what we do is... I can feel her rolling her eyes when I say I have a ton of work to do. Like, everything we've done to be a part of game creation, almost ruined games for us, or for many... did ruin video games for them.
agreed - I almost wish he hadn't shown the bit at the end, and just stopped at the end of the two weeks. I know, give people hope and all that, but you really need to hammer home the fact that game making IS HARD.
As somebody who is working in the 3d industry for 20 years now, and in the gaming industry for about 4, this resonates a lot. A lot of banging your head around stuff until you figure it out. Really love your dedication man.
This is something that I can't help but admire. As someone who has tried to get back into programming and learning it only to give up after a few days, I can relate to the frustrations and glimpses of hope you get when actually managing to make something work as you imagined. I also love how you show the "mistakes" and how your attention can only hold for so long until something else grasps it away.
I truly hope you continue with this and actually start producing great games, since you have a creative mindset and a vision what you are aiming towards.
Thank you, and we’re still cranking! On my first paid udemy course recommended by someone that emailed me
Start smaller. Give yourself projects you can actually complete. Plenty of excellent 2d games. Try game maker studio. Don’t do visual code, do the actual code and quickly move into scripts and inheritance. Give yourself goals you CAN achieve and start small. Then you will actually learn and you’ll love it. It’s the difference between trying to make something AAA and just giving up vs making some meh games that feel complete which help stepping stones to greater projects.
Oh from someone who does programming for a living gaining control over yourself is the key.
Like you do stupid misstakes when you got tiltet in a competitive video game, programming can overwhelm you with frustration if something doesn't work.
If you want to get better you need to replace frustration with curiosity. Collect things that work. Try braking those pieces and understand them. Ask yourself why something doesn't behave like you want it to and experiment around a lot.
Keeping your attention at programming is like running. You need to build your stamina slowly over time. Gladly my job involves a lot of other timeconsuming tasks, because i still couldn't maintain ~40h of pure programming a week.
It's really time consuming to become a decent programmer. Good education can give you a jumpstart, but you need to start grinding and embracing it at some point.
could you share the udemy course by chance?@@JackSather
@@JackSather Have you tried to buy into Unreal Sensei's Masterclass? I bought into his Masterclass 2 years ago and I'm not sorry, he has really good tutorials starting from scratch
As a professional game designer who has worked on AAA Games, the parts where you go "why isnt this working?!" then realize its a button press hit home lol. Keep it up man, love the video.
Control system engineer can proudly say it wasn't a button. It was a typo in the makescript or config file xD
Thats kinda cool that you worked on Diablo 4.
Just as a general question what game engine do AAA titles use?
Just as a general question what game engine do AAA titles use?
@@weirdthings9583 For the most part the one the publisher is providing. EA has Frostbite, Ubisoft has Ubisoft Anvil, and Blizzard used to write the engine alongside the game so Diablo 3 or WoW all have a tailored engine for what the game needs. Today many tailor Unreal for 3D and Unity for 2D made games.
The youtube dilemma is so STRONG. TH-cam needs to implement a STUDY MODE, where in your account you have your STUDY DESK, there you choose a very specific topic you want to study for X amount of time that you input and then youtube helps you by only showing you suggestion of videos related to the topic you want to study for that amount of time.
yes, please
That’s an awesome idea
Good concept
Patent that and roll with it. Very awesome concept
The ending made me happy. A true testament to the saying “finished over perfect.” Nice job!
Perfection is the enemy of the good enough.
Ubisoft says “Not finished…Perfect”
I’m really proud of you for doing this Jack! Small as it is, it actually seems fun and shows perseverance!
I just stumbled across this video and your channel. THANK YOU for documenting this journey. It's the first time I have felt genuinely seen in the journey we all share called "Solo Game Dev with ADHD" (you mention not being diagnosed, but the constant distractions and other problems you run into are my experience to a tee).
Seeing the joy on your face when you figure something out and show off what you finished with is the type of payoff that myself, and a lot of people, are striving for.
who else is procrastinating by watching this video right now?
Waiting on ue to download ironically enough. Went looking for something to watch. Good job augarithium.
Underrated comment!
I was supposed to be studying for CCNA, but I'll do it later.
I don’t want to talk about it lol
Im always procrastinating something. If I could procrastinate life for like a week and just like sleep I would
Good luck on your journey. In case you don't know, Astlibra and Chained Echoes are 2 of the most amazing JRPGs and both were made by one guy.
Wasn’t expecting to see Astlibra mentioned here of all places! +1 to both these.
Kenshi was mostly made by a single madlad, and he brought more people into the project after his initial success with it.
I just love your humility and authenticity in showing your process. It's so helpful to see all the pitfalls that people can fall into, and to also realize that that's kind of a normal thing. We're not going to pick up a new craft knowing what the perfect workflow is. It takes time to realize what tasks take priority and what tasks need to be delayed.
whenever i play indie games like dredge or something i always think ‘man, i wish i made this’
i hope u can make this work. and think ‘man, im glad i made this’
You learned so fast! I loved how everything turned out. I'm happy my tutorials were helpful! ❤
Bro, you are the GOAT man. You really helped me through my Game Dev course at University. The way you explain things makes it super easy to understand.
THE LEGEND APPEARS
@GorkaGames dude!! Thank you so much for your help! Your a legend out here
@@pterafierhow are you here you play ark and make ark content
no way
I love this video, as someone who just opened unreal engine yesterday to start my adventure on making things within the video game world, even for people have no experience it still a teaching point for people to learn what to priorities to achieve their end goals, as even reading through the comments, where experienced people also have their input on your starting experience, not only does that show you were you went wrong but also shows others what to focus on
There's your studio name... "Just a horse games"
"I've got a TH-cam channel" ltd
"I sorta make games" home studios ADD limited
"Just the horse studios"
Careful now. You might summon vaush.
JAH Games
Hi Jack, I was a senior game designer at Square Enix for 7 years. I worked on Final fantasy 15, 16 and kingdom hearts 3. Honestly for a newcomer, you did really good man. You created more game in 2 weeks than i did in a month when i first started (and I was unemployed 😂). Good gob my dude. My only critique is that you didnt add any taxi's, and the game is not called crazy taxi, and the game is not crazy taxi. If you add those simple elements, you might have some gold on your hands.
Didn't really ask ok
Thanks man! And This is the advice i’m looking for people 🚕
You should have told them to make a new final fantasy tatics
@seandavid9440 BIG FACTS OMG. Sorry I loved that game growing up.
After starting this journey myself for new years I started to lose motivation recently and this video helped respark that drive to keep going. Thank you
Man, I really really appreciate this video. I have been trying to learn game dev in the same exact way, I feel like I just watched a video of myself. Except for one key difference, you kept with it. I've hit all these different levels of frustration and given up and revisited over and over. Sometimes I get so discouraged I start thinking I'm the only one that runs into these problems and that I'm incapable. Oddly enough I found your video "Getting distracted" but it was exactly what I needed to see at this moment. I forget we all learn and experience the same difficulties and I need to power through and continue to learn. Thank you for the gentle reminder that we all struggle in the same ways but gotta push through to see progress. Thank you for your time, your humor, and your complete honesty. Great video and i'll be subscribing for more to follow you along this journey!
Don’t give up my friend. I’m going to be 50 this year and I’m still playing games on my rigged pc. When I was 20 something l always wanted to make games but that time it was difficult. I always had mad imagination and visionary about what games I would make. But unfortunately never had that opportunity. But you keep going forward 👍🏼
So pleased you watched and enjoyed my video! Really interested in your journey too, good luck with it all, I’m just starting to take a look at UE5 to see if I can incorporate it into VR and/or games in the future.
Bless you, Mr Spaceman...
Wow I never saw you responded! Thanks man!! Can’t wait to see what you make, i’ll be watching
TBH, I love that simple concept of a Norse hero, fighting his/her way through mobs of enemies to reach the next menhir with glowing runes, that provides respite even if just briefly. I think you nailed the visual atmosphere in the end, with the blizzard limiting your view distance creating a dramatic tension at all times. If I was in your shoes, having gotten that far, I'd honestly just keep working on what you already have and not give up. The hardest part is coming up with an original concept/world/story, the technical stuff like polished animations, you can work out when you get more experienced in the programs you work with.
This dude’s style of videos is awesome
Not for this video
Hell yeah, welcome to the game dev journey! Even after using UE for 8+ years, I'm still constantly learning the tools- it's a software that encompasses a whole umbrella of jobs so it can definitely become a bit overwhelming. If you ever need any assistance with the learning journey, feel free to throw me or any other UE devs a message, the community is very open to helping each other. Great video!
I will!
Omg you made suit for hire! That’s where I know you from, I was like, I’m subbed to you haha, yes lets get connected
I have wanted to make a game for years and recently started trying too, but it was getting frustrating and it felt like i was doing everything wrong, I was just scrolling randomly on youtube today and found this, i am not even joking this video helped me out so much, from the tips you gave to the funny parts in this video, they all helped me by calming down my frustration, I successfully have made my first game and it turned out pretty well, this is the first of your videos i have seen but I am definitely going to follow and keep watching, I wish you, and everyone reading this, success, whether its making games or playing them.
Love seeing creative people do creative things, shout out Jack Sather
I started into Unreal like 2 weeks ago, with the mission of making my own game and god I can relate to this video. Excited to see how you progress, and appreciate you sharing the roadblocks and solutions.
The biggest lesson I’ve learnt so far is to stay focused on one aspect at a time, which is super hard when you keep finding shiny videos on how to do “cool” things in UE. I’ve now made myself just save videos and not watch them until I’m finished with what I’m working on before getting distracted 😅
Update?
Sorry he’s distracted at the moment. 😂🤣
yo
Try doing something on your own based on what you've learnt.You'll enjoy a lot more and it will cement what you've learnt.Then move on to the next tutorial.After watching a general game dev tutorial on UE watch small small tutorials and come up with your own small projects to try out.This way you'll avoid tutorial hell.I remember while trying to learn blender i watched tutorial after tutorial and blindly copying what I saw i didn't make anything my self i didn't learn and following someone do a whole model was really boring.
@@AmitGidwani-l9t no
As someone who uses youtube a lot for things like study music, that part about getting sucked down the youtube distraction tunnel was the most relatable thing ever
I didn't thought you would go down this route but damn is it a dream of mine too. Good luck on the road and I hope you will make some unique and great games in the long run!
If you really want to, there's no better time than to start now and you could even e-mail Jack. As said, it's a passion thing, hell, the team could exchange so much knowledge out of passion itself that you could learn new things and teach new things. A true collaborative experience! And if you do decide to start learning, best of luck and remember, you can do this, no matter who says what!
Even if he can just have fun with it, it would be fun to follow along with the journey. And him having a large audience and captivating personality, will make it worthwhile, whether he finishes it or not.
Also he shouldn't worry too much, about the horse and cart thing. Even a AAA game studio such as Bethesda can't get that one right.
You thought I was talking about their workflow with Starfield right? Where they just started making all the different systems, hoping it would eventually turn into a streamlined game. It did not. BUT I was actually referring to the intro to Skyrim and the glitchy horse+cart.
I'm 36 myself and have been wanting to make games for many years. Started learning unreal many years ago, when UE4 had a subscription model. But I stopped doing it for many years, due to multiple reasons, including mental and physical health issues. I'm really wanting to get back on that horse now and these kinds of videos are very inspirational. Its my dream to create something. Not even to make money or for clout or anything. I just want to make something I like to play myself, and others might enjoy as well.
Great video and very relatable haha! Excited to follow your progress and best of luck on this journey :)
The 🐐
Thanks bro!!
Cant wait to play your game, been watching since the first recreating stunts video.
@@JackSathersuper awesome, to also see all your pitfalls was super interesting. I can relate am in the middle of learning it.
I bought myself a course in unreal 5 which will take you in ten days from noob to be able to use the entire engine, make you familiar with all it's lingo, basics and then some. It is a filmmaker course. But it also learned me the in and outs of the engine itself. I can confidently say that I could make a game in 2 weeks just from this course alone. It goes into every detail in bitesize chunks so you don't need to sit through 5 hours of footage. It breaks it down day by day in 30-60 min sections and after ten days you actually know unreal 5. It also updates everytime a new feature is added and you get lifetime acces to it. I bought it at a discount, but believe me this course is the real deal. It's called boudless resourse in case you want to know. I am not sponsored but this resource literally changed my life. I hope this helps you out in some way shape or form. Just felt I had to share it with you since it has helped me tremendously...
I got a question, not to detract or take away credit from this man here at all but where are the TH-cam guys who are educated in making actual games that aren’t big or mainstream? From the first few minutes it seems like this is just some guy who loves videos games trying to make a game.
I almost didn't click on this but this was the REALEST tutorial I've ever seen
While i greatly applaud the effort, the problem is you’re basically trying to do / learn everything all at once. Most solo devs started with a foundational experience in one craft of game making and then ‘winged it’ for the rest, slowly learning everything else. I’ve been in the industry 15 years and i still barely can make my own games, coding especially haha
thats the reality for most solo indie devs
That's the case with the people who start out in directly in the industry. I am a back-end developer/systems designer by trade, but in reality I can do some devops, front-end stuff, desktop apps, machine learning because I had to because I did not land a job directly. Most people in my team severely lacks the understand of other parts of the development cycle. Lacking the knowledge is easy problem to fix, but usually people learn to rely on other people which is called having a skill in teamwork. Well, I never learned that fully. Been solo for so long, started a job solo, got raise after raise while being solo, hired other people and made the project modular enough that I can stay solo.
Now I am about to turn 30 and decided to make a video game for the first time in my life. I am for sure making use of my profession using my coding skills both in C++ and Blueprint in UE. I am for sure using my understanding of front-end and UI/UX experience. I am for sure using my very little skill in 3D modelling because when I was 20, I needed money and had to learn Blender, haha. I find myself jumping between these skills and losing a lot of time in one sense, but gaining precious knowledge in other sense. The thing is that nowadays, the video game engines are just advanced enough to make it easier for us. Is asset flipping bad? Maybe yes. But you can use those assets to make the prototype of your game and focus on learning other parts and maybe you can get a 3D designer to help you in the future. When one focuses on the good aspects of it, one realizes that it has never been this easy. Still difficult, but the easiest so far.
Skill issue
I've been coding in Godot for a few months now and at a base level it's extremely user friendly and intuitive on the other hand I still know very little of the obvious infinite depth of coding techniques but am quickly learning the basics.
@@mistermelancholy7698yah! Godot’s great, i’ve been experimenting with it as well, gscript’s super easy to learn too, my problem is just ‘sticking with it’ i get too distracted with another game idea haha
This is honestly very inspiring. I've played games all my life and have always wondered about making my own game but fearing that it was just writing lines of code all day. Seeing you with the same passion and going out and chasing it is awesome. Love the video!
I love this video specifically because I just started a project to make my own game in my spare time, coming at it from literally the same place as you did. I.e. having art oriented hobbies, being in love with video games and thinking that I have lots of cool ideas to make my own, and simply having a desire to finally do so. The difference, though, is that I began more or less at the ground level: picking Unity as my engine, trying to learn some code, writing a design document to figure out what I want to make specifically, and trying to put the gameplay pieces and game systems together before worrying about any of the art or assets. So far it worked relatively decent. I still get tired of the tedium, I also get distracted as hell, but I rarely stumble into a problem that I have literally zero idea how to resolve.
Also, I'm not making it a 14-day challenge for myself and I'm actually not expecting to get anywhere with this until sometime next year, but that's beside the point, lol.
As someone who did youtube and makes games now, it's so fulfilling and I'm glad to see a youtuber trying it out! Making games is all about learning from the failures and trying again, and you did exactly that! There are probably people looking at the final game like "Damn I wish I could make that", and you should be proud to have made it. Also UDS is amazing. Best of luck on your journey! I've been in Unreal for about a year and a half and i'm starting to feel like a real dev lol
A few of the biggest tips I can give as a senior developer.
1. Learn and use revision control. At least the basics. And commit to it every time you get something working. Work atomically as we call it. Small changes that you get working and commit because you can revert back to it if something goes wrong.
2. Learn to actually use the basic tools of unreal. Get a good grasp of typical workflows.
3. Blueprints alone will not be a good choice for building a game unless it’s little more than a walking simulator. Blueprints are in fact code, minus some syntax.
4. Watch GDC videos. If you want to see how things are done from both graphics and gameplay perspective, these are some of the best videos around. Most describe theory instead of just providing a tutorial. Two great ones are the Tsushima grass one and Spider-Man web swinging mechanic.
My favorite thing about this video was not the obvious frustrations and what feels like constant failure, but your persistence through it. So many people would find it easier to just scrap all this, forget the video and just go back to what you know. But after 2 full weeks of trying to learn something incredibly difficult, realizing you didn't really have much to show, but still felt the drive to give it a couple more days and make something you are proud of is what I find so inspiring. I actually saw your Godot video first (distracted my recommended videos) and I am a fan. Keep it up man I hope to see more updates whether its Godot or Unreal or whatever else.
this was so cool!! good video and story telling
Holy, I haven't seen you in ages!! Guess I'll start watching all your videos from 22 and up now 😂
Thanks man!! Means a lot coming from you!
Broooooo!!!! I'm so excited! I started learning UE4 about 4 years ago as a hobby during COVID. Since I found your channel, all the videos on awesome game ideas (coughs in Bannerlords video), I thought, "I need to make one of his ideas a reality!" Time for me to put the work in and get good enough to make it happen.
It takes a special kind of sadist to know how easy it is to get distracted and then proceed to list a bunch of really cool/fun videos to watch in the middle of their own! I'm just lucky Young Frankenstein isn't available on streaming or I'd have been lost for another 2 hours.
Seriously, though, great video. Funny as hell as it genuinely reflects my own experiences trying to learn new tools like Unreal Engine through online resources (especially the constant starting from scratch). There is indeed value in "failure" so long as you let yourself learn from it, which I agree is an important take away.
Jack, DO NOT compare yourself to others! As you may know very well, the videos you watch that show how to do things, or the guys who make a playable experience or game in X amount of days, they don't show all of the struggle!! It's not always what it seems! You are an inspiration to me because I have been down this same road as well but I was not as committed as you are. You're the freakin man, keep it up.
The attention thing rings home so much to me. I set out to just do something new and end up spending the day regretfully wasting it, and then wishing I had done better. I'm so happy that you managed to overcome that!
This is the part of dev that no one seems to really show: the INTENSE procrastination, tutorial overload, and distractions. There are some that harp on the fact that you really won't get much done, but this really shows just how much work and time and effort it takes to do like the simplest things. Ironically, this was the most encouraging video I've found so far that made me feel not so stupid for feeling so stupid. Thanks!
I love that you also talked about the problems that you stumbled on in game and life, not many people talk about this, and they tryna make it seem like they didn t put that effort into making something. cuz now everyone shows only the succes. and it also helps others, they can also learn from your mistakes, or simphatize with with like see that they have those problems, struggles too. it isn t just them(cuz that s how social media makes us think cuz they show only the succes). so Thank You!
Hey! I would say I'm an intermediate 3D artist, I've been modelling for a few years but I have a lot of concepts to learn yet. In my time learning 3D, something important I've learned is what failure means. Failure is not the opposite of succeeding at something, failure only happens when you stop trying. Every time you make a mistake, every time you have to scrap everything and restart, every time you get a weird issue that you spend hours trying to fix, only for the solution to be turning on or off one tick box, is the process of improving. There is a way around every obstacle, even if it means starting over. The path forward is never blocked unless you stop trying!
You never failed in this video because you came back and kept trying, and you learned so much in doing so 😄
(Also the constant youtube tutorials is so real lol I have so many playlists for Autodesk Maya, Substance Painter, Zbrush, etc.)
You remind me of what the millionaire (I can't recall who it was) said when someone asked him how he succeeded: "Fail as often as you can!"
This has been my experience with every single project of mine, ever since learning blender. Having a giant dream, trying to make just the minimum viable product and then three weeks later 12h/day banging my head on the keyboard and getting distracted by TH-cam/downloading way too many assets I'll never use, I restart five times and keep adding stuff until it breaks, then overshoot my deadline by another two weeks, and then settle for even less than I originally thought would be the worst case scenario.
It's the life of a CG artist, and it's very similar to a game dev, except I never have to deal with programing.
This is one of the best videos I have seen so far on youtube regarding game development. The struggles are real. I also wanted to create my own game but never got to do it. I hate myself every day for it but this video has given me some hope. Finally I will start making my own game Thanks for sharing your experience. Kudos to you. Dont stop now, its only the beginning...
I'm not a game dev, but I went through a similar character arc with music production (i.e. starting with zero experience), and I have to say that satisfaction of finally achieving a workable result is SO real. I related to this so damn much.
Great job man!
I started out on Protools 6.5 and worked my way into a top 10 studio...
THIS IS SO COMFORTING! Even as a game designer (but never worked in engine) i am so overwhelmed trying to learn unreal or unity, as most things come so naturally to devs and digital artists I feel so dumb. thank you for giving me the comfort that not everyone can just pick up something like this and learn it instantly!
I actually cant wait for another video like this I love seeing new game dev's getting introduced to game development and I love watching it
The amount of stress and pure suffering I had to go through to fix problems that appeared out of nowhere is accurately portrayed in this video and that gives me so much motivation. You'll get better with time, just stay persistent and don't give up.
This really shows how essential it is to know programming pretty well lol. I remember before going to college for it, the tutorials are literally impossible to follow. Since they’re teaching you about the engine, you have no clue about core coding concepts or terminology. You don’t understand how anything works, and in order to do so, you’d need to go down a massive rabbit hole which involves learning syntax, different libraries, loops, algorithms, etc. You can only really get so far clicking buttons, let alone understand what that button is or any relationships. If you’re struggling that’s super normal, I suggest just learning a basic programming language like Java, C, python, etc. it’ll help way more than you think. Also, you can’t find relative information on google because you don’t get the theory or terminology behind some of these properties. It helps when you know what that “button” you clicked does, and how the script actually works behind it.
I don't make video games but I make board games, and this is one of the most important things to nail down. At the start you should spend 90% on mechanics and maybe 10% on visuals. Just enough to not have an eye bleed while testing. You never know when visuals or even your entire theme might change. Then as you progress and things get more established that ratio can shift until by the end its 90% visuals and 10% mechanics. It's hard because beautiful visuals are motivating and get you excited more easily than fixing the umpteenth bug etc. but it saves a lot of time and money, especially if things change mid project. **That said, I found this inspiring and anyone starting their journey is cause for celebration!
Great video. As a former professional game Artist 3d/generalist, your decision to give Blender a whirl is awesome. Your idea in filming yourself for animations is spot-on, and a technique used by professional animators for decades. When I was learning 3d animation (before TH-cam, working on a Pentium 66MHz PC and an SGI Onyx) we always had mirrors at our desks to learn facial animation and were literally throwing ourselves on the floors to nail the movement of a death animation. Keep up the work and don't be afraid to get into the meat of traditional modeling and animation. It is becoming a lost art among indy devs. Creating your own assets will give you freedom in design and your game a consistency in visual style you will never get from purchased assets alone. Rock. On.
I would've loved to be a fly on the wall. I'm imagining walk into an office of people pulling funny faces and randomly collapsing. Lots of fun.
@@aldunlop4622 That's pretty much the way it was. We didn't have reality capture to digital twin the models (photogrammtery) or grab the motions (motion/performance capture -outside of ROTO). We created morph targets (the non-fancified way of saying shape keys or blend shapes) by hand. No sculpting. Pre-TH-cam and GUI-based social media (FB, X, IG), our Bible was the Animator's Survival Kit, a physical book written by Richard Williams, the Animation Director for "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Great times (Oops, time to yell at those kids to get off my lawn).
i feel like the most important thing you need to do is to reward yourself for your 'small' wins. Period. A lot of us dont do that and end up getting depressed/discouraged when in actuality, doing something like making a floor is a HUGE step forward because having a floor means you need physics and something the floor is standing on (the character). Besides learning any type of coding/making a game is going to take ALOT of time. You will truly never feel satisfied with yourself because thats just how we are as humans. Anyways im only 19 mins into the video and im loving it!!!! Hopefully you keep going. Im here to support you!!!
It is really captivating ( to the point that it's entangling) to hear and see your excitement about doing such a bold move. Whatever you do, do it with a spark of passion( You, mister, definitely have it. ) Good luck , work hard, and (most importantly) have fun while doing so.
Absolutely loved Yahtzee’s dev diaries where he tried to make a game a month and gave us updates on the development process. Never expected to see a spiritual successor come from you, but I’m 100% down for it! Godspeed! ^^
Learn by failing, that's the best way.
We all (at least the ones of us that stuck to this path in life) went thru exactly what you went thru in this video at one point or another.
This video is kinda nostalgia invoking to me.
This was a great watch! I hope you do extremely well in this endeavor and come out of it better then ever!
I haven't shipped any games yet (even though I'm pretty good at Blender if I do say so myself) so take this comment with a grain of salt, but my #1 recommendation is: just team up with at least 1 other dev that can complement your deficiencies. Yes, solo devs are amazing and there's great success stories, but for every successful solo dev there's a million who failed. Making games is hard, so I highly recommend to team up.
In this regard, I feel artists have an advantage as (assuming they're good enough) they can present some cool concept art and even actual tangible usable 3D assets that a potential coder might go like "huh, that looks neat enough, I might join this guy", 'least that's what I'm hoping to achieve.
I did work with an indie dev team before and it was... Bad lol, because the team leader turned out to be a 15 year old who had no clear vision on what to do, really bad managerial skills and he himself contributed in no way to the project: crappy writing, bad concept art, no code, no music, just sweet fa. This isn't deterring me from trying to work with other devs, but if you're gonna team up make sure you make your due diligence, and know that even then you likely won't get good people to work with on your first try. Gamedevving takes perseverance, and gamedev hunting takes perseverance too.
Lastly, don't be "that guy", and in the wannabe gamedev world "that guy" is the ideas guy: a guy who has only ideas but no actual talent to bring to the table. If you wanna be a dev and are lacking skills, I recommend looking into learning sites like Udemy, I joined some Blender courses there and have gotten pretty good at it since, but I wouldn't have made it without that initial push that eased me into 3D art. YT tutorials are good for a need-to-know basis, but Udemy courses give a more wholistic view of a discipline or software, now there are some stinkers too so you have to be careful to grab only the highest rated courses. I recommend GameDev dot tv as a channel there on Udemy, no I'm not getting paid to recommend them (I wish I was), I'm just recommending content creators who I have personally ascertained are worth investing into. Oh, speaking of investing, Udemy courses have pretty nutty standard prices so make sure you always, ALWAYS wait for a sale to grab courses at like 10 eurodollars a pop. It's easy to fall into a buying spree but not actually study all the courses you buy, so just buy a single course when starting, maybe two, then stop: complete the courses you have, then buy more if you feel like it
Thanks for the insight man! Glad you brought up Udemy, i’m looking for another learning source outside of TH-cam rabbit holes lol
@@JackSatherthe official unreal engine tutorials are bar none the best source to learning the engine.
This video convinced me to finally start my game dev journey and I have been learning unreal from the ground up for the last 2 weeks , would be really awesome to see a part 2 either building further on what you made or with the knowledge you have now see what you could do in another 2 weeks .
Your video game concept is so great, the Viking, glowing tombstone and Valhalla end lol. Thank you for this video, I found it because I’m looking to make my own game, so thank you, it inspired me and showed me quite a lot
Read the title and thought this was an Ubisoft video for a second.
😂
Thanks for taking us along on your game dev journey! This was a super fun watch. I’m a board game designer but am also learning about video game design. And one thing I have noticed in video game development is the focus on the visuals over the mechanics of the game. When I prototype my board game ideas, I will make a super quick paper prototype and play it myself to see if it’s even fun. If it is, I’ll then get others to play it and see what they think. I won’t even think about making it look good until I know there’s potential in the gameplay. So my biggest advice from the board game design world is to focus on the gameplay first, and once you have a game that plays well, then you can add all the visuals to make it come to life. All the best in your adventures! 🙌
Not as a game developer but as a 3D artist and animator: Disappearing textures are often a result of insufficient memory allocation for textures. The defaults can quickly become full if using extremely high resolution textures and/or algorithms that combine textures (such as layering the terrain texture over the rock object texture) which often creates yet another texture file besides the ones being combined. In some cases the software will attempt to store textures, especially textures with "baked in" effects like shadows or ambient occlusion or combined layers in memory locations it can not access because it is outside of the texture cache range. What it retrieves from this inaccessible memory is all zeros resulting in pure black or sometimes pure white textures or completely transparent textures depending on how it interprets the pixel data. I don't know if Unreal provides a way to increase texture cache or not, but the other way around the issue is to reduce the resolution of the base texture files. In some software the resolution reduction is done as the file is loaded into cache so you don't need to actually alter the original file. This is an experienced guess. I know nothing about Unreal, but most 3D software use similar procedures to render an image to the screen.
r.streaming.PoolSize xxxx maybe ? That's what i used when my textures started flickering in the viewport. xxxx being the number of megabytes of VRAM you want to allocate.
I love this so much. I've been exploring the possibility of getting into game development, and the fact that you did this in 2 weeks is amazing. You've given me the push to just go with it and try it out
Watching your struggle is so relatable. I have ADD myself, and it's not easy finishing a project. It is impressive that you have the drive to keep going despite the difficulties. I hope I can get some inspiration from you to do my own thing. Thank you!
Ain’t nobody skipping to @6:30
We love you jack, and we’re totally here for the entire journey
i did. this 30min could be 15mins if we cut out all the nonsense. random tangents about videos he watched while being distracted? jfc
TH-cam distraction is so real
Very well done. *People don't realize how within their grasp game building is today because the technology has advanced so much, you don't even need to know a software language.* I'm familiar enough with 3D CAD and enough basic tutorials on C++, C# and JAVA that I know if I genuinely set a schedule and stick with it, I can build the game I mapped out on paper a couple years ago.
Be proud man, you didnt make a game in 14 days. You spent 14 days learning how to make a game, then made one in 2
Mr Jack Sather I must say this is one of my favorites of your videos. I would absolutely love if you did a series where you documented the progress of your skills with unreal engine. I wish there was more stuff like this on TH-cam because it’s inspiring and entertaining. Plus you’re also getting better while giving us good content. Hope this comment can at least give you some ideas! Love your videos
THANK YOU for this! I'm going through a similar experience and it is VALIDATING to understand that I'm not insane, things sometimes just don't seem to work for some reason that you would have to know before it happens to prevent!
Unreal is INSANELY powerful and just as complex.
hats off to you jack sather i think you have generally done well to create what you have within the time you had, i have recently start game dev and im still no closer to even create a game i wanted to and im about 3 weeks in so well done
Jack, thank you for putting this video together. You are not alone in your learning process. I find almost everything you described to be true. No help from google, the squirrel moments (that can last hours), the fixation of the smallest detail and the overflow of asset collection. Excellent job of not being defeated. I guess the real game was your journey into this project and being able to conquer the level boss, having a final product!
Seeing you struggle day in and day out through the process in the video really does make me feel good, not because I like to see people suffer (Maybe just a little), But because I do the exact same thing but worse, I feel as though morale is very important to not just game development, but modding as well. Things breaking for no good reason can make or break morale and that's why there probably wasn't as many indie devs making a name for themselves years prior. I wish to make a game myself one day, but modding is already difficult enough for me as it is but making an entire game where things can go wrong? My perfectionist self would implode in anger and sadness. tldr I'm glad more people can dive into game development with no experience, learn from countless mistakes, and keep on going, cause lord knows I couldn't.
16 days? Honestly amazing how far all this has come. I needed 3 months to grasp 3D modelling and getting my stuff into idtech3 engine like 20 years ago.Tutorials were available but few and the tools were by far not as advanced.
Your resilience for suffering that straight is impressive. Enough to say you've gone far my friend. Keep it up.
Learning Tip 1 - Virtual Textures is a cool feature but there's a lot of unspoken things about it. First of all, there's a great deal of optimization [number of layered textures, tiling textures' resolution, colorspace and a ton] involve to make it run smoothly . I would advice if you'll be using VT, make sure your landscape material doesn't have a lot of fancy blends like World-Align/Tri-Planars or any gimicky masking. Just start with a very basic landscape setup keep it to 3 material textures.
Learning Tip 2 - Prioritize more task that is actually about making a game. Go to unreal engine learning place and make your first interactive mini-map. Jumpstart your blueprint fundamentals instead. It's boring but theres just no way out of it. As far as your 1st week goes, you're only doing visual stuff and not really working on gameplay. If you really want to somehow integrate great environments for your game, don't create an open world map. Create a small island instead. You're being bogged down by details that you don't need. Do you really want to game, or do you just want to do speed level designs?
Learning Tip 3 - Learn to embrace the shitty look. While making a game, you shouldn't be distracted by how much sandboxy your map/level/environment look like. The visual stuff (while it can be technical as well) is actually the easiest task in a game project on a general scale. Game Developers learn to work with shitty UVs. Disgusting tiling. AND horrendous flat gray terrain and environments. They know that the priority is the game, not the environment
Learning Tip 4 - Rabbitholing is not entirely bad. You only need to make sure your rabbitholing to the right priority. Environment prettifying is every beginner unreal developers' procrastination. If you noticed yourself running around your map in circles orbiting the camera around as if there's much to see, then your already procrastinating. For example, how about rabbitholing on your first enemy AI? Or how does your enemy take damage OR how do you take damage? How about the pick up system? How about the push and pull? Should I include jumping in the game? These are the best thing to rabbithole into. Once you got 2 or three things of these somehow sorted out, then slowly make the environment around it because now you have a reason why it needs a realistic environment or a so-so environment.
This video is so relatable I also started with that castle tutorial for Unreal. You had more experience with stuff I haven't messed with yet but I was so happy to finally finish my own version of that castle scene I spent way too long over downloading and finding the right assets and just making it way more complicated than it needed to be but in the end I think that I learned a lot more by just letting my imagination go wild🙂
Never seen your channel before, but you absolutely earned a subscriber. Your presentation style is incredibly genuine. Wish you nothing but success for both this cannel and your future studio. You might have even inspired me to get into Unreal as well. I've had a couple game ideas floating around in my head for years, thank you for outlining this process in so much detail. Perhaps I can avoid a few of those early setbacks. Cheers!
i felt this entire video deeply lol... from the same exact distraction videos to how you consume information -me these last six months learning blender.
so i decided to learn unreal today, with the launch of 5.4 and just discovered your channel through this video. i'm sticking around for the journey.
YES - go for it!
EXCELLENT video - takeaways are: Start small, make a schedule for breaks, prioritize essential that are immediately needed. (example : make a mannequin, get it to swing a sword or shoot a gun, then costume it, then make a place for it to do it's thing, then shape the place into a game level...big gulps there but this makes sense. Thanks!
Love this I have a transport company, and taking steps to start dev'ing a game. Loved games since I was a kid, no experience just pure love of the games
I really love your candidness- your work and distraction levels are relatable to me lol
This is the most relatable game development video I’ve ever seen! Like every 2 minutes I keep finding myself nodding and saying “me too!” with the biggest smile on my face.
Hey Jack! I'm a 3D Environment artist at Hazelight (kinda new, haven't shipped anything yet but working on Hazelight's unreleased title) and I just wanted to say that this video was so incredibly inspiring! This is the first I'm seeing from you. I happened to stumble upon your channel just now, and I felt genuinely proud of you at the end this video.
Amazing job! Your dedication should not be taken for granted! Keep going man, you're gonna go far
i went to school for game design/ game dev. I graduated, couldnt find a job, kind of gave up for a bit and moved home. but after watching this, it is rekindling something inside me to keep trying
Great video. Thank you. I'm 44 and decided following my lifelong dream starts now, and began my solo dev journey this week. Built a studio and have the tools and a deep, deep lack of knowledge. See you on the other side.
I'm not making a game but I just stumbled across this video and had to comment.
You've got such a great style man. Really good explanations and the pace of it keeps it interesting. Above all I loved how you not only explain the journey you went on but also lessons learned, including tech-wise and process-wise, like not wasting too much time obsessing over details early on, and to ensure you're learning the content and not just following instructions blindly.
Some really smart wisdom in there and a lot of this advice would apply wider than just this topic actually. Great work and best of luck mate, you seem like a really good guy
My laptop is a really slow potato so i started with scratch for my first games and so far given the limits of it i'm happy with what i make.
Watching you struggle getting distracted,frustrated is every beginners experience.
Wow...Such a huge life lesson. I "suffer" from the same ADHD issues. I search for tutorials and end up in rabbit holes, focus too much on the end result while trying to learn something new, and also choosing what parts of a video I "need" to watch to figure something out. So frustrating!! Your video has given me incentive to finish my project that I started 2 years ago.
Starting over can make you faster the next time, I had a 3D modeling professor in art school literally recommend starting over when you’re stuck. Make sure you’re saving your Blender file as v1, v2, v3 every 10 minutes (and turn on autosaves) so that when you make mistakes, or the software crashes, you can go back to a previous version of the file that works (much the same as you would do with big photoshop files) This might’ve saved you when your textures stopped working. Command S is your friend. Procreate really spoils you for auto saving so you don’t have to think about it
I've been working on a game for just over a year and I've learnt a lot of things. It's been such a fun journey. Have fun.
I'm really happy I found this only 2 months after you posted it. I was playing ESO and looking for a video to listen to and about 5 minutes into this I turned off ESO to give it my full attention lol. I want to work in game design but with life as an accidental gen x bastard adult I can't actually try. -LMFAO true story
But my experience is just hobby based. Drawing, creation kit. I remember my mother putting the controller in my hand and I remember learning that when I pressed this purple circle on this thing she gave me that something happened on the on that bright box in front of me and that was it. idk why I didn't try to do this a decade ago. Good on you for starting so young. I'm too old and stuck in life to actually do this but it's gonna be awesome to keep up with watching you do it. :D:D
GL
I fell into depression five years ago. Decided to shut myself in my room for about a year and half. During this time I learned Coding, Unreal and Blender. Even though I have nothing but small demos to show for it, I enjoyed the process of learning all these things so much. It saved my life