One marketing learned the power of is making a good trailer video featuring the game you made. Feature some of the interesting parts in your game. Videos are even how I discover the games that I want to play. So, that's what I do and then one could post the video on social media platforms like TH-cam, TikTok (which is become more and more huge by the day); and put it on Facebook, Instagram and community forums.
I think the source of stress/anxiety comes from knowing just how much work/time/effort a game is going to take (years of full-time work possibly) with the odds of around 98% that no one is ever even going to play it, given how saturated the market is. It’s a tremendous amount of risk.
I am a total noob. I am going to do the impossible. Of course, chances are I will not make something that can ever be a succes, even slightly. But just thinking of the learning process makes me happy. If I can finish something, I have redefined greatness for myself. I like that proposition.
What really drives me crazy is trying to find "good practices" for problems I have. How do I implement first person animations? IK or FK? Do I use events to communicate with components or just method calls? How do I connect all scripts in a loose enough way? I hate to get stuck in a analysis paralysis, but I always think that to implement it how I think it's OK will give me a lot of headaches later (already happened).
what has been helpful to me is getting down to the root of wanting to get it right. Cause what happens if you make the wrong choice? Am I afraid I will waste my time, my game wont be good, I will feel ashamed/embarrased, etc? This deeper introspection has helped me to see my fears, and free me to fail. Thus probably giving me the ability to succeed.
Make it first, fix it after. As you build more things you'll gain an intuition for what decisions to make and what not to. Also software is kind of "inexpensive". If you have the time you might as well try both approaches and see which you prefer.
Hey @Diablokiller999, i feel your pain. I've been a normal "make machines run" software developer for 10+ years before getting back into gamedev. At my dayjob, there's so much documentation about best practices and patterns and examples. So obviously, i tried to learn Unity the same way: Seek in-depth knowledge, learn from experienced developers. That it really rare in gamedev. To the point it made me crazy. Probably matches what you describe as "analysis paralysis" when there's not even a rough estimate on where to start to do things right. In normal developement, there's standards which means "the way it's usually done according to experts". In Unity, "standard" as in "standard character controller" means "here's an example that one of our interns did". So take 4 "standard first person character controllers" and they are all different. What a standard! In my thirst for knowledge i opened a disassembler and disassembled the sourcecode of Unity games, which was kinda simple before IL2CPP happened. What's below the surface of professional games would get you spanked like a misbehaving kid by a 50ies dad if you showed that in an engineering office. Holy crap. A lot of the youtube content about "how to do stuff" comes from people who may or may not have made an indie game, so what is told as how it's done may not actually be good. It's kind of a "the one eyed leading the blind"-situation. Don't take what people teach as gospel, but rather as "one way to do it" and build your own in-depth knowledge over time. There's a different type of youtube content, which is about showing how the "real professionals" do it. Usually with patterns and how to build complicated flexible systems that are powerful enough to handle everything you might ever need. Sounds impressive? Often horribly overengineered. I'm in this weird spot where i don't know how to do things in Unity, but i know enough C# to know when something has blatant flaws. I have no solution for you. Just my experience in taking that path. There's no way around accepting that gamedev is not as structured as other fields. The best advice is always: keep it simple. Accept that gamedev is iterative so it's more about building, trying out, throwing away than bulding the ultimate flexible system.
This is something I needed to hear. I've been slowly learning how to create video games for about the past 3 years and it hasn't been easy. Definitely had a more than a few instances of just wanting to quit everything and give up. I work full time while also trying to become an indie developer and sometimes I only have maybe an hour or two that I can dedicate to working/learning game development and it is going to be a long hard road but definitely worth it in the end. Keep up the great work with these videos!
I want to say something that a lot of people never talk about for some reason when it comes to being an indie developer. Not every game has to be made in 2-4 years. Youre only one person, i think it makes much more sense to build small ideas that can be prototyped relatively quickly and expand on them but not every project has to take years. Because at the end of the day most of us arent professionals and will probably think making that game wasnt a good idea or you realize you like working on a different type of game. This is especially true if youre still not experienced in making games
This video has been so help full i am in high school and almost quit game dev this has really shown me how long it is meant to take and i am now planning a game that i estimate to take 2-3 or more years.
At the beginning of the year I started to make a new game with the idea that before the end of February - I have 3 more weeks ;P to make the website on steam, then in 3 months a demo for the festival and after another 3-4 to release the game, the plan is ambitious but I think I will succeed, wish me luck
There's so much talk about how your first indie game will most likely fail, but is there any stats on how much more likely your 3rd Steam game might make some decent money? How many quit after their first Steam release? I've published 10 android games years ago and my first Steam game 2022. This year I will be releasing my second Steam game, but I don't think it's my last one.
I've been in tutorial hell for a few months. I don't know where to learn, I feel like what I learn is a bad way of doing it. I'm not stressed about anything besides how to learn this language without forgetting a certain syntax next time i go to use it. I have no social life, I spend all day everyday coding, yet I don't feel like I'm learning anything, can't do anything on my own. I feel defeated. I've been trying to make a top down 2D game, maybe it isnt for me
Honestly felt like you were talking about me with this comment. I’m right there with you man. I can’t implement anything without a tutorial. Half of the tutorials I can’t figure out how to extend features that I really want, and the other half are legitimately teaching bad practice. The amount of times I’ve looked something up only to see another video saying “stop doing this” after I just learned it… I’ve lost count and lost all confidence. But if you want to partner up in discord and struggle together let me know, It’d be less miserable if we suffer together 🥹
@@anonymawci we’ll get through it. I do this too much as a hobby to not get paid for it eventually. What engine do you use? I’m making a city builder, RTS game. Probably too big for me but it’s coming along
@@ECAKJ I was really tempted to buy a Udemy course but decided on some books instead. Not sure if that was a good decision or not tbh. But I’m only working with 2D atm. 3D a little too ambitious for me
Since I am a solo game developer, I have had to reduce my scope dramatically in order to attempt to finish my first game. So, say my first game takes 9 months from start to release. I think that's a good goal for a very small scale game. I am very curious how long each game genre would take to make. Some genres, like MMO take much longer than a simple match 3 game. By looking at enough dev logs an personal stories it may be possible to gauge how long each genre would take in "man" hours. My game for instance is a mobile arcade game and may take about 1500 man hours (just guessing , maybe double that and add 1). If I paid myself some ridiculously small wage of $20 per hour I would need to net $30,000 after the publisher takes their 30% , plus , plus. So say $60,000. Not going to happen, lol. So how many "man" hours to make a (successful?) 2D platformer, or a pixel art RPG or a 3D RPG, or solitaire? Impossible to know? I think it can be calculated, (roughly) and it would make for a very interesting video imho. It may also help those of us (like me!) from biting off more than we can handle for our first game. Cheers!
I don't think one can really calculate how many hours it takes to build a successfull game. That would imply, you know what would make a game successfull, and if you would know, just hire x amount of people and let them build it for you. Easy. If you leave "successful" out of the equation, you probably can roughly estimate the amount of effort, but you still need to take every aspect of the game you want to build into account. For instance a 2D Platformer could be build in 1,000h. But if you add multiplayer, character progression, skill system, sophisticated animations, you might end up with 10,000 hours. Even if you only consider a skill system, that could add maybe 100h, 200h or 600h, depending on how sophisticated it is. And if you're a solo developer (I'm too) it also depends on your skills, how fast you can implement new mechanics, add new animations etc. Cheers
2:00 - as freelancer who apply for game industry jobs, I agree with that as a core issue. I sacrificed my free time, social life and family to learn 3D after work by 5 years. I managed to quit my daily work and decided to find work in industry, after a 9 month I got 2y contract and now im jobless 14 months once again. Why i can't get a job? that a good question and thoughts that I wasted past 8 years of my life seems to crawl on me time to time.
Hi everyone, I want to develop my own game one day and I'm curious to know what focus I should study first? Should I start with Art and Animation? Then, programming?? The rest seems like something I can hire someone else to do. Thanks.
IMO art and animation is the biggest time sink. If you look at a lot of successful solo dev games, they are by artists that learned to code and not the other way around. Even if you end up hiring an artist, being able to draw solid concept sketches is always valuable. if I were to time travel back to like 10 years old, I'd learn art, because it takes a long time to get professional quality art. Comparatively, it doesn't take that long to learn to code and unlike art there is no training of a mechanical skill which can take a decade or longer. That said, it might be worth it to learn a basic programming language like python early on to get familiar with how coding actually works. Most of it is probably simpler than you might think. Learning how to use arrays and manipulate variables and write and call functions will give you a better idea of what can be relatively easily done with code and what can't and that'll help you a lot in the early brainstorming process of deciding what to make with the resources you have. There's no part you can't hire out for though and theres also a lot of value in knowing at least a little about every part of the process so you can coordinate people more effectively and communication skills in general are extremely valuable if you plan to do more than solo dev. Just my 2 cents though, I haven't finished making anything worthwhile so I wouldn't pay me too much attention.
Yeah, I still have this extreme need to enter this field but finding the joy in it to keep with it is still hard for me. As a guy who really doesn't have a choice but to do it solo, programming is not my forte and I still have yet for it to click with me even after years of studying it. The fact a lot of other indie devs are very pessimistic right now isn't helping either.
@@DOSRetroGamer Its very complicated and I don't understand it myself to be honest. Its that thing of you need to do it but can't and you don't know why but if you don't do it you know you will regret it for the rest of your life. That kind of thing.
Your editing style is really coming on. Appreciate the content.
I appreciate that, thanks!
One marketing learned the power of is making a good trailer video featuring the game you made. Feature some of the interesting parts in your game. Videos are even how I discover the games that I want to play. So, that's what I do and then one could post the video on social media platforms like TH-cam, TikTok (which is become more and more huge by the day); and put it on Facebook, Instagram and community forums.
I think the source of stress/anxiety comes from knowing just how much work/time/effort a game is going to take (years of full-time work possibly) with the odds of around 98% that no one is ever even going to play it, given how saturated the market is. It’s a tremendous amount of risk.
I am a total noob. I am going to do the impossible.
Of course, chances are I will not make something that can ever be a succes, even slightly.
But just thinking of the learning process makes me happy. If I can finish something, I have redefined greatness for myself.
I like that proposition.
The best feedback I’ve gotten is someone telling me the game wasn’t for them. Not every game will be liked by everyone.
What really drives me crazy is trying to find "good practices" for problems I have.
How do I implement first person animations?
IK or FK?
Do I use events to communicate with components or just method calls?
How do I connect all scripts in a loose enough way?
I hate to get stuck in a analysis paralysis, but I always think that to implement it how I think it's OK will give me a lot of headaches later (already happened).
I feel the same way
connecting components is always the bane of my existence
what has been helpful to me is getting down to the root of wanting to get it right. Cause what happens if you make the wrong choice? Am I afraid I will waste my time, my game wont be good, I will feel ashamed/embarrased, etc? This deeper introspection has helped me to see my fears, and free me to fail. Thus probably giving me the ability to succeed.
Make it first, fix it after.
As you build more things you'll gain an intuition for what decisions to make and what not to.
Also software is kind of "inexpensive".
If you have the time you might as well try both approaches and see which you prefer.
Hey @Diablokiller999, i feel your pain. I've been a normal "make machines run" software developer for 10+ years before getting back into gamedev. At my dayjob, there's so much documentation about best practices and patterns and examples. So obviously, i tried to learn Unity the same way: Seek in-depth knowledge, learn from experienced developers.
That it really rare in gamedev. To the point it made me crazy. Probably matches what you describe as "analysis paralysis" when there's not even a rough estimate on where to start to do things right. In normal developement, there's standards which means "the way it's usually done according to experts". In Unity, "standard" as in "standard character controller" means "here's an example that one of our interns did". So take 4 "standard first person character controllers" and they are all different. What a standard!
In my thirst for knowledge i opened a disassembler and disassembled the sourcecode of Unity games, which was kinda simple before IL2CPP happened. What's below the surface of professional games would get you spanked like a misbehaving kid by a 50ies dad if you showed that in an engineering office.
Holy crap.
A lot of the youtube content about "how to do stuff" comes from people who may or may not have made an indie game, so what is told as how it's done may not actually be good. It's kind of a "the one eyed leading the blind"-situation. Don't take what people teach as gospel, but rather as "one way to do it" and build your own in-depth knowledge over time.
There's a different type of youtube content, which is about showing how the "real professionals" do it. Usually with patterns and how to build complicated flexible systems that are powerful enough to handle everything you might ever need. Sounds impressive? Often horribly overengineered.
I'm in this weird spot where i don't know how to do things in Unity, but i know enough C# to know when something has blatant flaws.
I have no solution for you. Just my experience in taking that path. There's no way around accepting that gamedev is not as structured as other fields. The best advice is always: keep it simple. Accept that gamedev is iterative so it's more about building, trying out, throwing away than bulding the ultimate flexible system.
This editing evolved very much over the last weeks. Good job!
This is something I needed to hear. I've been slowly learning how to create video games for about the past 3 years and it hasn't been easy. Definitely had a more than a few instances of just wanting to quit everything and give up. I work full time while also trying to become an indie developer and sometimes I only have maybe an hour or two that I can dedicate to working/learning game development and it is going to be a long hard road but definitely worth it in the end. Keep up the great work with these videos!
I want to say something that a lot of people never talk about for some reason when it comes to being an indie developer. Not every game has to be made in 2-4 years. Youre only one person, i think it makes much more sense to build small ideas that can be prototyped relatively quickly and expand on them but not every project has to take years. Because at the end of the day most of us arent professionals and will probably think making that game wasnt a good idea or you realize you like working on a different type of game. This is especially true if youre still not experienced in making games
Great Advice!
I will take a lot of it under consideration when I start working on a game release, Thank you!
This video has been so help full i am in high school and almost quit game dev this has really shown me how long it is meant to take and i am now planning a game that i estimate to take 2-3 or more years.
Thank you for sharing valueless experience! I also revealed such thing as scope creep in my videos, and this is completely accurate!
Finally came over from the podcast to your TH-cam channel phenomenal content!
Love, love, love this video. There’s a lot of truth and wisdom in your words.
At the beginning of the year I started to make a new game with the idea that before the end of February - I have 3 more weeks ;P to make the website on steam, then in 3 months a demo for the festival and after another 3-4 to release the game, the plan is ambitious but I think I will succeed, wish me luck
You nailed it. This is not just for those who are starting out, but also a good reminder to everyone.
There's so much talk about how your first indie game will most likely fail, but is there any stats on how much more likely your 3rd Steam game might make some decent money? How many quit after their first Steam release? I've published 10 android games years ago and my first Steam game 2022. This year I will be releasing my second Steam game, but I don't think it's my last one.
A lot of the videos only cater to beginners, very few game dev YTers have even got to the point of releasing more than 1 game
Yeah learning to temper my expectations was a game changer for me
yea, the first game i tried to make long ago took me 2 years and never finished, i ended up burning out, sometimes give up requires courage.
you quit after two years of work? wtf
I've been in tutorial hell for a few months. I don't know where to learn, I feel like what I learn is a bad way of doing it. I'm not stressed about anything besides how to learn this language without forgetting a certain syntax next time i go to use it. I have no social life, I spend all day everyday coding, yet I don't feel like I'm learning anything, can't do anything on my own. I feel defeated.
I've been trying to make a top down 2D game, maybe it isnt for me
Honestly felt like you were talking about me with this comment. I’m right there with you man. I can’t implement anything without a tutorial. Half of the tutorials I can’t figure out how to extend features that I really want, and the other half are legitimately teaching bad practice. The amount of times I’ve looked something up only to see another video saying “stop doing this” after I just learned it… I’ve lost count and lost all confidence. But if you want to partner up in discord and struggle together let me know, It’d be less miserable if we suffer together 🥹
@@anonymawci we’ll get through it. I do this too much as a hobby to not get paid for it eventually. What engine do you use? I’m making a city builder, RTS game. Probably too big for me but it’s coming along
@@ECAKJ I can’t even imagine that complexity >.< I’m working with Unity. Taking a swing at a horde survival.
@@anonymawci nice! I did a Udemy course on a survivors game, just never completely finished it. Are you working in 3D
@@ECAKJ I was really tempted to buy a Udemy course but decided on some books instead. Not sure if that was a good decision or not tbh. But I’m only working with 2D atm. 3D a little too ambitious for me
Since I am a solo game developer, I have had to reduce my scope dramatically in order to attempt to finish my first game. So, say my first game takes 9 months from start to release. I think that's a good goal for a very small scale game. I am very curious how long each game genre would take to make. Some genres, like MMO take much longer than a simple match 3 game. By looking at enough dev logs an personal stories it may be possible to gauge how long each genre would take in "man" hours. My game for instance is a mobile arcade game and may take about 1500 man hours (just guessing , maybe double that and add 1). If I paid myself some ridiculously small wage of $20 per hour I would need to net $30,000 after the publisher takes their 30% , plus , plus. So say $60,000. Not going to happen, lol.
So how many "man" hours to make a (successful?) 2D platformer, or a pixel art RPG or a 3D RPG, or solitaire? Impossible to know?
I think it can be calculated, (roughly) and it would make for a very interesting video imho.
It may also help those of us (like me!) from biting off more than we can handle for our first game.
Cheers!
I don't think one can really calculate how many hours it takes to build a successfull game.
That would imply, you know what would make a game successfull, and if you would know, just hire x amount of people and let them build it for you. Easy.
If you leave "successful" out of the equation, you probably can roughly estimate the amount of effort, but you still need to take every aspect of the game you want to build into account.
For instance a 2D Platformer could be build in 1,000h. But if you add multiplayer, character progression, skill system, sophisticated animations, you might end up with 10,000 hours.
Even if you only consider a skill system, that could add maybe 100h, 200h or 600h, depending on how sophisticated it is.
And if you're a solo developer (I'm too) it also depends on your skills, how fast you can implement new mechanics, add new animations etc.
Cheers
I noticed that it's almost always mentally issues and difficulties that causes the problem
Not gonna lie, 2:03 looks exactly like my laundry room.
2:00 - as freelancer who apply for game industry jobs, I agree with that as a core issue. I sacrificed my free time, social life and family to learn 3D after work by 5 years. I managed to quit my daily work and decided to find work in industry, after a 9 month I got 2y contract and now im jobless 14 months once again. Why i can't get a job? that a good question and thoughts that I wasted past 8 years of my life seems to crawl on me time to time.
Industry is not in the best shape right now, I think solo/very small team indies will rule for a while.
Hi everyone, I want to develop my own game one day and I'm curious to know what focus I should study first?
Should I start with Art and Animation? Then, programming?? The rest seems like something I can hire someone else to do.
Thanks.
IMO art and animation is the biggest time sink. If you look at a lot of successful solo dev games, they are by artists that learned to code and not the other way around. Even if you end up hiring an artist, being able to draw solid concept sketches is always valuable.
if I were to time travel back to like 10 years old, I'd learn art, because it takes a long time to get professional quality art. Comparatively, it doesn't take that long to learn to code and unlike art there is no training of a mechanical skill which can take a decade or longer.
That said, it might be worth it to learn a basic programming language like python early on to get familiar with how coding actually works. Most of it is probably simpler than you might think. Learning how to use arrays and manipulate variables and write and call functions will give you a better idea of what can be relatively easily done with code and what can't and that'll help you a lot in the early brainstorming process of deciding what to make with the resources you have.
There's no part you can't hire out for though and theres also a lot of value in knowing at least a little about every part of the process so you can coordinate people more effectively and communication skills in general are extremely valuable if you plan to do more than solo dev.
Just my 2 cents though, I haven't finished making anything worthwhile so I wouldn't pay me too much attention.
I just stayed awake all night to create my game, kids wake up soon and I’ll gym before that, shower then go to work. I’ll take a nap later 👍
Don't lose sleep over it. Nothing is worth that.
Hold on! This title is giving me Deja Vu! 😮
Yeah I thought I just saw this a few days ago
The one with Isaac in the Thumbnail :D@@dreambadger
th-cam.com/video/WOQfopITEpw/w-d-xo.htmlsi=FjTJGNLmyFNAiHUd
Right? At least add a (part 2) to the video title
Yeah, I still have this extreme need to enter this field but finding the joy in it to keep with it is still hard for me.
As a guy who really doesn't have a choice but to do it solo, programming is not my forte and I still have yet for it to click with me even after years of studying it.
The fact a lot of other indie devs are very pessimistic right now isn't helping either.
Why do you have a need if you don't enjoy it
@@DOSRetroGamer Its very complicated and I don't understand it myself to be honest. Its that thing of you need to do it but can't and you don't know why but if you don't do it you know you will regret it for the rest of your life. That kind of thing.
thank u
10/10 Great video!
Thanks for confirming being a game developer is NOT the best job in the world
Does anybody know the website he's using at 1:18
That looks like Trello, tho it might be another similar site.
Trello
great video thnx
First
yea you were!
1000% agree, as someone getting into game deving. expectation is the seed that sows disappointment.