23 mistakes we made making our first game

we just released our very first indie game Forge industry a resource management and automation game if you're interested you can go down below in description there's a link to the steam page please help a brother out please help us out indeed and we've been working on it for I think about 18 months in total together with two other developers and well I think Thomas you can say that a lot of things went wrong during the development we have been big Dum Dums we yeah we this was our first game that we ever made so in this video I wanted to sit down together with Thomas who was our main programmer guy and I did basically everything else and we're gonna go over some of the well 23 mistakes is I think the number we landed on 23 mistakes we've made during development of our game so hopefully you can learn a few of these and not do them yourselves because some of these have cost us literally months of development time and a lot of frustration so the first one is probably one of the biggest ones and this is a mistake that you can't avoid really and that is going in blind because there is a point where you'll have to start and you don't really know how game development works because in our case we're four people but only Thomas here had some idea of how do games really work how do I make games and he just sold us basically oh it's gonna be great we just make a game easy like that we had no Unity experience we had no modeling experience we had no like Unity specific programming experience we just new c-sharp basically from our previous degree and we you'll see a lot of the mistakes we made down the line in this video all stem from not having made a game before and one of the first mistakes we made was we had way too big of a scope I think we once mentioned if you have a scope like divided in two look at it divide it in two and maybe then you can finish it in like two years you don't you cannot have a scope that is too small so make sure your scope is not too big especially if this is your first project yeah I think we we have some scope changes but for example at some point we wanted to have railroads in our game no you wanted that well I wanted a railroads in our game and then at another point we had this idea of hiring Consultants to come work for you and teach you new stuff and things like that yeah so that's basically mistake number three too many scope changes yeah that's indeed mistake number three is once you have your scope we used to have this gdd I wrote like yeah 18 months ago and we've shifted a lot from there now of course this is normal whether it's through play testing or just to finding out that something sucks or it's not feasible you will be changing things about your scope but ideally you want to have as little of those as possible because sometimes you may spend months working on something and then be like well this is kind of dumb let's just get rid of it all and start over so spend some time with your scope and also I think we didn't research how feasible our game was really we just were like this is our scope and we didn't do any like proof of Concepts really for certain mechanics who are just like this is our scope let's go for it yeah I think it was half a year before we ever got our first feedback yeah so not good do it faster another mistake we made is in the beginning we didn't have enough commitments and this is something that the entire team suffered from basically and it's you get started you're hyped for a week second week is a bit less and then it's downhill from there so do make sure you you make sure you well Reserve enough of your free time so to say to work on your game because you need constant progress yeah of course the problem we had there was we all had main jobs on like we were just making a game as a fun side project we weren't when we started 18 months ago this one's like this is going to be our career no it slowly evolved but because we didn't have that mindset of this is going to be our future career or whatever and we were just doing it for fun we never had the commitment and sometimes there were people on the team who didn't really do anything for two weeks and then you know it also brings the rest of the team down when nobody really does anything now that has changed of course once we started getting more and more up to speed we have gotten more commitment and even me and as well as one other developer have gone full time here at Bite Me games by now and there has been a huge difference I feel since we went full time and how much we went to do so this is something that you as an indie developer will probably also be working on because not everyone has a huge Nest Egg to just be like I'm gonna quit my job and just make games and hope for the best and part of that commitment issue was also our next mistake we are colleagues so to say we're all just friends with you're my employee I mean I'm his employee that's what he says but in reality we're all friends because we knew each other from before we started game development because we went to the same University and the problem with that is that you don't want to ruin your friendship even when things aren't going as great in Game Dev for example there was a period of time where William one of our developers he was really busy at work at his main job and he didn't really do anything for I feel like a month I don't know William if I am not exaggerating he doesn't watch our videos anyway but it was really hard for me or anyone else of the team to be like yo William you have to work more because well we're also just friends and I don't want to risk ruining my friendship by telling him what to do another mistake we made is we didn't play this nearly enough especially at the beginning there was a time period where we would Implement mechanics and then after like two months marnix would be like hey I this mechanic for once and it's completely broken yeah not good yeah I think this was mainly also because we had the devlogs once a month I went through everything we added that month and started actually play testing it because I needed footage and I remember vividly like every time that I was recording of devlog we have like this Discord Channel with like bug reports I would just send like 20 different bucks like this doesn't work this doesn't work guys did you even test what you wrote and I think we still have play testing issues not just with public play tests but even internally if you look at for example you Thomas wait what did I do how much have you actually played Forge industry the answer is not enough that's what I can tell you I won't go on record saying I hate this game but but yeah there's and there's a problem if you don't play test the game enough you need that feedback because for I think the first like nine months I wasn't even certain until we went to Game Force to demo is what we're doing is anyone actually gonna find this fun because especially if you have a game that's like somewhat broken and like in development it's really hard to see the potential of it another thing we should have done is code reviews we especially from the beginning like Memories mentioned Jamie and William didn't have any experience and they committed basically without a code review meaning their code is still in the game as we speak and at the beginning these these lines of code were just not good just like when I commit things sometimes everyone makes mistakes and a second opinion is very valuable so when you make a project Where You Are Not Alone try to make code reviews work this is actually a bonus one that I just thought about a bonus mistake and that is don't do drunk commits you're someone who was very guilty of that where it's like you know you just we work we use git if you don't know how git works there's this system of branching and what you're supposed to do is oh I'm gonna work on roads for example you create a separate branch and then once you're done you would get that Branch reviewed and then once someone else is like this is good work you can merge this into Master what we had Thomas do is like sometimes I see a commit straight to master that is like workers go or whatever or and those things well they're not really useful in figuring out what actually changed for example I guess you're right another problem we had was that we had too many distractions we we set out as a studio to make a game but we did so much more this was something that especially I had to deal with a lot is I was like we need to have this YouTube channel but I don't know if you've been following it since like day one well thanks first of all but you'll remember that we used to make blog posts about our devlogs and every video we used to make tick tocks for a certain while as well and all of those things take a lot of time especially now I'm getting better at making these videos so I can make one in about four hours start to finish that's still a lot of time that you could spend making models developing reaching out to other people for marketing play testing your game and I think we definitely over committed in that regard like for example the blogs and tick tocks we just were like get rid of it so ideally only work on your game and I do think that devlogs can also be a good like extra bonus but don't do like read it with like two uploads every week if you don't really know what you're doing another thing we did wrong is we didn't really look for funding from the beginning so up until this day we are completely self-funded and for Forge industry this was possible because we were still working as like our main jobs however if you want to make a living out of this you should probably look for funding pretty early on this is also what we are planning to do for our next game and you can find more about that soon and then you know because we didn't have any funds that also meant we didn't have proper talents for certain aspects so the main ones here are 3D modeling as you may have seen our game doesn't really look the best because we're four programmers in the end and I just got the the head of mornings now you get to make all the 3D models I had never made it before this game any models so I just had to learn suddenly on the Fly whilst also managing all of those other things and another aspect where having some funding would have helped us is getting something like music right now our music is also just generic music and it still works because it's like you know we're a generic Fantasy game but especially for maybe our next game you want to have funding so you can actually get a proper composer or if you know a proper composer that works as well but we don't know anyone who has any musical talents really so that was something that we also missed out talking about talent that brings us to the next point which is number eleven I don't know yeah yeah I think it's 11. so if you're keeping count good job and that is we didn't really think enough about our course structure because we made it in two days this is also because we didn't know what we're doing from the start we basically started with a quote unquote game Jam where we would make a MVP in like two days yeah this was not a good idea this is something I regret to this day one of the probably the biggest mistake even because you just make goat that is not very scalable because of that brings us to next point which is we had to rewrite a lot of code and that brings with it a lot of time waste and we didn't have to rewrite just once I feel like there were certain things we have even Rewritten like four or five times Jaime rewrote the item system like seven times I think or so yeah if if not more but on the other hand there are things where we should have Rewritten them yeah because there are still parts of the item system that we didn't rewrite that we're now like only realizing like five days is before launch as we record this that we have a big problem and that leads to a lot of like extra manual work like it works the current implementation but we never tested it so it's not as efficient and it's a lot of just monkey work basically yeah that's a scalable part I mentioned just try to think ahead of what you have to do in the future future you will thank you and speaking of thinking about the future also don't just say I will fix this in the future because that's another problem we had we just ignored certain issues so for example our item system was one of those things we only really started implementing our items like three weeks before launch we had like I think like 20 test items but we have I think in our final game it's about 700 different items and like variants we had to manually make all of them because we didn't test on time is this actually a good implementation that we wrote and especially for us it hurts a lot because items are literally the core of our game and it feels like we didn't like really think enough about it or didn't on time be like yo this is a problem we need to fix it another problem is we over promised probably from the beginning yeah because we were at gameforce and we were like releasing March I think we said February even oh boy well anyway yeah this was way too optimistic so yeah do make sure you keep your scope in mind but also give yourself some leeway of course this is also going back to our first point we had no idea what we were doing we came in blind for our next game we now know to double triple whatever our estimate is we're gonna make it a lot larger than and not waste time on Railways Marx my Railways were gonna everyone wants Railways I feel comment down below if you want to make a post release update with Railways if please don't comment that comment marlex it was a stupid idea speaking of stupid ideas using assets that we just ended up nuking I think you know a bit more about those yeah we we started and we were like oh I used to be wired in the past which is still a great asset don't get me wrong but we didn't really need it because well unity's new input system is pretty good and in the end we switched over to it anyway so we had like a lot of overlap because we first implemented rewire throughout all our game and I was like well now we're going to rewrite it once again for the unity input system so yeah think about what assets you really need because in the end you make a game yourself and you should only rely on assets that take something away from you that is pretty Technical and not core to the experience and also think about the free Alternatives because Unity actually provides a lot of good things already now we said that we didn't ask for feedback on time or we haven't been looking for feedback but then the other problem was we took some feedback too close to heart really when we were demoing our game at Game Force I think like 10 people came up to us played the game we're like oh this looks great but I would buy it only if it has multiplayer and it was like you know Co-op and there were 10 people in the end and we were like okay 10 people just said they need multiplayer scrap everything we've made so far we're gonna add multiplayer to our game even though once again our core wasn't written to support multiplayer so first of all there was a lot of on your end to get all of that working it always just worked like mediocre at best and then in the end we were just like yeah no we're not adding multiplayer for release we had to scrap it all and that was something that dragged on for literally months and was just like making our game unnecessarily complex yeah it's just also a lot of wasted time because in the end I implemented a very proof of concept version we didn't well completely implement it but we also added things like an in-game chat and stuff like that which is hey that's what you did you can complain about my Railways I never asked for a chat system I mean I made it anyway but it's still better well it's not better it's both are horrible don't do it speaking of horrible ideas yeah speaking of horrible ideas we didn't respect localization enough I think from the start Martis was like we're going to make this game in 13 languages yeah it might have this was once again you know going in blind it's like what should we do for a good game oh I know be as accessible as possible and we were like oh let's support our game in Arabic I literally know nobody who even plays games in Arabic or like Russian or things like that yet we were still like oh let's just add all of them it'll be easy to just like localized it it was not yeah we started way too late we had way too many languages and another mistake we made is we didn't translate everything by default like lazy me was often me uh like I'll implement this feature and Marx could add the localizations for me uh yeah don't do that not a good idea think about what languages you really need and if you don't want to deal with it just speak English yeah I think the language is we stuck to in the end are just the ones that either we knew ourselves or we knew someone close to us who wouldn't like mind like chipping in and helping us with the translations so I think we ended up with six languages in total which is still quite a lot which is still quite a lot for indie game indeed um but that was just you know the collective of how we know multiple languages another thing where we were probably a bit too lazy is at the start we made a lot of things well mechanics UI things like that but we didn't bring him to high enough quality from the start overall it's like it works in its base form we don't need to make the UI pretty already that's problems or future us yeah this made it so we went to gameforce and we were like two weeks ahead ahead of it we're like well it kind of works but everything looks absolutely poo poo so yeah now we have to remake every UI element in the game so it's actually presentable this is something you should probably also do way earlier and this is something we will do in our next game and that's like we make something we bring it to our quality standards or at least of a high enough quality standard that we are not afraid to show it to the public yeah I think what you do see is that you know I've actually seen a lot of games but they're always Early Access games where like for a long time they do just use a Unity default buttons I think unturned for example still pretty much uses the default Unity buttons but that was also a game you know if it's in Early Access it's like one of the things you can excuse but we're not doing Early Access so now it's like a few days before release and we are like reworking all of our prefab still to get it up to spec to how we want our game to look and then one of those problems was because we didn't really have a visual good looking game is our marketing got so hard and once again we also like ignored it and we just simply didn't try our best to do marketing so what was our idea for marketing it was just this YouTube channel and that was really all the marketing we did events a bit events a bit but we only did like one event in the end really where we advertised our game because the problem was there once again we didn't have enough funding to like go to like actual marketing campaigns or to pay influencers or whatever we did reach out like two weeks ago for Steam nextfest and we have some people who played our game there but in general yeah we didn't really do much marketing we had like we we commissioned one piece of concept art as like our promo art and that's it that's all we did really and even things like our steam page you normally want to have your steam page up and pretty as fast as possible whereas we've only reached the like final pretty States or steam Pace like two weeks ago from like recording this video and if you want to see how we go from marketing zero to marketing hero to make sure you subscribe because uh we will be making a video about how we will tackle it in our next game yeah and also just like a bit more in depth into all the marketing mistakes specifically that we made this one ties a bit to play testing but that is that we didn't have enough iterative development this is honestly a bit of a shame on us because we come from a software engineering degree where practices like agile and scrum are like rammed into you for three years straight yet we didn't really apply any of them and what that means is that for example the problem like how we ignored items or also simply things like balancing are actually a horrible mess for us to deal with because we didn't really balance anything up until again one month really before the game came out and then you have the problem of well you only have one month to play test it whereas if you balance very early on and then you play test and you balance again that's that iterative Loop that you want whereas now we simply don't have the time to do that Loop often yeah and it brings the next point and we already briefly mentioned it is we had too tight of a deadline because basically our deadline was good to have feature parity of what we wanted but to make it work we also needed to do a battle of scale because we were ready with the features but there were no items there were it wasn't balanced nope yeah all the like requests for example like are in game like yeah in the harbor so we the deadline was too tight we had still have to do a battle of scale that meant we didn't sleep a whole lot with last weeks now there's the deadline issue and then one other issue we had is that we didn't finish our game on time and what do I mean isn't that the same there's this concept that a lot of games have where they go golden which means that you know we are not adding any more features we maybe just fix some bugs and like pretty up a UI but you don't Implement anything really anymore whereas now we had planned that but our plans suck everyone has a planet punched in the face in which case item system punched Us in the face multiple times multiple times which caused us to now only like one week before release finally finishing all the localizations for six languages and I think we have like 2 800 keys so that was a lot of pain to get all of that so so lost minutes so ideally you wanna just be like okay now no more new features whatever we have in the game right now that's it and maybe the rest we do Post launch and updates or whatever now we just focus on finishing the bugs making sure that their game plays smooth and just like some quality of life changes and these were really all all the mistakes we could think about now that doesn't mean if I look at Donald we made a lot more mistakes I'm very certain I'm very certain there was we this was a rocky start to our Game Dev journey I feel but I am glad that we made all of these mistakes and now we know that's 24 mistakes less really that we'll be making in our next game yeah we were forceding the fires of Mount Doom we are indestructible now let's see about that but I'm curious about you guys leave a comment down below maybe what are some of the mistakes that you've personally made on your game or maybe some like little tips that you have on how to avoid certain mistakes I really love to interact with you guys and yeah as I said before if you want to see how our game ended up despite all of these mistakes link down below you can go and get the steam page and if you want to see how we do for our next game make sure you subscribe because we will be covering it as well and in I I don't want to see a deadline yet but once it's it's finished be sure to we haven't even defined the scope and you're already giving us a deadline this is another mistake don't do this don't listen to we will add that one in the video in like one or one and a half or two years let's see but yeah apart from that you can stay tuned to get more information about our next game and also just these kinds of game death videos where we talk about the behind the scenes so to say of creating your own video game so if it's something interesting go ahead and subscribe down below and also maybe leave us a like as it's a win-win for both of us because we get our number going up in the amount of subscribers you'll get this cool content two times a week that's all we have to say I don't know you don't have anything to add or I want to sleep you want to sleep well thanks for watching and we'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 30,728

Keywords: gamedev, indie, indie developer, game development, unity, c#, blender, game design, game studio, devlog, development, startup, forge industry, flega, steam

Id: M1-K1eHGXL8

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023