5 gamedev misconceptions that are holding you back

I think it's pretty safe to say that every year there are more and more game developers maybe you're one of those people who has been playing video games for the past 10 years or whatever it's like what you grew up with and now you're like I want to make my own games because I saw that braies got back and making games is easier and cheaper than ever let me jump into it as well but chances are that you don't have a complete understanding yet of how game development works and with that there are a lot of misconceptions that I see as well when I talk to other game developers about getting started as a game developer so in this video I want to dis spel five common misconceptions that I see other starting game developers do that are either holding them back from starting game development or are immediately setting them up for failure when they get started on that first game and one of the first big examples of one of these things that is immediately kneecapping you is looking at a game and you create your little game design document and whatever and the first thing you decide when you're making a game is this game is going to be 6 hours or 8 hours long or whatever that's pretty much the most common numbers I see where people are they're not even sure yet what their game is going to be what their mechanic is going to be often they just know like oh it's going to be a racing game or it's going to be a shooter game or whatever and I want it to be 6 to 8 hours because that is generally where I feel like people will start paying money for my game and they focus so hard on game length without ever having even made like a 10minute slice of their game or like try it out of a mechanic and I need to tell this to you making your game longer is hard and honestly you think you should be already quite happy if your first game is like 2 to 4 hours at most and I don't think you should aim even for specific times of how long should I play there are plenty of great games that can be beaten in just one or two hours and depending on the price people don't really care that often of course you have the thing of like hey if my game is under 2 hours what about people refunding my game within like the 2-hour period And it's like sure you will have some of those people probably but it's not going to make or break your game Development Career honestly because steam also does some like fraud prevention with those refunds as well and there will always be people who refund your game there will always be people who pirate your game at the end of the day it's much better to focus on making a game that is just fun to begin with in those first two hours versus trying to make some mediocre game at best that is like sure it reaches an 8 hour gameplay Mark but nobody wants to play it for 8 hours because it's just not fun because your core Focus was on pading out the content so you could get to that imagin number of 8 hours so don't get stuck at looking at how long is my game going to be of course depending on the genre you go for like for example if you want to go for a Sandbox game or a like Survivor like or a Rog like it is going to be easier to get a longer game versus if you're making a linear narrative based game those things are going to be much harder to make like 8 hours long because you don't have any replayability but regardless of what genre you're going for don't look blindly at this game is going to give this many hours of content you can't tell that in the beginning of your development process anyway and then of course another one of the most common misconceptions that I often see with sty game developers it's also like our most popular video on this YouTube channel I think is what engine should I pick and why do people care so much because changing engine once you've committed and you're like a few months into your games development process is not something you can easily undo once you've developed multiple months in like unreal or something suddenly changing gears and going to gdau isn't as easy and it feels like there's a lot of pressure on picking the ride engine from the first time but I'm going to tell you something there is no such thing as a right engine you can make pretty much any game in any engine and of course certain genres and visual Styles will have affinities with certain engines for example if you want to make a very like realistic and beautiful game you can probably get started more easily in unreal versus in something like a gdau where like 3D performance sure it is there you can make 3D games in gdau but it's simply not as easy as using a real engine for example now there are two things that I would say if you are looking at okay what engine should I go for and the first one is what is your like technical prior knowledge for example if you're a software Dev in your main job and you work in C well probably it's going to be easier to switch to Unity versus if you are a C++ programmer then go for something like unreal for example that is one thing or maybe you're an artist and you have an art pipeline that is more geared towards a spefic specific engine in which case yeah the decision is made pretty easily for you but otherwise I wouldn't really worry about it too much one thing you can also do is just prototype like follow some tutorials for the three different engines the three big ones un real gdau and unity and then decide based on that like spend a week or so making like a very simple clone of a other game or following a tutorial and figuring out which one do you have the most affinity for because I have people who are like oh I can never use unreal because it keeps crashing on me or I can never use Unity because it keeps crashing on me whereas other people are like I have no problems with this engine that is something that you need to figure out for yourself and there's no point in just pondering and always looking at oh Kau released a new update Unity is releasing Unity 6 maybe I should go for that it doesn't matter don't go for games with long ass development Cycles to begin with and then the engine also doesn't matter as much and then something else I see is that developers they start working on their game and they're focused purely on making the game and nothing on the marketing at all like months in advance you should start already and when I ask them like why are you not focusing on marketing why do you still not have a steam page why haven't you reached out to anyone they're like oh yeah I don't really need to care about marketing that much because a good game will sell itself at the end of the day right and I mean technically maybe you're not wrong but on the other hand we're living in a climate where so many games are being released every day it's like 10 or 20 games every day at least that are released on Steam that are just the Indies and it's getting harder and harder to just organically stand out with those and sure having a good game is going to make it much easier to Market when you have things like a demo for example people will talk about it people will love it but you still need to build up that initial momentum of people who play the game and are like this is the best game ever let me tell my friends about it or whatever and you can't get that without doing any marketing and you don't need to spend like thousands of dollars on advertisements and things like that we made a video about how you can reach out to influencers for free basically getting them to cover your game and if it truly is an amazing game it shouldn't be that much of a problem to get people to cover your game and then on the flip side this is a misconception I see as well and that you see a lot with like developers who mainly played AAA games before they went into game development is oh a bad game I can still just Market the hell out of it and it will still sell like I don't need to worry too much that my game play isn't perfectly there if I just get enough YouTubers to cover it or whatever or I pay for some ads it will pick up and then ball will get rolling once some people buy it and it's going to be okay and also here you're not fully wrong especially with those AAA games if you look at games like OverWatch 2 they're overwhelmingly negative or like the Call of Duty games they're very negatively reviewed but still they sell so much because they just have big ass marketing budgets but you probably don't have those and another thing that I want you to keep in mind is even if you do have that marketing prowess to get a lot of eyeballs on your bad game it still doesn't mean you're going to be successful and I think I have to be honest the best example of this is Forge industry which is our own game and we worked on that game for 18 months we put a lot of effort into it but at the end of the day there are just some big mechanical issues with it however we got hundreds of thousands of views combined on like our videos where we plug it and we've been able to sell Forge industry as well we've sold over $10,000 worth of it but when the game just isn't fun it doesn't matter how many people buy it because also your refund rates will go up so at the end of the day you'll just not earn as much you'll have to deal with seeing things like oh mixed reviews or negative reviews which also hurt a lot and once you've reached that mixed review on steam basically your game becomes near impossible to sell even if I were to plug it in like every single video we make here and people would watch it and like do other advertising stuff so having a bad game or having no marketing are both big mistakes ideally you want to have a good game and also have a more thought out marketing approach where you start thinking about marketing before you're actually planning on releasing now what should you make as a good game this is another one where a lot of people are like immediately overwhelmed when they start like planning out their first game because they're like it has to be original and this is one of those things that a lot of developers feel like oh I need to have my games be completely unique completely original nothing else like that exists and I know some of you guys commenters are like oh Marx you're just a soulless developer who just makes whatever like will earn the most money and no I don't think so because because I I still don't have a Lamborghini unfortunately but also originality when you're really getting started in game development is actually going to hamper you more because first of all you're still figuring out your engine that you still also aren't really committed on yet what engine you're going to take and the originality will mean you're going to have weird Mechanics for example weird movement systems or whatever that you just don't have any references for I think it's much better especially with those first games to take something that is already established which is something that we kind of did with for industry as well where we took a game like factorial an automation game and instead of being 100% original we took that core concept of we have different buildings we move items between the buildings and we make new items and we sell them for profit and that's the game and we just added on top of that we were like okay how do we change this and make it a bit different than everything else on the market by not using conveyor belts instead we had like little guys who would walk around and transport items using B finding and that combined with our setting was pretty much our originality and sure it wasn't the most original but it allowed us as well to when making that game and we weren't sure about like certain design decisions look at games like factorial how do they Implement things and also more importantly look at reviews of those games and figure out what people did and didn't like about it that's also extremely important if you're making something completely unique you could be spending multiple years on a unique project that at the end of the day when you do release it nobody will understand and because it is so extreme and unique marketing also just isn't there because there's no anchor is what it's called like no frame of reference for the player to understand oh this is a shooter but you have a chainsaw as a lag for example so don't get stuck on finding that original idea just expand onto something that already exists in my opinion and then the last misconception is one that we once again also fell victim to and it's like oh I'm going to make my game in like 1 to three months that's my schedule I think and we still make this mistake to this day game development will always take much much longer than you plan on it when we started working on Forge industry we figured we would make it in about 1 month it ended up taking 18 months and honestly if we really wanted to do it right it probably should have taken 2 years and okay we had a big scope I understand that but you probably also have no idea what is a good scope and what is a bad scope we actually made another video about that like how you deal with scope creep and scoping your game correctly so check that one out over there but realize that if you want to make a game and it's not just a Flappy Bird clone it is probably going to take at least 3 months probably more like 6 months if you want to make something that is more commercial grade and you can put on Steam versus just a simple prototype because there's also just so much more that comes to play it's not just making the mechanic it's making all the content it's making all the story because we talked about like how long your game should be in the beginning sure if you have like a month time you can can probably make a game that's like 15 20 minutes long but most likely you won't be able to make a game that reaches like you know the one or two hour mark which is in my opinion a bit still the bare minimum for a steam release and also if you're making a game in like one month that gives you no time for marketing because steam also requires you to have your steam page up 2 weeks before launch so generally go into game development with the idea that hey this is going to take more time than I probably plann for but that's okay I don't need to like earn a profit from my games in like the next 3 months as long as you understand that you should be fine so if you are on the fence of hey I want to get into game involment I'm not really sure yet if it's for me or I can commit I hope this video has helped you a little bit more in understanding how the game def World Works basically it is something that sure there is a lot of unknowns it is a lot of work to make a game but at the end of the day it is also still fun there's a big difference as well I need to say this between making games and planning to earn money from it or just making games as another fun hobby if it's the ladder it is a really great hobby if you're going at this purely for fun then definitely it is a bit harder but I hope this still helped clear things up if there's anything else that you're like hey I want to get started with game development but I don't know if it's going to be worth it for me or you have anything else that is stopping you leave a comment down below and I'll respond to it probably dispelling it or giving you some more information about the problem that you're dealing with I want to help you guys because Gil like I said it is nice and I wish that I had someone like me when I started to 2 years ago working on our own first games so if you like this kind of content talking about game development and the entire process about it you're at the right channel we make two videos every week talking about the process of being an indie game developer the business behind it the things that we personally learn along the way as well the mistakes we make so you don't have to make them like we did it and you can just bypass a lot of the dumb fuckups basically if that's something that you're interested in be sure to head down below and subscribe as it really helps us out in knowing that you're interested in this kind of content and you get these videos delivered to your subscription box two times a week that's all I already to say thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 7,508

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

Id: 2gQLEg0B4wI

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2024