5 Steps To Start Making Games

- hey guys my name is Thomas brush and the creator of a game called pinstripe I'm also working on a game called once upon a coma I love making games but I gotta say that it can be a little bit complicated getting started so I want to distill down those steps for you and give you five ways that you can get started in game development so first I want to quickly answer that looming question about getting a job in games do you really need to go to school or can you bypass all of that money expenses in time and just get started learning games on your own I mean my recommendation right off the bat is just don't go to game design school and the reason is simply because game technologies tend to be changing so quickly they're changing way faster than they used to spending two to four years learning the specifics of the industry will likely prove futile in the end I mean that's just my opinion examples of this are unity and unreal are constantly competing with one another to be the most simplistic and user friendly so they're always pushing updates and changes to their systems there's hair in my eye they're constantly pushing updates to their software and removing content that might otherwise not really work for the current system obviously there's changes to platforms - right Steam used to be the thing that indie developers wanted to release on now it's switch and maybe even the epic store so these schools are likely going to focus on the generalities of game design and development because they want to avoid the problem of the things that are constantly changing I mean but that brings another problem and that's that generalities are honestly really easy to learn you don't really need school to teach you these generalities so I recommend teaching yourself I mean don't rely on a teacher or a boss or your friends or family to push you to be disciplined about learning you don't really need that and you especially don't need to pay for that so be disciplined yourself spend three hours a day I recommend three hours a day learning the following five steps and you'll be set now I get it if you're someone who struggles to be motivated struggles to learn without direct person-to-person teaching perhaps schooling is for you and that's totally fine I get it you can choose from a plethora of schools here are my recommendations Becker college Full Sail University and Savannah College of Art and Design those are great schools to learn games overall I mean everything you need learn about game development is available online for free regardless the following five steps to get into game development will apply to either students or just people who want to learn on their own now step one is to learn unity or unreal I mean the good news here is both unity and unreal are absolutely free although unreal you got to pay 5% royalties on gross revenue above $3,000 per product per quarter trust me that 5% is a lot I mean I know it can seem really complicated but 5% is a lot especially when 30 to 35% is gonna be going to a platformer and then another 20 to 30 30% might be going to a publisher so if you choose to work with a publisher that 5% can really be a lot of money especially when you're getting a small cut so that's why I recommend unity because it's just strictly free they don't make you pay anything along with the fact that it's really easy to learn now with without getting into the nitty-gritty unity uses a script evil scripting language called C sharp which is super easy to learn and to me makes a lot more sense than something out of the box like C plus plus the good news is unreal has something called blueprint which means you don't really need to write C++ code they kind of just can do it for you now regardless both tools are incredibly robust I can't complain about either I just really recommend unity regarding out-of-the-box graphical capabilities unreal has certainly had a leg up on unity in the past but I think now unity is starting to really compete with unreal I think by the time you release your game maybe in a year so if that's what you plan on doing the unity will probably be comparable to unreal graphical capabilities that's just my gut feeling I can sense that a few of you probably have some comments about this so please let me know in the comments below what you think about unity and unreal graphical capabilities now ultimately I recommend you just download unity and gifts started it's the perfect tools for making games now I've made two games with unity pinstripe in once upon a coma because of unity I've been able to support my indie game studio also pay the bills and pay for my family's bills I mean it's an incredible tool honestly I thank unity and this isn't a sponsored video I just thank unity for how free available and amazing the tool is now unity can port to pretty much every platform Under the Sun and this is true for unreal as well you get port to PC Mac Linux iOS Android Xbox ps4 and even Nintendo switch and that's really cool we'll talk about in a second I've released pinstripe my game about a minister on hell on all of these most recently is Nintendo switch and actually reporting to mobile right now so we had a released on mobile just yet but unity has had some incredibly simple resources available in conjunction with each of these platforms now I can tell the relationship unity has with all of these platforms is really tight it's really good because every time unity has an update the API is available for all of these platforms have an update pretty fast once unities done an update it's really amazing how quickly these updates are and these platforms are never really behind now that you've downloaded unity or unreal and learn the basics of code it's time to start doing artwork and environment art so one final side note before we get into that is there are plenty of other unity and unreal competitors out there I get that but the truth is unity and unreal will probably be best suited for your long-term goals although currently maybe your idea would be best suited on something like game maker that's more of a short term strategy I think long term you want to go with the big guys because they're gonna be pushing updates and they're gonna be hanging out with the platforms especially the new platforms that are coming out especially something like Epic Games of store so step 2 is to learn your art creation tool of choice plenty of Indies like making 3d games but I know my audience and a lot of Indies out there certainly prefer making 2d games especially for their first game simply because of budgetary constraints simplistic 2d art is fairly straightforward to create and more importantly when you get to the QA phase there's not a ton of roadblocks and speed bumps for releasing your game materials textures lighting and 3d art can bring a project to a grinding halt believe me depending on your platforms limitations 2d art if approached simplistically meaning not a ton of lighting crazy materials and 4k artwork it tends to be friendly across all forms trust me pinstripe was developed over the course of five years I mean five years is a long time to become better at something starting out I was terrible at making games so if you look under the hood of pinstripe the code is terrible but because it was a 2d game it was economical it was efficient and it released on all platforms pretty well all that said here are the tools you can use for 2d art we'll talk about 3d art in a second so obviously we'll start off with Photoshop which is my first choice for creating character art environment art and pretty much everything else including UI some people critique me for this telling me I should be using illustrator honestly though when I use illustrator I'm kind of a layman so when I use illustrator it's really slow and it's incredibly complicated I like things to be flat simplistic clean and not really take up a lot of the computer's RAM I have no idea why illustrator is slow for me on Mac but it just is so I go with Photoshop I mean also there's some pretty sweet plugins with Photoshop and unity so for example there's something called Photoshop two layers and that's really awesome because unity can take a Photoshop file and break down the layers convert them to P and G's and then build a game object with all those layers inside so you're you're literally going from Photoshop to unity and everything is already layered in unity and that's pretty cool all right - after I import my Photoshop layers into unity break up the layers and build the scenes it's really time for me to start animating okay so I take layers from Photoshop and I bring them into something called spine to D now spine to D is made by a company called esoteric I mean unity is doing something very similar that esoteric is doing so unities recent release of 2000 18.1 actually includes a lot of the features that spine uses but we're gonna talk about spine right now so spine basically allows you to create simplistic bones attached your PNG graphics from Photoshop and start using your characters in unity I mean it's incredibly simple to master and I highly recommend this method making an old-school game like cuphead or holo night it might be better to do sprite sheets but for me I love doing spine 2d skeletons because it's just a lot easier to animate and it doesn't have to be too complicated and also heavy we don't have a ton of different sprites we've just got one set of sprites that we can animate multiple animations now obviously these tools can change if you're going to be making a 3d game I can't tell you how many times I've been told how amazing blender is I mean blenders a free tool to make 3d artwork whether it's simplistic 3d artwork or very complicated artwork blender really is an amazing tool so you should check it out they've actually had a recent release so for those of you who have heard that blender is very complicated they've actually been doing a recent release that will make it much more simplistic to learn now if you're just gonna be making 2d games and don't really care about 3d games ignore everything I just said but ultimately don't stress if you feel like you can't create 2d or 3d models believe it or not the first video game ever made was in 1958 by this physicist called William Higinbotham I think he's how he say his name he sounds like a physicist any it was basically pong now I bring this up because back then making game art let alone just games required scientists and very intelligent creatives to be making art work and getting these games finished now in you know starting maybe in 2010 until now unity started offering and unreal does this as well started offering paid in free pre-made assets so artwork or development tools so this is a great opportunity for people who don't really want to make artwork to still make games without having to hire an artist to do this just promise me that if you're going this route you'll try and personalize the artwork and the pre-made tools that you're downloading you don't want to do an asset flip rather you want to be personal and personalize the artwork that you're downloading a great example of this if taking pre-made assets and making them your own is a game called the first tree I mean it's an amazing game it's beautiful and I recommend you give it a look it uses assets from Unity store including art and development tools now step three for getting into game development it's learning your sound design tool of choice I'm not gonna linger on this for too long simply because discussions about sound design best practices are a bit of a mixed bag but it's really hard for me to offer up specifics but I will tell you that creating great sounds from my games has always felt like the wild west from freesound.org to production create calm and other paid services I tend to bring various downloaded fully sound effects into a free program called audacity so you should download that immediately just mess around until your sounds feel right audacity has some great tools that are really easy to learn and also some really cool effects so just to mess around until it feels right and before we get into exactly what makes a great sound effect you really should know where you can get these foley sound effects from and a lot of them are free some websites that I find myself hanging out on a lot are freesound.org it's the first one now I've been downloading sounds from this public library for almost 12 years man it was that like 16 Oh 16 years old when I started using it obviously there's plenty of awful sounds here trust me but overall you'll likely find what you're looking for you can just download multiple sound effects to piece them together to get the sounds that you like I mean even movies like Star Wars the original Star Wars movie they would take multiple fully sound effects that you wouldn't think would makes sense combine them and then it would be this amazing sound of a TIE fighter so it's incredible you should actually watch a documentary on it's pretty cool it'll help you learn sound design now the second website is kind of the opposite of freesound.org and that is production crate production crate is almost completely opposite simply because as a paid service and it's fairly limited in terms of its library to freesound.org now the sounds on here are high-quality and really showcase what makes a great sound effect again we'll talk about that just a second so for 70 bucks a year it's really hard hard to say no to this and don't let me forget to mention that production crate has some awesome music and video effects as well so this is perfect for throwing together an epic trailer in a hurry and we'll talk about trailers in a second so that's a way to kill two birds with one stone you can get great effects for your trailers will also get really great sound effects for your games production crate is awesome take a look now there's plenty of other sites with sound effects obviously like 99 sounds org noise for fun calm and competent calm open game art org or razed beaches calm I mean the lists can go on and on honestly though I would just stick with freesound.org and production create I mean they're gonna serve your needs and it's not expensive at all so take a look at both those websites all right let's jump into what makes a great sound effect really quickly I know it feels weird for me to get so specific about this but a few key points will save you a lot of confusion in the future and I just had this problem yesterday where I was wondering why my game sucked there was a part of my game that really sucked and I couldn't figure out why and it was just because of the sound effect the sound effect wasn't snappy it didn't feel right I'm so I'm gonna talk about some some quick tips about how you can make your sounds feel great and make your game even better I mean first your sounds typically should include a good amount of bass and treble I mean this is bass okay and this is treble and then this is them combined see how it feels full I typically have to find two sound effects to achieve this and combine them and I can use something called equalizer and audacity to make both bass and treble happen with my sound effects obviously this takes practice I've been doing this for over 10 years now but just be sure that when you're comparing your sounds you're comparing them to really great games who do this well obviously a game like hollow Knight does a really good job of making their sounds feel good they feel bassy they feel Trembley if that's a word makes them feel alive so just compare your sound effects to great games out there now I've found the simpler the sounds the better and I know this sounds weird since we were just talking about Star Wars combining sound effects so if you're not making a sci-fi game simpler sounds are probably the best bet here a great example of this is a game like below where they take very simple clean raw sound effects and they don't really mess with them too much as opposed to someone like me who spent all of yesterday trying to figure out how to get a pile of leaves a xylophone and a whooshing sound to be the sound of collecting a heart in the game and then I finally found a sound effect for a triangle and it was really like simple and it made sense and I felt kind of guilty like I didn't spend much time getting this sound effect to work but it just works honestly there's no reason to be cocky about this just get a great sound and move forward with your game sometimes I find myself trying to be little bit too creative when in reality you can be pretty simple like games like below finally if you're having trouble finding awesome sound effects just use instruments in GarageBand which is free or logic pro or Pro Tools or FL studio they have some awesome live instruments that you can use to get some great sounds believe it or not games like breath of the wild do this amazingly well if you ever open up the menu in breath of the wild you'll notice that a lot of the sound effects of selecting certain UI elements are actually just simple clean instruments alright the fourth step man I hate talking about the fourth step but we got to do it is beta testing look I'm not gonna get into the nitty gritty about beta testing mainly because I already made a video about this and I don't really want to keep talking about it but it's the most painful part of game development I mean honestly we got to do it though because we can't really see our own games the way that maybe our audience will see them so it's really good to get their perspective I mean honestly though it's just a depressing part so let's kind of get through this here for beta testing you really can approach it as casually as you like but I recommend doing it in a specific order and here it is first I reach out to my audience on all social media platforms and I collect email addresses of willing participants then I send them a steam key a survey and instructions finally I try and incentivize or just communicate how important it is to my beta testers that they complete the survey don't send out a steam key and not remind them to do a survey because people will just play the game and not do a survey no one know mal-intent here they just might forget alright finally you collect the data and the things the players if they hate you the bugs other comments they have and here's a little tip maybe drink a little bit of whiskey while reading this because you're gonna need it it's tough alright I can't overstate how important this step is please don't skip it I know I hate it and I know you'll probably hate it don't skip it though you're likely gonna launch and your game will fail because you just didn't have the perspective of your audience maybe you had a little bit of rose-colored glasses on for your game now technically emotionally mechanically they're gonna be able to tell you how your game is failing so you really need to be listening to people outside of your studio now finally the fifth step to getting into game development and ultimately launching a game is well launching a game launch on one platform can be completely different than the launch on another I mean preparing for the launch of Xbox for example is really like really gritty there's a lot of things you've got to do to sort of conform to the standards that Xbox and Microsoft has for their games whereas something like Steam they're not really gonna tell you what you can and can't do you just launch a game it's really amazing so if you're gonna be launching a game steam is really the easiest option to do believe they're not Nintendo switch isn't that challenging either but if you're gonna be doing a simultaneous launch you're gonna need to put a lot of effort into getting these games built and ready to perform well on each platform it can take a lot of time so for me because I'm such a small studio it's just me I usually launch on one platform and then another and then another and another this reduces revenue but you know honestly is it even possible for a one-man studio to release on every platform I mean I don't know you tell me but I really don't want to be focusing on the specific platforms right now regarding launching a game I'd rather focus on marketing to release on those platforms marketing is really the most important part here marketing preparation should really be taking you about 40 hours a week for a month that's really how much time you should be spending on marketing I know it sounds like a lot but just remember how hard you worked on your game to begin with finish strong here don't walk the final lap of the marathon the 40 hours of work per week for a month should consist of the following compiling a list of 150 to 200 personal and don't don't don't let me understate that personal email addresses of games journalists and youtubers who might take an interest in your game and I'll make another video soon explaining how you can find journalists who will likely enjoy your game an example is you don't really want to find a journalist who is an MMO enthusiast and you're you're telling them about your art game they'll give you a bad score and you don't want that you should also be spending your time building out a show-stopping trailer okay all I could say here is plan to it or just like you did with your game a good rule of thumb is is don't be self improver stit eration of it probably sucks pretend you're a red it's the most pissed off user and then watch your trailer and then critique it be critical because you really want to make this thing pop it's what's going to sell your game be sure it's around 1.5 to 2 minutes long include your logo links etc you probably know the drill here now finally get your audience ready when you're gonna launch a game you want to be utilizing your audience even if you have a thousand followers total and that's about it on all social media platforms that's great if you can get 10% of them to grab a copy of your game and write a review that's awesome now just remember here just remember you can't be giving free games especially like free Steam games out to your audience and then hope that you can get great reviews on Steam it doesn't work that way steam actually ignores the value of a good review from someone who got the game for free so you really want to tell your audience on social media how important it is that they can go buy your game and let them know it's at a discount maybe if you're launching at a 20% discount let your followers know that for a limited time they can get you a game for 20% discount and then tell them emphatically how important it is that you get a review because reviews will help your game get into the atmosphere all right requesting a review from your followers just FYI you don't need to feel bad about this don't feel bad about Tooting your own horn because your followers are likely gonna want to see you succeed because frankly they've been following you for maybe a year like if you've been working on your game for a year they really want to see you succeed and they'll likely be much more incentivized to go purchase a copy of your game and read review if you're honest with them and tell them how important they are to your studio alright so that's it not bad right it might be complicated to get into game development but trust me this is just a lot of words spewing out of my mouth I know I talk kind of fast in hindsight looking back it really wasn't that complicated for me to release a game on a platform I made a lot of missteps so I'm glad you're watching videos like this because I should I certainly did it honestly just this is a really good piece of advice budget for stress budget for anxiety budget for worrying and I mean budget in here plan for it because every game is kind of feels like building a house of cards it's part of the process making games it's a challenging thing everyone's gonna stress about it so if you budget for it if you plan on it believe it or not you probably won't stress or worry as much I used to feel so stressed out because I felt like I was the only person making games that felt stressed when in reality you're putting together a new world you're playing God with code and you're using all these different plugins all these different platforms and systems it can be really stressful so don't stress out it's really a lot of fun when you learn to get used to living in transition I mean honestly all of us need to live in transition regardless of whether we're making games are not life changes things change get used to it learn to love it I certainly have and I'm much happier and less anxious for it again my name is Thomas brush I make video games for Lee I love what I do and I love posting videos about it I post bi-weekly if you want to subscribe to this channel I would love for you to do that hit the bell icon to get notified of my bi-weekly video posts and leave a comment I'm trying to answer any questions you have finally I just want to let you know that patreon is a huge way for me to pay the bills and run this studio I have a link to patreon in the description there's a lot of cool tiers you can actually get your name included in the next video and I love doing that giving shoutouts to my supporters and also I'm doing this new thing where I actually want to help you I want to coach you I want to be your mentor and your advisor and maybe even your creative director for your game if you will if that interests you head on over to patreon there is a tear for me to mentor you and be your advisor I'd love to help you out and coach you thanks again guys I'll see you later bye

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 1,026,127

Keywords: unity vs ue4, unity vs unreal engine 4, unity or unreal engine, how to get into game development, unity vs unreal engine, unity vs ue, unity game engine, unreal, game, engine, better, ue4, school, beginner, study, program, game development beginner, unreal engine graphics

Id: B8ttFXUgtMw

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018