6 Years of Learning Game Development

hey hi i'm making a third person shooter game where you can transform and climb stuff however this isn't my first project in fact i've made hundreds of projects over the years and in this video i will attempt to summarize my first six years of video game development [Music] my journey began almost 10 years ago with a software called sketchup as a kid i was never really into gaming but i did draw a lot sketchup allowed me to take my drawings and turn them 3d i would make buildings furniture floor plans and even completely replicated my house after a while of playing with sketchup i also got into making some 2d stickman animations the ones you see all over the internet though stackman animations were pretty cool but 12 year old me wanted to take it to the next level and turn them 3d to do so i installed a bunch of plugins for sketchup that were supposed to add animation tools to the software obviously sketchup wasn't really the best animation tool and so when my dad saw i was trying to make 3d animations he told me about blender i remember being super excited to try out all the features blender had to offer and so made a bunch of cool animations i also learned to rick and animate characters which allowed me to put together this absolute masterpiece after messing around in blender for about half a year i got a bit bored and decided i wanted to try the blender game engine luckily the blender game engine was integrated into blender quite well and so it didn't take too much effort to get started i connected some sensors controllers and actuators in the logic editor and managed to get my t-posing man to jump over a cube continuing to learn the blender game engine i managed to get some animated characters to work on my game and at that point i figured i was ready to start my first big game project it was a fairly generic platformer where you would explore levels and fire projectiles from your hand to defeat enemies i worked on it for quite a while and was actually so excited about it i even shared some of my progress on this channel despite all of its great features the one thing that bothered me about the blender game engine were the limited export options to my knowledge you could only export projects to mac and windows making it impossible to publish my game to mobile platforms i really wanted to make a mobile game and so i had to look for alternatives i did some research and found a game engine called unity it had all the features i was used to in blender and it could even export to pretty much every platform there was just one obstacle left gold seeing coding unity always scared me a little in fact i was so hesitant to learn to code i procrastinated going into unity for a couple more months then summer holiday came and i had a lot of time and decided to just do it i got a super helpful book to help me code my first couple mobile games and even though i had no clue what any of my code did it allowed me to finish my first project obviously i didn't get into unity for nothing and so i exported my game and put it on google play to my surprise i didn't get the millions of downloads i thought it would but i continued learning anyway i kept making more mobile games which gave me a good amount of game dev experience and one game in particular that i was quite proud of was called blue runner blue runner was a mobile platformer game where you could only jump and so you had to time your jumps correctly to complete the levels around the same time i also made an overly ambitious zombie shooter and a point-and-click sci-fi game eventually i started putting together some projects for the unity asset store and for the next couple years i switched back and forth between mobile games asset store assets and simple game prototypes i experimented with a lot of different genres and platforms including augmented reality virtual reality multiplayer games [Music] and even music visualizers yeah funnily enough the one thing i made that actually got some downloads wasn't the game it was a dutch educational app that allowed students to calculate the minimum score they would need to pass their school courses at this point i'd been doing game there for a while and i felt like challenging myself a little more i wanted to make a bigger mobile game and actually finish it the game was basically a platformer but by swiping up or down you could change the camera between perspective and orthographic this effectively changed the game between 2d and 3d and opened up a lot of cool puzzles i worked on the perspective switching ninja game for a while and even came up with some backstory then one day i was browsing youtube and came across this video about a game called swords and magic and stuff i remember thinking how gorgeous it looked with all the bright colors and open landscapes for some reason after watching that video to me it made sense to take my dark mobile platformer and turn it into a colorful open world pc game i pretty much completely restarted my game and the only thing that remained from the initial idea was the backstory after a while working on the open world project i got demotivated and figured it was once again time for something new i put together a bunch of new prototypes including the stop down shooter about a ball with a gun the initial idea was to make the guns recoil the only way to move kinda like lost man sitting however i realized it was more frustrating and fun and so i just put regular controls instead now the game was actually quite fun to play but with the new controls it was no different from any other top down shooter so i once again jumped to the next thing and that's where my current project started after a couple of game dev 3 months i came across a noclip documentary about the making of horizon zero dawn this documentary was super inspiring and since i had also been watching some flambeer talks about their game nuclear throne i got this idea to combine the large robots from horizon with the small quick runs from nuclear throne since i didn't want my game to be a complete ripoff i figured the dinosaur should be replaced with giant robot insects i started working on the project by writing a procedural level generator it placed rocks on the map using a simple walker algorithm to form rooms and corridors basically the same algorithm that nuclear tone uses next up i worked on some enemies and also got into procedural animation to animate them i was quite fascinated with procedural animations and it got me sidetracked from the game for a while during this time i made all sorts of creatures ranging from robot wasps scorpions [Music] centipedes and even giant particle spiders [Music] once i got back into making my game i wasn't super into it anymore especially because i realized just how similar it was to a game called risk of rain 2. the quick runs random areas large creatures and even the similarities in my main character pretty much meant i was making a worse version of an existing game in an attempt to set my game apart i decided to turn my main character into the human creature hybrid that can fire guns as well as climb anywhere instead of the randomly generated areas and roguelike gameplay i switched to small handmade areas and action-adventure gameplay i got rid of the desert environment and the simplistic cube rocks and instead began working on slightly more detailed areas i made colorful trees bright green grass and added the first creatures to bring everything to life at the same time i also got into shaders i tried writing shaders by hand for a while but it felt unnecessarily complicated and so i soon switched to the amplify shader editor i've honestly never really been a fan of visual scripting but for shaders it just made everything much easier to get into anyway for the next month i continued exploring where i could take the game i also put together some enemies and new abilities for the player i improved my level design and lighting skills and further tweaked the game's look near the end of the year i finally managed to implement climbing or moving objects which opened up a whole new set of gameplay possibilities at that point i was pretty happy with the state that my game was in and with the start of the new year i also began sharing my progress here on youtube in the form of devlog videos i have since continued developing and sharing the game making new creatures abilities transportation options areas and enemies [Music] during the development of my current project i've also started to take part in game gems more often since last year i've done 5 gems and i really enjoyed every single one for some reason knowing i only have 2 or 3 days to make a game takes the pressure off and makes gem games really enjoyable to work on my last gem was only a couple weeks back and i made a game called balance field it's a top-down shooter where you need to move your enemies around to balance the battlefield that's my first six years of learning game development i'm sure i'll be making many more projects in the years to come and my main goal for now is to finish the weird shooter game i hope this video will be encouraging to try out game development because it's a super fun hobby if you're new to the channel consider checking out the devlogs to get a more in-depth look into the development so far as always i hope this was interesting thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Codeer

Views: 2,146,538

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Id: kRVQYb9wzaU

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021