Developing games is a dream, and what a time
to start your journey in indie game development! There are numerous tools and engines to get
you started, countless tutorials online, and platforms like the Switch and Steam filled
with players clamouring for next great indie title. When we first started making games, we were
wide-eyed, committed, full of ideas and energy, and nothing was gonna stop us. And you know what - nothing did! BUT we made more than a few mistakes along
the way that cost us time, money, and opportunities. In this video, we’ll go over these mistakes,
so that you don’t have to repeat them! We are Ask Gamedev, and here are 8 mistakes
to avoid when making your first game Welcome back! If you’re new to Ask Gamedev, we make videos
to help you learn about the games industry so that you can elevate your games and Inspire
others. If you’re on a gamedev journey, consider
subscribing. We’d love to help you along the way. With that, let’s get on to…. 1. Making a game for no one. This isn’t exactly accurate because you
should be making your game for at least yourself. What we mean by this is making a game where
your potential audience is minimal. Before embarking on your gamedev journey,
it would be good to know that you have a potential audience for your game, and what the size
of that audience is. To do this, look for sales or install numbers
of similar titles. If your game is going to be on Steam, use
SteamSpy to see how many people own and play similar titles. If its on Mobile, Check App Annie for competitor
data. Another thing you want to do is see if you’re
going with or against any trends. You can do this with a simple exercise:
Step 1: Find the top selling titles that are similar to yours
Step 2: Write down the number of owners each one has, as found on SteamSpy
Step 3: Group the titles by release year Step 4: Analyze - do the top selling titles
this year still sell as well as the previous years’ did? If so, you’re in a trending space! If not, the market for your title may be dwindling. 2. Trying to create an engine For whatever reasons, a common thing that
we’ve noticed with devs starting out with their first game, is a desire to make their
own engine. Some devs might just have that inherent need
to create things from scratch. Some just might love the thrill of the challenge. Whatever the reason may be - it’s not a
good route go down. There are more than enough engines to use,
and they’ll all save you time and money. Benefits to using an existing engine are countless,
but here are few anyways: Tutorials. Engines like Unity and Gamemaker have countless
tutorial available online and even in print. The knowledge base for engines likes these
is fully developed and easily accessible. Support. If you’re going through an issue, you can
be sure that your issue is not unique and that someone has probably posted about it
a support forum already. And if not, these communities are so vibrant
and helpful, you should be able to find someone to answer your questions in a forum. 3nd assets. Need ready-made assets for your game? How about a tool to build levels. Or maybe you need a physics engine for more
realistic water? Engines like Unity have complete asset stores
where you can buy tools and assets to use for your game. 3. Building costly features and tech to support
a huge user base before achieving any sort of success It’s good to have high aspirations but it’s
also important to ship! We’ve seen teams work on expensive features
because they wanted their game to support huge user bases - they then release, and instead
of the millions they were expecting, only hundreds show up. Working on those extra features delayed shipping,
and also may have been wasted work. Instead, just focus on creating a minimum
viable product, and scale once you have the numbers to prove that it would be a wise investment. 4. Not identifying critical path and having a
backup plan This one is a two-parter. First let's talk about critical path. Critical path is the sequence of events, that
if any are delayed, will delay the entire project. It’s important to identify critical path
at the very start of your project. Once you have that identified, it’s time
to mitigate any risks that you foresee - you need a backup plan. For example, what if that a person crucial
to a sequence in the path, gets sick or hit by a bus. If that happens, the cost of the whole team
continues while development effectively stalls. Not having a backup plan for situations like
this can end a project. 5. Not planning for certification Allocating time for certification can often
be overlooked. Certification is basically the process that
your game goes through when submitting your game to specific platform. For example. If you’re developing for a unique console
like the Nintendo Switch, there might be specific guidelines on how your game should interact. With the Joycon alone, one can imagine a number
of scenarios that have to be accounted for, like what happens when a joycon is removed
mid-game? You need to allot time to read over all of
the certification guidelines, and then allot more time to execute on them. It might feel a little tedious, but doing
this is only way to get on your desired platform, and on the bright-side it makes you an expert
on that platform for future titles. 6. Not reading postmortems. What is a postmortem? A postmortem is a process, usually performed
after a game is released, to determine and analyze elements of the project and document
what went wrong, and what went right. Organizations use them as tools to guide follow
up projects. A lot of devs have been where you are, some
have failed, some have done ok for themselves, and some have captured lighting in a bottle. What’s great is that a lot of them tell
their stories. That’s what’s so awesome about the indie
community. You have people sharing their mistakes and
providing solid advice on what not to do, and you also have other devs sharing their
tools and secrets to their success. Read as many post-mortems as you can - a post-mortem
from a dev can be more valuable than any lesson in a textbook. This is 1st-hand experience in a market that
you’re about to enter. The best place to read indie dev post-mortems
is gamasutra.com. A simple search for “post-mortem” yields
results from the devs of: Rogue Legacy, Shadow Tactics, Epistory, Costume Quest 2, and more. You can also check out the GDC vault for video
post-mortems. 7. Being too secretive during development One thing that we all have the natural tendency
to do is keep our games a secret until we want to show them to the world. Either, we’re holding off because we want
to make it perfect, we’re too nervous to show people, or we think people will steal
our ideas! The problem is, you can’t just flip a switch,
and have the world see your game. Getting people to just even see your game
is a struggle. In today’s market, you need to start building
an audience from day one, and sharing your progress along the way. Here are a few things you can do to be more
public with your development. Get social. Create a social accounts for your game or
studio, and get involved in the community. Follow other indies, and spark or join conversation. Use your socials as platform to slowly build
awareness and distribute content from your development. Have new concept art? Share it! Toying with new gameplay mechanics, post a
video of it! Create a dev blog. Keep track of your progress on a dev blog. Sharing your progress is a great way to keep
your followers engaged with your game. Attend meetups. Every major city has meetups for game development. Our city for example has meetups for indie
development, vr development, mobile development, and Twitch streaming. Join them, bring your demo, and get feedback
from your local community. To find a meetup, just go to meetup.com and
search for game development. And finally, 8. Not optimizing your store page It’s not enough to just add your game on
a platform, you need to optimize your store page. In a recent video we shared 7 tips on how
promote your game on Steam. You can watch the video here, but if you want
the gist of it, here are the 7 tips: Time your discounts and take advantage of
all of Steam’s sale opportunities Optimize your visibility and page activity
during Steam’s sales A/B test your game’s thumbnail to make sure
you’re using the one that converts Utilize Curator Connect
Utilize visibility rounds Utilize community coupons
And start building your wishlist numbers early. A lot of these recommendations came from post-mortems
from other devs, and other can be found in Steam’s documentation. For more details on each one, check out the
video! If you’re developing on mobile, do the same
and read post-mortems from other mobile devs and go through Google Play and the App Store’s
documentation on marketing and promotion. We have links to each in the description. Thanks for watching, we are Ask Gamedev, and
we make videos on games, the game industry and more. If you like our content, please subscribe! We’ll be back next week with a new video,
in the meantime, let us know if you have any gamedev mistakes that we should avoid! Share your tips in the comments!
