Become a Gamedev in 3 Months

one of the things I've learned whilst making this YouTube channel and interacting with you guys is that most of you are stuck in the stage of wanting to start a studio and make your own games but not really knowing exactly how to do it and I've been talking to a bunch of you guys that have been sending me emails and explaining how they should get started but I figured that you know I'll just make one video where I go to this is my ideal setup if you told me that I had to start over again make a brand new studio goodbye Bite Me games and I had three months here's how I would do it to release my first game in that period in this video I'm gonna go through every basically like week what you should be focusing on in all the different stages to get you from zero to just you know having an idea or having the dream of becoming a game developer to actually delivering a game so let's get into it foreign now maybe a bit more explanation why three months I think if you're going full time you should go for three months anything less and you'll end up with a game that you know looks a bit like it was just made on a game jam and then slept onto Steam for like money and usually people don't like that anything longer and you start getting diminishing returns based on how much time you put into the game versus what you actually get out of it one mistake we did is we worked on our game for 18 months which was way too long for the end result really and you end up losing motivation about making your game I'm also assuming that you know you're doing this three months full time if you aren't doing this full time if you're just doing this trying to combine this with another job for now whilst you want to pay the bills that's perfectly fine but you'll probably need a little bit more than just like double the estimates or something I have depending on how much time you actually have so we have a One Step Zero first and there's gonna be determining how many people your studio is gonna consist of we for example we started with four people three developers and then me who did everything else but maybe you're a solo developer or maybe you know one other person or maybe you're like a whole group of developers I've interacted with all of them basically and I just want to quickly give some thoughts on that being a solo developer is probably the most common two is ideal really ideal would be if you have a developer and someone who's a bit more on The Artsy side and then you have a true Powerhouse and you can make some really good games three people is doable as well you'll probably be able to like add a bit of Polish into like one extra part of the game four people is already pushing it a bit because then you're starting to get like some management issues and like keeping everyone up to date and then anything over five people you basically lose one person to just being a dedicated project manager at that point and I would very much not suggest doing it and now what I will say to everyone is the next thing you should do is already start concepting on your game but I know from experience you don't want to do that you're in the beginning you're hyped and You're Gonna Want to make like oh my logo should be beautiful oh I need a website I need to get fancy email addresses and a lot of developers get stuck in this trap already of like spending way too much time figuring out how should they get incorporated or what logo they need or you know which framework for JavaScript would they use for their fancy site this is a waste of time in my opinion but I've learned that even though I keep saying it's a waste of time you keep wanting to do it so get it over with quick take one day in the beginning when you're like all pumped up just get like your name out there don't think too much about it we our name was quite dumb Thomas just came to us and he said like art game Studio should be called bite me and we were like sure whatever let's go with that and here we are like 18 months later and don't really regret it your studio doesn't matter in the end it's the games that you make that matter a lot more same goes with like a website you don't need a website just make like a Twitter handle and that's fine enough make a YouTube channel if you want to do devlogs but don't bother with a website when you're just starting out first of all you have no content to put on what are you gonna say oh I'm going to be making it but nobody cares that you're going to be making games they care if you've already made games if you really are like no I need a website throw some money at it if you really want to again this is very dumb but for some reason you guys want to do it and get like some simple like drag and drop website host and don't waste any more time on it this is a problem but we've also made multiple times where sometimes we were just too busy with like oh logos or names or websites for like we need a new site for our game Studio look to our site it's horrible I just linked to our YouTube now instead of like our actual website whenever there's a form that asks for a website URL you have all of that out of the way you've gotten your studio name you've got your fancy logo perfect let's start actually making games now we get to our concepting phase here is where you're going to get your game idea here's what I'm gonna tell you don't reinvent the wheel you've probably played plenty of games and you probably have a favorite genre of game just go with that don't reinvent the wheel improve upon it what is something that you've got a lot of experience with a genre maybe you play a lot of Shooters but you want to add a Twist to it but you already know how Shooters generally work mechanically or you play a lot of like tabletop card games and you want to add some other elements to it do this it will save you a lot of time because you don't need to figure out every single mechanic and it's also much easier for people to understand what your game is about it's like oh it's like this game but with this it's more than fine enough also make sure that you aim for a commercial release for your game what I mean with that is at the end of like this three months you want to release a game on Steam I'm assuming Steam for like most of this it costs between two to five dollars or if you're feeling a bit risky you can also try the free to play with Cosmetics model it could earn you more it could also like not earn you anything it's so that one is up to you I would suggest just going for regular pricing why do the pricing well there's two reasons first of all you can make free games if you're just a Game Dev as a hobby but you know free is never going to get your studio off the ground same with like free with ads generally it doesn't pay as much and especially on something like steam it's not done at all second of all this will also force you to think about stuff that you like that aren't really gameplay so things like your main menu being able to save and load games or like tutorials these are things that generally if you just make like an HCL game or you make a game Jam game you ignore all of that and you just start the game and it's straight into action that's something that you can't do with a game that you're starting money for and it's also a very important part of the the process of learning to make games now I have a little step 2.5 this one only applies really if you're a solo developer this is where you're also going to incorporate your skills into your like actual concept are you someone who is much better at programming just use assets for basically everything for your UI for your characters for your models anything really don't try to draw it yourself just go with assets there's tons of free assets and if you want there's also some paid assets there's actually an affiliate link down below if you want to help us a little bit out thanks but if you're a coder your strength should be on implementing really cool mechanics the opposite is also true if you're someone who doesn't really know how to use like engines yet and it's more of you know I have this art style or I have this concept and I can draw or I can model but I don't know how to make it into a game don't bother with learning a completely new engine like Unity stick to like the more easy stuff such as either game maker Studio or something like construct tree alright we've got our concept you've written it all out in like a document you have a video about like game design documents one page or maybe you want something a bit more extensive where you describe all of the mechanics and the levels once you have that it's time to go into our planning stage this is really important don't just immediately once you have the concept fly into programming really look into how am I going to make this game a reality how you do this is by using a kanba board don't know what a kanban board is well look up Trello it's basically you have a board and you have different like issues or like little tickets and in each ticket you put some tasks that you need to do maybe you need to add player movement to like controller support or maybe you need to add like some Shader that will change the way your game looks or maybe you just need to make some models and then you have the columns like I'm doing this this is priority this is in progress or this is done and you drag the issues depending on where they are in the development process and what I would suggest you put as your first issue on that board is to create your steam Page by now you should have spent about one to two weeks at most concepting and like planning out what your game idea is gonna be and you're getting ready to actually start programming next week start with a steam page already you probably have some concept art you have your name or anything really make the steam page already it helps a lot because from the moment you have a steam page you can start collecting wish lists and that's something that will get back to you in a little bit is it's gonna be a big part of our marketing and making the game a success now we've got our game idea we know how we're gonna get started on it because we've planned it all out now is the time that we actually start working on it ideally from week 3 to to like 9 or 10 of our three months you want to start making the game whether it's through Unity or whether it's to maybe a game maker Studio like I said depending on who you are and what your skills are work on it make your models Implement your mechanics create your levels things like that and ideally you want to keep weeks 9 10 and 11 free of new features so there it's just bug fixing of course maybe you still need some time but try to finish all of your main mechanics in the in the first seven weeks of programming so that you just have time to Iron things out and to make sure that it's just that little bit more polished like go twice it's not as clunky maybe there's like some animations here and there but no new features don't make the mistake with it don't commit updates to like big mechanics like two weeks before release it's gonna bite you it bit me pun intended I'm so sorry just keep them free you're gonna need them probably for bug fixing now this next step is gonna take place during the programming as well and that is play testing and every two to three days dedicate half an hour either you or everyone on your team should go and play what you've made so far there's some vital feedback in learning what's actually good and bad about your game and start doing this from probably week four then once you've reached like week six I think and you have a bit more of a product that you can show already by that normally go and contact your friends who are maybe also Gamers but not game developers ask them for their feedback ask your mom for feedback I don't care get feedback about your game and start incorporating that as well try to get the external feedback once a week once you've like pushed a bunch of updates and like added new features and such now you can make an awesome game that people say is awesome but if nobody knows it exists well there's not really a point in making it so that's also where marketing comes in as I said your first issue that you should do is get that steam page up and running to collect wish lists and you'll probably won't have much pictures by then but you can update that throughout the development process once you've started your external play testing as well start sharing stuff on like the indie game subreddits make some cool little clips of what you're working on to get that initial ball rolling and it's also an extra point of feedback maybe people don't like the Shader you're using or maybe they don't really understand what the game is about that's invaluable feedback as well to improve your game then once you know most of your development is done so somewhere in like week 10 start making all of your like full-on marketing materials so make a trailer don't make it complicated just like record some gameplay and Stitch it all together so you show off most of the game start making things like a press kit as well or maybe you want to give your store page that one final like look over and make it just a bit more up to date at the trailer for example to the steam page as well and do this in week 10 then once that's done start looking for YouTubers or other like tick tockers I don't care whatever platform you use if you spend a lot of time like watching twitch use twitch use the platform that you're most comfortable with and reach out to people who played similar games to yours reach out with a hey hello I've been working on this game it's going to be releasing soon here's a key if you want to give it a go don't expect many or any of them to really respond but if they do it's also once again going to be great marketing and then one last thing is that during the three months that since you've started basically look online for local Game Dev meetups I don't care how shy you are I want you to go out to them and bring a laptop with like something playable ideally and people are always willing to give feedback and tell you more or maybe you can learn some new programming Concepts and things like that it's gonna be worth it to getting your game spread out more and just getting better marketing and then it's almost over already ideally your last week so week 12 you want to be free no work really it's gonna sound really weird but your game should be done by then this last week is just there as a buffer just to polish things up you'll probably things will go wrong maybe there's like some last minute bugs that appear but you don't really want to have to spend that much time anymore it's just one week of counting down to pressing that release button and hoping that people buy your game once you do press that button take a break go and like climb some mountains with no internet I think that's the best thing we just kept refreshing like every time and oh we got a new sale oh we got a new sale oh we haven't really got any sales in the last hour this sucks this is horrible for you just go out and do something good with your life get your phone away get away from internet and just take a break after you've been probably grinding quite hard for the last three months then once the release is a bit more over and you know it has settled down a bit it's very important to do what I call a postmortem both of your game and also maybe of your studio and how you work what this means is you sit down with you and if you have other teammates you sit down all together and you look back at what have we accomplished first of all and where did we go wrong what did we do good basically you become an outsider looking at the whole development process and trying to objectively State this is what we did well this is what we can improve and this is what we should never do again maybe you had some horrible crunch because of a mistake you made somewhere in the beginning with your planning you'll learn from these things your first game probably isn't going to be a great commercial success but it should be a great learning experience to make sure that your next games are that successful if your first game is a success I mean that's great but I wouldn't go in with this like three month program expecting it to be a success then once you've done that and if you think hey I want to continue with this Game Dev stuff just keep going do this process again maybe you can get a bigger scope now but you should have learned a lot from this whole process releasing games is the most important thing and you'll also have accomplished more than like 90 percent of the wannabe game developers who always just dream about making their game but just are stuck on like 10 different prototypes and never really finishing anything so you should be proud of yourself so this is what I generally give as advice to other people that are planning on starting a studio don't spend too much time on it is my main takeaway there's diminishing results in doing this too long and just do it just get started and make that game get some feedback along the way that's also important but just keep doing it anyways that's all I really have to say if you're new here we're a game development Studio we've released our first game we've learned a lot of stuff from that and we also make videos about all of the things we've learned so for example you have this where I talk more about General game development strategy maybe in the business behind it we also talk about our experiences of like making our own game like how we got pirated before we even released or when we go to conferences for example like Gamescom we also go ahead and provide some Vlog footage of us being there we upload two videos a week so if that's something that sounds interesting to you be sure to give us a like and also maybe subscribe down below as it's a win-win for both of us thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 90,768

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

Id: AmiI0M6_3DM

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023