every step to actually make your dream game (then sell it)

this is the blueprint to make your first game as a complete beginner in 2024 I'll guide you through the seven key steps that will take you from zero not knowing anything about game development to Hero successfully publishing your first game going off the path could make you give up on your dream forever and the first step to avoiding this is learning what not to do when starting your game development Journey most beginners start making a game in the wrong genre a few that beginners love but lead them to failure are multiplayer games open world games and RPGs starting your first game with no experience in one of these genres is like trying to climb a mountain without any gear you'll die only professionals with years of experience and a solid foundation can tackle these challenges now I'm not saying it's impossible but there's a 99% chance you'll fall off that mountain and this is where the second mistake beginners make comes in underestimating how long it takes to climb that mountain on YouTube you usually see these 24 hours make a game challenges guilty as charged where the final product looks amazing and that leads people to believe that they can also make a game of the same quality in that amount of time what they don't see are all of the careful lies hidden behind the careful editing the truth is that they plan ahead for these kind of challenges they heavily edit the video to support their story they have years of experience and the game is usually filled to the brim with bugs that you won't see in the video but the reality of game development is like that mountain it's a long and hard journey filled with intense challenges that will make you want to quit at any point but if you are one of the few that Embraces those challenges heads into the high winds with Fierce determination and reaches the top of that mountain having made a game you won't be able to compare that feeling of accomplishment with anything else but there's a third beginner mistake you have to be aware of the worst one of all not believing you can climb the mountain in the first place there's a trend of self-deprecating game developers and a lot of unsuspecting beginners follow these trends of negativity and end up believing it themselves what if you were right at the start of the mountain all geared up excited to jump into a new adventure when a fellow climber who's covered in bruises comes up to you and says it's impossible to climb that mountain what do you think would happen the beginner may start climbing but halfway through the Journey doubt will start to creep in and this is not a mountain that you can complete with a half-ass mindset or maybe seeing as the other experienced climber couldn't make it why would you be able to so the beginner climber gives up right at the start you have to understand that the only limit to your success is yourself if I could do it you can also do it I started programming in college and I learned game development All By Myself by using free online tutorials all of the knowledge that you need is out there and it's all free heck I even failed my first programming exam but even through all the bugs that seemed impossible to fix all the sleepless nights and all the times I wanted to give up I kept going each day I decided to take one more step and since then I've grown this YouTube channel and have gotten some pretty amazing opportunities from game development companies you never know what that extra step could lead to but now that you're ready to climb the mountain what kind of gear do you need and what's the best path to take a lot of beginners get stuck at this stage because they can't decide what brand of gear to start with when you make a game you usually make it in a game engine a set of tools designed to simplify the game development process these provide Frameworks that help you create and manage your game's assets like art and music they take care of rendering the graphics implementing a physics engine and much more so you don't have to build everything from scratch but there's a lot of game engines out there each ones with its pros and cons and with a hardcore dedicated community that will convince you that it's the only right choice for making a game some popular choices are unity unreal good and game maker each engine has tons of tutorials and courses online for virtually any kind of game you want to make I recently made an in-depth video on choosing the right engine for you but the main takeaway is just to try a few and see which one works for you best and for the type of game you want to make you can make both 2D and 3D games in both engines but for 2D games Unity good and Game Maker are usually used while for 3D Unity good and unreal are usually used it's best not to over complicate it when starting out I've seen a lot of people not even get to climbing that mountain because they couldn't decide what brand of gear or what game engine to start with now that you've chosen your gear you have to find out the best way to climb the mountain with it but you can't climb this huge mountain without having climbed smaller ones so how do you get experience with smaller mountains the best way is to learn by doing and there's two great ways to get started learning an engine the second one being my favorite the first I recommend is to follow some tutorials or courses to recreate small games you should aim to focus on learning how the engine works not making the most perfect or most unique final product the second method and the most effective method by which I learned is by joining a game Jam in game jams you usually have a time limit and or theme you must follow there are both virtual and in-person jams but for easy access virtual ones work just as fine what I like about game jams is that it forces you to do some critical thinking on your Noggin with the limitation of time and a theme you have to think outside of the box on how you can most easily accomplish your goal as you're climbing that mountain you won't always have to perfect guide around to lead you to the top so you'll have to start thinking for yourself on which path will lead you to success it doesn't have to be perfect this was my first game made in a game jam and yes that's my voice it it I had followed a tutorial series to generate these boxes infinitely and when I'd get stuck on another issue like figuring out how to display text or play a sound I'd just search up a tutorial for that specific problem and easily Solve IT Google and YouTube are your friends knowing how to use them effectively will 10x your productivity and make you a better game developer and of course chat GPT is also great but until you get a good grasp of how the engine works because sometimes it could just be plain wrong or even lead you down the wrong path of the mountain it. I has thousands of free jams you can join and there's bigger yearly ones like ludmar and Global game Jam but there's still one big question you may have what about programming or art or even sound design how do I learn these things what if I don't have experience in any of them the simplest answer I can give is to learn learn the different ways of climbing up that mountain there's a million resources online there's no excuse not to if you're adamant on not learning one of those specific Fields team up with someone that does know how to do them so you can Venture up the unknown path together important side note if you do team up with someone please please please sign a contract detailing what each person will work on and what their cut of the game will be there are some templates online or even chat gbt may work but a lot of the times you'll need to be super specific with these contracts so a lawyer is going to be your best bet and this is not legal advice also you shouldn't use chat GPT for contracts but when you do this you'll thank me later I do highly recommend programming because it's going to be virtually impossible to make any game without some sort of programming as an alternative there's visual coding or you drag blocks together and have it do certain things depending on certain conditions but this has the same critical thinking needed as programming so there's really no way around it each engine has specific programming languages so learn the one the engine uses you can learn it separately from the engine or while learning the engine itself as I was learning Unity I learned c as I went this was the easiest way for me but it's going to highly depend on your learning style and as for art there's no end to the amount of paths you can take you can choose to learn 3D modeling with blender or make Vector art in illustrator or even pixel art in Asif my forte is programming so I make use of a lot of art assets which have already been made and can usually be purchased at a reasonable price there's a lot of free ones too most game engines have their own stores where people can sell engine specific assets or there are other stores like .io where creators also sell engine agnostic assets for the game I'm making called boomi I personally hired an artist from Reddit to draw and animate the main character please wish list the game down below the main takeaway is that there are a million ways to climb the mountain but the important thing is to just take the first step and learn as you go now that you've learned the basics of A game engine it's time to start making a bigger game I usually recommend starting with a 1 to 3 month small project and and then publishing it online making a full game is an entirely different experience than a game Jam it's now much more challenging and that's when we have to deploy step four of the seven-step blueprint for Success planning and one of the best tools to do this is Milano the sponsor of today's video trust me when I say I had a pro subscription before they even sponsor this video so I really like this product millano is a visual tool for organizing any sort of creative project it consists of boards where you can place anything from text to images to tables and my favorite part are subboard so you can easily keep things neat heck I even wrote this script inside of mileno my favorite part is its seamless online collaboration so I can easily invite my friend to my board and we can edit it in real time they also have a ton of templates that you can use to plan your games like this brainstorming one where you can post inspiration images and brain dump your ideas into once you've come up with a basic idea for your game you can start filling out your game design document or gdd sort of like a blueprint for how to build your game this can include a mood board which is how you want people to feel while playing your game and the color schemes you want to use a very important step in making your game Stand Out Among the thousands of others from there you can figure out the story behind the game the characters their relationships level design and how the general flow of the game will work they have a ton of different elements which are an easy drag and drop to use and you can even add some handwriting to your boards milanote has a great starting template for each of these steps and once you've determined the game play you can easily keep track of development milestones and your budget all in millino there are literally an infinite amount of uses for this tool and they have great example use cases to help get you started it's the tool I use for almost everything and I highly recommend it to get started on your next creative project you can sign up completely free with no subscription in the link down below so now that you have your gear and you've mapped out the perfect route to take up the mountain here comes the hard part developing the game you'll want to start prototyping the core mechanics of your game these are the fundamental elements that make your game playable and enjoyable for example if you're making a platformer focus on getting the player movement and jumping mechanics right first developing a game can be overwhelming so it's important to balance your workload break down the tasks you determined in the planning stage into manageable chunks and set realistic deadlines but there's a secret hidden rule to development that can throw a lot of people off for any time limit that you set make sure to extend it by 1.5 or two times the amount because there's usually always a bug or something that just throws off the project make sure to take breaks to avoid burnout and keep your creativity flowing burning out is very common in this this industry so it's important that you take the necessary physical and mental breaks you'll always run into problems and bugs during development so you'll want to approach these with a problemsolving mindset think of it like climbing the mountain there's going to be rocks or weather changes that you didn't expect but learning to overcome those obstacles will bring you one step closer to the summit if you're stuck you can look up solutions from the Internet or even ask chat gbt or get help from the community there's thousands of Discord Channels with tons of people willing to help you feel free to join mine which has over 2,500 game developers and a lot of them are really nice and willing to help but when you ask a question online please follow this format it is imperative for your success ask the question directly don't ask to ask State your issue the code or details you're having trouble with and mention solutions that you've already tried this is the best way to get answers back quickly in Discord you can even format your code with markdown so it's easier to read you also need to make sure that your project files and assets are well organized I 100% recommend non-negotiable to use a version control system like git and GitHub these let you push your project and changes online so if anything were to happen you'd always have a backup I've seen numerous people in my Discord lose months of progress because they didn't back up their files with Version Control this is also a good practice to keep track of your changes because more often than not you'll want to revert back to a specific change if you find the PATH you were going up the mountain is blocked you want to know the exact steps you took to get there so you can recreate going back down down until you find a new opening where you can Branch out and continue it's also necessary when collaborating with others you have to make use of branches which essentially lets everyone work on their specific Parts without accidentally overriding another person's work you wouldn't want your teammate climber to be bumping into you potentially causing you to fall off the mountain once each person is done with their features or path you merge the changes similar to taking a break on the same part of the mountain and resolve any remaining conflicts I'm working on a project with a friend and what we do is clear work on different scripts or scenes which are kind of like levels while also working in our different branches this makes merging easier so we don't accidentally overwrite each other's changes the easiest way to get started is to sign up on GitHub for free and download GitHub desktop there's multiple tutorials on how to get started there's also Fork a more advanced interface or even plastic SCM for larger projects or if you're feeling up to it you can use the command line and write commands directly but for a beginner I wouldn't necessarily recommend this and it's not needed most of the time clear organization will help you stay on top of your project and easily identify any big issues you wouldn't want your rope getting tangled on some rocks that may delay your progress for several days or weeks there's another thing that beginners leave towards the end or even completely ignore and some might be able to get away with it but more often than not this is one of the most vital things you need to keep in mind when making a game optimization very fun stuff think about optimization as packing your gear for the mountain climb just like you you wouldn't carry unnecessary heavy items that slow you down and make you more tired you shouldn't overload your game with unoptimized assets and inefficient code every step becomes harder as you have a bunch of weight on your back after all carrying only what you need packing efficiently and regularly checking your supplies makes the climb easier and more enjoyable similarly optimizing your game helps it run smoother reducing the chances of weighing down your players with lag and glitches making it a better experience for everyone it can be pretty overwhelming to optimize your game considering all the other things that you need to do and I'm not going to go super into depth with this because this is a beginner video but here are some tips to help you out each engine comes with profiling tools to help you find performance problems these tools can show you which parts of your game are using the most resources such as CPU GPU and memory make sure your assets are optimized large images audio and even 3D models can increase the size of your game by a lot and decrease performance so make sure to reduce their sizes by using compression or even consider using simpler models you can also have the same model with different levels of details and switch them out in the game depending on the distance most game engines have a way to do this automatically called LOD or level of detail physics simulations can be very resource intensive try simplifying Collision shapes reduce the frequency of physics updates and use layers or tags to manage which objects can interact with each other design your levels in a way that reduces the load on the system you can use occlusion cooling which is also a built-in feature in a lot of engines to avoid rendering objects that are not visible to to the player if you have a big map you can also do level streaming which only loads the necessary parts of the level this is usually seen in open World Games a draw call is a request to the GPU to draw something on the screen it's one of the most important numbers you need to pay attention to when making a game having a lot of draw calls can make your game super laggy you can reduce them by batching objects together which basically makes them appear like one object instead of two before sending it to your GPU so you make less draw calls you can also use texture atlases which combine multiple textures into one and reducing the number of materials used in the entire game is also good practice you got to make sure your code is efficient and isn't creating or destroying objects for no reason you can use object schols to keep your spawned objects of the same type in a list and avoid having to recreate them this is perfect for bullet Shooters which spawn a lot of bullets every second if you plan on publishing your game to different devices like PC switch console mobile make sure to test the game on as many devices as possible this helps you ident Iden ify device specific issues and ensures a smooth experience for all of your players for some of the consoles like a switch you'll need to purchase a dev kit ahead of the time unfortunately you can't build just directly on a switch so make sure to look at the requirements for the platforms you plan on publishing to for your first full game I would Target either itch.io steam or mobile consoles usually require a bit more expertise because they have certain requirements that you have to meet see how overwhelming all of this can be climbing a mountain is no easy task but people still go through the trouble of doing it because the benefits outweigh the risk and the biggest risk you can take in your life is not taking any risks at all but there's two other risks in this seven step blueprint that you must do while developing your game not doing both especially the latter could make or break it when you're making a game it can be easy to develop tunnel vision you only see the path ahead of you but you never look left or right to see if there's some sort of Danger on that mountain that can ruin your progress luckily with game development it's much easier to avoid this issue than on a mountain dangling thousands of feet in the air play testing is an essential part of development and it's something you need to do in order for your game to be the best it can be it's when you have others play your game to gather valuable feedback and find problems you might have not noticed which is crucial for a game that's not only polished but actually works a lot of beginners fail to take this step seriously and when they launch they're surprised when little sales trickle in and those that do leave negative reviews which can totally tank your game in steams or another stes algorithm you don't want to wait until your game is almost complete to start Play testing you should begin as soon as you have a basic playable prototype doing so can help you catch major issues before you spend hours and hours and hours developing the game only to realize that that feature does not work but where can you find people to play test your game your friends and family are a good starting point but try to get feedback from as many different kind of people as possible because usually your friends and your family are very biased towards you they might be too nice and they might not point out out details which might ruin your game for other players like every time I ask my mom if my game is good she'll just say yes all the time you can try asking in online communities like Discord join game development forums and consider participating in game jams to find testers you'll have to be ready for some harsh feedback so just don't take it personally and just use it to improve the game as much as you can and if you're scared of them stealing your game idea which is very rare in general because games take a lot of time and a personal Vision to develop you can always make them sign an NDA or non-disclosure agreement I had to look that up where they won't be able to talk about the game or make a certain type of game for some time there are some templates online for these kind of agreements like I mentioned previously but a lawyer is always the best bet so how do you even do play tests well you want to provide a simple way for them to give feedback so you can do this in Discord maybe make a Google form or even have a button in the game itself that lets them give feedback ask specific questions to guide their feedback such as what did you enjoy the most what frustrat you were there any bugs or things that just broke and do you have any suggestions that I could improve on if possible you'll want to watch someone play your game if you can't do it in person then try to have an online call with them or if you can't do a call just ask them to submit a screen recording pay attention to where they get stuck what confuses them and what they enjoy and this is extremely important do not talk to them while they are playing the game I know you have this little itch to tell them oh go over there that's where it is but the whole point of them playing the game is to see something that you don't see and when you talk to them and tell them to do this or that it completely ruins the point so after Gathering feedback you'll have a lot of things to do which I don't like Gathering feedback because it gives me more stuff to do but you have to do it so you should prioritize the most critical things first like gamebreaking bugs just focus on the changes that will have the most positive impact to your game because it can be hard to fix everything there's just a lot of stuff usually and once you do that you want to play test again and see if any new issues have evolved it's a continuous cycle unfortunately on itch.io if you have your game published you can even have little Dev logs to update your followers on new updates to your game which I definitely recommend for some Community Building you should also keep a log of your feedback and any changes that you've improved and most important of all make sure to express your appreciation for them they are spending their time and doing all this work for you you can give them money or not maybe give them exclusive access to Future bills maybe some credits in the game they would appreciate building a positive relationship with your testers is always good because then you can have them test future games but the final and one of the most important steps to making a game that can potentially ruin everything that you've worked on the step is marketing a lot of beginners don't go through the trouble of growing a community because it's a hassle it's a lot of work I understand but when they launch the game they're surprised when no one buys it well because they didn't advertise it you can have the coolest game in the world but if no one knows about it no one will purchase it even before you make the game though you'll want to know what your target audience is and maybe even ask some people directly what kind of habits they have and what games they like to play because if you have a clear idea of who your game will be for you'll have an easier time marketing it for example I'm always looking at Steam and on YouTube to see what kind of genres are popular what games are doing well and what people seem to be asking more of I recommend this video by Jonas Ty roller that goes into dep on how to choose a winning game idea the moment you have a showable prototype that looks good and features the core mechanics of your game you'll want to make a steam page which does cost $100 but once you make $1,000 on your game they do refund it back to you so that's nice you'll want to make sure your page looks really really good if you don't know how to make a page see how other people are doing a page and try to copy them not in a way where you copy steal it but inspiration you'll want to put a small trailer and some screenshots that show the gameplay in the best way the trailer should show gameplay right at the start no one cares about your name about your studio name of especially of a new studio that no one knows about so just show the gameplay because people are going to click away in literally two seconds you have two seconds to impress people maybe a little longer you want to make a steam page early as well to collect wish lists which is when people are interested in your game people who wish list your game are more likely to buy it usually it's around 20% of wish listers buy the game but the more wish list you have the better you'll be ranked in steam's algorithm when the game comes up which could be a Snowball Effect to get a lot of sales even consider translating the page to other languages to increase your audience reach you can hire translators use chat gbt or even crowdsource the translations then you want to start posting the game on Twitter Youtube Tik Tok Instagram Reddit wherever your target audience is hanging out that's why you have to determine it at the start marketing is an entire topic on its own but see how other studios are doing it and take examples from them and learn if you don't feel like doing this there are Publishers which will do all the marketing for your game and you can focus on building your game and they may even fund your game in advance but they will take a cut of your game when you release it so you want to make sure to partner with a really good publisher because it can determine the success or failure of your game you see how this is so much work that's why a lot of indie game studios hire a full-time employee just for marketing but that goes to show you just how important it is you'll usually want to reach around 6 to 7,000 wish lists and that's the minimum because with the number of games coming out each day the competition is getting fiercer and you're going to want to have big numbers when you launch now it's not necessary to have that many wish lists when launch you can just launch whenever but to put your game in the best possible spot you'll want to have at least a couple thousand wish lists because that kind of converts into the sales that you want to get especially when you've been making a game for many months or years but there's been success of games not launching with that many wish lists and still selling a lot of copies so you never know I've been advertising my game for a few months and so far I have 2,000 wish lists it's not bad but I'm still working on getting that number up and hopefully when you launch you'll get so many sales that you'll treat yourself to a nice dinner and vacation and just relax for a while and not worry about anything because once you reach the peak of that mountain and finally publish your game you'll know how good it feels and you'll want to do it all over again it's not the mountain we conquer but ourselves subscribe if you enjoy this kind of content and sign up to my newsletter down below where I give tips on game industry secrets and watch this video

Channel: samyam

Views: 25,818

Keywords: unity, tutorial, game dev, unity beginner tutorials, blueprint, making game, no experience, engine, game engine, samyam, sam yam, choose game engien, best gamne engine, unreal, godot, gamemaker, unreal vs unity, unity vs godot, unreal vs godot, best game engie, game engine tiers, tierlist, pick the best game engine, pick the best engine, enging, samsyam, yamsam, The Blueprint to Making Games with No Experience, dream game, make your, dream, make your dream game, game no experience

Id: dXy8_T4Z5Kc

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2024