How I Learned To Make Games | One Year of Indie Gamedev

[Music] creativity lies in all of us [Music] it's what makes us human [Music] pizza time pizza time pizza time pizza creativity lies in all of us it's what makes us human hey everyone david here it's been about a full year since i started working with game development and i wanted to make this video to share a lot of my experiences and offer some advice to those interested in this kind of either as a hobby or even a profession this is not going to be a tutorial or a step-by-step process but rather i'll be covering things such as getting started with indie game development advice on learning the software and disciplines how to be efficient with your actual development and staying focused and motivated if you are interested in a more detailed and complete guide to making games i'd recommend the course from this video's sponsor full-time game dev there are over 100 step-by-step videos and tutorials designed to take you from literally like absolutely nothing to successfully releasing your first game the courses are run by developer thomas brush who created the games pinstripe and neversong both of which have been released on steam and were met with very positive reception while i've been making games for a year now thomas has been making games for over 10 years that's like twice as long by taking the course you'll learn how to make both 2d and 3d games within unity without any steps skipped over which includes photoshop tutorials for making the assets learning the basics of c-sharp coding and finally launching your game however what i love most about this course is that it doesn't simply teach the development alone but also the marketing and business side of things there are entire sections on branding marketing publishers crowdfunding press and even legal stuff even gives valuable advice on how to get your game to land on the steam front page which is super important you'll also be invited to live meetings with thomas himself twice a month get access to his 2d game kit and can join his private discord where you can interact with other developers share work offer help and grow your network right now thomas is offering the first 100 of my viewers an incredible 25 off discount these coupons usually get grabbed fast so if all this sounds interesting to you simply click the link in the description and you can begin your path to being a full-time game developer so you're interested in making games where do you begin where did i begin in my opinion the first step is to figure out what you'll be using to make your games get it and open it up the two options are to either build your game from scratch or use an existing game engine honestly i wouldn't even consider making a game from scratch unless this is something you're already very familiar with and confident you can do what you'll more likely be doing is getting one of the three common game engines unity unreal engine or godot go dot got it godot all of these game engines will be perfectly capable of making fun games and they're all free to download and start using i'm not going to go too deep into comparing them as personally i'm not very familiar with godot and i've only used unity briefly many years ago there are loads of good videos on choosing your game engine and you can read the licensing pages to compare what you'll be spending long term if you want to sell your games and if you're worried about not knowing how to program both unreal engine and unity offer visual programming methods where you can you don't really actually need to learn the programming languages i've personally been developing my unreal engine game using the visual blueprint scripting and i haven't written a single line of code for it yet so look at the different engines and consider what seems right for you however in all honesty none of that really matters if you don't understand or enjoy the software so my advice is just to pick the one that seems most interesting to you install it and start playing around you might even find it's worth installing multiple engines and spending a bit of time in each and this i feel is the point that most people don't make it past if you're new to this line of work the software can be so overwhelming and alien with big no noodle networks and you feel like you just sat down in an airline or cockpit you're the only chance we've got [Music] [Music] i used to be a teaching assistant at my university for the 3d modeling and animation courses and the expression i heard most often from the students was i'm afraid to do it wrong and this is reasonable this is something i too experience when i first start using new software or even playing a new game you don't want to mess something up and then not know how to fix it or break something that you've worked hard on so if you're also feeling this my advice is to kind of change your perspective a bit and consider your early work to be purely for the purposes of learning you're not trying to make or create anything yet you're trying to learn so open your game engine start trying to figure out how to do random things press buttons open up windows this is also a great time to you know watch some random getting started tutorials if you get to a point where you you think you've messed up the project you know that's fine start up a new project keep going you'll probably find that already you've learned a bunch since the previous project all of these early projects are throw away the goal again is just to learn so doing anything at all is helpful and i did this for months when first working with unreal engine 4 before beginning to develop my actual game one of the earliest projects i made was just called pizza time which was just one of the starter content levels provided with the engine and then i started changing things one step at a time like okay how do i change the textures on the environment how i swap the gun sound and the projectile model i then use this level to create all sorts of just random little tests and experiments and this wasn't the only project i had loads of other small ones where i just play with something specific like the niagara particle system or play with animations i had a forced one i made to try to do some kind of lighting and even before making my actual game i created some more projects to figure out how i could develop first person character animations by making just the most basic quick arm models and rig and all of these projects i considered throwaway none of them were intended to be anything at all and finally when you're just getting started i don't believe there is any right way to do anything you see terms thrown around like best practices and while i agree that there are definitely more efficient or faster ways to do things at the end of the day as long as it works and it isn't causing problems then it's fine if you do pick up any bad practices it's going to be extremely easy to get out of those bad habits when you eventually learn the better methods so get the software of your choice open up start playing around make throwaway test projects prioritize learning over everything else and don't worry about you know doing things the right way just yet so after you've familiarized yourself with the software basics now let's talk about learning all the gazillion different things you'll need or want to understand in order to make games you've probably already watched a handful of tutorials when you're first getting started but now is the time to start focusing on tutorials for like specific disciplines you'll want to learn how to create art assets whether it's 2d or 3d you may want to dive deeper into understanding how the material editor works in your game engine all these are subjects you'll probably want to follow along with some tutorials of however in my experience if you only follow tutorials you're only really getting one layer of understanding you're you're only going to learn as much as what's covered in those tutorials you're not ever going to have to do any kind of problem solving of your own what i would recommend is alternating a bit between tutorials and self-explored learning if you watch a tutorial on materials then spend some time on your own seeing if you can go a bit further beyond what was shown in the tutorial then watch a new tutorial and by doing this repeatedly i found i would start watching a new tutorial and i'd start to predict what they were about to tell me to do and that was the point when the understanding really starts to kick in another tip with tutorials is that sometimes re-watching them can be super helpful especially if it was a good tutorial sometimes you'll watch or even follow along with the tutorial and then you don't quite understand all the you know the whats and the whys you can rewatch that tutorial later maybe just throw it on you know at one and a half times speed while you're eating or taking a break and you might find yourself understanding everything a lot better the second time while you're doing all this i think it's absolutely worth it to take notes in a document that you can easily access many things you'll hear or find in a forum post while solving a problem and it's something super useful that you'll probably have a hard time finding again my last advice for the learning process is to try to pick topics as you need them and then study them until you you know understand the basics there are so many disciplines and things to learn when making games you'll never be able to fully understand everything and you probably won't ever need to to start focusing on learning topics that you know you're actually going to be needing for the games that you want to create and then explore that topic you know until you understand it don't try just learning a bunch of different things all at once so alternate between tutorials and hands-on learning re-watch tutorials if you need be take notes and then explore the different subject matters as they become necessary for your projects eventually you'll come to a point where you start becoming comfortable with the game design basics let's say you want to create a moving platform you'll know exactly how to do it at this point this is when you'll probably want to start creating an actual serious project possibly your first game when deciding on what kind of game to create first consider scale think about your current knowledge whether you're doing it completely solo and how long you want to be spending on it now take that idea condense it into something half as complex and then consider that it'll take twice as long and that's kind of the scope you'll want to consider for your first game in addition make sure it's something you enjoy and are passionate about it's also kind of lean into your strengths if if there's something you know you're bad at or unexperienced at find ways to avoid that in your game entirely i know i'm not a good character modeler or rigor face animator so i'm avoiding having human characters anywhere in my first game figure out as much as you can about what your game is intended to be before beginning to work some people find making game design documents helpful if you're not familiar with these that's basically just a really large document where you lay out all the different tasks processes assets and a map of how the games can all fit together i'd recommend reading up on them a bit more as as a huge topic of its own but it can help you kind of solidify your thoughts and help you schedule if you don't want to have any sort of formal design brief at least maybe have some notes brainstorming documents flow charts or whatever else you need to organize your thoughts however regardless of how much you plan i definitely say be open to change your game is almost definitely going to end up nothing like what you initially planned which is probably good allowing your game to grow and adapt as new ideas come in and then finding you know flaws in the design as you're playtesting is probably some of the best ways to end up with a good fun game i personally didn't create a design dock for my first person shooter game arcadian rift as i'm just solo developing it's easy for me to kind of keep most of my ideas in a more fluid form in my head i also expected the game to shift and evolve a lot as i developed once you've started working on your game i would very quickly start working towards an mvp or minimum viable product the concept of an mvp is described best by this famous example of building a car if you build the car piece by piece like in the top half of the image you can't drive it until it's completely finished with an mvp approach each stage is still viable it's still a viable product that you can use even if it's not your long-term goal and this is super important with game design you need to be able to like drive your car so to speak without waiting until your game is fully complete i would start by creating a list of just the most essential things that you need for your game to be playable this can be you know this can be this can be drastically different from project to project so it's a bit hard to give advice on what is and is not mvp material but general consider what is needed to have a complete functioning game loop for arcadian rift the game i'm creating involved things like getting the player first person experience working the ability to use weapons switch weapons fight enemies kill the enemies and get loot sell the loot use that loot to buy new weapons and use those weapons to kill more enemies to get more loot you know as well as things like losing gaining health dying and respawning pausing the game quitting the game saving the game those kind of things were all in my mvp it's important to remember a few things about the mvp though is that first of all it's the minimum so usually you'll just want to put in some basic placeholder art just to make sure things are functioning also when dealing with quantities let's say you're going to have 10 guns in the game well you only really need two guns for the mvp because that'll prove that you can have a gun as well as switch between different guns any additional weapons aren't going to prove out anything new with your game they're just additional work doing more of the same after you have your mvp everything you add to the game afterwards should maintain the overall viable product nature and not you know break your game loops or any functionality and there are many reasons this can be super important one the game will be easier to test at any point in time you'll be able to jump in play it and get a feel for what's fun what's not fun which is super important to do like on a day-to-day basis as you're developing two it's less error-prone air error prone by always maintaining your full game loop playable you'll you'll be less likely to kind of reach a point where you're just unable to play for a while and then you suddenly you're unable to fix a bunch of bugs which then get all stacked up later and three there's also an argument for having a playable version of your game ready in the event that you ever need to show a working demo for your game either for events publishers or other reasons my next advice comes from a gdc talk by charlie cleveland on the design of subnautica in this talk he mentions how the process for subnautica began by creating a compelling five minutes of fun you know how can you make your game fun for the players in the first five minutes minutes man it is not my day for talking next they focused on the first 20 minutes experience then the first 40 first hour and you can kind of see that by working in this way you end up building a game that is continuously fun and you don't have just like some random game loop that's getting repetitive or boring because you made a bunch of just random features and moments without taking into account the overall linear experience a player is going to have when they play your game for the first time and finally wrapping up with some development advice if you find yourself about to tackle some something new that you aren't familiar with something you've never studied you know when doing your early learning my advice would be to create another throwaway project to test the process there first this goes back to what i was saying earlier about you know being able to learn it without worrying about messing up if you create a throwaway project you can focus on learning whatever the new task is and once you feel comfortable you can just easily either copy it over or just do it fresh in your actual game so decide on a game to make while keeping it reasonable scope that you know plays to your strengths and interests create some amount of planning before diving straight in then build up the minimum version of that game that is playable and has a complete game loop even even if it has a lot of temporary art and shortcuts and finally start focusing on the actual player experience in their first 5 10 20 minutes and beyond if you make it to this point in development of your game you're probably doing great according to different statistics however most indie developers don't actually finish their game their first game at least there are many different reasons for this but i have some ideas on how to maybe counteract some of the different problems problem number one too much work i imagine this is one of the main reasons games get started never finished you had a cool idea you started it and then months later you just don't seem any closer to finishing this grand vision you had so the project gets dropped my advice here is to maybe reconsider the design of your game you know how much can you cut or remove from it think about that mvp how much do you really need to go beyond the mvp to have a fun game problem number two losing motivation this is a tough one and there are many reasons you might be losing motivation picking something you're passionate about definitely helps offset this problem a bit but the game might just take so long that you lose interest in it later anyway which is yet another reason to actually make your game small that way you can complete it quickly before you lose interest beyond this i find it helpful to maintain inspiration in order to keep up kind of your own motivation which for me involves watching like the various talks from the game developers conference they got like a youtube channel where you can see all the stuff they have i find it helpful to either sort by most popular or even browse around on threads or forums where people have posted the talks that they'd recommend there are many ways to be inspired sometimes it just takes playing a game or watching a behind the scenes video of some game development a big one is always just having players play your game even in an early state whatever it is use this inspiration to give yourself a boost to kind of complete your current project problem number three new projects perhaps you aren't losing motivation on your current game but instead you're just getting even more motivation for a new gamer idea while there are sometimes occasions where you may find it worthwhile to scrap your current project and start something new i'd say in most cases it would be better just to at least finish your current game in some degree maybe you could just strip away as much as possible and just push to have something finished in a single month finishing a project is going to be way more important than starting many different projects make something simple that can be played and enjoyed for even just for like a 15 minute or so experience another thing that has helped me personally is rather than having the motivation for the next project mean stopping my current project i instead use that motivation as kind of like a feel to work harder and smarter smarter to finish my current project if i'm really excited to be working on the next thing i work extra hard to finish my current thing problem number four burnout this might be a different problem than the scope of the game being too big you may just you know you may have had a great concept that should been done in six months but two months later and you just find yourself just burnt out and losing interest anyway there's no point overworking yourself i give myself weekends nowadays where i just take it much easier only work on things a little bit or not at all you can also pace yourself by having schedules and tasks to complete as long as you're making good progress you won't feel like oh man you need to be working overtime seven days a week there's another really good gdc talk by seth coster called stress free game development where he brings up a lot of good points about how game developers often pride themselves on how they they crunched for three months straight and slept in their office overnight etc however if your game requires this amount of crunching it's actually just a sign of a poorly managed project or bad development workflow it's a really interesting talk on how his company changed the way they work to be smarter and more efficient and they were able to create less buggy launches and updates while also working less and taking more weekends it's pretty crazy they literally had like an overall win-win scenario and finally problem five isolation this is the one that probably gets me the most if you're solo developing your first game it might be hard to kind of get those interactions with other people to help motivate you or prevent you from just you know working in a box and having no real perspective on what you're doing or why you're doing definitely working on a team project it's so much easier to have someone else to kind of bounce back and forth when you're working on something like oh check this out yeah and they send you something and it's that experiences can be kind of missing if you're just solo developing for your first game one option is to join communities of other developers things like discord are great for that if you can find one that has people with similar interests game jams are another way but that's a huge topic that i'm not actually that familiar with another way is to sort of do what i do which is being a bit more public and open with your work share on reddit youtube make devlogs even if you're uncomfortable at first having people play your game which is why you need a working mvp it's super helpful to remember that you're making something for people and not just yourself also gives you valuable feedback to make a game better at the end of the day the goal is to have fun making your game while making a game that others can have fun with as well and that concludes a lot of the advice i can think of from having worked on game development for a whole year now find your game engine of choice open it up get making stuff prioritize learning and don't worry about doing things wrong or messing up stuff just yet then begin alternating between more focused tutorials and kind of self-explored learning take notes and consider which topics will be more important for your project once you're fairly familiar with your software decide on a game you're gonna make with the kind of manageable scope that focuses on your interests and strengths get a plan and ideas for your project and start working towards a minimum viable product which contains the basic game loop and features then maintain that mvp as you work towards the first 5 20 60 minutes of gameplay avoid giving yourself too much work by updating your game design to be a bit more manageable stay inspired and interested in your game by sharing early builds watching videos and finishing your game before it can get old avoid starting new projects by using that new excitement to finish up your current project even if it means reducing it down to something very small and simple don't get burned out by overworking yourself all day every day instead be smarter about managing your overall development workflow leave time for yourself and don't let solo indie game development deprive you of you know interacting with others sharing your work joining communities or game jams making games can be a lot of fun and if you follow these easy steps you too can make games and have fun yeah i don't know how to end this star white thank you everyone for watching i hope you found this somewhat helpful or insightful or at least a bit motivating if you did please consider leaving a like or comment and if you're interested in following my own game development or hearing other videos about game design be sure to subscribe and remember if this video was interesting to you but you want to dive much deeper and have a full hands-on course to teach you everything you know on how to develop and successfully launch your video games head over to full-time game dev by simply clicking the link in the description and the first 100 people will get 25 off discount it literally has so much on it i don't even know why you're still here i'm gonna leave so you stop hanging around

Channel: David R. B.

Views: 324,440

Rating: 4.9513245 out of 5

Keywords: indie gamedev, game development, one year, 365 days, advice, tips, getting started, unreal engine 4, ue4, unreal engine, unity, godot

Id: naES42NxbyY

Length: 23min 13sec (1393 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021

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[u/vordrax]

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