How I Started Making Games with No Experience

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going when i tell people that i make games they usually ask how long i've been doing it for and how did you get started especially when i say that i never coded anything before i started making games so this was my process of going from a board artist to a game designer some quick background on me for my day job i'm a graphic designer working in advertising i went to art school and i have a degree in photography i like visual art a lot and i've enjoyed making it for a very long time around 2012 or so i was really into minecraft like the rest of the world was at that time i made a custom sprite for a server i was playing on and it was really exciting to be able to interact with my art as opposed to just looking at it i'm known to like sensible challenges so i started a project where i would release at least one new texture for minecraft every day until i did the whole thing that shouldn't be that hard right it was pretty hard actually but i began to get a peek behind the curtain of how the game textures work especially when i got into animations that had to have their values tweaked well 418 consecutive days later i was done i was able to load up the game and everything i interacted with was all my artwork to be 100 honest with you i loved it it was so cool everywhere i looked i made that and i made that and that and that and that unfortunately not too long after that i kind of stopped playing minecraft and didn't really have any other projects for a good couple of years but that wow feeling kinda stuck fast forward to september of 2016 i just so happened to see a humble bundle for click team fusion 2.5 it said it was a game engine now at this point i was into playing games so i had a vague understanding of what a game engine was just not how it actually worked or functioned but this game engine said you didn't need to know how to write code to make a game and for me the closest i'd ever come to writing code was updating some images in wordpress so suffice it to say none i really liked having my art be interactable and i wanted to try that again without the restriction of being in minecraft so i bought the humble bundle and decided to see if i'd be able to do something with it i followed a beginner tutorial that i found on youtube and within about an hour or two i had made a bare bones flappy bird clone with no art and the bare minimum of functionality and i was so excited seriously the first time i pressed the button on my keyboard and that little box flapped up the that's awesome feeling was pretty unreal it's hard to describe and i really don't have any other words for it other than it's so cool so i did this thing while following a tutorial and i'm not going to lie i just blindly followed along at this point i didn't actually understand how it all worked i knew the concept of if this than that but this was the first time i had ever actually put that concept into practice i continued to play around with fusion for about another month or so watching tutorials and getting the basic understanding of how events work in the end there was just a handful of things that i wasn't really a fan of with quick team fusion and i figured if there's one engine where you could make a game without knowing how to code there's got to be more so i did a bunch of research and looked at a few different engines my number one criteria was that i didn't want to be looking at walls of code or typing out tons of syntax for everything i know that's the kind of thing a lot of people prefer it just wasn't for me after reading about and testing a couple different engines i finally settled on construct 2. it just worked the way i wanted it to and the ux made sense to me this began my obsession for the next year all of my free time was spent watching and following tutorials to figure out how to do different things and just poking at it to try and figure out what other things i could make it do because i was so new to this i thought that everything i was making was pretty much garbage and i just kept trying to do things better i didn't know there was an indie game dev community at this point so i wasn't talking to anybody about what i was doing it was just me making things showing them to my wife and daughter sometimes and that's it i had no feedback or input from anyone else that would know more than me or was into the same kind of things as me and looking back this is probably the worst thing i did while learning to make games it stagnated my progress because i had no one to bounce ideas off of and started to make me go a little crazy from not having anyone else to talk to about this thing i was spending so much time doing during this year i was just making prototypes small pieces of games to understand how they worked i watched so many youtube tutorials and bought a handful of udemy courses the person i learned the most from was jerementor and i eventually followed the tutorial that he put on his channel about making your first platform game i started following along and decided to change the art for the main character because in all of this time that i've been learning i had yet to actually make my own art move on screen you know that whole thing that i kind of started all this to do i'd been so preoccupied with just learning how to make something move i hadn't really done any art to put into those things that are moving so i drew my first tile set and character with animations after i finished the tutorial i was really proud i wanted to make my first real game maybe first original game is a better term one that wasn't a copy of a tutorial and had more than one level i was still struggling with a lot of the basics so i came up with a concept that only needed the player to run and jump i was watching a lot of mario maker videos at the time and thought i could make a tough platformer with a short time limit so i got to work on that it was also around this time that i found tim russwick's youtube channel and the gamedev underground community they were all about encouraging and wanting other people to finish their projects and really help motivate me i finished my first game called don't explode using the same character but making a different tile set and i posted it on itch which was absolutely terrifying then to my surprise within a couple of days a video was linked in the comments of someone on youtube playing and raging at my game it was hilarious and gave me a huge vote of confidence that i could make something fun as an experiment i'm currently in the process of remaking don't explode to see how far i've come as a game designer make sure to subscribe to see that video when it's ready after being encouraged by the gamedev underground community i realized i needed to stop working in a silo i had heard about gamedev meetups so i looked one up and lo and behold there was one happening not too far away from me now i have really bad anxiety especially when i'm doing something for the first time to the point where i was considering not going to this meetup even when i was sitting in the parking lot of the venue i forced myself to just go in and see how it was and it was one of the best decisions i've ever made i had intended on lurking in the background but i was encouraged to show what i had been working on i was told that i was making great progress had some neat ideas and given some feedback to help improve it was awesome thank you to tony and everyone else at oc indies you guys are all amazing that meetup changed everything for me i had a new invigoration to learn because i wanted more feedback i began my first prototype for what would eventually become monkeys with guns specifically to bring to the next meetup after the first i know i'm extremely lucky to live where i do and have this community if you don't have that near you i'm sorry i wish you did i joined a 12 hour game jam that was put on by some of the other members a couple weeks later it was my first game jam and i was terrified my plan was to just be an artist but there were already too many so i volunteered that i could code a game by myself since no one else used my engine and use a couple of the artists that way we would be able to have another team coding a game alone is tough doing it in 12 hours is crazy and it gave me the same rush as that first time i made that box flap just pure amazement that i was able to make this and that kicked off a game jam addiction that's just been a whirlwind of making and learning i did 13 game jams in the 12 months that followed my first i fell in love with getting feedback after game jams i would find streamers that were playing games from the jam and submit my game to be played i found so much value by watching the faces of players and what they did more so than what they actually said about the game i tried to empathize and feel their frustrations at things that i thought were clear and their annoyance when something had to be done just right to work during this time i was developing monkeys with guns by making some changes then every month bringing it to our meetup and seeing what changes were good and what were bad repeat i was able to demo the game at a few local conventions and play test nights which if you ever get the opportunity say yes i learned so much from demoing that will basically be its own video someday this is also around the time that i started making dev vlogs and everything after that is pretty much here on this channel and that's my story so far four years in and i've made amazing friends seen incredible projects and learned more than i ever thought i could this is by far the best hobby and community that i've ever been part of and i'm humbled that others enjoy the work and content that i'm creating thank you all very much for watching i'd like to give an extra special thank you to my patrons especially abby sean adam edwards david scott mlk ragna bro scott hanson and sopinom you're all awesome people and i truly appreciate the support and a final thank you to the sponsor of this video core don't forget to check it out it's completely free and a great way to create something you can interact with just click the link in the description if you'd like to play any of my games you can visit vimlark.itch.io to get in contact with me you can stop by my twitch streams where i'm always doing something related to game dev or pixel art message me on twitter or join the discord with a lot of other really cool people if you enjoyed this video please consider liking and subscribing and i will talk with you next time have a good one later

Channel: Vimlark

Views: 1,784,143

Keywords: game, game dev, indie, indie dev, Construct, construct 3, photoshop, aseprite, pixel art, pixel, video game, madewithconstruct, devlog, Indie Devlog, Indie game devlog, dev log, nick, dufault, nick dufault, Construct 2, Camera, zoom, Game Jam, gamejam, jam

Id: DyVRjp0Nf7w

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020