How I Started Making Games with No Experience

I am 25 years old and I quit my job three weeks ago thank you Kickstarter I make video games from the comfort of my own home full time but this didn't happen because I knew somebody or because I went to school for it now I had zero experience when I started but there is one thing that I had to do over and over and over again to get to this point I'm not good at being social whenever I walk into a room with more than two people my stomach immediately ties into knots so you can imagine how much I hated school especially middle school and that was back in 2002 this anxiety was why I would rush home and jump on my windows Millennium Edition Dell after school and learn to animate in Flash which was basically the early 2000s version of unity nobody told me to do this it came from a place of wanting to say something without being in a room with more than two people I'd spend countless hours every single day illustrating and animating in Flash looking back I think I made like 50 or so animations I'd even do some voice acting with an old PC mic and I tried my hand at directing films with my older brothers I tried being funny that didn't work being horrifying that didn't really work and apparently I tried creating the first bad lip reading ever before it was cool did you notice my ears are big I uploaded a few of these animations to Newgrounds and honestly they weren't half bad right I don't know but ninety percent of them were truly cringe and some of them frankly I have no idea what I was trying to do and if you're currently thinking most of your work is also cringe and you're too embarrassed to show it I want you to keep that fact in mind this cringe Factor has everything to do with that one thing that will Propel you to get to where I am today and that's making video games full-time I also got into music production in high school using audacity and eventually Apple's Garage Band I'll bring joy [Music] and seeing if I could make some money making video games this started in about 2007 my junior year of high school I made games using Flash and action script which is basically C sharp it's just worse and more horrible in every way I started with creating menus I don't know why but apparently that was what I was into I think it's because it was the easiest thing to create my first real game was this game called German invasion and then I made a game called flash Geometry Wars and this by the way is called copyright infringement then pans apples coma skinny and then Steve Jobs killed flash Steve Jobs killing flash was kind of a big deal this was the moment Unity became a thing because honestly it was one of the few Alternatives available to us so most of us just switched over and that's when things started to get unreal foreign that's when I started to make money I spent Five Years Learning unity and working on a game called pinstripe which was the culmination of everything I'd learned Vector art Photoshop music storytelling animation code and even film which ended up being worth a lot of money more on that later I made pinstripe in and throughout college and also while working three years at a marketing firm and during this process I learned the ins and outs of marketing well at least the basics of marketing with that knowledge I crafted my first Kickstarter campaign High Kickstarter my name is Thomas brush and I've been working on a game called pinstripe for almost four years which raised over a hundred thousand dollars and I eventually released pinstripe to glowing reviews from there I actually recreated my first successful flash era game coma [Applause] thank you and I eventually signed with a publisher and apple arcade with a new name neversong even stranger I got into filmmaking including creating YouTube devlogs about my games and built an audience of over 300 000 subscribers by the way thanks guys my early teen years of doing cringe voice acting and filmmaking on an old camcorder paid off and I could speak to a microphone in a camera and I could come across kind of cool despite being not so cool in real life and remember those bizarre animations those evolved and manifested into live-action horror films that have now been purchased by Alter and crypt TV with over a half a million views in total now I'm working on my third commercial release which is called Twisted Tower which again is a culmination of what I did best from my teenage years and that's bizarre atmospherics and unashamed almost cringy dialogue that somehow players are finding funny I also run an online school and teach people how to power through through self-doubt to make video games okay so what's the one thing that got me here making video games full time with no formal training or experience before I tell you I wanted to let you know that I do teach about all of this at full-time Game Dev which is 50 off right now the reason I do these ad reads is because joining the program really does support this Channel and it supports my team as we create our game Twisted Tower anyway I'll teach you everything I've learned in becoming a full-time indie game developer from coding inside of unity to securing six figures in funding with just a demo you're going to learn how to build a profitable full-time indie game Studio especially in confusing Times Like These there's just 150 seats available and you'll also get my 2dr and 3D art programs totally free but only for this spring sale event join 3 500 students below well I used to get super embarrassed about just about anything when I was a teenager my cheeks would always turn cherry red I'd clam up I'd shut down feeling ashamed was something I was really good at but I remember a distinct day as a teenager that I decided I was done with that I was determined to make and release cringy stuff regardless of being well embarrassed my portfolio is a pile of bizarre and embarrassing animations songs games and films but without them I wouldn't know how to do any of what I do now nor would I know what my voice or my style is and honestly that cringy pile of strange artsy garbage is what got me a girlfriend who is now my wife and mother of my two kids she saw something in that garbage and I'm glad she did and no other girl did ultimately that one thing that propelled me to full-time Game Dev status is shamelessness if you want to find success as a game developer stop being ashamed release cringy embarrassing content ignore the comments Blaze forward with confidence you've got this cheers

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 97,835

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: FijuQYHmMRs

Length: 6min 53sec (413 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023