How I Would Start Game Development (If I Started Over)

so I was watching this video by this studio called what's happening I'm shrinking I'm shrinking hold on much better I was watching this video by a studio called Bite Me games and bite me games they made this video about basically if they started making games from scratch what would they do differently I thought it was a great video the link is below to watch that video I'm going to offer my two cents so here are 10 things that I would do completely different if I started my game Studio again specifically if I started my game Studio making the game we're currently making which is called Twisted Tower it's currently uh published by 3D Realms um 3D Realms did Duke Nukem what else do they do Wolfenstein max pay all great games so I'm really thrilled to be working with uh 3D Realms but it took three years to freaking get there three years of working with my small team spending money spending time trying to get there at that moment where we finally signed with a publisher of our dreams so here are 10 things I would do different first things first this is going to help you so much figure out your hook figure out your hook what is a hook well it's a freaking hook it captures your audience they bite onto that hook and they what buy your game what does that mean it means they give you their money and that's great so what I want you to do is think about what's the thing that's going to actually sell your game what's the thing that's going to make you money and that is your hook now for me I call it a trinity hook and I say for me because every studio is doing this they're thinking about the hook but for me I think about the Trinity hook I've talked about this before Trinity Hook is what's your visual hook what's your mechanical hook and what's your story hook you need to be thinking about those things and test it with your social media if you have even the smallest following on social media bring that up bring up what you think your hook is what makes your game special pitch it to your audience and see what they say a lot of times we think a hook is a hook and it's not a hook it's like uh well actually it's there's no bait on it it's a rusty boring hook that's often times what most indie game developers hooks look like so you need to test it with your audience once you figure out your hook once you find out what really makes your game shine what I want you to think about is number two figure out your Loop okay a lot of people get confused by okay there's a hook and then there's a loop and often times this stuff is put into what's called a gdd which is a game designed Bible a loop is completely different than your hook a loop is the thing see that that's a loop the thing that your players will do over and over and over and over but it's fun it gets funner and funner and funner that's what a gameplay loop is and you want to figure out what that is but the most most important thing and this is why I'm saying this is the second thing that I would do differently you correlate it to your hook you figure out your hook and then you figure out what your Loop and your Loop has to correlate to the hook so for example if you're making a game where you break blocks and go deeper and deeper into a cave that's procedurally generated AKA Minecraft that's not enough that's a cool hook but then you've got to incorporate a loop something you do over and over again so for example with Minecraft the loop is you dig and explore but the creepers come out so you go back to your house you build your house upgrade and do it again and again and again and again with the day night cycle right every great games Loop correlates to the hook so that's what I want you to figure out and write that down in what's called a gdd it doesn't matter if it's a text document just write it down and call it your gdd number three I need you to play games that are similar to your game not only in their hook or their Loop or their genre play games that are similar in scope what that means is budget so if you're an indie game developer and you have no money or no time you don't really have much time to make a game or your schedule kind of sucks and you're working full-time or you're in school I need you to play games that were made by developers in a similar situation with a similar scope a similar schedule so if you want to make an MMO don't that's the first rule the second rule is if you want to make let's say a platformer think about games that have a similar scope to yours and I want you to go and play those games and then write down exactly what makes those games special what makes them shine before we talk about that I did want to let you know that for the spring sale full-time Game Dev is 50% off right now you're also going to get my art programs totally free we'll talk about it more at the end of this video but if you're interested click the link in the description I know it sounds silly to tell you to play games but this is so hard to do as an indie game developer I want if you're somebody who struggles with this let me know in the comments below if you struggle with playing games cuz I don't play games and I know that I should but I don't play games so in your GD after you've written down your hook and your loop I need you to write down why these games these similar games why they shine and every decision you make is going to correlate to those three things your hook your Loop and then also trying to mimic and Echo what made the jebie stop licking your butt okay come on you're making me sick figure out what makes those games shine do it similarly obviously put your little twist on it make it a little bit better next number four what I would do differently is focus on a prototype that looks like crap but feels amazing that prototype it doesn't need to look good it can be black and white it can be just simple squares a simple blockout nothing special but build it out so that it feels really really good and the way we do this is everything that we build is focused on those first three things so it's kind of like you wouldn't put the framing up for a house before you built the foundation the same is true here you wouldn't build a prototype until you knew what your Hook was until you knew what your Loop was and until you knew the games you were trying to mimic build out your prototype with these three things in mind now this one's weird but it's it's about scale okay so number five is scale think about scale what I mean here is the units of measurement for your game I didn't do this with my previous games and it caused so many problems in the long run because I wouldn't think about jump height I wouldn't think about the distance of a swing for a sword I didn't think about the values of a jump or or or move speed for enemies I didn't think about any of that I just sort of shot from the hip and made a game now that's cool and it's fun but it's not fun when you're 4 months before launch and then none of your measurements are correct and you have to go in and ultimately suck it up and actually focus on the math might as well just focus on the math at the beginning of the game's development so if you have the Prototype made and it's focused on your hook and it's focused on your Loop then you can lock in your measurements and you can use Uni's 2D Grid or 3D grid to start building out your world using those measurements the jump height the player speed the player Dash length the enemy jump height the enemy attack radius all of these things should be frankly written down in your gdd these are my measurements for every little thing in the game that way you can hyper fine-tune all of those measurements and every decision you make about the visuals of the game we'll talk about that in a second every decision you make about the visuals of the game are correlated to those measurements now they'll change and you'll tweak them but at least you have a foundation okay we've got our game made it's focused on the loop it's focused on the the hook I'm going to harp on that forever uh has a very specific genre that hearkens to other games we've got our measurements down we've got our gameplay down in a prototype what's next well this is a mistake that I made and I ended up creating this way too late and it caused us to re this chair's in the way it caused us to recreate everything we had made a year prior for Twisted Tower I wish I would have created this earlier I need you to create a visual Bible for your game this is kind of like going to I don't know if you've ever built a house before maybe you've I don't know know worked with a builder in a neighborhood they'll take you to a design studio let's say you're going to build a house with a builder they'll call you up and say hey come meet us at the design studio and we're going to pick up pick out all of our designs for the house instead of you picking out the designs and then putting there and then you see it and then you hate it and then you have to repaint a wall and take down a light remove the floors instead of that what they do is they give you samples and you put it together on a table and you look at all of the visuals you see it all and you can get a good idea of what exactly it is you want for your house this is cheap right you're not spending any money you're just spending time and then you commit to it you sign a document and that is the path moving forward the same is true with your game now obviously you're going to make changes along the way but at least you can build a foundation at the very beginning of your game's development so here's what you need to do you need to start putting together mockups Concepts screenshots logos color schemes fonts you need to do all of that and put it inside of your gdd now this is going to take some time and it's also going to take a lot of guess and check work you would think a logo might look good in orange but really it looks good and red you thought this font would look cool but instead it looks better with this font you want to do this in a GDB as opposed to with your game so that you don't have to spend all that time building it out in your game and then removing it and putting in something else instead do it in a Photoshop document get those images together and put it in your gdd and now you know moving forward what your game is supposed to look like the next mistake I made is I didn't make a 10minute demo despite the fact that I talk about this all the time on my Channel with Twisted Tower I did not make a 10-minute demo instead I made a 2our experience and I didn't even have that first 10 minutes polished what I think you should do is take all of those previous elements we created and build out that 10-minute hyper polished demo this demo needs to be almost an exact representative of what your game is going to be in the final product so instead of building out 2 hours of gameplay and taking years to do that what I want you to do is just build a 10-minute demo Focus all of your energy on taking all the elements we created including that visual Bible and bringing that into your game the reason why is because number one you can use a demo to get funding how many of you right now would take a deal from a publisher if they offered you $100,000 in exchange for a 40% rev share and 60% your favor how many of you would do it let me know in the comments what this means is you can go full-time you can go full-time with just a demo I know it sounds like a pie in the sky or I'm like lying to you but I've done it four times it's really just like finding investment money that's kind of what working with a publisher is it helps you go full-time so that you're not constantly a hobbyist and stressing out in the evenings trying to finish your game instead you could take that hyper polish demo convert it to $100,000 and then finish your game full time now if you don't want to work with a publisher you can take that 10-minute demo and do a Kickstarter campaign you can take that 10-minute demo and submit it to steam as a demo for Steam nextfest and get 100,000 wish lists and then self-publish your game with 100,000 wish list that could fer at a 10 to 20% conversion rate what have you just made you've made well let's say it's a $10 game I can't even do the freaking math it's 10 $10 time a 10% conversion rate 10,000 oh you just made 100 Grand so that is the importance of a demo a demo on Steam with the steam nextfest is a great way to get a ton of wish list so you can see here there are three use cases for a hyper poolish demo so if you just go ahead and do that you can reduce a ton of stress PR on you because you can well hopefully go full-time with a publisher or a Kickstarter campaign and if you don't want to do that you can at least have this I don't know a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that you have 100,000 wish lists and when you launch your game you're almost certainly going to make a significant amount of money number eight put together a team to replicate what you've done in that hyper polish demo what do I mean by replicate I mean build out a system of rules resources in your gdd and help guide a small team to extend your tiny little prototype and build it into a full game why am I having you a build out a team now and not while you're building a prototype because when you're building out a prototype you personally are highly involved you're basically building out a small little shed and that shed with that knowledge you can then convert that knowledge into building out a house with the help of a team same is true with a game now that you know how to build that prototype you can create systems and you can create resources so that your team can almost autopilot create your vision for a full game now how you build out a team is up to you let me know in the comments some great Discord servers that you guys love seriously I'll pin that and you guys can uh well do the work for me of what Discord servers are really helpful because with Discord servers you could find people who are interested in partnering with you and doing the work pro bono frankly I mean you can return the favor as well now if you don't want to find someone to do pro bono work you can always pay someone part-time maybe even 2 hours a week if you have some funds or if you've done a Kickstarter campaign or you've signed with a publisher and you could find contract workers who can help you build out your game and I had to do this slowly you don't just jump in and hire a bunch of full-time contract workers instead you slowly make one Higher after another part-time to full-time maybe bring in another part-time developer and I've slowly done this to build out a team of well I had two full-timers now it's one full-timer part-timer and then a part-timer as well this is expensive but it's a lot less expensive than if you're doing all the work yourself especially on things that you're not fast at and things that are not your Forte number nine project management tool I wish I wish I would have started using this years ago uh I use clickup now um and I actually pay a fee every month to keep using this clickup is freaking incredible now clickup is not the only project management tool out there there's Trello there's monday.com the cool thing about clickup is I can assign tasks to all of my team members I can assign deadlines inside of the task I can provide a description of exactly what I want and the best part is I I can even record my screen and with clickup just paste video after video after video explaining exactly what I need for my project now I know what you're thinking well Thomas why don't you just do the work yourself what's wrong with you well I've done that uh that's the first point I've done that and I'm exhausted I'm getting old so I want to get some help but number two guys you can compress down 3 years of making a game solo you can compress it down into one year if you have three people working with you so if you could build out systems on clickup what I mean by systems is rules resources deadlines exact descriptions video tutorials even just teaching your team how to do certain things inside of unity and how you want it done in your game it can go a long way right now I've got three team members who are just following the rails I've provided them and creating Twisted Tower while I talk to a camera that's really cool and they love it you know they're they're they love me they they they they worship me they they they they wash my feet no but they really they really do love working on the project at least that's what they tell me number 10 and this is what Bite Me games mentioned at the end of their video as well start a YouTube channel um I've been sort of thinking about YouTube a lot lately I'm so grateful for YouTube because it's kind of this income stream that it's like what what you call a passive income stream it's not really passive cuz I actually have to do the work and talk but YouTube is the what you'd say the start of a funnel and then that funnel converts to income I'm very open about this on my channel it converts to wish lists which end up converting to sales of a game you can also sell courses you can sell digital products you could sell you know actual copies of your game when it launches you can do sponsorship deals you get ad Revenue you can do patreon that I just listed Seven income sources just because of YouTube YouTube is great and it brings in income why do we want income so that we don't have to freak out when we're making our game and worry about okay is this game going to make enough money for my salary or my team's salary for the next year I never worry about that anymore I don't worry about the performance to my games I really don't because I know that I always have a backup plan and then another backup plan and another backup plan because I've got multiple multiple social media accounts and all of those accounts provide value to my followers but there's also a small amount of followers who are willing to buy a product course so there's always money available while I'm making my games and I don't have to stress out about the game sales granted my games have sold well I've worked with platforms Publishers Kickstarter which are all other income streams as well um ensuring that I always have a full-time salary for just me just from my games but think bigger than that passive income is a wonderful thing it helps you sleep at night as a needy game developer and if you can build your wealth slowly over time year after year suddenly you realize you're always okay income is never a problem anymore and it's because of YouTube it's great start your own channel go for it all right those are the 10 things I would do differently if I started my games again now be sure to check out the link below if you're interested in joining full-time game def this is again passive income right here uh it's 50% off right now there are 100 seats available it's 14 days left 100 seats available you're going to learn everything I've learned in the last decade of starting an indie gab studio and bringing in a full-time income yes my gamees bring in a full-time income for me year after year I'm currently making a game called Twisted Tower with 3D Realms this is my third commercial release third time I've been published by a large publisher so I'm going to show you how to do that click the link below to check it out talk to you later cheers

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 52,544

Keywords: game development, game dev, indie game development, learning game development, gamedev, game design, game development unity, indie dev, indie game dev, indie game, how to make games, programming, indie game devlog, indie gamedev, the reality of game development, beginner game development tips, get started with game dev, how to learn game development

Id: 5yWvB79On10

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2024