How NOT to make an indie game

[Music] so five years ago now i started work on my first unity project with very little experience i mean i'd made some smaller hobbies games as a teenager in game maker studio but this was my first time working on something professional and progress was really slow beyond the obvious art and programming challenges i also had to worry about a whole range of skills that i hadn't really fully considered like music and sound design user experience marketing and game design itself and it's no secret that game development takes a really long time but fast forward five years and i now have a relatively complete game that i'm really happy with it's simple it's juicy and it's fun however the path from there to here was very shaky with a lot of setbacks and tough lessons and halfway through i even had to scrap development and start over from scratch but you know these kinds of problems seem to happen to a lot of new developers to varying degrees of course and so that's why i'm making this video so that you can learn something from my mistakes now let's begin at the beginning [Music] so i started development with a whole bunch of different ideas and plans for my game i wanted to make a roguelike but instead of setting it in a dungeon like is typical it would instead be set on a tropical island and i wanted the forces of nature to be your primary enemy so there could be rivers that soak you or sticky mud that slows you down and you need to prepare the correct remedies and antidotes if you wanted to explore far from home and i also wanted it to be turn based so that you can really consider your moves and play tactically and i thought it would be cool if the overworld was made out of tiling patches of land and these tiles could be shuffled to create unique terrain on each run putting all of this together along with a bunch of other ideas that i had i ended up with a really lengthy wish list of stuff and it wasn't really clear in my mind exactly how all of these pieces were gonna fit together but even so i was excited to get started and so i just jumped straight in and immediately i hit the first major roadblock programming is really hard i mean i kind of knew that since i did programming at university but i really underestimated the jump between coding my uni homework and coding an entire game and on top of this i was learning to use unity at the same time and it's a complicated beast with hundreds of different features i had to learn about cameras and the ui canvases and animation and particle systems and profiling you know even just getting to grips with an object-oriented programming style was hard and so i ended up spinning in circles for a pretty long time but eventually after a full year's work and a toolbox of new skills i had this demo [Music] there's a player character with the ability to move around and there's a hud showing your status and your possible actions there's a basic quest structure where you go looking for items and then you return back to camp with them there's the early beginnings of some kind of base building system and there's a mini-map too all of these things took a long time to make and getting this far was a lot of work however even at this early stage something was pretty clear to me the game wasn't much fun it had weird mechanics that don't exist in other roguelikes like the overly complicated ailment system and it was also missing important mechanics that you find in almost all roguelikes you couldn't even directly fight the enemy monsters you had to avoid them and run around them and so all in all the first year of development was disheartening i wasn't anywhere near creating the thing that i wanted to make and the game that i had created i didn't really like but i figured hey you know that's okay i'll just keep fleshing out the game until it starts to be fun i mean surely that can't take longer than another year or two right so i started revamping the mechanics and the systems in my game the ailment system sounded really cool in my head you know each time you stepped into dangerous terrain you'd get a point in a specific ailment and as those points added up you'd start to be afflicted with a variety of harmful effects so maybe when you're sticky you can't move as fast or you know when you're itchy you would sneeze and then you could also reduce the points in these ailments by exploiting the various items that you gather while you explore however in practice it was really confusing the terrain was everywhere so you'd constantly be picking up all these different ailment points and the effects of these elements would change based on how many points you had it was just far too much to take in and so in the next iteration i tried to really strip this down so now each ailment just had a binary state it was active or it was inactive and it would activate after you gained three points in that ailment but it was still really hard to follow you know you had all these different ailments doing different things you also had this separate health meter above that was actually more important because the health is what would make you die so i tried again and i simplified things even further you would now have a single meter that represented both your health and your status ailments combined so basically each point of damage would be represented as a block that dropped into the meter and these blocks were color-coded based on the ailment effects that they inflicted and if the meter itself overflowed then you'd die however this was far from the only system that i needed to redesign the quests were causing a lot of problems as well the original plan was to place these buildings down and the buildings would make you helpful items and then you could unlock new buildings as you explored and that would open up new areas of the map however in practice this system really sucked because the buildings all had these very limited functions and so i tried out a bunch of variations on the base building to try and make it more interesting i thought maybe a larger grid would help and maybe your base would contain all these natural resources that would influence where you put down the building and maybe you'd have this little robot thing in the middle of your base that would print out all the other buildings yeah that idea didn't last very long then i thought the world was already broken up into all these patches of land so why not let you capture those patches of land instead and then maybe you could bring them back to your base to improve it but that opened up even more problems there's limited space in your base for the patches so you can't actually bring very many home with you and put them down and so i thought you know maybe the overworld could be split up into a bunch of different landmarks instead of just a single base camp and then maybe there could be a bunch of different characters that live on these landmarks and maybe the characters need different patches to level up their resources and maybe they could also talk like banjo-kazooie it took a really long time to try out all of these variations especially this last one but i never settled on one that i truly enjoyed playing and the combat system was potentially causing even bigger problems the original idea here was to encourage tactical positioning so you would skillfully maneuver around the enemy attacks and pass through the jungle that way however since you could only move a couple of spaces at a time you never actually had much of a chance to be skillful i tried to fix this by giving the player a bunch of extra moves like the ability to swap places with a monster or the ability to leapfrog over a monster's head and i tried adding a bunch of extra enemies that had more diverse abilities like monsters that could push you around a monster that could steal your items but this variety was really just a band-aid that didn't solve the deeper problem which is that positioning by itself isn't enough to make a game deep without any direct means of interacting with the monsters you pretty much just had to run away from all of the dangerous things and almost everything was dangerous so realizing this i tried to splice in a combat mechanic the overworld was now full of these big juicy fruits and you could push these fruits into the monsters and when they combined the monster would become satisfied and it would leave combat and you know for this to work i had to change how the player movement worked as well so you could sort of drag this wiggly line to get around the fruits and to push them around to the right angles and you know it worked okay this revision was easily my favorite to play out of all the ones i tried but it just still felt like a band-aid that was too simple to really be fun while also just being too complicated for its own good in other ways i tried to explain some of these more complicated and confusing mechanics using a variety of different tutorial setups but this really just made the game even slower to get into and i was adding all sorts of other things too you know like a scanner that functioned pretty much like a pokedex and a fast travel system that could take you between different parts of the overworld and this guy but at some point i had to stop myself and take a step back i'd been spending all this time literally years at this point redesigning and redesigning and redesigning all the different parts of my game to try and make them stick together but i could never find that balance where the mechanics were easy to learn tough to master and just fun to use and one day it dawned on me [Music] the mechanics that i had chosen just didn't fit together i'd made a really fundamental mistake the project started with a wish list of features that i thought would be fun in a vacuum and then i tried to squeeze them all together without really much concern for the game's overall structure and then i spent years trying to mold these features into something that was actually fun but this is exactly backwards a great game starts from a great prototype that's already fun to play and then you can develop this prototype to make it fuller and more unique and this was a really tough lesson to learn because by now i'd spent over three years on this game working nearly every day to develop it into something great and yet by this point even i didn't think it was any good and so after a brief spell of depression gathering a lot of advice and talking it through with my friends i figured there was no other option i had to start over so as a first step i wanted to strip away every feature that wasn't directly relevant to the game's core but i quickly realized that i couldn't do this because the game didn't actually have a core there was no central unifying idea that the rest of the game revolved around the core of spelunky is platforming and the core of the binding of isaac is shooting both of these are tried and tested foundations for a game that also give a lot of leeway to slot in your unique elements but instead of this what i had was a patchwork mess of different kind of unrelated features and none of them were really central to the design and this is why the gameplay just never felt cohesive so i went back to the drawing board and i started playing a bunch of other games in the genre trying to figure out what worked and what actually was making them fun and in the end i settled on a similar approach to enter the gungeon or the binding of isaac where you're in a room enemies will shoot a lot of bullets at you and you need to dodge them all and you need to shoot back it's a simple and a sturdy foundation for a game of course every game needs a unique twist of its own and so i took stock of everything that i'd been making over the past three years just to see if i could maybe salvage any of it and what i ended up deciding was that i had a bunch of different monster designs many of which were pretty cute and had quite a bit of personality and i'd also written a library that could automatically animate any new monsters that i might want to add and so after mulling it all over one idea for a twist just really leapt out at me i'd give the player a lasso that lets them mount and ride all of the game's monsters and each monster would be a power-up that gives you a unique trio of offensive and defensive skills and so finally my game had a hook patch quest is a twin stick action roguelike where you can mount and ride all of the enemies by this point development hadn't even restarted but already i'd planned out a simple gameplay core a unique twist and i had an easy to explain hook and that's three essential things that had previously been totally missing from my game and so using that as my encouragement i took the plunge [Music] to start off i took my favorite monsters from the old version and i redesigned some of them for the new genre this meant making them stouter and rounder so that they would just fit better in their collision boxes and since these monsters are now the focal point of the game i really wanted to make sure that they all had a strong personality i also had to make the player much shorter so that they'd fit inside of a circular collider as well next i hashed out the basic mechanics that's moving and shooting and dodging [Music] then i added the key twist lassoing and riding the monsters this mechanic also meant that i had to be careful with how i designed the monster skills since they needed to be usable by both monsters and the player and by this point just a month into the reboot i already had something that was more fun than the game i threw away that's the power of building a game on a solid foundation and from here things went really fast i added a bunch more monsters with new skills since these monsters are both the enemies and your power-ups it was important to design lots of them then i added a new feature to your blaster after picking up a bunch of different ammo types you could now blend those ammo types together to create a combined ammo smoothie with all of the effects this mechanic was fun but it was also really powerful so it needed a few revisions to really balance it properly then to bring back some of the free roaming aspects of the game i expanded the overworld into this 2d maze-like structure and of course this meant that i had to make this improved minimap the old minimap was made out of a lot of different individual sprites which is very inefficient so this time around i made it out of a series of custom meshes created programmatically on the fly so that was a bit of a learning curve as well then i worked on the terraforming mechanics where you would be able to pick up patches and plant them elsewhere at first i added only a handful of spots on the map where you could stick down a patch however this was a bit too restrictive and so i added these soil plots that can appear in almost any room on the map and then you could plant just a single item in these plots and then they would give you a specific bonus when you were near that area [Music] on top of this any items that you didn't plant would be taken back home to your base camp and learning from the past i decided to make the base building very simple you just had to group your plants together according to their themes and then you would earn some small bonuses at the start of your runs and i link this into the upgrade system as well so whenever you capture new plants you would gain experience and each time you ranked up you would then pick a perk from this new perks grid there's 20 slots on this grid and some of the perks i added weren't actually that much fun so i had to replace and re-jig a bunch of them a few times before this grid was finalized and i designed a bunch of extra habitats to flesh out the island and for each of these zones i drew a bunch of new collectible plants and minerals [Music] and to cap things off i added four dungeons to the map that contained boss battles and i made the bosses by taking the existing monsters and creating jumbo variants of them they get a bunch of new attacks and abilities including the power to call in a swarm of children but they'd also get that monster's base abilities and so this was a quick way to add a lot of boss variety and throughout this process i was still hitting dead ends from time to time where i had to stop and redesign a system that wasn't working how i'd hoped it would but the difference is that this time i had a clear destination in mind and so i could tell whether a redesign had moved me closer or further away from my goal [Music] and that brings us up to today five years after i started i'm super happy with where patchquest is at this point it's way simpler it looks great and it's a lot of fun to play around with and there's actually a free beta linked in the comments below if you want to try it out but my journey to this point was extremely rocky with a lot of setbacks stress and heartbreak and a lot of this could have been avoided if i just absorbed one key idea which is that you need to start development with a prototype and you need to make sure that this prototype is fun before you continue with fleshing it out and one of the best ways to do this is to take an already popular game and put a twist on it for example make super mario but you can stick to walls like a gecko or you could make factorio but instead of conveyor belts you have an army of a million ants most games can actually be described this way as a twist on something that came before and from this simple hook you can then build a proof of concept prototype or maybe even a handful of prototypes and you've got to show these prototypes to as many people as you possibly can you know friends and family help but really you need to be showing random dudes on the internet or even better show random game designers on the internet and only after a lot of people are genuinely enjoying playing your prototype should you think about fleshing it out into a full game at the very least you definitely don't want to copy what i did which was come up with a big wish list of disjointed features without any clear idea of how they were all going to fit together and then try and just duct tape the whole thing into the shape of a game and looking back if i had spent that first year just prototyping trying out a bunch of ideas before settling on a plan forwards then maybe i could have avoided wasting the second and third years of development that said i also think it's important not to be too hard on myself because you know those years weren't really fully wasted i was sharpening my game dev skills i was getting my head around the unity engine and of course i was learning a dozen ways how not to develop a game and that was actually super useful in the long run you know whenever you start something new you're going to suck at it but it's through practice and through making mistakes that you gradually learn the right ways to do things and so in my opinion if you want to make a video game you should just do it get started jump in and start learning the ropes because nobody knows how to do all this stuff until they try and if my patchy journey can result in a game that i'm truly proud of then yours can too so yeah i hope you got something useful out of this video if you want to learn more about patchquest i've been running a monthly video devlog ever since development was rebooted and you can check out that series to see in more detail all of the steps and phases the game has been through in the last year or two also patchquest will be coming to steam this winter so be sure to subscribe if you want to stay in the loop and of course you can also wishlist the game but anyway that's all i've got for now and as always thanks for watching you

Channel: Patch Quest

Views: 1,302,035

Keywords: how, to, make, indie, game, dev, gamedev, develop, code, write, art, sound, journey, story, tutorial, coding, adventure

Id: NnI_1DOYt2A

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/xix_xeaon]

Notice that while the aesthetic basically stays the same and he keeps a lot of stuff from the original idea, he completely changes his mind about what kind of game it should be.

He says he "wanted it to be turn based so that you can really consider your moves and play tactically" but no matter what he does he either can't design that type of game well, or he doesn't actually like that kind of game as much as he thought.

The game instantly becomes fun (from his perspective) when he changes it to a real time action game. So yeah, his conclusion that he should've done prototypes until he found something fun and only then settled on the type of game to make is probably right.

[u/FunnyFaceGames]

I know modern internet users are accustomed to video. But a little subscript would be nice.

[u/doejinn]

Really Great video. And your game looks great. Your art style and animation is top tier.

[u/PeteGrammarman]

This video is great, thanks for sharing your lessons! I really liked that sentence structure you used when presenting the premise of your game, "Patch Quest is a twin stick action roguelike, where you can mount and ride every enemy." It states the genre, and what makes it stand out. Incredibly helpful way of summarizing a game and making sure it can shine.

[u/w0nche0l]

Wow this a really well edited and informative video, good work :)

[u/Niklus90]

Brilliant video thanks

[u/JayarmstrongMM]

I can’t tell you how close this hit to home for me. Congratulations on sticking with it and making the game!

[u/pozzisoft]

Great video! Very honest!

[u/mo0g0o]

That was a really nice video and encapsulated a lot of mistakes I've been making. Thank you for helping me better understand what I've been doing wrong and I wish you the best on your launch.