How To Make A Game ALONE (5 Secrets)!

Wow thank you for clicking on this thumbnail I can't wait for you to watch this video my name is Thomas brush in the creator of a game called pinstripe I'm also working on a game called once upon a coma now believe it or not the majority of my portfolio which is about 10 years of work is been completely solo from the music to the design to the artwork to the code I do it all and I love doing it now full disclosure my current game that I'm working on I have a coder doing the development work behind the game and I'll admit it's really nice to have him working with me but I'm not gonna sit here and lie to you and tell you that it's not possible to do it all on your own so let's get started here are five reasons why you can make a game completely alone okay so the first reason why you can make a game completely alone is just look maybe 20 years ago what they had to do to make games especially with code one of my favorite games from childhood is rollercoaster tycoon and I remember being really impressed with that game because it wasn't actually 3d right it was 2d sprites like stacked on top of each other and like interweaving and looping together it was insane well this game was written in assembly which makes it even crazier assembly is extremely strict and difficult to write and it takes a lot more code to write a simple command now flash forward to things like c-sharp and unity or unreal it is so much easier to write script unity basically writes the code for you and if you don't understand how to write something it's just a simple google search away and we'll get to that in the next point honestly when I hear about people complaining about coding now I think they're forgetting about assembly or just C or Visual Basic those languages were much more difficult to learn now you could pretty much have a computer write the code for you I'll be honest though it does take time to learn to code but once you get the general idea of how code works and how it's supposed to be written you could pretty much get started on making a game immediately all right the second reason why you can make an indie game so low is that there are easy to understand resources available at your fingertips all over Google okay if you ever have a problem just google it right and I think this is kind of a meme now for indie game developers they've always got Google available at their fingertips to figure out a solution to a problem looking back even it like the flash days resources were so much more technical than they are now so if I ever need had a problem with ActionScript which is the language that you made flash games in you'd have to go to Adobe's website and and look through these highly technical resources that really weren't written for for people like you and me but now when you go to unities website and look at the resources it's almost like someone like you or me wrote those resources they're written in layman's terms and sometimes they're even funny ultimately I think gaming software companies like unity and unreal are actually competing with one another to be the most dev friendly it's also really cool to see companies like unity coming out with their own online courses that you can take to master game development and I've actually linked that in a description below now the third reason why you can make indie games completely alone is that there are easy to master tools available at your fingertips there's Logic Pro there's photoshop there's unity there's even blender and I've actually gotten in trouble in my previous videos for saying that blender sucks but the truth is is now they're coming out with a new version of blender that is much more user friendly so you can see that companies across the board are competing with one another to become more user friendly easier to master now I know what you're thinking you're thinking okay Thomas cool the tools are available but what if that's not for me what if I'm not an artist what if I'm not a musician what if I can't do 2d art or 3d art what if I'm more of a coder well let me say this Logic Pro has a ton of free stuff available free loops free drum loops free melody loops that you can drag and drop inside of Logic Pro and make a song in like 10 minutes now again I'll be honest and say that if you're going the shortcut here you will make a good song but it's not gonna be great and it probably won't fit perfect with your game I've said this in previous videos if you lean into your talents but sort of but if you lean into your current talent what's your skill set and then sort of do the right generic things for other skill sets so write a decent song I've said this in previous videos it's important for you to lean into a talent or a skillset that you have so if you're like a really good programmer well make a generic good song a decent song and Logic Pro and then make sure you're doing a really good job with the code honestly this can band-aid anything that's not super awesome in your game but then again you still made the game alone and that's pretty cool fourth reason why you can make indie games completely solo is pre-made assets and there's actually a ton of pre-made assets available inside of unities asset store now a great example of this is the first tree by David well actually he just texted me I swear that not even kidding he just texted me about this so he said he used a lot of I swear he's right here he said that the most important one that he used was playmaker which he said he still lousy at code third person controller by op Civ stylized nature pack and Gaia GA ia he always tried to add his own touch to the assets and make sure it didn't look like an asset flip I took a bit of the assets here too so great advice from David Wright he took a lot of assets from Unity store but he made sure to make them look personalized for his game you can do the same thing and you really shouldn't be ashamed of it this is becoming more and more of a norm and in fact I used to be a purist I wanted to do everything from scratch on my own but now for my next game I'm gonna use pre-made assets and I'm not gonna be ashamed of it even games like hollow Knight did this hollow knight use something called 2d toolkit and I'm gonna be using 2d toolkit for my next game here's one major warning if you're going to be using pre-made assets especially if they use code make sure that the developers of those assets are keeping up with the unity updates the last thing you want to do is download an asset that no one really knows about and that the developer is not keeping up with and making it crucial to your game then suddenly when you update unity the whole game will break now the fifth reason why you can make indie games completely alone is that it's okay to make games that are small now this might sound a little weird but when I first started making games in the flash era and that was almost 10 years ago it was okay to make small games maybe even 15 to 30 minute long games because honestly they were free and people were just happy to be playing your game if it was free so you'd spend 4 months making a game you'd release it on new grounds or armor Gamescom and then you'd get millions of players happy with your game even though it was 30 minutes long then like 5 or 6 years later people were releasing more and more releasing indie games on Steam it became the norm to release games that were a little bit longer maybe 4 hours long - 6 hours long and charging $20 for these games now something I didn't realize is there is kind of a new trend and I could be wrong here but a new trend for hour to hour and a half long games coming out on places like Steam and even Nintendo switch and charging about 10 bucks for these games honestly I think this is a result of triple-a companies releasing games that don't really have a storyline don't have a good campaign and they focus way too much on making money in the multiplayer environment YouTube reviewers like Jim sterling for example are more and more starting to complement games that are small short and sweet and he actually reviewed Pinstripe and one of the reasons he loved that game is that it was short and it had a good story so I figured you know what I'll play something decent for a change and these days to get some decent story based gameplay that isn't gonna charge you up the wazoo and charge your 10 bucks for a save slot thank you very much but we'll get survive oh yeah I was too busy laughing at their zombie unicorns to mention that little detail where aren't you gonna play something good I think it's our job to make games that are small meaningful and sell them for 10 to 15 dollars this is also a really encouraging thing because when you start making games solo it's really daunting to think about making a three-hour project those will take years to make but if you decide that you're gonna make an hour long game you can actually probably finish it in five months this is great because honestly if you're gonna be spending three years on a project you're probably gonna quit before you finish again my name is Thomas brush I make video games for a living and I love what I do if you like this video please hit the subscribe button and let me know what you think hit the bell if you want to get notified please leave a comment and I'll trying to answer as best as I can if you want to support this channel and what I do you can head on over to patreon and support for five dollars or more and you'll get your name in the next video thanks again guys see you later

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 129,704

Keywords: solo game developer, game developer succsess, indie game development tips, indie game developer tips, game developer tip, how to make games, game development tutorial, #atmosgames, how to make a game alone, do i need a team

Id: ZjDibmEtJmY

Length: 8min 43sec (523 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018