Indie Game Devlog: My Experience and gaining Motivation and Discipline

are you interested in games or thinking about making your own i've recently finished developing a hyper casual shooter called ultrabug blaster max and in this video i'll be explaining my thought process throughout development and detailing my experience working on and publishing my first game my goal is to share my experience with you so whether you're interested in game development or already working on something you can hopefully be inspired and learn something new throughout my life i've almost exclusively played multiplayer games from call of duty to runescape and maplestory these games had a huge impact on what i enjoyed today having loved multiplayer games when i was in high school i decided i would try to make my own while looking for something i could use i eventually stumbled on an open source online game engine called eclipse origins i ended up working with eclipse for a couple of years and in that time i had made many friends started a lot of projects and recruited others to work on games with me nothing really came from our efforts but i had a lot of fun plus through working with others i made some amazing friendships which last to this day after working with eclipse i started to mess with java when my closest friend offered to teach me what he knew i never really made anything of substance since i was focused on learning but it helped introduce me to game programming concepts when i started to get more interested in indie game development i looked around to see what others were using i noticed a lot of people using game maker to build amazing things and i had seen a humble game maker bundle that was currently on sale i purchased the bundle figuring that it would be a perfect opportunity to try it out [Music] when thinking of game ideas i couldn't help but admire the appeal and adoption of mobile games i thought it was awesome that you could make a highly accessible game that could be replayed while still feeling different endless times because of this i knew i wanted to make a mobile game so the next step was deciding on a genre [Music] i thought back to games i loved playing like mini gordon box head these games were top-down shooters where you killed enemies to survive and see how long you could last these games introduced me to survival shooters and had a huge impact on me so obviously choosing a genre was easy for me next i needed to focus on specifics how would i create a different experience every playthrough and how would i give the player a sense of permanence and progression for a game with high replayability you want each gameplay experience to be different enough from any other so that the player still feels novelty after numerous gaming sessions progression then complements this by adding an overarching goal to gameplay players are motivated to achieve something while still having fun one approach to making each match unique would be changing the map one way to do this is developing multiple unique maps and cycling through them alternatively you could randomly generate each map through process called procedural generation which is popular in roguelikes some other ideas were having a different weapon each game adding randomly dropped power ups and items introducing new enemies making enemies harder to kill or making them do more damage in my opinion progression is easier to tackle as this is where common monetization techniques are used generally you'll earn a currency which can be used in cosmetics or other unlocks those could range from power-ups to new abilities or new areas or new maps so with most of the core idea fleshed out i had to decide how to approach difficulty the most important thing to me when creating difficulty was making sure that the players feel in control of the outcome from their actions we all know how it feels when you think something is rigged or unbeatable even in the souls games you can recognize that you did something wrong and try not to make that mistake again with this in mind some ideas for creating difficulty were spawning enemies faster over time increasing the chance for harder enemies to spawn over time introducing new enemies increasing enemy health over time and increasing enemy damage over time considering this was a mobile game i wanted to keep difficulty elements to a minimum so that the player wouldn't get overwhelmed i also wanted to keep in mind the average gameplay time when designing the difficulty curve i ended up only making enemies spawn faster while keeping a limit on difficult ones so that gameplay is easier for mobile i also made the difficulty max at around four minutes said games could be completed in short chunks unfortunately tweaking the numbers to get to this point was so much of a challenge for me that it was often demotivating and i would quickly be captivated by another project or opportunity this led to multiple long breaks being taken that spanned throughout the course of four years every time i returned to the game i was overwhelmed by a plethora of new possibilities when assessing where i left off i was always thinking about what else i could add and what could be improved i was never fully committed to an idea or theme and was always captivated by a new fresh idea or found things to be dissatisfied with some of the more intricate game ideas sounded more exciting but also required a lot more work and i was reluctant to switch paths because of it some of the things i was torn over were whether i wanted the player to protect something or just survive whether i wanted enemies to spawn in waves or spawn infinitely whether i wanted there to be multiple maps or for them to be procedurally generated and whether i wanted there to be one map or have the player progress through different rooms like a dungeon crawler taking breaks inadvertently gave me scope creep if i had settled on something and worked to complete it without taking breaks i wouldn't have spent so much time deliberating on the correct path i also spent so much time thinking about these ideas instead of implementing them to see which i liked more i thought i was saving myself time but i realize now that even if you spend the time to try out multiple options the code might be reused in a different way in the future so finally i said enough was enough and i sat down to finish what i started the first thing i did was forget about all the things i wanted to add i brought the game back to its original concept and identified what was essential for gameplay then i identified what i could add that wouldn't suck up a lot of development time after four years i really just wanted to get the game out there but i still wanted to make sure that it would be in a playable and fun state my main changes were simplifying the menu ui and removing player progression initially i wanted to have a more detailed menu with settings and the option to change your character but i simplified it and made an arcade-like intro sequence i also decided on releasing a pc version first initially this was only meant to be a mobile game but in the name of completion i decided to take the fastest road available i figured that it was okay to leave out some of the things i originally planned on because they could always be added back later i knew that i learned a lot and i felt comfortable putting the project to rest after all it was my first game and there's no way to be perfect there are a couple things that stick out to me is the most important lessons learned through this experience the first is the power of programming effects while completing the game i was looking for opportunities to substitute pixel art animations with code this would allow me to rely less on assets while also having the ability to fine tune the animations to my liking some examples of this are the explosions the dust from your speed boost and the spawn sequence i made for the enemies instead of having a pixel animation everything was made through code the second is the difference between motivation and discipline i was not always motivated to work on the project and honestly towards the end i even had a hard time testing the game after my hours played surpassed some of my steam library but this is where you need discipline to push yourself to work on it i made sure that i was working on the game even when i didn't feel like it and honestly the worst part was usually starting understandably if there's a knowledge barrier then it's not as easy as it sounds but at that point you'd make learning your main focus and you'd discipline yourself to learn one trick i used was to work a little bit each day even if it was something small or cleaning up code this meant that i was still making progress instead of being stagnant this plays into the third thing i realized which is that i could work on whatever i wanted to it was a lot easier to find passion when i worked on something i was interested in instead of forcing myself to work on something else that might be more important this also allowed me to make constant progress while avoiding burnout which would have slowed me down finally i definitely recommend for anyone that wants to get started in game development to join a discord community for whatever tools you'll be using people are generally helpful and will answer any questions that you might have i hope you guys found this video helpful if you did make sure to smash the like button for the youtube algorithm and subscribe to this channel

Channel: The Everything Project

Views: 9,026

Keywords: indie game devlog, indie gamedev, gamedev, making an indie game, game maker studio, game maker, gamedev motivation, indiedev motivation, dev log, devlog, indie dev, make a game, making games, indie game developer, solo game dev, indie devlog, devlog motivation

Id: iG0uw6o0cSc

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021