Is The Indie Game Dev Dream Real? - The Full Truth

is the indie game development dream real or is it just a dream only the luckiest of us get to experience the independent game dev dream for me is sitting in your home in your pajamas making games full time bringing in enough money to support yourself and your family and creating the games that you want to create and finding an audience that loves those games a lot of people say that the indie game dev dream is a lie it's unattainable unrealistic so i invited a professional full-time game developer the creator of never song and pinstripe thomas brush the indie game dev dream is real uh yes the dream is real whether it's a cop whether you can accomplish it yeah don't worry we'll get into it this is the speed round man it's easier to succeed in game development than ever before yes success in game development is mostly based on luck no a lot of people enter the indie game death scene with unrealistic expectations yes becoming a full-time game developer is realistically achievable for everybody [Music] kinda kinda okay we talked for quite a while so i tried to edit everything down to the most interesting parts for you and oh boy it was interesting hope you enjoy is there some survivorship bias on our end because obviously the people who succeed in a certain field are also the ones who think it's a lot easier than it yeah than a few others right exactly jonas i think you're you're totally right and i think it would be wrong of you and i to both smile and tell everybody that you're going to be a full-time game developer and you're going to be successful and you don't need to worry and just make games and follow your dream i think that that's that's an immoral thing to say without some context and also some clarification like this year we had a really good year and i say we it's just me i just speak in plural so that i don't feel so lonely it's been amazing but the majority of my indie game career especially when i first started out it was scraping by especially when i made pinstripe pinstripe you know i spent five years on that game and like many of your listeners i was making that game from my cubicle at my desk job and finally finally i i launched that game i did a kickstarter campaign scrambled to get that done it was exhausting it was really scary it raised a hundred thousand dollars and i was also able to partner with armor games to to get some additional funding i spent the majority of that money finishing the game and then when i launched it it didn't bring in enough income to support my family and that's just because you you spent all of the money to make the game and then you have to split that revenue and i definitely don't don't hold any grudges with my publishers i'm so i'm so grateful that they helped me finish my games but you know you launch your game and then you lay in bed i remember laying in bed it was a it was a rainy day and i was looking at the sales figures and it was after the big spike of launching uh pinstripe so you get a big spike on steam on launch day and then it drips and and sort of uh peter's off i remember calling my publisher and being like are we am i gonna make enough money to to support my family because i had a daughter on the way my first kid was on i have two kids now i had a daughter on the way we had just we had just purchased a house not outright obviously we had so we had a mortgage my wife was really sick and she was working full-time she uh she she has a autoimmune disease so she was really sick and she was working uh as a full-time nurse night shift and so it was just a really dark sort of time and then i'm like please god please god please god and then it turns out that we're not gonna make enough money so i'm like well i gotta figure out how to make more money and this is what i love about the like 2020 has been a really bad year let's let's just clarify that it's been a really bad year for the world okay and for the world economy and all that but i will say this we live in a time where it is the best time to make games because there are so many income streams available to you you just got to know what they are and where they are there's crowdfunding there's there's publishers there's investors there's uh exclusive and non-exclusive deals you can sign with all these platforms including like stadia which i don't even know how viable that is but epic games store and apple arcade and there's just a ton of places to find revenue and i had to scramble to find out where those were um because my the way i live my life is i'm not going to go back to a desk job i'm not going to do it yeah i tried your game development course no let's let's talk about the elephant in the room uh yeah you're you're kind of using the game development dream to to sell that course right so yes yes i i talk about this all the time in my in my videos like i'm like i'm a capitalist so i'm i'm gonna to to a lot of me is a capitalist so i'm gonna like look at something i'm gonna go okay is there a demand for this if there is a demand and i can produce something i'm going to sell it and so i'm totally fine selling a course as long as it delivers i see so you're you're basically doing what you're teaching right you're diversifying your income streams and one way of doing that is making yeah an online yeah and yeah actually really quick oh thanks thanks man really quick i just want to clarify um and then sorry to interrupt you um we have a little bit of a delay here so just so the audience knows that i'm not just constantly interrupting you it's because there's a little delay um so but but i want people to know that um there's so many gurus out there who are like i'm i'm driving a lamborghini and i live in a mansion and you can too and the reason why they're driving a lamborghini and the reason they live in a mansion is because they're selling that idea so they're not actually doing what they're not actually doing what what they teach what the majority of my income comes from game sales and and various partnerships with platforms so my income the majority of my income does not come from youtube and it does not come from um my online course i'm actually super super happy you here to hear that yeah because that yeah was one thing i was kind of wondering is is it okay for me to ask how much money the course makes compared to the other revenue streams i wasn't really sure about that but you just yeah so of course perfect i'll just i'll just put it bluntly um the the online course in the last month of selling which by the way i launched it a month ago so it's not like i've been relying on my online course for the last decade i've been scrambling finding income from all over the place and then i finally said you know what i'm going to make this online course so i just launched it and within a month i've got 800 students which people can do the math i'm not going to lie when you announce that you're going to do an online course and then when i saw the price the price tag i was really really worried that oh my god i hope this is gonna be good but yeah yeah i tried it and i can luckily i can confirm it's not a scam like it's a it's actually useful uh recommend it if you can afford it i appreciate it that's the thing yeah that's the question right so and hopefully hopefully the discount that there's a discount code below this video oh nice uh you get 40 off but anyway i don't want to go too far actually i i want to i just want to talk about the meat of what the whole my whole idea is which is becoming a full-time game developer is possible but it's not the way that people think it's not just selling your games on steam and i'm sure that you've figured this out too there's a lot of ways to make money i feel like the a lot of the other income streams are always a little scarier like for example when i think about starting a kickstarter or something the risk of failure maybe not achieving my goals wasting a bunch of time etc is i think what's stopping me from dipping my toes into that yeah i'm probably not alone with that oh for sure and i'm not gonna do another kickstarter probably i've done i've done two of them both of them basically raised six figures individually but i'm at a point now financially where i'm like yeah it's not worth it like it's too much yeah it's a lot of effort you have to put into it right it's not like you're getting that money for free or anything oh no oh no you're not and and i would i always say i'd rather stand in front of a crowd of five thousand people butt naked and do like a dance uh than then do a kickstarter campaign because it feels so much more the exposure is so much more real and you're much more vulnerable with the kickstarter campaign and and i've always said look if you're going to be vulnerable you're going to be vulnerable on your steam launch day you're going to get public reviews for your game so why not just jump into the vulnerability right now and get used to it that is that is actually one of the things i really liked about your course as well is that the very first thing you tell people to do is to set up their steam page their social media page yeah just get the scary part out of the way so that is definitely something i would subscribe to and recommend as well if you like that thing yeah and i'd actually say i'd say people like you who are building a social media presence right now um you're actually you're actually doing something that creates less fear because even though you're being public on a weekly basis or i'm not sure how often you upload videos and engage on social media but what you're doing is you're building an army that's going to support you no matter what anyone listening right now you need to go start i i know you a lot of you might hate it but you need to be building a personal brand so that you can build an army and that army look everyone talks about wishlists on steam you know you want to build up your wish list build up your wish list well a wish list is an army it's an army of people who are going to support you on day one stimulate the steam algorithm and hopefully put you on the steam front page well you need to be building an email list too and a social media presence because those things are they're not just for your game they're for you for the rest of your life as long as you don't get shadow banned those things are for you for the rest of your life so you need to be building that social media presence right now and it seems scary right now to go every day put something up on on on twitter or on instagram or on youtube that might be scary but you get used to it i'm sure you feel that way you're like uh you know yeah i don't know to it but it it it still has its up and it's ups and downs you know sometimes things aren't going well sometimes you screw up you maybe say something you shouldn't have said sometimes the numbers aren't just aren't where you want them to so yeah maybe it stops being scary but it starts being scary in a different way where you're like yeah what if this doesn't work out after all what if the numbers keep going down what if i say something really bad and i get cancelled you know oh dude that's i gotta say that the more the more that social media platforms age and and uh the more ridiculous they start to get with canceling you got to be i get more and more and more nervous about building my army uh because you never like you said you never know if you're going to say something you shouldn't say or whatever what the rules are what's what's the phrase if you're not building enemies if you're not if you don't have people disliking you you're probably not being yourself and i posted that on twitter once and everyone got upset with me because they thought i was making a political statement i'm not making a political statement i'm saying you've got like for for you you posted this video about toilets it's a very odd thing to post it's it's funny it's by the way that's my favorite video in the game devs in the game dev youtube sphere that is my favorite yeah that's because you haven't watched any danny videos yet yeah i need i need to get watching those but anyway my point my point saying that is you need to be willing to build create a list of enemies for the sake of creating a bigger list of major fans or salty fans like energized fans who are who are willing to support you because they love how honest you are um and again this isn't a political conversation this is creating content that is real to you that you're passionate about and i struggle with this and so my point is is that anyone listening right now they need to be willing they need to be totally willing to post content that reflects them here's why maybe you feel like you're a really unique person if you're listening right now you're like i'm weird i'm very unique i'm an introvert nobody likes me i don't have any friends at school how much you want to bet there's a million people on this earth out of all the how many people are on planet earth i don't even know it's a ton out of out of all of those people don't you think there's a million people out there who are just like you so why don't you go ahead and start putting content out there games out there um social media posts about your games that are exactly who you are a perfect reflection of who you are and then go find those people the reason people don't sell games it's not because they don't know how to make games there's there's plenty of people there who think that the ability to make games is the problem no the problem is finding the people who like your games it's all about accessing it's all about transferring information to your audience so you need to find a way to to find the people out there they're somewhere there are there is enough people out there to support you i promise you but you've got to know how to find them and i think of it as throwing out like 3 000 fishing lines and then just slowly catching those fish they're all over the place and let's say you make a really crappy game well there's probably a million people out there who would enjoy that crappy game and you just got to learn to find those people and so my point is is your audience my audience guys you got to learn how to market yourselves you've got to learn how to market yourselves and it sucks and it's hard but you've got to do it unless you want to go work for aaa and then you can just go make a game which is totally fine but yeah if you want to be an indie game developer you got to learn how to market yourself next one i have is um is the game dev dream even desirable because you know it's it's not always fun and games and i'm not sure it's it's for everybody you know it game dev is stressful it has its own ups and downs so i'm very curious to hear your opinion on that yeah it's only desirable if you desire it i know that's a kind of an obvious thing to say okay the independent game dev dream for me is that i would 100 subscribe to that as well okay and i think most of your subscribers and my subscribers would agree to subscribing to that content to that idea okay so that's the indie game dream now what does it entail what does it involve it involves knowing how to market yourself putting yourself out there dealing with negative reviews spending a year to three years making projects or one project and hoping that it sells you got to be willing it's kind of like buying a lottery ticket every day and hoping that it pays off right you got to be you got to be a person who's willing to to take risks and i i hate saying that because it does isolate it it narrows down the the people who thought that they wanted to be an independent game developer and then they realized oh man so so basically i have to be an entrepreneur and i'm curious if you agree do you agree that an indie game developer needs to be an entrepreneur i mean if you wanna if you want to succeed as a solo developer you unfortunately need a very wide skill set and marketing and entrepreneurship is definitely very high up the list of things you need to be good at probably the most important skill you need is communication which ties directly into marketing and communicating to players yeah et cetera et cetera okay we just clarified what it is which is it's entrepreneurship and putting yourself out there and being willing to jump off of a cliff and and be and hope that your parachute opens it's kind of like people who are who who love skydiving and are willing to take that risk so that's in my head that's what the game dev dream is and so do you desire that if you desire that then it is desirable yeah i feel like you you're a few years ahead of me you know um one of the reasons why i really feel excited to talk to you because i'd be really happy if in a couple of years i'm just wait where you're at where you know i have i have a family and i maybe don't have to worry too much about paying the bills yeah i think the question two years ago i was i was there yeah okay so the main question is is there ever a point where you feel like you made it well it defining made it you know um are you ever at a place where you're financially secure yes okay yeah that was the question i had yeah so basically does it ever ever stop being stressful or do you ever yeah of course er the the second game should never be as hard to sell as the first the third game should never be as hard to sell as the second yeah the fourth game should never be as hard to sell as the third and so i've made three commercial games the second one was for pewdiepie so and that one made my i say commercial because it made it made money um but but your game should always be more profitable and also more economical and by economical i mean you need to be able to make that game quicker okay but here's the thing why do people invest money in the stock market the reason why people invest money in the stock market is because the stock market works for them it brings them like eight to 12 percent yield or whatever or sometimes i think it's seven percent maybe people can correct me if i'm wrong in the comments section but the reason why people invest their money in the stock market market is because it makes money for them well the same needs to be true as an indie game developer you need to be investing your time because time is money you need to be investing your time and eventually when you make money you need to be investing your money in things that will bring you more money meaning more freedom and it makes it easier for you to make your next game so again it comes back to being an entrepreneur you need to be finding ways to make this thing easier you can't be the same game developer you were two years ago if you are you're doing something wrong so for me the way i make games now is i absolutely 100 percent without even with without even blinking i i hire contract workers because i can now so i've got somebody i've got somebody porting pinstripe to mobile for me right now i'm not doing that myself why like why would i do that myself now i already did that i already paid the piper like i spent five years making games solo i'm not going to do that anymore so and i know a lot of people might think that that's um the pure thomas the innocent thomas is gone because tom i was i was the guy that people would like i think time magazine in washington post the the the nucleus of their article was thomas is this this independent game developer and he makes games completely alone and how cool is that well it's it's only cool for so long and then you just you have to start making progress at some point right right and so now i'm in a position where i have enough funds in my business bank account to go look i'm gonna go hire someone for this i'm gonna hire someone for that i'm gonna partner with that studio so i partnered with serenity forge in colorado i'm in south carolina and we worked on uh my latest game never song they did the code base i did the art direction music and all that stuff so they i'm i'm working with people making it easier okay so it's back to the stock market you're not there's a there's a big difference between cash and then a mutual fund cash it depreciates in value i don't know if that's the right word but because of inflation you're just it's slowly it's slowly losing value the same is true as if you maintain a very simplistic view of the indie game career if you're just saying i'm just gonna i'm just gonna use my time like i would cash i'm just gonna make games and have fun and i'm not gonna worry too much about investing my time in places that will build build an engine that makes it easier to make my games so you need to slowly be building up people you trust who can help you with games contract workers maybe even employees i don't have employees you need to find business partners you need to find publishers that you trust you need to be building relationships with large organizations like apple or epic games you need to be building these relationships and slowly as you build up that network it becomes easier to make your games that yeah that answers the question so eventually there comes the point where you don't have to worry as much anymore because you just keep getting more and more efficient and it's not as hard to be profitable anymore because you built that machine that allows you to have the necessary efficiency like for example you can also build up your code base reuse code from previous projects et cetera et cetera yes absolutely that's that's actually a really good point that's something that i forgot about yeah um you're you you should you should be reusing your code base so that's why for me i use something i call the super simple 2d kit a super simple 2d game kit and i made this game kit for the pewdiepie game i knew that the uh i knew and i i disclosed this on day one so just for clarity but um on day one of the pewdiepie game jam that i did i had a kit that i had made for my games and that kit all you really got to do is skin it and so it's hilarious like skinning a game is like is like half of the work um it depends on it depends on whether you want to make a really you like for example portal that that game it uses like a first person shooter kit like uh what what does valve use um they use uh what's it called what they use oh man i can't i should know what it's called but anyway they use they use this baseline api or sdk or whatever you call it and and on top of that then you can you can change the mechanics a little bit so you've got first person shooters and then on top of that you you have this portal mechanic uh which is insanely unique and then on top of that you just skin it and make it look beautiful the same is true with like hollow knight hollow knight is just a basic 2d game kit it's so simple but it's just so beautiful the artwork and the music and the atmosphere and obviously you gotta you gotta fine-tune the mechanics so that it's really tight and i know that um ari uh i think he was the he was the artist for that game but he uh he mentioned that they spent a long time fine-tuning the speed and the movement and the and the the variability of the jumping they fine-tuned all that and then once that was done they could just skin it and make it look beautiful yeah i mean i think i think that's something a lot of people don't get is that it's oftentimes the the subtle changes and that you don't have to entirely reinvent the wheel right yeah um yeah i mean of course you obviously there are a couple of things that still matter about your game for example it needs to be memorable i think you say that in the course as well it needs to have some sort of something that makes it unique and stand out but besides that you can create a lot of variety just by fine-tuning tweaking and re-skinning stuff so there's definitely a lot of potential to save a huge amount of time there well actually i would argue that if you're not piggybacking off of something else that's already been done you're actually you're shooting yourself in the foot if you're trying to be entirely unique you just lost like perhaps arguably 75 of a potential market like for example hollow knight people buy that game because it's a metroidvania it looks beautiful but it's a metroidvania yeah so your your game needs to be you know unique and memorable but it also needs to be familiar then it needs to be like an old friend people look at it and they go huh that reminds me of that game but it has these unique features i'm gonna go buy it because you have this sort of automatic trust that you've built and it's just because you piggybacked off of some other game one thing i have here that i feel like is a strong counter argument against the indie gamedev dream is that clearly not everybody can win right there are a lot of people who want to make games and if you look at the steam numbers a lot of games actually don't make it like what's your opinion on that like the correct the statistics kind of speak against the i have a gamedev stream yeah so two things there first one is is because one of the main reasons is because indie game developers don't understand that they need to be entrepreneurs like they got to market themselves and so yes your steam steam numbers might be weak but what are the numbers outside of that okay what about crowdfunding what about publishers what about um exclusive deals and partnerships with ps4 expo and by deals with ps4 and xbox i mean like getting your game packaged in bundles with other games you know uh what about humble bundle you know there's a ton of other places to build wealth and revenue [Music] and i know that's an icky word wealth but yeah that's what you're trying to do for sure um that wealth can be yeah sure and wealth doesn't mean that you're going to go buy a yacht it means that you can invest that wealth in your next game okay and in your business which is what you should be doing um so that's the first answer to the question the second answer is look i i know people will they'll launch their first game and it will fail and then they feel like a failure and then they just want to quit it's so cheesy but it's so true you've got to learn to love your failures you gotta learn to just get back up like there there there are some friends of mine who have failed in the in and they they they will admit that they failed i've spent all this time in this game and then it just completely fell off the face of the earth nobody cares about it and i'm like well try again now the problem is here's the big problem what people do is they go i want to be an indie game developer and so what they do is they take that identity and they just put they just literally cover them their entire heart with that identity i am this artist that is who i am and then when it crashes they themselves crash they disintegrate and they don't know who they are anymore and so you need to be willing it's a weird balance you need you need to be both on one side of your body of your identity you need to be like i'm a dad or i'm a friend i'm a son i'm a daughter uh i have all of these identities of who i am and then on the other side of you you're like yep i'm a game developer and when that fails you need to be like okay with still who you are and my big problem when i first started making games is and you you see this on uh what's that show um ninja ninja it's a ninja course um why am i everything's blanking today ninja warrior yeah so at the beginning of ninja warrior every time someone's about to do the course at the beginning a ninja warrior the the the host will say this is john and john is a firefighter and in my head i'm like john's not just a firefighter like he's so much more than a firefighter and the same is true with you jonas and your audience guys you're not just a game developer that's just a little cherry on top of your life and so you need to learn to be able to pursue dreams without them completely overwhelming your identity yeah like you need to be okay with being and this comes back to what i was talking about earlier being in transition and always making progress when you're making your game you need to go you need to be able to tell yourself first this game's going to go gangbusters it's going to make me a million bucks you need to be able to live in that dream but you also need to be able to live in the dream which is it's okay if it fails i'll be all right it's it's pretty tough to detach yourself from that success or failure i know i mean the moment you the moment you say i'm a youtuber you automatically start caring about your numbers way more than you should and it's the same with gaming oh i know for sure yeah it's it sucks and it's it's natural it's totally natural uh people always say and especially indie game developers they go it's my baby and i'm like it's not your damn baby you know your baby is your baby so go have some kids and then you're going to change your mind like i have two kids now and and they're they're free radicals they're they're chaotic and they exhaust me and i don't sleep a lot and when that happens you go oh my games aren't my babies they're just games like this is this is my wife always tells me that she's very she's very quick to tell the truth she says thomas it's just a job it's just a job stop like about my games don't take yourself too seriously here and that's what i'm when i come back to being in transition what i mean is you need to be able to tell yourself of course i'm not perfect of course i don't know what i'm doing like why would i and i tell myself that now and i've been doing this for 10 years of course i don't know what i'm doing i've got so much to learn and so if i do something and it fails or it flops it's like well of course it did and that's okay and ultimately it comes down to this you need if you don't enjoy making games yeah i'll be only games because if you if right but a lot of people do it because they're like i want to make money or i want to be you know successful yeah don't get into game development for that reason though yeah now the more you mature the more you mature uh like for me like i'm pretty much confident in every game i make that it's going to make me money and that there's going to be a return on my investment so the older you get the more you can become sort of an opportunist and become more of a businessman but the more when you start out you don't know what you're doing so don't expect to make a return on your investment just yet um you just you there's a psychological game that you've got to play and that game is on one side you dream big you visualize big why because otherwise you're gonna quit your game so you need to have something that you can hold on to a dream but on the other side you also need to be okay with saying if i don't achieve that dream that's okay at least i had fun that means that you should not be sacrificing things that are more valuable than your game so here's a good example should you go throw the baseball with your son or should you make indie games at 6 p.m hmm which one should i do go throw the ball with your son that's way more valuable why because if this fails you're gonna go oh i sacrificed my son's teenage years because i was too obsessed with my game but here's a better here's a different example should i go drink beer eat pizza and watch netflix or should i make my game you should probably make your game and the thing is is that the beer and the pizza people spend so much time on the beer and the pizza and the social media and flipping through your phone for an hour when you're taking a dump when really you should have been taking a dump for like five minutes you know max so that's what i mean by sacrificing things what are you willing to sacrifice you need to be thinking about that yeah so you need to prioritize correctly that's that's what you're saying i agree yeah yeah yeah so you don't suffer some major emotional collapse which most indies will eventually have an emotional collapse because they they frankly they worshipped game development how big do you think is the role of luck because a lot of people who say this entire indie game development full-time indie game development stuff is unachievable or say that the people who make it make it because they are lucky what we say to that obviously that's true to a degree just like anything um and yeah like the people who are making good money on steam and i say steam just alone with or like nintendo switch or whatever and that's all they focus on like yeah i made tons of money on steam but then you you go what else do you do what else are you pushing um and they're like nothing then i'm like yes probably luck or you're just and a lot of people go no no it's just because i'm a hard worker and i'm an artist and i'm really talented and i go that's still luck like you were born with all that a lot of people weren't born with that and so what i like to say is um yes there's a whole side of indie game development that's luck but there's also a side of it which is well you might you know you might not be super talented in one key area but let me ask you a question did you have you have you read any books have you reached out to anybody to ask them to mentor you uh what what youtube channels are you following what online courses have you taken what are the various there's a ton of solutions to your problem other than just saying well it's just luck so i'm not going to even try there's a ton of other things that you can do besides just hope for the best and so on one side of the indie game equation is it's just like buying a lottery ticket but on the other side of the equation you go well no it's just like starting any business you've gotta you've gotta grind at the beginning you've gotta read and you've gotta research and you gotta listen to people and you gotta be willing to say i'm this big i'm this big and i don't know anything and i need to listen listening is a better investment than a lottery ticket does that make sense i'm not sure if that makes sense luck is definitely a ginormous component but the luck is not where people think it is like the luck is in who were you born at like how who were your parents what what did you grow up learning right that's where the real luck is and then after that it's not as much luck as people think i think i was lucky that i met the people i met i'm lucky that i learned the things i learned yeah in my opinion people are lucky to be learning from you like people who are watching this channel guys you're lucky that you came across jonas seriously and so so for me for me oh dude i was totally lucky like my my parents were super super into what i was doing how many of you in the audience listening right now have parents who don't get it they don't understand why you want to make games and they think it's a waste of time there's probably a majority yeah that's bad luck guys and i get it i understand that but i will say this you just heard this video didn't you so now you have authority figures i put that in quotes because i don't know if i'm an authority figure but you you now have authority figures kind of like parents who are telling you the opposite who are saying look we get why you love the idea of making games so now that you just heard that piece of information that you just listened to you know 45 minutes of me rant now that you hear that you just got lucky so turn that luck into something special so i think our final conclusion on on the topic is the game dev dream reel is probably mostly a yes with a couple of caveats of course right it's maybe it's not real for everybody maybe not everybody should become a game developer what advice advice would you give to to people who have the dream and want to make it come true like what would you say are the first steps to making sure you you'll get there tear down your pride and learn to separate yourself from your body and it sounds a little woo-woo but i i advise a lot of my students and my youtubers to like think of your body as an avatar um we we hear a lot about this if you if people listen like joe rogan i love joe rogan so if you listen to joe rogan you hear a lot about like uh um are is life even real or are we like on a server i can simulate entire universes millions of them in fact is this world actually digital kind of like the matrix and like i say you know maybe maybe it is maybe it isn't but if i had a controller and i was controlling me i know that sounds weird what would i do in a video game see the thing is is people this is so frustrating like people are so good at figuring out animal crossing like i have friends who are so like they have mansions they have this huge society that they've built and they've built a ton of wealth in animal crossing but they won't do it for themselves and it's so frustrating i think i know exactly what you're getting at basically that people are way too emotionally attached to themselves which i guess makes sense because it does your life it's natural but it kind of stops you from taking a step back and taking a more strategic approach to analyzing what do i want what do i need to do to get there i feel like a lot of people for some reason um can't do that yeah or another way i think they can yeah but they they don't so yeah the same is the same is true for uh like um it's really easy for us to tell other people how they should live their life and like why why are they why are they going to why are they going to mcdonald's every day like surely they know they shouldn't do this but then you then then you treat yourself poorly all the time it's because for some reason when we think about ourselves we get proud and we get we close up and we say well i i don't i can't do that or i'm not going to do that because because of all this baggage we have and it's it's real baggage baggage from your parents or your family or what some how people treated you in high school or whatever there's a ton of baggage and that's why i say learn to separate yourself from your body and look at yourself and say what what if that was a video game character maybe your name is is uh john john if you're listening can you separate yourself from your body and say okay that guy's name is john this is the video game character that i was given i can't trade him in what can i do with john to make his life better and not only that if if if you have an indie game dream what would you do in this video game to achieve that dream life is a big rpg it's a it's a massive rpg it really is so play the game and don't do it pridefully just play the game play the game um do some proper risk management you know just like yeah all x into one basket not all backs exactly exactly exactly that's totally true and that comes back to putting your eggs in one basket that comes down that's that's specifically true with steam don't invest all of your time in thinking you're going to make money on steam learn where are the other baskets what are they dude honestly i feel like i should do a probably do a way better job at that i mean i don't have patreon or anything at the moment my two income income streams are uh islanders which i'm in a very fortunate position that that is doing oh dude that game is awesome yeah dude you're so talented all all of the props goes to my team members and also to the university where we made the game uh i gotcha so i'm very nervous about launching my first complete solo project that i made without any help so it looks great without any help it's not true obviously the community has been an amazing support and there are a lot of other people who helped but i'm quite nervous and i say i say you know mitigate that nervousness if you can by starting a patreon making some youtube ad revenue which i'm sure you are um you know maybe launching a small maybe it doesn't have to be kickstarter maybe it can be indiegogo and just bring in some revenue there but dude you're in a position now where i'm like you're in a way better position than i was in because there is a feedback loop or some kind of loop you can get caught in where if you work with a publisher immediately you don't really make money because they're cut they're taking a revenue share and so you're caught in this like well i gotta go find another publisher because i didn't make money with my last game and so i'm out of that feedback loop thank god um but uh for you it sounds like you know you're in a position where automatically you're you're starting off on the right foot and you have enough money where like so i don't i don't do patreon either anymore because it's just like i felt like i feel like i'm taking people's money because i don't really need it so i'm not sure if you're in that position yeah similar honestly if i really needed it then i'd probably set up a patreon as well so yeah it's at the very least coming to know that you have that opportunity you know yeah absolutely but like for there's people out there right now who are listening guys why don't you have a patreon like if you want to go full time why don't you have a patreon um it's not it's not it's not bad to ask for people's money like it's really not um you should be you should be looking for all sorts of ways to make money um it's only bad when you're asking and you really don't need it um that's when it gets a little weird yeah but a lot of you right now you need money especially if you want to go full time so don't be scared to start a patreon or do a kickstarter campaign i mean i could go on and on but yeah i know oh man i'm very i'm i i want my audience to in your audience to know that that i'm really passionate about seeing people succeed and so i just want you to know whoever's listening to know you're not defined by the people who define you that's not the way this works you're really defined by who you say you want to be and then you make it happen so start living your life like an rpg what's the strategy with your life my goodness can you write it down can you write down the strategy and go make it happen and if that means becoming a game developer well then make the strategy happen um and so i want to see people succeed and obviously if they want they can go check it out at full-time game dev link in the description thanks for the discount but yeah but but yeah i don't want to i don't want to push that course too much but i just i but i do want people to know goodness gracious you know you don't have to live the way that you think you have to live like there's so many opportunities right now and obviously certain economies and certain cultures are different there's a lot of political strife in certain areas of the world i get that but we do live in a time where it is so much easier to follow your dreams than it used to be don't squander that don't waste that there's there's plenty to complain about i promise you there is so much to complain about um but it doesn't do you any good there you go it's okay to dream big but if you really want to win all you have to do is enjoy the process you

Channel: Jonas Tyroller

Views: 95,335

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Id: 6GEM8nPgUvo

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020