Make Video Games

the frigging is upon us don't leave the fridge up and i'll leave it open dude i need to breathe i'm in the fridge [Music] i'm live why hello can the fridge people see me now ate with dylan am i fridge viewable hello fridge people if you're there what's up so for all you new guys my name is thor i make video games been in the gaming industry for 18 years used to work at blizzard entertainment worked on everything from world of warcraft vanilla all the way into overwatch except for burning crusade because i left for a while and then i left and i worked at amazon game studio on the lumberyard game engine and then i left that and i hacked power plants for the federal government so i was a pen tester working at the doe and then i quit because i didn't like having my hair cut short and i started my own indie studio called pirate software now i make games on the internet and this is what i've done full time for the last five years i just make games and i build stuff on twitch and that's it that's all i've been doing so one of the things i want to talk to you guys about immensely on here the biggest thing of all is our studio wouldn't exist without twitch hands down it wouldn't what we're doing would not be possible without twitch in any respect over the last year we've finally gotten our own categories we have software and game development as a category now which is really really cool but on top of that it's shown that so many different people can come in here and make their own games which is something that they didn't think they would be able to do so i'm going to show you something i put together a website called develop dot games how many of you guys out there ever wanted to make a game and he was like i can't do this i'm not a good programmer i'm not a good artist i'm not a good musician i don't have the ability to do this thing that i want to do i don't have the the technical knowledge on how to make a game that i need in order to do this you have to be this high to ride the ride right it's not a thing so we're gonna go into this for a little bit but the first thing is what skills do you need none you don't need to know anything you need you could be bad at everything and it's totally fine so let's let's go to a few of these you don't need to be an amazing artist thomas was alone is a really really good example of this really really good example this thomas was alone is a game about rectangles and it's going to make you cry it's one of the most deeply moving stories oh my god did you just give how many how many is that barely mod mother what is this hey pirates offer you inspire many with your talent wit we wanted to give you something that would fit 20 gifted subs dude what a boss thank you very much holy moly dude 20 gifted subs what a mad lad now we're going to see the dog for him it's baron he's here i'll pause it for a moment we'll pause it for a moment we have so little time thank you very much seriously that is a lot that is a lot of sub student you're amazing honestly thank you for making this possible man so as i was saying thomas was alone it's a game about rectangles it's gonna make you cry you you could have very little artistic ability to make this game you could absolutely make this game it's all rectangles even the particle effects let's look at this look at this it's all particle effects there are rectangles the objects are rectangles and there's triangles in there you can do this it's programmer art nothing is stopping you from making this game you go oh well they had really cool lighting in that maybe i can't do that what about suits of business rpg what about this what about suits of business rpg this whole game is drawn in pencil and scanned into a computer and then you play it all of it is hand drawn the entire game what's stopping you from making this nothing the only thing that would stop you from making a game like this is fear that someone would look at your art and go that's not good enough but suits a business rpg exists and it's done really well people like it 89 positive it's actually doing great thomases alone are sitting at 93 positive that one's doing great let's go to west of loathing how many of you guys have ever played kingdom of loathing old web browser game love this game love the hell out of it very funny very silly good stuff stick figures the whole thing is stick figures it doesn't need to be god's gift to graphics it just needs to be fun that's it that's all you have to do so so you look at this and go okay well maybe maybe i don't need to be an artist then maybe i could just make something funny like throw dynamite at a cow that's fine you know i could do that i could do this i can make make this kind of stuff happen we got nepenthe here too this was actually made by one of our community members and this one was all scanned into a computer as well like suits a business rpg but it was done with colored pencil look at this playable game something you can pick up on steam the penfe this stuff is awesome and it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to be yours and then you get better at it you get better at it better at it make cooler and cooler stuff so you go okay well i could i could do the art then if if that's the bar standard i could do the art then but i can't do the music but you can let's go pull this up we're going to pull up hidden folks let's go pull up hidden folks real quick and i'm going to stop our stream music by the way all this music here on stream it's from our game heartbound we have a hundred songs in the osd it's bananas it's gonna be loud for a moment got it listen to this it's where's waldo with mouth noises if you can't make music you can still make music do you have a microphone can you record your face you can make this game and it's charming dude it's charming it's funny called hidden folks the whole thing is just a hidden object game and it's sitting at 97 positive on steam it's done really really well so inability to make music inability to make perfect art those two things are now out of there they don't matter anymore you can make a game if you don't have two of those things you just need a cool idea and you need to execute on it really well right let's go to the last one you're like oh well i'm not a programmer then i can't make that let's go to the final one undertale you don't need to be an amazing programmer undertale had all of its dialogue in the entire game put into one giant switch case statement and that was it it was thousands of cases long every programmer in the audience right now just like lost their mind hearing that but it didn't matter it didn't matter at all the game is still fun you don't have to be a good programmer you don't have to be any kind of good programmer you can start off not knowing what you're doing and start working on stuff let's go to a really good example of this how many of you guys have played five nights at freddy's five nights at freddy's made by scott coffin right we're gonna go pull up scott confident on wikipedia real fast scott cawthon's wikipedia page i want you to look at all of these games look at this look how many games this is these are all the games that scott kaufman made before five nights at freddy's did you know in the same year that he released five nights at freddy's he made a game called fart hotel that's right a phone app called fart hotel where you had to choose who farted that was that was the whole game you just had to guess who farted like that was a game right like you can make these things and you can sit down and try to make stuff and fail at it and get a little bit better and get a little bit better and get a little make your fart hotels go make fart hotel and then eventually make your five nights at freddy's because eventually if you keep making these things someone's gonna take notice someone's going to see the stuff that you're making you're going to get better at making those things and eventually you won't be making fart hotel anymore you'll be making something else and that's the whole idea the idea is to make things and grind that xp and learn how to do this stuff because nobody knows how to do it at first that's okay you don't fight the final boss at level one you start at the very beginning and you gain levels you get xp and you get better at this stuff so one of the things that i put together three times a year is we actually have a game jam that we do if you've never heard of a game jam if you don't know what that is go and look this up there are hundreds and hundreds of different game jams that go off on the on the internet every day they're constant you go look at itch.io it's a great website to find this kind of stuff and a game jam is a place where basically you get a theme and the theme will be like you must incorporate giraffes or whatever it's going to be right and you have to make a game centering around that theme in a limited amount of time and you won't know what you're doing and you'll probably fail the first time and that's great because in the action of failing that first time you're gonna learn so much you're gonna learn a massive amount of stuff about yourself about team members that you bring along with you about the skills that you need going forward about maybe some stuff that you you didn't know about originally and you'll incorporate all of that into your design and like i know this is easy coming from someone that's you know i've been in the gaming industry 18 years it's easy coming from me saying that but i followed the same advice so if we go on to steam and we go look at part bound heartbound's the game that i work on now and i work on on stream every day and we're sitting at 97 positive reviews out of 1057 reviews and we also have a hundred thousand wish list because the game's in early access people are waiting for it to come out right but this isn't the first game that i made as an indie it's actually the second one our first one was champions of breakfast which is it's not great right it's just it's a silly little arcade game it's got sick music listen to these sick jams dude good music but if you look at this it's just spinning objects and it freezes thank you steve well done what's your spinning objects that's all it is they don't animate they just rotate really easy to build how long do you think it took us to make this this is with me having never worked in game maker studio before in a programming language i'd never heard of never used before in my life and artists who had never made pixel art before had never made anything for a game in their lives or never made pixlr never made anything for a game and then a musician who had never made sound effects for a game or music for a game before they'd only made stuff on their own for like you know indie soundtracks and things like that how long do you think this took us anybody in chat how long do you think it took us to make this game our first game to launch it from i want to make a video game i want to make asteroids with a toaster so my game is on steam how long do you think it took 24 days 24 days from i want to make a game to my game is up on steam was 24 days and it's not the best game in the world it's not and that's okay because here's what we learned by making this we learn how to make all of these steam icons and everything that goes up on this page by the way steam doesn't auto scale these you have to build these yourself you have to make every one of these little icons yourself we learned how to make steam achievements there's 164. my god we learned how to make steam point shop items we learned how to make steam trading cards and then we found out as developers when someone buys a steam trading card from another person you get a little cut of the money as a steam dev i didn't know that that's really cool so that means that you want to make really cool steam trading cards so that people really want to trade them around because you're making a little bit of money off of that that's really helpful for an indie studio i learned that when you add controller support to your game it's really important for people that have physical disabilities i didn't know that before i made an indie game i was in you know aaa i had no idea that that was the case so we started adding you know controller support to every game that we work on now the accessibility is built right in because they can take that controller remap it to whatever devices they use and they can play your game i had no clue this game taught me all of this it taught me everything that i needed to know to go and make something better and that's what you need to make you got to go make your champions at breakfast you got to go make your fart hotel you know whatever it's going to be make that game and then make a better one because you can do that nothing is stopping you from doing that nothing at all now the next thing of this and this is this is the you know the real big one after hearing all of that you're like man i want to go make games like some of you guys are like oh man i gotta go do this right don't quit your day job don't do it do this on the side do it as a side project go to work every day have that financial backing that keeps you afloat go home and instead of sitting on the couch and watching netflix take two to four hours a day whatever it's going to be and the amount of time that you can devote to this and work on your game you won't you won't know what to do at first it's going to be frustrating at first it's going to drive you nuts at first but if you get over that and you learn some stuff and you learn like oh man i'm actually making something the moment that you make a character walk on screen you've already won that's all you need to do yeah oops already quit my day job don't do it dude don't quit your day job keep your day job it's going to help you to be financially stable while you're doing this so you're not going to stress out you're not going to worry about oh my god i have to do this kind of thing like just keep your job do this kind of thing and eventually one day if you do it long enough there's a chance that you'll be able to do it full full-time not everyone gets to but you have the chance and the more that you do this the more that you plan for it the more that you get better at this the more small games that you release the more game jams that you're a part of the higher that chance gets that's the only way plan on your future by doing this you know invest in yourself by learning these skills it's the whole point of this so from there let's take a look at this like how do you i put all these different sections in here it's not just about what skills you need like what kind of games should you make how do you pick the kind of game you want to make oh i want to make an mmo don't don't make it mmo is your first game make a little arcade game make a platformer make something small something you can build in under a month like i was saying with champions for breakfast do that you can do that there's nothing stopping you from doing that other than fear of not doing it well enough you know someone on the internet making fun of you i'm going to be honest with you no matter what you make someone in the internet's going to make fun of you but it's yours and they didn't make it so you know right like it's super good that way it's actually really fantastic that you can say i made this thing you know so outside of that let's go to how do you build a community tons and tons of social media stuff now you've got discord twitter instagram steam gamejolt itch io twitch youtube reddit like all these at gilded now you know you've got all these different places that you can build community every time i go live on twitch i announce it on twitter and discord every time i make something in heartbound we release a new patch it goes on every one of our social media sites every single thing i do ties into every single other thing that i do because you're an indie dev no one is shouting from the top of the mountain for you you're not triple a you don't have piles of money you don't have infinite cash to throw into games the average amount of money used on a game for its release like for for the actual um you know marketing for it is a third of the cost of the actual game itself you don't have that so it's got to be you stand at the top of the mountain and scream about your game scream on every social media platform tell every single person about it go into your comments on you know social media and actually respond to people tell everyone you know what what did you feel about the game what do you think about the game get that feedback and don't get weird about it don't get mad about it accept it and then change yourself as a developer to get better there's tons of times where people come to me like your game sucks right i'm like well why does it suck and then they tell me and i'm like you're right my game does suck i'm gonna go fix that and then i do and then that person has a better experience i grow as a developer everybody wins right now that isn't to say that every amount of feedback is good because sometimes it's pretty terrible i'll give you an example i had a person come to me and they go your game has no story and i'm like what do you mean you mean my game has no story in it right but the whole game is story it's a it's a narrative rpg right you're just you're fighting monsters and talking it's 99 of the whole thing and they go and i talk to them like 20 minutes it's like 20 minutes back and forth this person then they finally go well i don't like reading so i skipped it don't like reading so i skipped it damn it so not all feedback is good sometimes it's you know sometimes it's like that but you should always listen i think that's the biggest thing it's not all feedback is good but all feedback matters you could get that for someone to go wow ed that's an interesting take thank you you know but at least you at least you heard them out because it could have been something important there were other times where people gave me feedback and they're like this area of the game feels terrible the developer is clearly just you know pandering for time so that i can't refund the game really spicy take right in reality it was a maze that had like shadow all over it and you had to like find your way through the maze and objectively it sucked it wasn't fun so i got rid of it bad reviews disappeared everybody was happy i learned something about you know player experience and valuing the time of the players a little bit more and not putting those types of mazes into the game because they just aren't fun it's just filler what's the point right so learn something from your players always 100 some people understand environmental storytelling or cutscene it's true the funny thing is is all of it is cutscenes it's just dialogue you know because we're in india i can't afford like 10 000 lines of voiceover we've already got it translated into six languages like it's it's out there in a bunch of them but like dude voice over is that something else that's really expensive so anyway tools people fight about this all the time what's the best engine what's the best engine i'm only going to use game maker studio i'm only going to use unity whatever engine you want to use is the best engine based on the type of game you're making different engines have different skills and abilities you know that are make them better suited for different types of games let's take a look at risk of rain how many of you guys have played risk of rain or risk of rain too let's go take a look at this this game is sick i love this game risk of rain is an awesome game it was made of game maker studio and ms paint it's not a joke they literally used ms paint to make this game it's phenomenal frankly it's a fantastic game and you use damage pain your tools don't matter whatever matter whatever works for you is what matters whatever works for you whatever works for your workflow it doesn't matter if it costs a lot of money it doesn't matter if it's free none of that matters the only thing that matters is that it gets out of the way and allows you to make the kind of game you're trying to make so game maker studio is really really good at making 2d games it's not very good at 3d godot is really good at 2d and 3d games unity is really good at 3d stuff but it's not as good for 2d games and then there's financial stuff on top of it unreal is great at 3d but like you can look at each one of these and i've got a couple of lists in here of different games that they've made so you've got you know godot is actually the new kid on the block but it's fantastic he's got a lot of community support it's really nice and it's free and open source then you've got game maker studio it's 100 bucks but it's only a one-time payment no royalties whatsoever you've got unity unity is really cool it's really good but it's got royalties after a certain amount it's like a seat license that you have to do unreal engine has royalties but it's after a million dollars if you made a million dollars off your game you're probably styling anyway and you probably feel fine so it's not going to matter much to you especially if you're a small team right but you can see the different types of games that they've made too so like with unity you've got hearthstone and cuphead and wizard of legend those are sick games hollow knight too unreal the only 2d game that i've seen that came out of unreal is really surprising to me it's octopath traveler and i think it was probably for the lighting and particle effects because that game looks sick but it's all 2d you know it's like 2.5 d stuff for everything you've also got things like fortnite conan exiles with game maker studio you've got all the indie darlings right you've got things like hyper light drifter risk of rain nuclear thrown undertale awesome games came out of game maker studios great at 2d pixel art games and then then you've got other free stuff renpi renpai is specifically made for visual novels that's what it's for it's made in python it's free and that's how doki doki literature club came to be was made in renpi it's awesome stuff so like don't worry about what the best engine is worry about the kind of game you want to make and then choose the right tool for the job that's the whole point of this is you want to choose the right tool for the job choose the right engine for the kind of game you're trying to make right the next one there's no best art program no best art program at all we use a sprite we use a spray because it's really good at making you know pixel art animations i really enjoy that super fun for that do you see future in vr games i do i see a future in that but not until it's like you know like nerve gear where it's like hooked up to your brain and for me it's kind of tough because vr games i can't play them i get motion sick really bad like the moment i put the headset on i'm vomiting all over the room it's great it's not what you want right but i do see a future vr games but i think what we have right now the things like the oculus and stuff like that all the the devices that we're wearing it feels like laserdisc to me it feels like that middle ground before we have true full dive immersion you know what i mean you've got that kind of interim technology where they're they're playing around with it and then eventually they're gonna be like whatever we're just gonna hook it up to your brain i'm waiting for that that's what i want i just wanna like load into video games and be done for the day in any case sounds like a good game i could get into hell yeah dude yeah so a sprite express great for for 2d stuff and it's 20 bucks or and this is the cool thing you can compile it from their github for free and they let you do that so these guys not only sell it but they give it away if you want to go through and compile it from their github that's fantastic that's really cool free it's free photoshop it's not as good as photoshop in some reason like for for some things but it's fantastic if you really want to use like you know photo manipulation software use there's nothing wrong with that blender blender used to be like sad it used to like maya used to just dominate over blender all the time and blender wins now blender is amazing for 3d modeling now it's used for everything it plugs into everything it's gotten so powerful over the years and because of that it's fantastic for making 3d games use it it's free it's totally free there's no best music program our musician's name is stein von waker and all this music here is from stein all of it and like i said we've got about 100 songs in the ost all this is from heartbound all of it's from stein sign is a wizard absolute wizard family studio is really good for making nes games that's a free tool that you can use are like nes style tip chiptunes if you love that old like nes style music like the old chiptune stuff use family studio it's fantastic for that anvil is the same but for midi and then the big one and this is the expensive one because it's you know it's a hundred bucks is fl studio all of our music is made in fl studio it doesn't mean you need to use this go and make something in family studio it's just as good and it's free and you can use it for all kinds of stuff in fact let's take a look at a game real quick i'm going to show you something really small that i love how many of you guys have ever played down well check this game out dude listen to this music [Music] i love this game it's hard downwell is amazing the music is fantastic the effects are really clean and really good and readable and it's all using three colors black white and one accent color and that's it this is a game that is attainable for any of you you can make this there's nothing stopping you from making this it's an easy and simple idea executed well and really clean with simple simple graphics simple audio all of this stuff is really easy to make you just have to do it and it's at first you're not going to know what you're doing but you can do this and you can learn while you're doing this and then eventually you can have a game like this it's pretty sick you know it's a fun game it's really cool downwards awesome good it's up on steam play this game do it it's three bucks three dollars but yeah do that seriously so you can use these types of tools to make that stuff then you're like okay well i don't have a hundred bucks forever studio and i want to use fl studio how to raise money there's a lot of different ways to do it there's a massive amount just like i said before don't quit your day job keep that day job use it to fund your gaming development habit right because at first it is it's going to be a it's going to be a hobby it's going to be a hobby at first you're going to learn this stuff and you're going to get better at doing this and eventually you'll make something that might stand on its own and make money back but make it for the love of the game at first then one day it might be your job that's how all hobbies go you know all hobbies are you doing something really cool and then you're like wait a minute i'm really good at making this maybe maybe i'll make this my job now and you can do that with game dev so raising money at first is really going to be about keeping that day job after that you can raise funds from a bunch of different places outside and the big one is twitch if i didn't have twitch we wouldn't be a studio and it's not just because of the income from twitch it's actually because of the amount of voice that twitch gives you as a game developer when i'm streaming on twitch we sell 400 more copies of heartbelt every hour on the hour 400 more copies than if i wasn't streaming and that is tried and true every day for the last five years if i miss a day of streaming that number goes down and this is a really good example of you are an indie stand on the top of the mountain and shout about your game twitch will let you do that it is fantastic for that it is very very good for getting the word out about what you're doing and we're evidence of that and i'm not special for doing what we've done i'm not you know god's gift to gaming or game development or anything like that i just tried something and it worked and i know other people can do it too because there was no special time period that allowed us to do this there was no special window that we had to work our way through now is the time to keep doing this stuff because or to start doing the stuff because it's going to carry it's going to snowball and unless you start now you're never going to start so do it do it stop talking about doing it do it nothing's stopping you and we have a category now software and game development you can go to this category and find other game developers and that doesn't just mean programmers that means voice actors that means writers it means pixel artists that means people making pen and paper games that means people making card games that means every kind of game you can think of that's what software and game development is for and we campaign to have this made for about eight months and twitch finally did it so get in here and be part of this category if you want to make games this is the place to be and don't get discouraged at first don't just get discouraged if you've only got two viewers and your mom and your dog because that's how i started two and so every single person in here started and it's taken me five years of doing this to get to where i am today and there's nothing stopping you from doing the same if you really want to do it do it make games make cool stuff other people will find out as long as you're telling people about it now inside of that and this is this is a cautionary tale you don't need a publisher so many people get stuck in this and go well i can't make games someone's got to publish me no you used to need a publisher because you had a release on a console back in the day when you wanted to release on super nintendo you had to pay mr nintendo 30 of your revenue because they had to go and make the physical cartridges why you don't need that anymore no one needs that you can distribute it yourself you can put it up on steam you can put it up on hio on gamejolt on humble bundle every one of these different places and you can do it without paying anyone so do it you don't need a publisher and many many indie studios that i know went oh man i went with a publisher because we thought it was the best idea and they took 70 percent of our income the biggest question you have to ask and this is the big one in here will their help will the help of the publisher lead to profits above and beyond the revenue cut that they take if you don't know the answer or if the answer is no then you don't need a publisher and that's it don't fall for the trap they're vampires also i love what we do in the shadows watch that show it's amazing good stuff next one is kickstarter so kickstarter isn't this is going to seem weird kickstarter isn't for making money that's not what it's for kickstarter is for raising awareness about what you're making it's not for making money at all so when i put heartbend up on kickstarter we did a bunch of analytics to find out like oh man how much money could we make within a certain time period like average right how much how much do you think we're gonna make within a certain amount of time and it came out to about five thousand dollars artbound is a game that's been in development now for five years we have it out in early access you know people buy it all that kind of stuff but five thousand dollars is not gonna make a game with a bunch of people working at full time for for five years it's not gonna happen so why do we put it up for that much because we knew from the analytics that it was it was a likely amount to reach that within 24 hours why do you want to reach that in 24 hours because of the news you want to be that sensationalist indie you got your game funded in 24 hours everyone wants to pick that up ign immediately picked us up and wrote a story on it that's what you use kickstarter for you use it to raise awareness for what you're doing you use it as a platform for media to pick you up and talk about you that helps you amplify everything that you're doing to tell the rest of the internet what it is that you're making use kickstarter for that great it's fantastic and you get to give out cool rewards to the people that back you too it's a really awesome thing to do builds community builds awareness of what you're making and also makes a little bit of money on the site but it's not primarily not for making money that's not what it's for it's for raising awareness merchandise make stuff do it we have a bunch of merchandise look it's merch wow look it's my my face all over a cup horrifying nobody wants that they still buy it anyway but yeah make merch merch is cool um we actually use a shipping service called pirate ship which is cool i like them because they're very own brand but we have a bunch of different like manufacturers and stuff that i put up on this and it's good to release these things the margins on them though are very small generally you don't make a huge amount of money off of merch but you do get to see people really happy about what they're buying right when somebody throws donations at you you can't really give them anything back when they're buying something they may feel really cool about it they may actually get into it and be like oh man i've got this cool sticker i'm gonna go put it on my computer and people are gonna see it i'm gonna talk about it merchandise is cool because it lets your fans show off that's that's more than anything else and it feels good man so like naked even if it's silly just little stickers just make them make them get them out there it's not super expensive to do it's really cheap so outside of that coffee good way to make money not patreon patreon takes eight percent patreon if you're a founder takes five percent coffee takes four dollars and fifty cents a month flat it's the exact same service there are other services like this that exist out there in the internet don't use patreon use coffee cheaper and i'm not saying none of these are sponsored by not a single one of them not a single one of these is sponsored this is all the best way to run this as an indie trying to live off of ramen that's it that's what it is you know you wanna you wanna retain as much money as you possibly can when you're india and this is a good way to do it so outside of that where should you launch your game you're like okay i've got it i've got a demo everything is out there people know about what i'm doing where do i send my stuff steam steam is the big one why is steam the big one let's bring out the good old ms paint ms paint the ultimate steam takes 30 and you're like wait a minute you said publishers bad 30 bad 30 is bad except for with steam steam lets you do something that's a magic trick they let you sell steam keys how much money does steam take when you sell a steam key [Music] zero percent if you take a steam key which you get for free you can order as many of them as you want as a developer on steam if you take that steam key and you sell it on another platform steam takes nothing zero percent they take absolutely nothing that is phenomenal so what you do is you take your steam keys and you put them on a humble bundle and you put them on gamejolt and you put them on hio and you sell your game on all these different platforms and some of those sales have no overhead whatsoever and then on top of it you have one center of distribution which is steam which means every time someone buys the game all the updates come from steam you don't have to manage all these different files in different locations it's all just on steam it's easy for you super simple stuff and the steam keys make it free super good way to do it so then outside of that you're like okay well that's neat well no one can find my game on steam steam has a way to fix this called visibility rounds when you release your game you get five of these five vrs right five visibility rounds that get released and when you use a vr you get 500 000 impressions on front page of steam is that legal by steamrolls that's what steam does that's part of their service that's 100 what steam wants you to do they want you to sell steam keys on other platforms i i believe in their agreement the only thing that they ask for you to do is it cannot be cheaper on other platforms than it is on steam that's it that's the only part of the agreement do this this is absolutely allowed yeah the steam visibility rounds let you be on front page of steam for 500 000 impressions that is amazing and you get to do that five times and when you leave early access they give you one that gives you like a million impressions on first page on front page and it doesn't even count as one of the vr's so when people talk about like oh steam doesn't do anything for visibility use their tools they have them there every time we enter a steam sale we sell basically 90 of our our copies for the year during steam sales and you can go and join those or leave those at will like you get to choose if you want to be a part of that or not they don't do that to you they don't set the rates for you you do it as the developer now people go like oh that's cool that's all fine but like you know what about what about people that steal from us right like what about what about pirates and you know on pirate software so i should know i should know a thing or two about piracy right a little bit about piracy with the name right so let's talk about piracy for a moment like oh you know piracy people are going to steal my game like steam doesn't really have any protections in place for it you're right but what is piracy really an issue of my chat knows you guys know what piracy really is an issue of because it's not people being jerks it's an issue of cost or distribution [Music] if people can't buy your game because it's too expensive they're going to pirate it if people can't get your game because they can't obtain it they're going to pirate it access and cost the whole thing so really good example of this is brazil our game harpound took off in brazil before it took off anywhere else in the entire world the average household income in brazil is 880 to 1100 brl about 180 us dollars if you're telling them to buy a 60 game you're saying give me a third of your household's monthly income with two working parents of course they're gonna pirate your game so what do we do to fix that let's go pull this up [Music] first off we localize the game into brazilian portuguese then using steam we localize the price you can see here the brazilian real it's only 20 brl which is about four dollars u.s 58 off in brazil how much money do you think we make off brazil knowing that the econo like the economic constraints there the fact that it's not a huge amount of income the fact that we've released the game there for 60 percent off how much do you think it is 20 to 25 of our studio's monthly income comes from brazil 20 to 25 of our studios entire monthly income comes from brazil and that's a country that's generally overlooked because of piracy why would you overlook it don't use steam use steam and localize your prices and localize your games if you do this those communities can support you and you're supporting them by giving them a game that they can actually buy that makes sense for them to buy so they don't have to go to a third-party site and get malware that's what this is all about that's the whole point you will make money you don't have to worry about it put your game up there and make the price fair and you're giving a better experience to people that otherwise wouldn't be able to have it and you'll make money out of it so yeah you guys are talking about argentina right argentina is a dollar and 13 cents right argentina dollar and 13 cents you're like oh well people just vpn and buy it there i think we've sold like two copies in argentina which is wild does our team manually set the localized prices for some of them yeah for the for the localizations that we do which is brazilian portuguese russian french spanish and japanese those ones we manually set them because i want to make sure that they're correct and i talk to people that are in those areas and i pay attention to the economics of that stuff and when you set it steam automatically starts doing the converted price automatically from there so i don't have to worry about fluctuating prices because steam automatically handles that for you once you set this value you're done basically they handle everything for you afterwards which is great it's really fantastic and they can you know they can do all this automatically for you as well if you don't want to touch any of it they do it for you if you don't want to touch it and you set it for free to a single country i don't know we're trying to find that out right now actually we're trying to find that out we'll we'll figure it out i'm hoping to find out um i've got like some some feelers at the steam to see if we can do that but yeah so with argentina people like oh man this price is there people are going to vpn over steam will let you do that if you switch if you try to vpn over it's actually based on where your payment processor is so you can't just vpn around it basically and if you do switch your payment processor around a whole bunch steam will eventually ban your account and then you lose all your steam games so people don't want to do that they don't do it and i know they don't do it because we've sold about 26 000 copies of heartbound there's about a hundred thousand wishlists and i think we sold two copies in argentina ever which is to me is pretty funny you know like the cheapest price on there we've only ever sold two copies so not really an issue ah but yeah with all that in mind man you have everything you need to make games then and it's all on the website develop.games and there's no ads on here the only thing that there is is me at the bottom waving it i'm there a lot just many hundreds of thousands of layers of me going back into the into the infinite behind my website yeah that's it that's what it is when i put ads because making games and seeing ads for that stuff up here just feels gross to me making games is hard enough i don't want to put a bunch of stupid ads on here i don't want to monetize this in a way that is gross i don't want to put a paywall in front of it i don't want to do any of that stuff it's gross dude it's gross you know what about game revenue taxation what about game revenue taxation does steam take care of all of that steam handles so what i end up getting is a royalty check right so royalty check from the sales of the game steam handles other stuff like that and all that other things like i don't have to deal with any of that i just have to pay the federal government and my state if we had state income tax which we don't washington hey indie state it's a good day good state to be but yeah steen takes care of all the other stuff i just have to pay federal taxes on income tax that's it that's all i have to do which is nice and then i my tax man does it so i don't have to look at it because it's scary is that viking blonde don't let thor fool you making games is dead easy just push the make game button game maker yeah dude just press make game and you're done and it's it's over you don't have to do anything else no international considerations no um when you're launching on steam it launches internationally already so like we sell copies of heartbound in japan for instance and steam handles all of that stuff for it which is really nice for you you know as an indie dev nothing could be more powerful than that i think effectively steam is probably the best publisher that exists right now and it makes it really easy as an indie dev and i think the buy-in is like 100 bucks in total and if you put your game out on gamejolt for instance like gamejolt is really good for launching like demos it's really fantastic for that look how nice the page looks make a sick looking page on here this is the one for heartbound and you can make this stuff look really cool and you can put your demo up here and people can go and support you and when they do support you if you're streaming on twitch and you've got stuff up on gamejolt and you do all this kind of thing you can take that money and then go put your game up on steam and then the ball starts rolling because then you have a base camp you have a place to put builds you have a place to interact with your community you have a place to have a sold game and that's something that's phenomenal it's something that you just can't really get anywhere else to the same degree and you guys are talking about epic storage tools do they compare to all the stuff steam does epic loses right out the outset even just with one feature and that's the steam key the moment that you say steam key epic games loses in comparison unfortunately and it's just because the steam key can be sold anywhere for free as an indie nothing beats that that is phenomenal oh god you found the channel what's up hi yeah it's pirate software slash pirate software it's me hello yeah so like i think as we wrap this up we've got about four minutes left i think the one thing that i want to impose on every single one of you is don't wait to make games you're not too old to make them you're not too young to make them i waited most of my life in aaa like seven years in aaa before i realized that i could just go home and make indie games and that nothing was stopping me you have access to all of human knowledge on the internet and you can do this you can absolutely do this and we have a really pretty looking game right now if we go and look up heartbound right now you can see this what we've made now looks just great right we've got this cool trailer and all this cool stuff and all these nice cutscenes and everything that we have on here it looks fantastic but it didn't always look that way let me go pull this up real fast look where is it i'm gonna show you something the screen's gonna go black for a second don't worry about it it'll be fine this what you're about to see is horrifying this is what hardband looks like today with all these animations and all these different cutscenes all this different stuff that we have here right this is what it looked like originally let me pull this up this was the first build of heartburn look at him he is a potato look at him my god every game looks like this in the beginning every game looks like this in the beginning i have 2d pixel art raytraced lighting in my game now this is what it started as you're gonna make it a game that looks like this at first and it's okay don't be down on yourself just make it better each day just make it better each day that's it you go make potato simulator dude make it i believe in you you can do this the rtx off exactly dude from all your games what be your monthly earnings from all my games monthly earnings i don't actually know i basically take all of my money that i make and i put it back into the studio everything i try to pay out to our artists and musician as much as i possibly can i don't make a huge amount of money i i used to make money i used to work for the federal government right like i was a hacker for the for the department of energy i was a big nerd but like if i wanted to keep making huge amounts of money i would have kept that job i want to enjoy myself i want to make games i want to make things that other people can enjoy and do this type of thing so that's what i do as long as i make enough money to pay my bills i don't care about anything else that's just kind of how i live if that makes sense it's kind of a weird one but yeah do you hack any nukes no and if i did i wouldn't be able to tell you yeah that's it dude that's the whole deal well it's been fun enjoy twitch fridge you guys are amazing thank you for being here goodbye everyone on the twitch fridge i think we actually have one minute left i'm just going to do this for a minute actually wait no my ferrets are all asleep unfortunate i was going to show you the ferrets they have a big cage over here they're quite quite a lot of ferrets but they're all sleeping inside of that hammock you can see it's like poor ferrets all sleeping it's not time for them to be awake anyway bye everyone goodbye you guys are amazing

Channel: Pirate Software

Views: 976,902

Keywords: Twitch, Game Making, Game Program, Game Development, Heartbound, Pirate Software, Game Programming, Game Art, Indie Game, Game Developer, Game Designer, Indie Development, Thor, Shaye, Stijn, Jason Thor Hall, Lore, Baron, Binder, Book, RPG, Role Playing Game, Game, Indie, Games, Gaming, Pixel Art, Pixel, Concept Art, Stream, Game Stream, Indie Games, GameDev, Music, Video Games, Breakfast, Champion, Champions of Breakfast, 💜💛, Positivity, Game Dev

Id: aMc-GKv5olA

Length: 44min 11sec (2651 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2022