My 10 YEAR Indie Game Development Journey

exactly 10 years ago to the day I uploaded my first video on this YouTube channel which was a little devil video about my first ever game project that I just started a few months earlier a decade later and I'm still making games and devlog videos so to celebrate this Milestone I want to take you through that 10-year Journey from that very first game that I made as a hobby in my University dorm room to releasing my first commercial game and becoming a full-time indie game developer to start the story though we need to go back a little further than 10 years to the end of 2012 where I just had the idea for a game that at the time I thought was such a good idea that I needed to learn how to make games just so that I could make that game I was 20 years old at the time and I just finished my second year at University where I was studying computer science so I knew the basics of programming but apart from the coursework they set us I never really attempted any big projects before so a bit of enthusiasm about my new idea for a game I Googled how to make an MMO because that's the type of game that I wanted to make and the first results all said don't it's too ambitious you can't make an MMO on your own so I scrolled past them and I then found results saying that you should use an engine but I didn't really know what that meant so I scrolled past them as well until finally I came across a YouTube tutorial series about programming 3D graphics with Java and I clicked on that because Java was basically the only programming language I had any experience with over the next few weeks I followed that tutorial series all the way through from start to finish and I then felt that I was ready to start making my dream game [Music] soccer one was the name of the MMO that I wanted to make it stood for someone come up with a name but no one ever did so I ended up just sticking with that at the time I was taking a year out from University and had just started a full-time internship which I was going to be doing for a year so I worked on the game mostly in the evenings and at the weekends pretty quickly I found that I really enjoyed game development and I really believed in the game that I was making and I actually got quite obsessed and spent pretty much all of my free time and some of my work time programming the game and when I wasn't working on it I was always thinking about what feature I'd be implementing next at the start I was still learning a lot from YouTube and while doing that I came across some other developers showing their games in videos called devlogs there weren't very many arounds back then and they didn't get many views but they caught my interest and I thought that I would have a go at making my own so I started recording some short three minute-ish videos each week where I would just record footage of the game and talk pretty much unedited about the progress that I'd made during that week I didn't actually release the videos right away I waited until I had about 15 of them stored up and I then uploaded all of them in quick succession in summer 2013. I think I thought it would give my channel more of a boost at the start but I don't think it worked back then those initial videos were only getting something like 50 views if I was lucky the first months were all very technical because there was so much to learn about rendering 3D Graphics but I started implementing some basic gameplay around the end of 2013 which is more than a year after starting the project my YouTube videos had also started to pick up a few viewers and going into 2014 I'd made 22 devlog videos so far and had around 220 subscribers which I was very proud of so that it for this week and for this year thank you guys so much for watching my videos and for subscribing I'm sorry I'm Sorry by now I was back doing my final year at University but I spent most of my time definitely more than I should working on sock one and I was starting to make past progress on the gameplay including adding things like shops combats and mobs and I even had it all working in multiplayer as the year went on it was getting to the point where I had to start thinking about what I was going to do after University and I was pretty keen on trying to do game development full time my parents were less keen on the idea understandably so and looking back it was rather ambitious I've always had in my memory that I had quite a large number of subscribers at the time so it made sense that I might be able to manage full time somehow but checking my analytics I actually only had around 900 subscribers at the time that didn't phase me I absolutely wanted to do it I had some savings from that year's internship that I did and I worked out that if I lived very frugally I could probably survive for around 10 to 12 months before I'd need to get a job around that time kickstarters were all the rage in fact the team who had made the devlog videos that it inspired me to get started with YouTube had also recently done a successful Kickstarter campaign and they only had a bit over a thousand subscribers on YouTube so I made a plan I would work on sock one and my YouTube channel flat out full time for as long as my money would last and I'd then do a Kickstarter campaign to hopefully keep the Game Dev dream alive one year to get everything ready for the kickstarter it was time to get to work foreign after next week I'm going to be working pretty much full time on this game and so these videos will hopefully be a weekly feature once again I'm also going to be starting so in summer 2014 I graduated from University I did manage to get my degree despite spending most of the last year working on my game and I guess I officially went full time as an indie game developer I moved into a small flat in Watford this was my workstation here and I got to work trying to make my dream a reality for the next year I really did work harder than ever not just on soccer one but also on the YouTube channel as well I was making weekly devlog videos I also started a tutorial series which I worked on at the weekends I even began a new devlog series which I called behind the scenes devlogs which is where I would basically Vlog every day showing what I was working on how I was implementing things and just generally what life was like as an indie game developer was also progressing faster than ever and starting to look and play like an actual game halfway through the year I also created a dev kit for the game which I made public and I started to get a lot of community submissions of content for the game lots of models items and animations and such and it became a really cool Community project short bow and there are also loads more weapons that you guys have made that I can't show in the game quite yet because they still need texturing or icons but I should be able to show them in the game next week finally there are even some new sounds all in all it was a really crazy year I'd made over 100 videos in total that year which today is still almost a third of all of the videos on my channel my YouTube channel had grown to 8 000 subscribers the game that I dreamed of was coming to life and I'd got to live my dream of being a full-time indie game developer for a bit but the year of preparation was coming to a close my money was running out and the kickstarter campaign was fast approaching I'd had my taste of full-time game development and I really didn't want to give it up so the kickstarter meant everything to me and at the time it really seemed like it was that or nothing if the kickstarter failed it would all be over foreign campaign is now just two weeks away and I'm currently just trying to make the game world look as nice as possible video so there are just four more days until the kickstarts now um obviously which I did manage to do and I submitted it to Kickstarter and it has now been approved so everything is now ready to go for Friday so today is the big day the kickstarter starts this evening at 7 30 and say on September 4th 2015 after about three years of development on suck one I launched the kickstarter campaign to try and get funding for the continuation of the project and well I'll let past me tell you how it went now 20 past one in the morning um it's been a really long evening uh but uh at the moment it doesn't look very good unfortunately um it's been doing that as well um but unfortunately it just doesn't look like it's going our way um as you can see it still hasn't reached I'm sure you've all noticed by now the kickstarter has sadly not been doing very well and I think it's safe to say at this stage that it is unfortunately not going to work out this time unless there's some sort of crazy it didn't go very well and I was devastated it seemed like the end of the journey at the time sock one was game development for me it was the reason I started Game Dev I'd learned everything I Knew by making suck one I poured my hearts and soul into it for three years straight and then just like that it was over it's kind of sad watching that video back I remember just how disappointed I was at the time I really thought it was the end but actually it turned out to be only the beginning foreign grudgingly started looking for a full-time job on account of me not having any money but I didn't want to stop game development just yet so I began work on my second game aquinonex the idea was this was going to be a very small project something I could easily work on in my spare time while also having a job for that reason I switched to a low poly art style so I wouldn't have to worry so much about making models and textures which had always been a bit of a weakness of mine and I was aiming to finish the game in a few months spoilers it ended up taking three years around the same time I started using patreon which a few people had suggested after the kickstarter failed My Hope was that I might be able to make enough income through YouTube and patreon so that I'd only need to get a part-time job leaving more time for game development but thanks to the incredible support of some of my subscribers it ended up making just about enough for me to continue full-time game development and so began the aquilinoxiers hello everyone and welcome to this week's game development log video diary and this week I'm going to be introducing my new project equilinox so what you're saying the new game aquilinox was a nature simulation game and I started work on it with the plan that it would be something like a city Builder game but for nature so instead of creating and managing cities you would be creating and managing ecosystems with the aim of spreading nature over the entire world development of the game was fairly smooth it just took a lot longer than expected I did go a bit off track somewhere in the middle of development I think the vision got lost for a while and I had some scoping issues but I think I managed to pull it all back together towards the end of the project there was actually a time in the middle of development where I was seriously considering giving up on the project it had already taken way longer than expected and the end was still nowhere in sight so my motivation had really started to dip but thankfully mostly because of the support I was getting on the devlog videos I decided to stick it out and keep going I kept making the devlog videos and tutorials throughout those years as well and I started to prefer the behind the scene Vlog style devlogs that I've mostly stuck with ever since the channel grew quite a lot in this time I think because of the popularity of those behind the scenes videos and it went from 8 000 subscribers to around 80 000 subscribers over the three years in May 2018 I was getting very close to finishing a game for the first time ever aquinonex was almost done and I had just put out a video announcing the release date for aquilinox which was going to be Friday the 8th of June it looked like I was finally going to be able to achieve my dream of releasing a game hey everyone and welcome to this quick update video and unfortunately I don't have very good news for you this week I'm really really sorry it wasn't to be not yet at least just two days after announcing the release date I went to the dentist because I had a sore on my tongue and it turned out to be a little bit of cancer so obviously I suddenly had very different worries the release had to be postponed and I had an operation and spent some time in hospital the good news though is that it all went very well and I've been cancer-free ever since I got back to work in July but I took it a bit slow to start with and I didn't announce a new release date until October in the end these extra few months of development were actually really useful and allowed me to polish up the game very nicely so while I obviously can't say that I'm happy about what happened it did at least have one benefit aquinonex was now more polished than ever and I was ready to have another shot at leasing it [Music] on the 23rd of November 2018 over six years since they first started game development I was finally ready to release aquinonex the first game I'd ever finished I was really nervous leading up to the release a lot of the time I was worried that I'd made a terrible game and that people were just going to be very disappointed with me I mean it's a game where you literally watch grass grow but in the last few weeks before launch I felt like it had all come together quite nicely I finally been able to see the game as a finished product the trailer was done the website was done all the preparations were done so I was feeling quietly satisfied a bit optimistic and ready for launch the release date itself was a bit of an anti-climax in the end I released Aquin and ox or at least I tried to but there was a bug with steam and the button to buy the game didn't show up on the store page so no one could actually get a quillinox after a few hours a handful of people managed to find a workaround so about 300 people did manage to get the game on launch day and they seem to like it and weren't coming across any game breaking bugs so it ended up being a bit like a test release and actually helped me to feel quite a bit more confident about the game a full two days later steam got back to me saying sorry and that they'd fix the bug so finally finally aquinenox was released and it was crazy the game did way better than I expected not that I really knew what to expect because I'd never released a game before um based on the number of wish lists I was roughly estimating 5 000 to 10 000 sales but it reached 10 000 copies sold in the first couple of weeks people seem to be genuinely enjoying the game it had 97 positive ratings on Steam at the time and it was even trending on Steam for a bit and then because of that quite a few YouTubers and streamers picked up the game which helped it to get even more publicity a couple of the people who made videos about aquinonex were actually YouTubers who I'd already been following and watching for years so that was a bit of a highlight for me when it happened it was very cool and kind of surreal hearing them talking about my game suddenly it's something I'd always imagined and hoped might happen someday but now finally it was actually happening hey everybody and welcome to let's look at equilornox which is uh a late candidate for like Feel Good video game story of the year or maybe just feel good they spent a few weeks after launch were pretty mad I was trying to fix any bugs that arose as quickly as possible and I was working through loads and loads of suggestions and feedback after a while they things began to calm down and I then started to enjoy what was probably the best time in my career so far I finally felt like a real game developer because I'd actually released a game the launch had been pretty successful and I knew that I was going to be able to continue doing full-time game development so in that sense my target was already met so I was able to relax a bit and just enjoy being a game developer working on a game that people were actually playing implementing their suggestions and working on all of the fun features that I didn't think were important enough to work on before release my YouTube channel also hit a hundred thousand subscribers during that time so it was all going very well [Applause] in summer 2019 about eight months after the release I decided it was time to move on from aquilinox I took some time off that summer to recharge and in August I moved to a new flat in Hamburg so it felt like the perfect time for a fresh start and I'm really excited about it I've been planning this project all summer I think it's gonna be really enjoyable and I just can't wait to get started next week the new game was going to be a low poly City Builder and again I was planning to make my own engine I'd learned so much from working on aquinonex and there was a lot about the equivalox engine that I felt that I could do better so I started completely from scratch and I built an improved engine from the ground up including a GUI Library which was probably one of the most complex things I'd ever worked on and I still use it to this day while I show you footage of how the city Builder game progressed I thought I should quickly talk about why I always choose to make my own engine instead of just using a pre-made engine like Unity initially when I first started game development as I've already talked about I did not know what I was doing I had no experience I didn't have a clue what a game engine was or how difficult it was to make one so I just kind of accidentally stumbled into working without an engine by the time I started the city Builder game though I had had almost seven years of experience of making my own engine and zero experience of using an engine like Unity so in many ways I didn't even really think about it it was just the obvious choice it was what I've always done the main reason though is I just really enjoy it at the time I was really looking forward to having another go writing all of the rendering code and optimizing all of the parts that I felt I hadn't done so well in aquinonex and I still feel this way I just find it really satisfying doing everything from scratch I love knowing how every little bit of the game works and having control over how every single byte of every vertex in the model is stored in memory making my own engine is what got me so hooked on game development back when I first started for anyone who's not specifically interested in engine development though and doesn't want to spend years learning about it I would always recommend just using an engine like Unity it's definitely a quicker and more efficient route to take but less enjoyable for me at least anyway having said all that I worked on the city builder for a couple of years and it was a bit of a struggle it was rather more ambitious than I had initially thought I had to tackle quite a lot of complex topics that I'd never done before like pathfinding the road Network and traffic and an activity system and I found it all pretty slow going it also wasn't helped by the fact that I had some more health issues around that time just three months after starting the project I had a collapsed lung and I ended up having three long operations over the next half a year so I was struggling a lot with motivation the YouTube channel suffered a bit as well in 2020 I only managed to make four videos and in 2021 I only made five so towards the end of 2021 I came to the conclusion that I needed to switch to a smaller project clearly the city Builder was a bit above what I could handle at the time and even though I put a lot of work into it already I felt like I'd barely scratched the surface of the project progress was desperately slow and I could feel myself slowly falling out of love with game development so on January the 1st 2022 I began work on yet another game I didn't tell anyone at first because I wanted to make sure that this new project was definitely what I wanted to do but by the end of January I was very sure it was the right move and I released the first devlog video about it the new game was called homegrown and it's the game I'm still working on today it's a casual farming game where you grow vegetables in your garden sell them at the local market and use the money to improve your farm and upgrade your tools and equipment so that you can Farm progressively faster and more efficiently I used the same engine that I made for the city Builder game and to start with i reused a lot of the models from aquilinox but after six months of the project I overhauled the engine and I switched to some improved graphics with new models better lighting and a terrain generation system that generates meshes with rounded edges and Corners which I'm very happy with the project has been so enjoyable so far it's exactly the right level of difficulty for me not too difficult that I get stuck but enough of a challenge to keep me interested it's got a really simple core game Loop but almost endless possibilities for features that could be built on top of that so it's extremely fun to work on as a game developer I think it's probably the most I've enjoyed working on a project since soccer one so I'm very confident that this game will get finished and released and that will hopefully be sometime next year and that brings us up to the present day 10 years of YouTube and I'm still here making develop videos and quite fitting the the most recent devlog video I made was a good old-fashioned update video the same kind of style as my very first videos although hopefully the quality has improved slightly since then um God that looks really bad on here I'm really sorry for that uh I'll try and improve the quality for the next video so there we go 10 full years of documenting my game development Journey on YouTube I want to say a huge thank you to all of you for watching my videos and supporting me over the years through all of the good times and the bad and a special thank you to Jamal Green for making the music that you hear in aquilinos and most of the devlog videos thank you to Constantine for making the aquinenox website thanks to Josh for making the soccer on website thank you to everyone who submitted models for soccer one if any of you are still watching and a massive massive thank you to everyone who supported me on patreon over the years for essentially making this whole journey possible so thank you all very much for watching I hope you enjoyed it I'll be back with the usual devlogs next week and I think it's only fitting if 21 year old me says the final words but yeah that is all for this week so do have a look next week for the next video um thank you very much for watching this and have a nice day

Channel: ThinMatrix

Views: 544,899

Keywords: gamedev, 10 years, thinmatrix, indie game, game development, socuwan, equilinox, homegrown, game, devlog

Id: FStOT4pP2tc

Length: 23min 57sec (1437 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023