My Game Dev Journey (40+ Games! | mIRC to Flash to Steam)

this video is made possible by my game bomber play seven awesome games and help support the channel get the steam game bundle at unity code monkey comm slash game bomb in this video I'm going to talk about my indie game developer journey how I got started making chat games 20 years ago then moved on to fly and eventually got to unity through all that I made over 40 games and learn a ton along the way which are now sharing in these videos let's begin [Music] hello and welcome I'm your code monkey and this channel is all about helping you learn how to make your own games with nf2 torrents made by a professional indie game developer so if you find the video helpful consider subscribing alright so here I will cover my entire game dev journey over these past 20 years how I got started making chat games then moved on to flash and finally to unity over all that time I've made over 40 games and more in the time this video took a real long time to put together with writing and editing so if you can please hit the like button and share it with a friend most of my CV games are included in the game bundle which you can pick up on the website this video is made possible thanks to these awesome supporters go to patreon.com/scishow to code monkey to get some perks and help keep the videos free for everyone my game dev journey started quite a very long time ago I've been making games using unity since 2012 before that I made games with flash since 2008 and before that I was experimenting with programming making all kinds of games since I was about 10 I started learning programming by modding Mirek which was a very nice and simple IRC chat client it was a great way to get started learning the basics of programming and logic it was mostly limited to text but the code was real and I found it fascinating to write code to tell machine what to do eventually I did a bunch of chat games like trivia hangman gets the number and so on so very simple stuff but it was enough to get me started on the idea of interactivity over time I was also interested in movies and animation so eventually I found my way into flash it was the best program to draw inanimate things it was frame by frame animation which is a very laborious way of animating but also extremely intuitive you just draw one frame then move the character a bit in the next frame and so on so as I was doing that it didn't take too long to see how I could also write code and flash so at that point my brain clicked and I realized that I could get the code and animations working together to create something amazing until then I had really just mostly made text-based games so the idea of adding some interactive visuals was insane I immediately started when they're thinking about all the amazing games that I could make the first flash version I tried was flash MX and I remember my parents buying me a great book about it I read the whole thing cover to cover and got better and better at writing code and merging it with visual and animations this was down back when I was a kid at around 1415 so I had no idea or any thought of turning this into a job I was just making cool stuff for fun so I kept doing things over time as my normal life went on so constantly learning and creating and in 2008 I randomly came across mochi ads this was an API that you could add to flash in order to play an ad before the start of the game and potentially make some money this was at the point where I started to think that maybe there was a possibility of making a job out of it so I went right for it learn all the basics really quickly learn all the various websites that existed and published my first game with the hope of making something out of it the end result was a game called freeway it's a very simple car avoiding game you have your car that you can move around the road is infinite in a straight line there are other cars that kept randomly spawned and there's a score being calculated so this was the first time that I made something that I could really call a game it had a complete albeit simple game design there were sound effects and music there were rules for winning and losing and player input in order to control the game so that's how I eventually got CERN a very simple very basic game but despite being simple it was still challenging to make since it was my first game now obviously ads are a notoriously difficult way to make money essentially you need millions of views in order to get a very basic decent amount so for that game it made something like 50 Cent's in the first few days that sounds like a meaningless amount but for me it meant that I had found a possible path as long as I got better at making games then the potential to turn it into a career was right there I just had to gain more experience and get a lot better so I just kept at it making many games one after the other all of them simple but all of them from start to finish I learned how to draw better in flash and managing animations I got better at ActionScript too and made more complex games later I moved to ActionScript 3 which is pretty similar to c-sharp simulator it helped me quickly gets hurt with unity I made driving games action games shooting strategy puzzle management and so on it was all about constant learning and experimentation so I kept at it and eventually started selling games as sponsorships and making a tiny bit more money as I got better over the course of five years I made roughly 35 games and learned a ton however it was still nowhere near enough to support a basic life at its highest I was making something like 300 bucks a month even while living in Portugal that's still a pretty low wage however it was a lot more than the 50 Cent's that I get for my first game but again still not enough then in July of 2012 team announced greenlight and at the time I didn't pay too much attention and just kept making flash games but it stayed in the back of my head so in December of that year after making a couple more games that still didn't get me minimum wage I started thinking of making a game to put on scene this was also when I started doing my research looking for how I could build a PC desktop game flash could technically do it but it wasn't really ideal so during my research that's when I found out about unity it ran on c-sharp which I had used for a bit and was very similar to ActionScript 3 it was capable of making bells for PC Mac and Linux it was used by a large community and it had a free version so with all that it instantly became my choice I download the unity started playing around with it and found it very capable and pre easy to use now before greenlight steam was a very closed off system essentially you had to know someone and have a top tier game to be able to even get a chance of getting on scene now the good thing about that system was if you did get on there you would essentially have guaranteed success and all the games on store had a very high quality bar the bad thing was that very few people could get in even if you had a very good game that would be perfect for a tiny niche so thankfully with green light it suddenly became possible to get on Steam and with all that I learned from making flash games for five years I grabbed that chance again flash games were a wonderful learning experience for me but not really profitable at its best I wasn't even getting anywhere near minimum wage so it was a great learning experience but in order to make it from free games with ads you really need millions of players whereas with a paid game you can get by if you just find a niche and make a game specifically for those players so I thought about what type of game I would like to make that would be played with a mouse a keyboard on a PC desktop one of the game series that I love this kid was swamped I love the tactics and the theme of cops versus robbers with a focus on trying to arrest people rather than just shoot everyone so when I thought of making playing mouse based it immediately came to my mind the goal was to make a 2d top-down SWAT game where you would control a group of officers and rest bad guys inside of a house however back then I was still very inexperienced so when making the AI for the SWAT guys to line up behind door kicked the door throw a flashbang in enter that complex scenario made me realize that I still didn't have anywhere near enough knowledge in order to be able to do that just yet and then I also came across a design problem that I had no idea two songs which is what led me to change direction the one thing that I love most about what games was going non-lethal and getting the bad guys to comply one of the ways to do that is to shoot them in the leg and sometimes they would comply after that however in a top-down perspective that's not really a possibility you can't really aim at different body parts so the issues with complex AI and the inability to target body parts caused me to reconsider the whole concept I still really like the top-down perspective so I wanted to keep that one of the unless flash games that I did that I really loved was Cobra team heart attack it was a top-down zombie shooter with lots of polish and lots of effects so that essentially made me think to switch from a SWAT game to a zombie game zombies have much simpler AI so that part would be solved and the characters would be completely controlled by the player without much need for some really complex ion so I got to work on that concept learning unity as I went along and six months later I had the very first version of what eventually became survivors work I still think it's a really great concept nowadays with controlling the survivors and making sure they are positioned in the right direction I really loved the field of view mechanic which by the way I did cover in a video on this channel but back then you also need the tons of votes in order to get through green one so when survivor squad was done the only place I could really sell it was still just on the website now the result of selling an obscure indie game in its own website is exactly as you would guess which is pretty close to zero copies that was quite a bummer I spent those six months giving it my own but suddenly I couldn't find the people that would enjoy the game but the greenlight page was still active and they were proving about a hundred games every two weeks so I started into math and realized that I would eventually get enough to get approved the people in the comments enjoy the concept and the game had a nice proportion of yes votes so I went back to work kept working and improving the game while the votes kept coming in every day eventually it was around October and when I finally got enough votes and the game was accepted onto steam I kept working on it and reading all the Steam documentation or to add the achievements and prepare the store page and everything else that was needed that was a ton of work and required me to learn a ton of these skills then finally in November 8 the game finally came out so the idea that sir nearly one year before finally came to pass I transitioned from making flash games with ads in order to making a premium steam game now thankfully the game actually sold quite well at launch especially when compared to my flash games which even when they are played by hundreds of thousands of people that's not really worth much money here with a couple of hundred copies I was already making a lot more than with any other flash game I had made for example my most successful flash game was game Corp it was played over 6 million times however that really only generated about a thousand dollars so robbery squad on the other hand made more than that on its first day on seam alone thanks to just selling a handful of copies back then Steam was still in transition so a lot of people were still very interested in every game that was coming out so a game which seemed to have some unique mechanics appeal to quite a bit of people however there was also a lot of criticism people thought the mechanics were unique but the execution wasn't like me in many places and that is very much accurate I managed to apply all of my knowledge at the time and build a full game but I still had a lot more to learn looking back I still very much like the mechanics but I think it's clearly made by someone inexperienced so since it's only one with lunch after thinking of what to do next I eventually decided on a sequel I still like the core mechanics and I wanted to improve everything in every way so I got to work on what eventually became survivor squad content I worked on it for a lot longer than survivor squad in total around 18 months and I even experimented with something new which was early access the game launched in early access and suddenly despite being better in every way it did not do well at all sales were about 10% of what several squads owned I was still committed to making the game great so during early access there were updates every single week for six months I was on there suddenly for every update that I made it wasn't like screaming to avoid despite my dedication and hard work I never really managed to get the word out I kept working on it hoping that if I just focus on making the game great you would eventually sell on the phone release however that was not the case before release came and not much really changed copy sold were still very near zero it really hurts me even now because I didn't love the game it has the same unique core mechanics of survivor squad once being better in every way I think the game as a whole is awesome and I think it's one with potential the map editor alone is like a programming language it has so many capabilities it's really insane I still will like the game to this day but suddenly I could not find enough people who share in that desire so this was my very first taste of a pre-series failing I worked like crazy for 18 months and result was almost nothing that is the danger of being an indie developer if you don't sound copies you don't make any money and suddenly you can't afford rent there's no inherent safety net no guaranteed minimum paycheck if he sound zero you get zero regardless of how many hours or how hard you worked thankfully I've always been pretty good with money so I didn't overspend when I found success with survivor squad which led me endure the financial failure that was gone once however I also certainly didn't have enough in order to handle another 18-month failure so after that I started to think really hard about what the next best approach would be the main limitation was time I couldn't afford even just one year but obviously I also didn't want to make any trash so I wanted the game that was short sweet and cheap in thinking about all the various options eventually I looked at my flash games and one of them had become massively successful over time game Corp I then had over six million place that's a very insane number however again most of those views came from a version that was onto a sponsor so on all those six millions plays that I made in other websites with ads amounted to a total of just under $1000 but the design of the game was very solid and a lot of people really liked it so it seemed like the perfect fit for something short and sweet I decided to remake game corpse to work as a full desktop PC game and add a bunch of improvements for a nice cheap price over three months I completely remade the game from scratch in unity and added a ton improvements and fixes thanks to all the comments on a flash version I decided to rename it to game Corp DX for the deluxe version since the quarter the game was mostly the same as the free version I knew I couldn't charge much so I came up with a price of just three dollars so it's more than free but it's the only very low amount based on how many people play the free flash version I was hoping there would be enough people who would be able to pay such a small amount and that would make the game profitable now thankfully I was actually right the core of the game was very solid and all of the improvements I made and the benefits of running it in unity instead of flash were very noticeable DM sold very well at launch and as a reviews kept being very positive it kept selling well for quite a while so this game that took roughly 3 months to make quickly became more profitable than countless which took 18 months to make again it still saddens me that confluence did so badly but that's what being an indie dev is all about sometimes you make it and sometimes you don't now despite the very low price on the game there were actually a bunch of negative reviews essentially saying that the game is great but don't buy it and play the free version instead these always struck me as very odd so here are some people saying they generally liked the game but also they want to make sure that developer doesn't get anything at all so that seems very odd to me but anyway it's not the topic for another time since game Corp did so well I thought afterwards I should stick with the same genre I didn't want to do something completely different and risk getting the set failure that ended up being Conklin's so I thought about what are the themes I could explore in detail in genre I explored a bunch of concepts and the one that I real landed on was some sort of medieval army supplier so you would get a contract saying we need a hundred wooden swords then he would build a Pure Land with factories and workers in order to make the swords and deliver them as I worked on it I found that the system I devised for building the final items was great and I kept its rating on as I went along it became clear that the indeed evil army supplier theme was being very limiting I could only design items that fit the Moon so swords shields armors and so on after working on it for quite a while I dropped that theme and just embrace the blueprints so now it would simply make these blueprints that they accessible items and create a complex item without the medieval theme I could then explore a lot more items the result of that typing and adapting to where the design worked eventually turn into print tycoon now in terms of sales the game did quite alright not bad around but certainly not a hit the game was extremely appealing to a very very specific audience does about it mostly really liked it but the concept screenshots and the trailer only attracted some very specific people so it was successful but only within its niche there were also several reviews regarding complexity so with regards to game Corp I got a bunch of reviews saying that the game was way too simplistic and any more depth and then with blueprint racoon I got lots of reviews saying it was way too complex I need to be a lot more simple so that really just goes to show you that you can never build the perfect game some people like more simple games some people like more complex games you have to accept that not everyone won't like your games because each person is looking for a different experience then after a blueprint tycoon came one of my most ambitious games with really interesting results with the success of game Corp and blueprint I cup eluded the fact that I don't really spend much money meant that I was feeling like I could attempt something a bit more risky I've never really played much on consoles as a kid most of my time was done on my computer the only console I had was a PlayStation so I never really had that connection that some people have specifically with consoles but still as a game developer the idea of having my games working on a professional console does sound very nice so when I was thinking of what to do next I started to really focus on making something that could eventually work on a console so that means making a game based on a gamepad which pretty much removes a Coon's as a possibility so the genre that makes most sense on a gamepad is action so I started prototyping some character movement but I didn't want to make just a simple action game I wanted it to be very fast that made me experience with various dashes which have me thinking about making some abilities then I also didn't just want a generic action game I knew I wanted something original to make the game stand out so that's when I started thinking about action mixed with strategy one of my favorite games is modern plate so that became my guiding idea make a game with nice and fast-paced action with dashes and skills plus the ability to rate castles and control your army that way it would be unique and fun controllable with a gamepad the end result of all that is hyper Knights now in terms of the result Hyper night was an interesting one in total development time it was around 14 months and spent six months in early acces i also invested heavily into professional artwork in order to make the game really stand out so it took quite a while to make and i invested a pre large amount onto it in terms of reviews it was the best game that I've done the review score stayed above 90 for a very long time however in terms of sales it was simply decent not terrible but not great given how much time I spent and how much money I invested the end result was just a very basic wage that really saddened me quite a bit I really liked the game and the reviews all seem to agree however despite that the sales never really came since those sales never came it caused me to again focus on what went wrong and how I can improve for the future so that idea of making a game and later porting it to consoles still hasn't come to pass I'd certainly like to but spending the time to focus on that potentially risky endeavor is really something I can't afford at the moment Harbor nights and it's somewhat family or despite being a great game is what caused me to really look long and hard at how steam works why is it that a game with positive reviews and low price doesn't seem to find an audience since then I've spent countless hours reading everything I can find regarding steam and in the game marketing analyzing games that make it and games that don't and through that I've managed to learn quite a ton I've made two videos covering what you should do before and after release on Steam in order to get the best chances for success so check those out if you're in the process of watching your own game or just want to know more about releasing unseen so I learned a ton and also did some experiments now one of the reasons why hopper Nights wasn't financially successful was just because of how much I spent on it both in time and money so my next game would be an experiment into code reusability and an interesting game with no marketing behind it the end result was hyper nice balance it's an interesting game it's clearly just an experiment it's more of a sandbox in a clearly-defined game it's great if you're a programmer and like building characters in AI but that's a very very small niche so with that game and learned that even if you manage to spend very little making the game if it's not well received and there's no marketing then you won't still fail to make a profit so with that in mind I started to focus really hard on what game could I make that would have an easy time with marketing also my most successful games were tycoons so I should stick with that a big part of marketing is really just having a very compelling concept now for a Tycoon game the theme is very integral to how it works now the reason you play a prison architect is because of the uniqueness of managing a prison unless you go for the more generic tycoons like building a city then there isn't much direct competition I obviously cannot hope to compete with Sim City or cities skylines so I have to go with the unique route and with that I came up with a very unique and interesting concept a tycoon with ninja account ninja Tycoon the name itself is already a lot more marketable than hyper Knights patterns and the concept sounds interesting and unique so that was part of the plan make it a unique and interesting concept and name part two is based on my research of steam and that wish lists and first week sales were very important so I started spreading the word as soon as I could in order to gather some wish list and part three of the plan was to make it short and sweet I didn't want to spend one year which would make it very much more difficult in order to be profitable without that the game launched and it was actually pretty nice success even how long in how little I spent on the wish list helped ensure a decent number of sales on the first week and it got a nicely through rate whenever the game showed up however the negative thing of spending such a small amount of time working on the game is that it is obviously very limited and very small the experience is great and interesting but it don't last for a couple of hours so what that really means that the experiment was a success I know understood better what makes a game sell and all I needed was to apply that to a game with a lot more content so once again I started prototyping some ideas and thinking heavenly about how marketable they were I wanted to stick with tycoon since that's the genre that I found most success in and one that is also very much appealing to a decently sized niche audience of the Steam audience as I worked on various prototype ideas I started playing around with the idea of Rinas and AI so essentially having some units fight each other at the same time I kept thinking about marketing barren ground games were a huge thing and they still are so when the prototype with the arena start to take shape it became quite clear I was going to make a tycoon game like roam across the tycoon but we shooting arenas and I was gonna battleground tycoon so I kept working on it and in December of 2018 after six months of development the game was released into early access again I focused on applying everything I've learned so I set up the coming soon page as soon as possible and start gathering wish lists the game had almost 10,000 wish lists when launched and that home didn't have a nice healthy lunch then in several months in early access I did that ton of updates improved lots of areas and continued to work on it I've also done several videos covering systems from the game one of the reasons I started this channel was to make tutorials that had an actual practical application in Saturday's theory so in those videos I cover a pretty much the exact same code that I use on the game something really great you can do is go play the game on Steam see it all in action then come back here and check out videos to see how the underlying systems work then one September the game finally came out of early access and it has done quite well I covered all the stats in detail in another video so check the link in the description if you haven't seen it yet in there I cover how much game sold and how it went so if you're keeping count at home that was a ton of random games and random programming over my childhood which gave me a nice knowledge base then 35 flash games which gave me a lot of game dev learning experience but never really any serious income and then eight Steam games too that found hard three that did well and three that did great so as you can see this has been a very long journey with lots of ups and downs over many years overall I'm pleased with where I'm at right now and look forward to the future but always constantly I'm learning on how to do better this is a really tough business and in order to make it it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of persistence so if you want to follow along with this path then do keep that in mind by all means do follow your dream but be aware of what it takes to get there I made a video where I covered seven clear steps to become a game developer so check that out if you're looking for more specific practical advice this video took a really long time to make so if you can please hit the like button and share it with a friend you can also pick up the game panel on the website and play the games for yourself alright so I hope you enjoyed this video which has been quite different from my usual step-by-step tutorials if you're new here consider subscribing and check out all the videos I've done which will help you build whatever you want in ent post any questions you have months and I'll do my best answer them this video is made possible thanks to these awesome supporters go to patreon.com/scishow to code monkey to get some perks and help keep the videos free for everyone alright I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Code Monkey

Views: 258,034

Keywords: game dev journey, unity game dev, game creation journey, indie game development, game corp, battle royale tycoon, code monkey, learn game dev, indie games, indie game devlog, brackeys, unity tutorial, unity game tutorial, unity tutorial for beginners, unity 2d tutorial, unity 3d, unity, game design, game development, game dev, game development unity, unity 2d, unity 3d tutorial, programming, coding, c#, software development, unreal engine, devlog, game devlog, devlog unity

Id: 0zscPf_U1VY

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 08 2020