Roadmap to becoming a gamedev in 2024

as a new year is coming upon us maybe one of your New Year's resolutions is that finally for Reales this time this year is going to be the year that you're going to release your own first game or maybe your second one I don't care the first one that will be commercially viable at least so in this video this is going to be your road map for the next coming year of how are you actually going to become a game developer now I'm going to be honest I've made a video on this channel before of doing it in 3 months but that is not realistic that is not for for everybody this goal one year even if you're doing this just a few hours a week you should be able to release something by the end of the year and have a game that you can look back upon and be filled with pride so if this is the first video you're watching on this channel we're game developers we've made our first game Forge industry before that we made all of the numbers public for we're working on our next game and we want to inspire as many other game developers as possible to get onto the world of game development because it's just really fun and if you look at it with a business point of view you can actually still make some money out of it now I'm not going to sell you that you're going to get $150,000 in Publisher funding for your first game or it's going to sell 5 million units like stard you valid it those aren't like the most realistic but what I can give you is a month-by-month blueprint of what are the things you need to do what are the steps you need to take and what makes a good game how do you Market it how do you build it how do you prototype it so this video is going to be a bit of a hyper mesh of all of the different videos we've made on our channel before if you want to go into deeper detail about something I mentioned in this video there's probably a video related to it that I've made before I'll put a card up there for whatever video that is going to be but let's just get into it there are a few ground rules that I want to set though the first is that this is going to focus on PC games more specifically steam because that is what I know best I know there are a lot of Indie developers out there as well who want to make mobile games I have my thoughts upon that but in reality I don't have enough experience with it and I feel like mobile is a very Cutthroat Market much hard to Market and steam and also much harder to get big Commercial Success on it so if you're planning on making a mobile game you can look at these steps but they won't fully apply to you the second thing is that if you're going into this as a full-time game developer already like we are this is going to be a very slow timeline I think you can then compress this video into about 6 to 9 months because you'll just have so much more time and focus than someone who does this on the side a few hours a week probably not that many of you who are watching this video do have the opportunity to work full-time on your game but if you do it's going to be a game changer in terms of how much work you can actually get done and then another thing if you can do this not solo I know most of the people who watch our channel are Solo developers solo development is once again going to slow you down a lot yes you have full creative control you know everything about your game inside and out but there's only so many hours in a week and by having one or two friends maybe who are somewhat interested or would have some skills if you just band up together you can already do infinitely more than if you just go at it solo you'll have someone to hold you accountable you'll have someone who you can share the load with and when you go through that value of Despair which is a very common stage in game development you won't be the only one going through it so if you can find a friend who maybe also at one point in life was like hey we should make a game at some point send them this video or just be like hey yo you want to make a game together let's do it and it's going to help you a lot next year and then lastly I'm not going to talk about specific engines specific languages specific tools because they don't matter use whatever you want take Unity take unreal take K do just don't take custom engines please it know you like it but it's going to slow you down way too much to actually release something in a year same with tools I don't care if you use Maya or if you use blender or if you use a Sprite doesn't matter depends on your game depends on your skill set but everything can make a good game don't let an engine or another tool limit your belief of how good your game's going to be this was a bit of a long intro but let's actually get into the meat of this video so January the first month what are we going to do we're going to plan our game what I want you to do is to write down your game ideas you probably have some floating around in your head otherwise I don't think you would be watching this video if you didn't know what you wanted to make usually you have like some dream of a game that maybe you played back when you were younger and it like never has been remade again or maybe it's this IDE idea that you're like hey this could be really cool really Innovative where you like smash two genres together that you haven't seen done before doesn't matter what it is what your game genres are what your settings are what I want you to do is in the description down below there's going to be a template for a onepage game design document I've made a video about it here as well where you're going to write down the core parts of your game game design documents can be a very controversial topic because they can be very big very bloated and very hard to update I don't think you should do that but a one pager is a really good solution to get a quick overview of what's the game about what would my main mechanics be why should people care about it and like what is the setting going to be what is the price that I want to aim at give some visual inspiration and just get an idea more visual especially if you're working in teams this is crucial of this is the vision I want to go to your main goal for the entire month now should basically just be do research about okay I have these possible game ideas they're in these genres let me play some of these similar games to just figure out how does the genre work how deep do these games go what's something special about them that maybe you can't see at the start and you're going to commit by the end of this month on one game idea if you have more than three game ideas or more than however many write all of them down but don't let them keep floating around in your head pick a single game idea and this is going to be your baby for the next 12 months it's going to be a long pregnancy but you really need to be able to focus on just one so many developers go wrong in infinitely prototyping seven different games and then just never releasing something now one Pitfall I see often as well is that you're not real with yourself you're not realistic about what you can do you have to remember I think for most of the people watching this this will be their first game that is maybe like not a game Jam or not a prototype that is never finished do you know how artistic you are and how good at programming you are and like at marketing or whatever if you are really good at Art but if you're horrible at programming then you probably shouldn't make a game that is very deep with complex mechanics and a lot of programming if you're great at programming but you're horrible at Art then you probably can't really make a cozy cute city-builder game but instead you should go for something that's very deep like what we did with Forge industry and just focus on the mechanics first like make it go very deep the game but maybe not the prettiest and I can hear you say already but what if I'm bad at programming and I'm bad at Art well then just focus on on making something that is fast based and fun those should be your main goals a really good example of a game that you can sell still even if you have not that many skills is something like I am Jesus Christ look at the game I'll put some footage of the game up right now it looks janky as hell it probably is janky as hell but this game is probably going to make more money than you can ever imagine the moment it launches just because of how viral it could go because of how it looked even though it doesn't look the greatest the plot of hey I'm Jesus is going to sell also certain genres are better than others I'm not going to go too deep into this but a linear game for example if you make more of a narrative driven game will mean that you can't reuse assets that often which means that you know you'll just have to do more asset creation often because once you go to a certain stage you never go back to it if you're just going to look at what are the best possible genres I only want to make money and I want to Market my game what should I make them go for a horror game or like a city Builder a settlement thing like crafty building games is what Chris UK said I asked him this question recently of what are the best genres to start with and he said horror games or crafty ability games because steam losts both of them and they're also well the horror games at least aren't that hard to make if you can avoid 2D Platformers because the market for those is very oversaturated and it's not hot at all anymore and then also if you can try to avoid VR games or multiplayer games because they add a lot of complexity that honestly you can do without and you can still make it great game I'm not going to kill you if you go for any of the genres that I don't recommend we've made plenty of genre tier list at this point where we go further in depth into the different genres you can make as an indie developers so you can once again check it out there you've got your idea nailed down this can take a week this can take a month depending on how deep you go if it just takes a week that's fine that means you just have three extra weeks to start the next stage which is the prototyping stage what I want you to do here is just take your game design document where you had written down this is what I want my game to be and open a new project I'm just going to say Unity for sake of I work in unity it's easier for me to say but it can be any engine open a new Unity project and just throw stuff at it to find out what works don't make anything new really use as many assets as you can especially for things like models or art or even full-on code Frameworks like if you're going to make a city Builder there are Frameworks that are like complete City Builder toolkits already that you just import and you already get a basic City Builder also something I see a lot of our audience struggle with is if you're a programmer first you're going to want to over complicate your code in this prototyping stage this month I just want you to write code as fast as possible and don't really care about how is this going to scale in the long term your goal now is to make something playable but not something you will ever ship this is just where you're going to go and validate how am I going to make my game fun because things are going to change something you write down on paper that seems like a good idea may actually be horrible and like very unintuitive the the moment you put it into a game engine that's why I want you to prototype this for at least a month just build up to like making a mini crappy version of your game just to figure out okay how would it look somewhat like what is the style I want to go for is it 2D is it 3D is it top down then also figure out what are the main mechanics going to be like you should generally you have about like three to five big mechanics that your entire game revolves around so for example for Forge industry is the system of the routes where we had the dynamic routes between workers it's our crafting system and then it was the entire Marketplace system of simulating supply and demand in the background those were our big mechanics and everything else was like surrounding that focus on getting those first big ones implemented as fast as possible to just figure out is this fun once you realize that hey this game has potential then only we move on to the next stage and this is what I'm going to call the demo grind so what I want you to do now is you take the project that you had originally made and you're just going to delete it well don't delete it but you're not going to touch it anymore you're going to start a brand new project now that you know what are the different parts you need to program or you need to get art for and you're going to start with a fresh slate because the prototyping code should be very messy shouldn't be scalable it should just be basically quick fixes to get everything working but that is not something you can build upon one of the biggest mistakes we did with Forge industry was keep building on our prototyping code which has cost us literal months of development time because we had to refactor things or certain mechanics that we wanted weren't possible with our previous implementation because we hadn't prototyped all the different mechanics we wanted at first but we kept adding them on through our development so you're starting a brand new project and now what I want you to do is not make the full game immediately what I want you to do is what in the business is called a vertical slice this is a 10 to 15 minute usually build of your game where you showcase the main mechanics where you showcase this is the vibe I want to go for these are the core gameplay Loops that I want to have and that is your main focus one great example of this is our next game that we're working on songs of ever Jade where there are three different stages that you will go through and do combat in but honestly between the garden stage and the temple stage sure there will be different enemies but the main gameplay Loop will not change so for now we don't touch two of the three stages we only focus on a single stage and getting all of the mechanics implemented because we are still working towards that vertical slice where we just showcase a certain part of gameplay with all of the mechanics that we really want to have now of course the 10 to 15 minutes that I said depends very heavily on your genre as well if you're making a procedurally generated Rog light 15 minutes of gameplay is going to be very easy if you're making a linear story based game 15 minutes is a lot harder to do so ballpark something like that but I wouldn't go below 5 minutes at least and like I said make the focus be the mechanics not the like whole scale of the project let's say you have a 100 items in your game just implement 10 of them and then leave the other 90 for later on you don't need 100 items to immediately sell the vision speaking of selling the vision let's say around April after you've spent like one month of development already it's time to get that steam page up get this up as soon as possible once you have something that is screenshot basically that should be one of the things you need to keep in mind in April you want to get the steam page up will you get a lot of wish list the moment you get your steam page up no not at all that's something that we've learned by now as well but having that steam page allows you to send people somewhere if you're doing a play test of your game if you're making videos about it if you're making like little GIF showcasing your work you have somewhere to send people to already this is going to stack up a lot a mistake I see a lot of developers make is fear that their game isn't ready yet to be put on Steam but I don't think this is a true statement because you can update your steam page and if steam believes that your game is good for like a certain steam user even if they like go through the discovery queue and get shown what once but they're like and this isn't for me if you update your steam page and steam is still like hey I still think this this game is a good fit for this user they'll be shown it again and again until they finally one day are like hey actually I do kind of like this game now they seem to be updating things so don't be scared to get that store Page up early you're not going to get that many wish lists yet because you're not fully marketing it yet but it will slowly add up and it could be like maybe another 100 200 wish list that just passively stack up without having to do that much Now quickly you're probably going to ask how should I make that steam page as of right now when this video is being made I haven't made a full in-depth video about it yet but be sure to head down below and subscribe because in the coming two weeks I'm going to make a video about how do you make that store Page what should you watch out for what are some good practices and what are some things that you should just avoid with that store page so look forward to that one and then by June July you should be finished with this little vertical slice with this demo and this is when you put it on that steam page and this is is also where your real marketing grind begins so you now have a somewhat finished state of the game where most of the gameplay and the fun should be there already it's just not going to be as long or as pretty as your end goal is going to be that is fine but this is the point in time where you can start reaching out to influencers because this is where the Big Marketing is going to come in it's not going to be from press releases on IGN because that's only going to happen if you already got big coverage somewhere outside of like gaming sites if this demo has gone all right if it's just on there don't expect like big blowups yet but this should mean that your mechanics of your game are getting there they're not going to be perfect don't get me wrong there's still going to be plenty of bugs but what you should then Focus like let's assume you release the demo in July what you should do from then on is focus on quantity and on the experience so quantity is simply like how many levels how many items how many enemies how many bosses things that are pretty easy to scale but don't don't take a lot of programming work don't take a lot of writing work it's just more of what you've already done you're not breaking new ground there and then also start looking into doing some play tests where you're really looking at what are users expecting of my game in terms of the UI in terms of interacting with it and how do I make this as smooth as possible I'm going to be honest this is going to be a pretty boring part and it's also where you're going to get that value of the spare we had this at least with for industry it's like okay we have 20 items implemented we still have 680 to go and you're just sitting there like why did I make this live decision but this is simply part of game development now ideally this period should take another three to four months at most so that by the end of October or like somewhere in November you can actually release your game now throughout this period when you're working on the quantity keep marketing keep sending out emails to influencers keep updating your demo pages keep posting gifs of your game to like Reddit or whatever but aim for a launch somewhere by October November and now you're maybe going like but Marx you set I was going to make it in one year can't I wait till December 31st no because you need to remember when you press the release button on Steam it's not over no no the fun is now beginning because suddenly assuming you have like some wish list at least and people actually buy your game there are going to be a lot of bugs that you hadn't prepared for there's going to be a lot more feedback than what you could have gotten through things like play tests and demos of course obviously do play tests do demos but they're not going to catch everything once your game goes public basically and anyone can play it there will be some guy who has like a random potato PC that has like some weird configuration of graphics driver and CPU which for some reason causes Windows to throw kernel panics because of your game and you're just sitting there like eh and you have to deal with that because the person has bought your game and you should support them you shouldn't pump and dump your games you should provide support and you should listen to your community as well we spend another 3 months after launching Forge industry even more just working on uex improvements reworking our tutorials listening to our community and actually implementing our changes this allows you to you know first of all show that you're still active as a developer which in turn will translate to more sales because people who go by your store Page they'll see that hey this game is actively being updated maybe there's some Community discussions oh the developer is active it gives them a lot more confidence that maybe even if the game isn't 100% what they thought the moment they Paul it they can see that hey I just make a post and maybe it'll get there and maybe you still want to continue working on your game as well that's perfectly fine as well maybe you don't go into Early Access it's just I'm going to make some DLC I'm going to make updates or whatever but have some time for that as well your troubles aren't going to disappear the moment you press release keep that in mind that is why I want you to release a little bit earlier because I wanted to fit all of this in a single year and then I think two months of post launch support is already pretty good I think that's at least a bare minimum of course if this game is a massive hit already you probably won't need to like immediately switch to a different genre or a new game idea but you can actually sustain just making updates for the game you already released because you know people talk about your game the community is growing that is very much an option still but if your game doesn't really sell that well I would still give it two months just to wrap it up nicely and then just make sure that you don't set any bad blood as a developer by just abandoning a project and not being transparent about it and then the year is over and you can watch this video again and do it all over again so I know this is still a very high level video but game velopment is a very big undertaking don't underestimate this I'm going to do my best to link different sources of previous videos I've made down below things like how do you price your game as well that's something I haven't touched upon but you probably have questions about I'll put those in the description down below as well I think we have some pretty good videos on this channel about specific problems you have similar to like scoping I could make this like a 4-Hour video if I really wanted to but now I do want to take one little moment to pluck myself if you feel like 2024 is going to be the year that you become a game developer and you like this video you like what I'm saying you think that I have something to teach you consider going to our patreon our patreon we offer a tier where you can get private coaching where I will look at your specific use case your specific game idea and I will sit down together with you and make a plan on how do we actually make this game a reality it's $35 a month you get monthly coachings with me you also get a bonus video every week alongside with a much deeper look at how does a game Studio business actually work so not just making games but how do we actually mon ize it correctly how do we sustain it how do we work efficiently keep making progress how do we deal with struggles coming our way so I do think it can offer a lot of value as well apart from that thank you so much for watching I hope 2024 is going to be the year that you break through because I want to see you succeed don't make the same mistakes that we did and by the end of 2024 I expect an email of you saying that your game has released that's all I had to say thanks for watching I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 45,252

Keywords: gamedev, indie, indie developer, game development, unity, c#, blender, game design, game studio, devlog, development, startup, forge industry, flega, steam

Id: 6cU3ru8NSWQ

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2023