Timeline of an indie game developer

the game I've experience is an emotional roller coaster and I mean that in the most literal way it's going to take you multiple months on end usually to go from start to finish for a game and it's going to give you a lot of different feelings as well when you're making that game whether it's your first or even if you're making your second or your third game you will go through multiple different stages in your Game Dev experience and I just wanted to go over what are these stages and how do you make the most out of them how do you push through to the next stage and make sure that you don't get stuck in one of those stages and end up losing a lot of valuable time so you can actually finish your game and the first stage is the one that we've all gone through it's the stage called the uninformed optimism you read some articles about how stard do Valley gross $300 million or how Dwarf Fortress like sold multiple millions of dollars as well when they did their 1.0 launch and you just imagine yourself being that you can imagine you know telling your boss that you're going to quit you're going to make games fulltime you're going to have those massive undertale levels of success and your life is going to be easy and you're like let me try out this game development stuff how hard can it be so you get ready to become a game developer you make a playlist with like different Brees and Cat monkey tutorials you start writing down 15 different game ideas and you're fully energized you have so much motivation you're going to own the game that seene and you're going to make some of the best possible games that you think are going to massively impact as many people as possible and the first thing I want to say here is and enjoy this because this is probably the happiest you're going to be in your entire Game Dev career maybe with a close second of the success stage the final one but this is definitely when I look back at it it's a very fun time you know you have so much stuff you don't know yet you don't know all of the sad life yet you don't know that hey maybe you don't earn that much money and things like that but it's really nice you have all these game ideas you have a lot of passion a lot of Creative Vision just enjoy it cherish it it is a really fun thing game def is still a hobby as well not everyone needs to be like me a sour guy who's just spouting videos on YouTube about the stuff that goes wrong in game development there is definitely some space as well to enjoy the entire process of game development one thing here is that there's a very hard balance between when do I start like when do I take that engine and write my first lines of code and how much research should I do you've probably watched things like our game engine tier list because you're not sure should I go unreal should I go gdau or or whatever and you're like this is going to be a very scary decision because once again you have that uninformed optimism you don't really know that hey look the engines don't matter that much just get started but you don't want to just blindly get an engine and just try and make something because you're going to be lost you're going to need to follow some tutorials as well so the big challenge you have here is don't get stuck in that tutorial hell sure you can follow a course start to finish but I think especially for you personally there should be a point I would say with at most a month of cut off basically where you're like okay look I've been watching like the 10hour Code Monkey tutorials and whatever now it's time that I am going to do it for wheelies by myself I think definitely don't just wait for that point where you feel comfortable making a game you're never going to reach that but also don't immediately go in blind download like a way Overkill engine for like whatever your game is and try to hack away at it and once you've started on working on your game you're starting maybe you're trying to join a game Jam making some first small prototypes this is when you evolve to the next stage which is called the informed pessimism you have been working your game for a few weeks now and it sucks like blender hard mechanics hard your game isn't really even fun you'd have no clue where all of your optimism basically went to because you had this gr vision of an open world game and it was going to be awesome and here you are and you can barely even let your character move like 2 weeks after development without like the rag dolls passing out or whatever it's not a fun time you've also been looking more and more into things like marketing you find out that most games don't even gross $1,000 when they release but now you're already like in the sauce you don't just want to quit now because you've just spent one or two months maybe even preparing for starting your own game and preparing to become that next stue Valley you don't want to give up on that yet but you also don't know if you should keep going if it's worth it after all this is probably the point where most developers drop off in the entire five stages I'm going to be talking about because here this is where it gets tough for the first time it's easy to think about game ideas but actually implementing them that's the point where you're going to be like what am I doing here and I think the first thing that you should really do basically at the start of this stage or like at the end of the uninformed optimism stage is to make a plan for your game's development like however long it's going to take we've made a video about it before and also plan for that plan to be completely wrong because this is the first game you're making probably you have no clue how long it's actually going to take to model a character to rig it for example put it in the game do the key frame animation do inverse kinematics you have no idea yet about that so know that things will go wrong but having a baseline plan already even if it's off by months can still be better than just starting and having your engine open and just doing whatever that's the main thing I would suggest you do and also recope your game if needed if you are like I want to make a game that's extremely visible but let's be honest you're maybe a programmer and you've actually never been able to draw anything you've never done any 3D modeling maybe this is the point where you should be a bit more realistic get out of that stage of uninformed optimism and okay realize that you're either going to have to use a lot of assets or you're going to have to focus on the game where the visuals kind of take a step back and it's truly like the mechanics that take place first and and lastly if you're like I don't know if it's worth it the best thing you can do here is talk to other game devs because sure right now it may seem a bit overwhelming but I'm still here I've gone through the exact same stages and it's not a permanent thing game development is still really nice it's still a really great thing to do there will just be ups and downs but being able to talk to other game developers who are in the trenches as well can help you immensely with feeling like you're not alone like you're not just stuck wasting time in your home and never going to find any success and never even going to be able to release your game now if you are like getting brand new into Game Dev and you don't know where to find these people I want to plug our own Discord server it's like 1,900 people at this point all game developers we were a really nice Community if you ask me and if you have any struggles if you aren't certain about what to do with your game I'm sure that people will help you out there and I'm in there as well so maybe I'll even chip in on what you should do and why it is worth it after all to keep continuing now you've moved past your first prototype or like your first game Jam version and this is where we enter the longest stage of the game development cycle which is called the valley of Despair I know it sounds very depressing it also kind of is because up until now you had your idea and you made a quick simple prototype if you were doing everything well about is my core game mechanic fun but chances are it's like a three-minute game that you have with like one simple mechanic this is not not something you can put onto steam already and sell you're going to need to add multiple levels extra mechanics extra models so much more maybe if you want to make a narrative game do more dialogue and these things they simply take time no matter how good you are as a programmer mechanics need time to be implemented they need time to be play tested it's not something you can just make a game in a day that doesn't really exist and because of that extra giant pile that just is dumped upon you of all the stuff you need to do it can seem extremely overwhelming it's like you know you've got a game that has potential but you also know that you're maybe 10% of the way there and that is with your pretty shitty planning to be honest so in reality you probably still have multiple months of doing the SLO Fest where maybe progress isn't as visual maybe you're not really day by day getting that many improvements this is a really hard stage and I'm going to be honest the best advice I can give you here is to just power true it is going to suck know that but it is something that will be rewarding once you finish it also it helps if you can acknowledge that progress is slower in reality than you thought about Forge industry took us 18 months to make and there were multiple months basically where in like a month time there was barely any visual progress like month over month that is extremely demotivating I know that myself as well at this point but know that it is okay know that it's normal that you're not going to have a truly visual stunning or fun toplay game from the beginning it's an iterative process and you just need to keep going addit keep adding more features keep play testing keep improving the visuals keep working on the UI all of those things they need to happen and you will get better at them and maybe you won't like everything but still if you want to make a full commercially viable game that you want to put on Steam you're going to have to go through this stage the best tip but also a very hard tip to implement to solve this is to find someone to do game development with because especially in the valley of Despair you won't be alone you'll feel incredibly lonely when you make that like a very slow day-by-day progress where you don't really see much change anymore and you know how ugly your code is and how unoptimized it is and you know all of the imperfections about your game having someone else who is with you there who is working on the same project or even just invested in the project can help you a lot to talk to someone to talk about how you're feeling and to work towards going through that we were a team we all hated the valy of Despair but at least we could come together in our studio to just wallow about it and be like okay no matter what David gogin is watching we should stay hard and keep going so that's what we did and we ended up somewhat Victorious if you ask me and then the last tip for that value of Despair is your value of Despair is pretty tightly linked to your scope if you have a game that has a larger scope you're going to be stuck in the valley of Despair for a long longer time the less mechanics the less like Advanced levels and whatever you have the shorter that value of the spare is going to be so if you're really are stuck in this stage you have spent like half a year already in the valley of this spair this is the point where you need to reevaluate your scope and really look at okay what should I cut what is not worth it right now for your first game I don't think that you should be spending multiple years on your game what we did with Forge industry was already too long that was 18 months and that was with four people but we all work part-time we should have gone for a much smaller game so we wouldn't have been stuck in that like Valley of Despair stage for as long but the good news is if you keep going at it you will break through that SLO Fest at some point and you'll reach a point where you're like hey actually I don't know when this happened but my game is looking better I'm actually enjoying it more and more and this is why you reach the point of informed optimism so you know now how does game development work you've learned a lot about coding about modeling about UI and ux design you've done your first few bits of marketing as well and you're starting to see potential you're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel now you just have to keep going if you're doing marketing already this is also the point where you're starting to get your first wins like maybe you got a post on Reddit that got you like 50 wish lists or whatever the first time you get those wish lists like maybe it's not that much in the grand scale of things but you feel like a God if you can have 50 people wish list your game in a single day so this is definitely the stage where things get better and things will be better but what is important here is not to make the same mistake that we did and that is trying to just rush it out so you can finish the game because especially the value of Despair what it does as well it makes you kind of hate your game in certain moments and once you reach that informed optimism stage it can be very tempting to just be like screw it let's just finish this as fast as possible and kick the baby out of the door is what I like to call it and release your game we did that with Forge industry and we kind of did it too early we should have let our game cook like an extra one or two months if we being honest but because we were so blinded by that fact of hey we just want to release as fast as possible we kind of messed up in that regard so don't just cut Corners to be able to release earlier at that point when you're in this final stage everything that survived the valy of Despair should be polished before you actually do the release once you've finished the valy of Despair there shouldn't really be any further scope changes also this is a stage where you want to play test as much as possible because your game starting to look better your core gameplay Loops are more and more implemented so you can get much more like nitty-gritty feedback like oh the tutorial isn't clear or I feel like this UI thing has one too many clicks these are things that you should focus on in this stage as well like the polishing stage you may think that you're 80% done to be honest you still have another 80% to go the mod checks out it is an unfortunate truth but you won't be as desperate anymore as you were in that Valley of Despair and then you've kept going at it you've kept improving your game then's a big day you've got steam ready you press the big green button to release your game and voila you have reached success as a game developer maybe not everyone will like immediately buy your first game but still the fact that you've released the game puts you in the top 7% of our audience when I do like polls of how many of our viewers have actually finished the game so if that's you I'm already extremely proud of you for having reached that stage success is different for everyone of course because we figured that hey we could quit our jobs we had that uninformed optimism stage where we were going to release forage industry and we would never have to work a day in our life anymore I hope that you are a bit more realistic in this and have more realistic definitions of success your first game probably not going to be a stard valley accept that and count success as just being able to ship because that is already one of the biggest hurdles now once you have shipped that game first thing you should do if you can afford to if you don't have like 15 different bug reports coming in every day is to take a little break don't immediately jump into game def for your next game it's going to be tempting because during your development you'll get a bunch of like fleshy new game ideas that you think are going to be much better than the one you made previously Let Them Sit let them cook for like a few weeks take a break because making games especially those final few weeks before release are extremely extremely crunchy you have the marketing you have the bug fixing you have the last minute like extra features extra promotional materials stuff you're doing it ain't fun take that break and once you've done that and you have a fresh set of eyes look at doing a retrospective we've done one it's called the 23 mistakes we made making our first game I'll link it up there as well where we just go through everything where did we go wrong what should we have improved about our game and you do that as well because we work differently than you maybe you realized that hey actually I can't work in the evenings after I've already done a full day of work I was trying to force myself to do that but was really miserable I don't want to do that again for my next game that is something that you should take with you really think about it what were all the points that went wrong read some feedback from people who played your game and take that incorporate it into your plan for your next game because that is the most important thing the best advice I can give you is to keep making games it's going to be somewhat discouraging I'll be honest if your first game only gets a few hundred wish lists and it releases with like 10 players but still know that this is probably going to be the worst performing game you'll make out of all the games you'll ever make so you should only be able to go up from there don't feel like if everything was a waste of time and effort because you are going to improve you just have to keep making more games doing those retrospectives learning what works best for you what are your individual strengths in relationship to game Def and just keep going at it so I hope this gave you a bit more of a highlevel overview of game development I'm curious are you currently stuck in the valley of this spare I guess most of you are uh I feel very sorry for you but just keep going at it apart from that if you're new here we're game developers we run our own studio and we've been documenting the entire process from basically when we started to where we are now in terms of game development and we just give you an open look into all of the mistakes we make and all of the lessons we learn from game development so if that's something that you're interested in be sure to head down below and subscribe because we make these videos two times a week I think there's a lot of value in them for you so definitely check them out thank thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 8,625

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

Id: 1Zf5GeafsAE

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024