Watch this if you're a solo gamedev

recently I did a little survey asking you guys how is your developer team composition and from that survey it turned out that almost 80% of the people watching this channel are Solo developers I was not prepared for that high of a number honestly so I figured I should make a few more videos dedicated to you guys the poor solo developers out there I've made videos before already about pitfalls of solo development generally I like don't recommend it if you can't but clearly for all of people solo development is still the way to go and that's why I want to make this video a bit more positive and the good things about solo development and how you can make the most of it for a lot of people solo development is basically a necessity because they simply can't find anyone to collaborate with or they don't have the full-time commitment that someone may need things like that but I think there are some other advantages as well that I quickly want to go over one of these things is that you can set the pace a lot of people they just do this as a hobby they don't want to make it too like business and they just want to have some fun making games and if you're doing that you don't want to be in a team where there's like pressure on each other to keep delivering sometimes life just gets in the way sometimes you need to take a few weeks off development and you're the only person that gets affected by that you're not holding back other people and it allows you to work much more relaxed on games so especially if you're a hobby developer solo development is the way to go and even if you do want to make some money well all the profits go to you if you're a solo developer or like your publisher but you don't have to split everything like four ways or whatever we need to make a lot more money here at me games if you want to pay all of our employees like a decent wage compared to if you're a solo developer I could probably live off the forge industry income even how little it may be at this point just from you know not having to share it and I think a mistake that a lot of developers make especially once they have that first game out and they have like that little bit of money coming in is seeing okay we have this much money we're going to hire this many people and then we're going to assume that it makes better games but solo developers actually can make really good games and it's really important to understand understand that more people doesn't mean that you'll have better games as a solo developer there's still a very high amount of stuff you can do and honestly a game idea is just one person that needs to come up with the idea of course you have the artist and stuff that can make it look better but there's plenty of really great games that's made by one person or maybe even two but honestly after that there's a very high diminishing return with bigger teams there's probably plenty of other reasons why solo development is great but I quickly wanted to start with that so now I have some tips for you I think it's about seven in total of how do you make the most of being a solo developer what are some some recommendations that I have for solo def specifically I also interact with a lot of our viewers and usually they are Solo developers about like what is their situation what advice could they use either through our Discord which you should join if you haven't or by emailing me with like a specific question that you have so I do feel like even though I'm not a solo developer I have interacted with quite a bunch of solo developers at this point and have actually helped them so I think that these tips will help you you as well and the first thing that I want you to do is do less now hear me out this may sound very weird what do you mean do less I have so many things to do for my game but I think the problem a lot of solo developers have is not accept that they solo deaths and that there will be limitations I think the most common thing I see here is almost everybody wants to start a YouTube channel about their game and honestly my answer for that is don't do it it works for us because we're not solo developers because I can spend a lot of time on this channel and and we have the rest of the team who's just working away on our games but you yourself you're going to be working on your game and if you're then also on top of that going to be like I need to do Twitter posts I need to do YouTube devlogs I need to go and do Twitch streaming I need to make Tik toks I'm doing the accounting of my company all of these things take away from development and I think you should really prioritize development just accept that certain parts you're not even going to borrow it another great one is music yes you can try to like play around in Bosa or in like FL Studio and make your own game probably you won't have that much experience with it though and you'll just be wasting a lot of time that you can focus on the things you're good at most of you people are also programmers so just focus on mechanics focus on using your skills as programmers let the rest go a bit back don't focus on like learning 3D modeling out of nowhere use assets wherever possible and just that way cut down dramatically on the development time and how quickly you can release a game and also related to that do less is unlearning perfectionism that's also a really big problem I see because you know this is my game idea this is my baby and I want it to be absolutely perfect no matter what but this kills game developers because they'll end up spending seven years on a game because it has to just be perfect like the music has to be perfect the art has to be perfect and usually they also play like AAA game so they want to be like I want to be like Zelda you're not going to be that it's really hard to unlearn that perfectionism it's really hard to just accept that hey this is the best I can do and this is just going to be it and of course there will be some backlash problems that's what we had with Forge industry it's not a perfect game not at all which means that we also get some negative comments mainly about the looks because we're not artists and it sucks but just by learning that hey this is still playable this is still like it's not horrible it's not perfect but it's not horrible and it's not the main part of the player experience in our case we should just chip it I could spend probably another half year or a full year even just on making the game look prettier but it's not going to be worth it I'm not going to be learning that much new stuff compared to just making new games from the start and generally it's also just going to burn me out much faster so don't try to go for perfect go for perfect maybe in one aspect such as your mechanic or if you're art if you're an artist but the other things just let them be basic let them be like you know create them personally if you're like how good do I feel my artist if it's like a six or a seven out of 10 that's fine don't try to push to like the perfect 10 out of 10 like model with like high poly things like that next up something that I see a lot of people also forget is marketing whenever I talk to solo developers they talk about I'm stuck with the art or I'm stuck with the mechanics I still need to program for so long and then I asked them for their steam page like hey do you have at least a steam page are you like collecting wish lists already nobody has a steam page so I try to call this out in as many videos as possible but if you're working on a game and you've been working on it for more than two to three weeks make that steam page like as soon as possible you can use shitty art you can have a non-complete copyrighting text but you should have a steam page it will help you so much in advertising your game because suddenly people don't need to write down the name of your game anymore if they see it and it will also just slowly build up you won't get a lot of wish lists every day but if you have a store Page up for longer you're always going to have more wish lists steam themselves also suggest having that store Page up as fast as possible as well as other game marketing experts such as Chris kovski so just do it it's not that much of an issue and yeah it's 100 bucks to get that store page but if you're not making like a small prototype if you're actually working on a game that you want to sell at some point you need that steam page just get one and get it as fast as possible that steam page is your main source of marketing and from then on depending on how far you are you could look into things like the Twitter posts or YouTube videos or the shorts but don't do them all pick one pick the platform that you yourself use the most schedule out a bunch of posts like at once and then forget about it for like a week or for two weeks and just keep on developing so this way you don't get overwhelmed by oh I need to make Tik toks and redit post and nine gag memes about my game and such don't do that but don't do nothing in terms of marketing so many developers they just work on our game and then they have like a vertical slice and then it's like oh well I'm planning on releasing in like a month or two but I have no store Page yet how do I fix this and the honest answer is it's really hard to near impossible to fix it next up is okay you're a solo developer probably because you couldn't find anyone who like matched your skill set or really wants to work on your game but that doesn't mean you should go into it all alone and what I mean with this is one of the big things one of the big advantages you have when you're working in a team is accountability basically if William or Thomas in our team doesn't work for like 3 days in a row I'll be there and I will call them out and be like hey what's going on why are you not doing anything as a solo developer that's not the case the only person that's like holding you accountable is yourself and usually we're really good at making excuses of like oh but it's really busy at work so I can't really work that much or it's like oh I just want to chill or like hang out with some friends who I'm not going to be working on my game and this slows down your development enormously so what I suggest here is you find an accountability partner this could be someone that you just know who maybe is like a bit interested in your games but not really that much and like doesn't want to join and you're just going to like ask them for like hey do you have half an hour a week and I just even send you an email where I give you an update of everything I've done and then you can just be like hey good work or like hey why didn't you work as much this week just someone to keep reminding you that you need to work and you need to deliver value on your game if you don't have anyone local I want to plug our Discord again I'm pretty sure that if you go into our Discord server there's like a channel looking for partners I think what you should do is just make a little post there be like hey I'm a solo developer I'm working on this kind of game I'm looking for someone to hold me accountable and then ideally you get matched with someone else where both of you are holding each other accountable so you schedule like a half hour call or whatever every week or you like figure out whatever works best for you just to update each other on the progress similar to you know posting stuff in our showcase Channel just to get some more feedback as well but not have someone actively developing because that's a lot harder but just to have someone who understands the struggles a bit and who can like help guide you in hey maybe we can see if we can do a little bit more next week to keep you driven and to just also yeah keep cheering you on almost and then man I'm plugging the Discord way too much here but try to find the community as well our Discord is probably pretty solid there's also plenty of other places where you can like hang out in forums in discords and anything else really specifically for Indie developers it can be really hard sometimes and it feels like you're the only developer in your country basically who's working on indie games but in reality there's plenty of people out there in the world who are all thinking that who are all like man I'm the only person here who's making like this kind of game or I'm the only person in my country who's like interested into indie games that's also not the case I have already connected so many developers with each other where they're like oh I am the only person who makes like this genre of game and it's like I have so many struggles and then I can be like hey no no there's another viewer let me connect you two together or maybe they live in the same country why don't you meet up once and you can just learn and get inspired and know that you're not alone this is really important to like mentally be able to keep developing your game so I talked about the accountability what this also kind of forces you to do is create a schedule this is pretty general advice but a lot of people also message me like hey I have trouble finding time or I have trouble with discipline to like actually work on my game and I suggest you make a schedule there and something that's really important up there is that a schedule you can spread it out over as much time as you want a schedule doesn't mean that you say every day I'm going to spend 1 hour on my game at least because for a lot of people especially if you do this at the site that's not feasible it's much better to schedule out a week goal or maybe schedule out over months even where you can be like hey every week I plan to have at least 10 hours of game development and whether that's like you know 2 hours every day or whether that's like you know one day a week where you just develop a lot try to create consistent there it's much more important to have a longer term consistency where week by week you're making progress compared to you know you have like one week of Hardcore development and then three weeks long you do nothing and then it's back to like a week of development that's not optimal because you have forgotten everything you've done basically and you'll lose a lot of like your momentum and a lot of your time sub part of this I always say this in these videos what I do is we aim for at least 5 minutes every day just a small thing but this will make sure that you won't like lose how does game death work how do I work what is my game again just 5 minutes probably you can do this almost anywhere even if it's just like writing down some brainstorming ideas for like a game mechanic still keep involved with your game every day of the week and then my last one is very technical suddenly and very specific but it's something a lot of developers also forget until after release find a way to test with multiple devices a very common thing is you know you develop on your machine and you fix things on your machine but once you put on Steam there's suddenly hundreds of different setups you know computers drivers Windows versions and like keyboards languages all of these things are probably going to break your game in certain regards send out builds to like people with like random configurations and be like hey does this work for example a really common one is keyboards we use in Belgian we use aeri we don't use quy which means that a lot of games that have like hardcoded WD because that's what works for them don't work for us unless we like change our keyboard nobody wants to do that similar stuff with like maybe you develop on a 1080p display well suddenly your game looks horrible on 4K but because you don't have a 4K display it's much harder to test getting physical Hardware or reaching out to people who have physical Hardware can help a lot in figuring out is my game actually compatible with everyone you don't want to figure this out once your game has already been released this is horrible because then you're suddenly doing panic mode fixing of your game and it's just a nightmare when you're in a team like us it's already a bit easier because for example one of our developers uses a Mech so we automatically have to solve all Mech issues I am an ultrawide user so I always break the game if there's no ultrawide support So when something goes wrong in development we already know because we have four different setups basically you as a solo def don't have that if you're a solo game Def and there's something that I've missed that is really helping you out please write it down in the comments down below it's really nice to help each other out we are all a community of developers here and you know as I said solo developers can often feel very lonely post something in the comments here or you know even like some words of ins spiration if you don't really relate to being a solo developer but just you know you can do it basically anyways that's all I really had to say if you're new around here we're game developers we've made our own game we talk about game development and just showcase you the entire world of how does it work being an indie studio if that's something that interest you be sure to head down below and subscribe as it's a win-win for both of us I get your support and you get these videos twice a week anyways that's all I really have to say thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 47,592

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

Id: Io7kock1ORA

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023