Why Nobody Becomes a Video Game Developer but Everyone Wants to #gamedev

hey it's Adam with tech dive and today we're gonna talk about how come everybody wants to make games and nobody makes games and so it's a common thing in life it's a common thing to kind of go I want to do this thing and get really excited about it and you see lots of people do it your friends will do it just pick something you want to do you try it for a day or two then you realize it's not really for you or it's not gonna work out because of something else and then you kind of just let it go but I want to talk about how come particularly everybody wants too many games like if you a person who plays a lot of games there's definitely a time in your life where you've thought hmm I think it would be awesome if I made a game and then you come back to it and you realize no I I don't think I'm gonna make games I don't think I'm gonna make games or you you talk about you're like I want to make games I want to make games I'm running games and then you spend most of your life just talking about how one day you're gonna make games and you don't actually make games and I was this person for a long time I thought man one day I would love to make games and and it's such a process it's such a process there is such a learning curve different than other things I've done and so let's talk about what makes making games so difficult and what makes it so different and why no one does it so I get into things I'm a guy who likes to get in and learn how to do something I'm and I've done this before I loved making videos I went to school for making videos I learned a ton about making videos I use video editing software I'm a video editing software affiliates now with Vegas creative software and you can even buy the software in the link below to help us out but that kind of stuff took a lot of time and it took a lot of practice but it kind of was approachable I didn't have to go asking people how to do it it's been a long time searching on the internet I just kind of picked up a camera I started out a friend who did it I kind of once I had that entryway I started taking step after step after step and getting better and better at it and using different softwares and learning more about what I'm doing and then I kind of just got into it and then I was like I can do videos and I have made lots of videos for money because I know what I'm doing and that took some time but I was able to do it it took years of practice but I was able to do it relatively I just wanted to and I did it I took the practice I took the time I got the education I did it and so the same thing with computers I have a background as a computer technician I am CompTIA A+ certified and that plus certified how did I get into that well with cameras being such a computer oriented thing with cameras being so big about the needing high quality computers and high quality video editors and file types and codecs and things like that I I had a head for IT because I had done so much troubleshooting I still installed my own firewire card and then that didn't work and then I had to reinstall the drivers for it then it started working and then I had to have a friend build me actually that friend was Steven build me a custom computer to edit high def video so by the end of that I started I just started tinkering with the computer I had adding parts eventually I got help building another computer in general and so once I had built a computer then I built some computers for different people and then started helping other people with their computer problems and then I was like I want to get into IT and so that was very approachable when I decided to that I wanted my full-time job to be IT which it isn't anymore but it was for four five years I I got my a plus certification and I just looked up how to get certified my ta plus came up I talked to a friend of mine who was an IT and he was like oh I know about this he's actually a developer but his dad owned a company that fix you know was an IT company and so so he knew all about the A+ sir that I was looking at into and so we studied for it together we met at Starbucks on Wednesdays for about an hour and a half no time and you know like gave her cellphone college course I bought a textbook in it and I just we read through the textbook we did a little quizzes at the end we talked about it with each other we gave her cell phone a little class and I got my a plus certification and then with my video background stuff I applied for an IT job and I got it and I got an IT job and I learned about IT was like dumb back then yes did I know anything that I thought I knew know I've learned a crap-ton since then but the fact of the matter the story is I got into IT I wanted the video stuff I got into I wanted into IT I got into it game development is my latest interest I've been looking into that for the past two or three years I've been like game development ha game development and with a background in video and stuff I was like this should be easy for me to jump into I know IT I know a little bit of programming I know I know video production and stuff I know about laws of competition I've had a little bit of art training I've like I've got a background and I've had writing classes and things like that - I was like video games involved writing and music I've I did band for six years in school I knew how to read music and you know write it a little bit writing music is different than reading it but you know I knew how to read music I'd played in that my own personal band for a long time I had a lot of experience composing music with friends and stuff like that so I was like okay so this should be something I should be easy to jump into I know so much about the periphery areas but I don't really know anything about you know game development and that's when I realized how hard it was I just started looking into like how do I make games for a living and everybody's going how do you make games and you can take one of two paths you can make your own games or you can make a game for somebody else but you don't want to make a game for somebody else when you don't know what you're doing so how do you learn what you're doing well you just make your own games well how do you do that oh man that's a big question and it's a big question for a couple of reasons one making games is as own art and science okay so a lot of people think like I just have this idea for a game I think it would be fun to catch butterflies so you want to make a butterfly catching game well like there's rules to that so like there's a thing called affordance right it's what you actually the information that you give the player you learn this through game design stuff and you learn like how could you tell if you're a butterfly game when a butterfly can be caught or not be caught like what's the visual cue for that you have to decide there's there's it's not just about art styles and presentation and 3d modeling it's actually about like learning what game developers do to make games fun what game mechanics do how they work how they come together what different types of games are what different players are looking for in games all that's the actual study that they do and I started watching these videos at extra credits was a channel I watch for a long long time and then Mark Brown is like the guy for this if you're wanting to know more about this you need to check out mark brown's gmt k game makers toolkit and his series boskie's on youtube this just mark brown gmt k he is he is the guy about game design so I just started watching his videos in other people's videos understood they're watching game design videos religiously for years I kept thinking that'd be neat that would be neat that would be neat to do and eventually I kind of I started looking at games with the critical I started really better understanding like what game design was why they were making those decisions much like with video and film I was able to start watching video and start realizing where they put the camera why they made that decision I started understanding the behind the scenes because I started doing it I started understanding the behind the scenes of gaming stuff so that was that was huge I was big that's a big thing but why am I not still a game developer well so then I had to get shoulder surgery and I thought this is a great time to just dive in and learn how to actually make a game and I had tried before a couple of times I tried Unreal Engine everyone said that was easy didn't need a lot of programming skills to do it because you could map stuff without programming it was not easy there like no tutorials about it all these are all these buttons and interactions and physics here's the thing about game development you are making a world it's a world it's a world that has rules and an art style it's a world that has to interact with itself it's a world that has physics and it's a world that has joints and it's a world that has layers and it's a world that has all these things and with all these buttons and unity here all these buttons I just don't know what they do I don't know I didn't know for a long time like I got understood like the lighting part of it kind of but then it kept talking about baking light and I was like what does that mean no one in videography talks about baking light or not and I understood about rendering but then I didn't understand much about live rendering and then I done like importing assets that's a whole big thing oh so you have to make your own assets to or find us as an asset store but then your game looks like other people who's had those assets from an asset store what if you need an asset that's not in the asset store you have to want to make assets what that means you have to make stuff in blender or you have to buy them from somebody who can make them in blender or you have to you have to medium is something in VR I learned how to make assets and medium and you can do that in VR and it's a lot easier than blender but the problem is it cuz like sculpting with clay but the probably that took me days it took me days and days of fooling around blender to get to the point where it not blender I'm sorry with medium to get to the point where I really felt like I can make something but then again I'm still limited by my artistic ability I've only had like you know high school art classes and stuff like I know a little bit I can make something kind of look okay but I'm not artists like that is not my thing I can do I will fight you all day long if you say I can't do video I'll be like ah no I can't do video but if you're like you're not the best artist you're right I'm not the best artist by any stretch of the imagination and that so that that's the thing you have to like wear all these hats to do it and involved programming and so I thought okay so I programmed in Python a little bit and I thought okay if I programmed a Python then I definitely knew how to do enough programming for this kind of thing and I jump in and I just I'm just lost I've never seen C sharp before I started using a unity cuz that's why there's more documentation about how unity worked and things like that more people were willing to work with you and you were working on unity all my friends who said they wanted to help me and never really did anything to help me wanted to do stuff in unity and and I just kept thinking okay I'm gonna learn unity but then I didn't know anything about c-sharp that's the programming language I didn't know anything about c-sharp and so when I it just all look like Japanese and people in these in these and and I don't speak any Japanese so it was really bad that I couldn't do anything so I would get into these tutorials and people would be like well you just take blah blah blah you put it here you move it here you do this and then you open up the script and you tie it to this that's the thing is not only you have to understand like a little bit about how programming works what's accessible from that little script what's not accessible oh I can see it what cannot see it you have to understand there's a programming like libraries that are specific just for unity that like programming stuff that you won't see unless you're programming for unity like terms and phrases and things like that when they would put like a dot behind something I'm like why does I change things and it would I was just so confused it was just so big and then I thought okay well let me take a course so I got an online course and I started going through the course and I they slowly teach you how to use C sharp and how to program with C sharp and I learned some better programming skills and I learned more about how to do the unity and I finally I made my first game it was like a number generating it was a I've made one before in Python but it was like a number guessing game and it came with a GUI and stuff like that and I was like that's cool I made this um even though it looked just like everyone else's you made it I still made it and I was pretty happy about it then I thought okay okay so I need to make a better game and then I made this this silly little text adventure but it worked it worked exactly like it was supposed to I made a text adventure game with graphics and words and it would flop around and I made it in unity and it's a text adventure game that worked and I was like that's awesome I'm so freakin happy I'm able to make this game because I couldn't do anything I couldn't do anything on my own I thought surely I'm used to using complex editors I'm not scared away by terms like different codec types and things like that like that does stuff like sense to me and then I'm thinking how come I can't do this game stuff so finally after taking this courses I can start messing with it and understanding it and then I get to a point where I can now understand the YouTube stuff when they're jumping into a script I'm not lost and so now after all of this I can finally I'm finally at a point where I'm thinking I can make a game and I'm actually doing and I made a game it's got like I got a I can do locks and keys and triggers and I can develop stuff and I can import assets and I'm I'm starting to make a game that's actually my game is 3d is actually VR and it's working it's working now is it good no definitely not good definitely not yeah and my game developer I would like to be one day I'm gonna keep working on this I want I don't think I can really call myself one until I've either got a publishing deal or or had more than ten sales that's a pretty low bar I think the more than ten sales but I'm willing to give myself that I will be a game developer once I've developed a game that's gotten ten sales because I've made a couple of hobby games now and that's exciting and I can actually mess around in unity but that it just took so much time so the original question is how come everybody wants to make games and nobody does it it's because it's hard it's legitimately hard this is what I think a lot of people aren't saying is that it's it's hard I've been watching game design videos for years watching and re watching them and I feel like I'm just now getting the point where I can have an educated game design conversation with somebody and I mean like not just little videos like in-depth videos like GDC analysis and and all that stuff I've been I've been immersing in this world it's been my like primary hobby I've been I've been just researching and researching game design for a long time and that's just a design like I can know everything about game design not actually be able to make a game so now I'm actually able to make a game I finally at the point where I'm making a game and I'm able to follow tutorials and things like that when I come to a new problem and I'm able to fix it and move on and continue to make my game and that is it what I've been wanting to do for the past two years I hurt my shoulder like I was saying and I sat down the program and I sat down to learn it and it's taken me two years now I've not been doing this constantly for two years by any means but I've been having jumping in jumping I'll jump in and jumping out trying at different times and just just so determined to eventually get this I'm in trying for two years to do it and now I know why everybody talks about game development and nobody does it it's a huge discipline it's got its own rules and it's got its it has several barriers to entry which is unlike any of the other more technical hobbies and professions I've taken up and so if you're curious I would say definitely do it if you want to make games if you're thinking I'm watching this video because I want to know why I'm talking about it and why I'm not doing it you're not doing it cuz it's hard if you're willing to do something hard to learn something hard I can tell you it is possible you have to be willing to learn a lot to take baby steps to spend a lot of time learning stuff that's not directly making games I spent a ton of time just I bought a whole other c-sharp course where I was just practicing how to program and c-sharp without making games just making applications just so I could better understand what I was doing and feel more comfortable in that world so so totally do it I totally do it but you don't do it if you're not willing to do something hard it's gonna take a lot of time it's gonna take a lot of effort and it's hard and it might not even have any payment options for it like you might not be able to make money you might make lots of money I don't know I'm not you I don't know what games are you have in your head what you're planning on doing and for that if you're gonna work for somebody else we're gonna work for yourself but it's hard and that's why and that's what no one really talks about everyone talks about like hey you should just make games I have so many videos with just like hey you should just make them you should just make games go do it just go do it and I'm like okay I'm gonna go do it and I'd be like damn what button do i press I've messed around with it everything would break and not work and it would just be a headache after a headache and I have these massive headaches after I was done because I was just trying so hard to understand and and finally I'm understanding finally after a lot of effort so maybe it'll be easier for you than it was for me I'm still learning I'm still creating if you're interested in this game stay subscribed this channel is not about game development but it is about tech dive Steven and I and what we're doing and reviewing and product reviews and stuff like that and if you're interested in video stuff I got a channel just for you there - link below and if you want to help us out if you want to learn new things if you want to try new things you can sign up for Skillshare if you sign up through Skillshare through our link you'll get two months free and that will give us a bonus kickback that will help us out a ton and let's continue to make videos and continue to try and create content both videos and video games things like that that you might like thank you so much for watching subscribe if you're looking for more like if this video helps you out i'll see you next time oh and the switch giveaway if you're watching this wondering is he gonna mention the switch giveaway it's going it's going good we still got till December 1st to get 200,000 views on that video but I think we can do it I think you guys are doing great with it and we're excited we're very excited links for that below - see you next time

Channel: Space Dodo

Views: 192,987

Keywords: techdive, tech, dive, gaming, why no one becomes a game developer, how to become a game developer, how to become a game designer, gamedev, how to, how to become a game developer without a degree, how to make games, how do I start being an indie dev, indie developer, indiedev, indie game developer, being a game designer, being a game developer, how to get started making video games, how to get started making, Video games

Id: 0ixsAavbBpU

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CommodoreSixtyFour_]

What this guy says really resonated with me. I have been there too: Telling my friends that I will learn how to make games and actually make one after that. Well, it was not that easy and I ended up not making a game. That was before Unity even was a thing.

This is meant as an encouragement. If you are just starting out and struggling to get results, don't push yourself too hard. Take your time and take one step at a time.