You Got This.

over the past year or so I've been making YouTube videos for this Channel about making video games I've made devlog series and single videos covering an entire commercial product that I've made my goal is to provide some insight into what it takes to make a commercial game but where did I get [Music] started when I was about 14 years old I was introduced to the idea of making my own games and I was really excited about it here I'll attempt to share a sort of timeline of those games and some of the best looking projects from over the years hopefully it'll be insightful because you can see that the process isn't all that glamorous there's simply one step to take and that is to make games that means following tutorials trying out something new or just poking around in a game engine or even making art for a game or writing ideas down on paper any of these constitute part of the game making process and part of my game development Journey hopefully by sharing footage of these projects game developers can be less harsh in their judgment of themselves of where they started and where they're currently at and understand that the process like with all things takes time and although there are ups and downs the process as a whole is quite enjoyable to share a little bit about me to preface what you're about to see I was first introduced to game development when I was about 14 years old I was entering high school in America and my cousin was showing me a game engine that that he had learned about through a short week-long class that he took I'd always enjoyed playing video games growing up anything from Pokemon on the Game Boy to GameCube titles and even before high school getting a little bit into computer games mainly Terraria I had always been interested in art and drawing and so in high school I focused a lot of my free time on drawing and doing concept art because I thought that's what I wanted to do long term I still have a lot of interest in these things but they have massive ly taken shape in my life in the form of being a game developer now I was fortunate enough to go to art school where I made a couple games and learned a ton about the game making process at least on the art side I learned programming on YouTube essentially I got a job working at a gaming startup and I've made a few commercial projects as you can see I've sort of dip my toes in a lot of the areas that contribute to game development and I'm constantly learning about all those disciplines today now that you have a bit of context about me let's start all the way at the beginning this game is the first completed project I have it is called wizard dungeon here's a little gameplay of me playing it and rediscovering it I was able to find an old game maker version and I was surprised when the game actually ran I don't remember it being this completed at all it even has different enemy types in UI what oh my gosh I forgot about this and it's got wow okay yeah and the Slime split it's interesting you move by going forward and backwards how do I open the chest I feel like there used to be a way to open oh okay oh these ones are locked oh I have keys now I have two keys that's crazy I'm so surprised I even have a little gradient going whoa whoa okay we got all the enemies okay there's a fake block which is funny this guy is cool he's actually got like AI that is nuts I do not like remember it being this completed oh sh does he heard me oh he drops money bags whoa the witch fire is a spell okay the controls are actually like quite interesting it's not intuitive at all quite honestly oh shop okay this is funny yeah this robot was supposed to be the shop owner hello my name is Don what and I'm a robot I live here here and my papa is up and steaming out of his sockets so be careful you said you want to escape take one of these to help you with a small fee cough cough but you get to pick one I think this was going to like shoot things and this is a shield and I don't think the shooting things works but or maybe I just don't have enough money oh this is his this is his papa this is his papa why did I say that oh he spawned skeletons dang wow nice I think that's it this is this this is actually kind of funny and kind of fun okay wow I kind of made this when I was younger and so I think when you're younger and you're excited about something you can kind of tunnel vision in on that thing and you can get a lot done this game is actually pretty fun for what it is and it probably took me a very long time I was probably intensely focused on doing this besides whatever activities I was in or whatever school I was doing at the time as well I don't have a ton of the game files from this period of time but I do remember making a platformer with a frog where you would climb up ladders and open chests and one of my other more completed games was called jolt man and Bubble Boy I think before wizard dungeon I worked on jolt man and Bubble Boy a lot and it was a puzzle platformer where you would click buttons to open up areas and get to the end of the level I remember them looking something like this I wish I still had those files because it was would be great to look back on I would go on to make a couple smaller projects that were more like demos made from tutorials they didn't really have any finished gameplay Loop they were just an idea I had and a sort of sketch of that game concept this one was called flute dog and it was a sort of Nuclear Throne clone where you play as a dog and you toot a musical instrument to combat enemies the only thing I really had in the game was the dungeon generation and this is a sort of theme for a lot of my earlier projects I would do other things related to games in high school for fun generally drawing pixel art and sometimes even doing pixel art for friends the earliest and most completed game that I have that was actually distributed to other people was a game called dunny for pre at my high school there was student Senate and a friend of mine was running for president he wanted me to make a game for his campaign and I said sure I ended up making a simple Mario type platformer with enemies and a couple puzzles I think it turned out relatively good for what it is and a lot of people in the school ended up playing it I remember telling people about it and seeing people playing it at lunch it was really fun here's a bit of footage of me playing the game and some live commentary it's very like the tile look like this the walls look like this the the lockers Etc there weren't spikes um sedexa was like the food provider for the lunchroom uh which everyone hated there like enemies and there's number of levels I even included this one teacher that would give everyone detentions for walking the wrong way in the hallway some of the levels were quite kind of cheap like this one starts off with this big fall into this pit of spikes so if you're playing on hard mode it resets you to the very beginning ye okay it's wonderful it is important to make you know creative and Innovative things but making a game that is fun for people to play and fun for your friends uh for whatever like reason or context is is a good thing after my time in high school poking around with the game engine it was time to go to college I had spent a lot of time putting together a portfolio of drawings so that I could go to art school and luckily I got in during my time at Art School I was in the game artch apartment and it was mostly 3D modeling and efficiencies related to that topic I spent some of my free time still making games or poking around with game ideas I would make a couple small demos like this Sprite stacking one where you control a frog with a sword made from a heartbeast tutorial whom I'm a big fan of there was this one with more dungeon generation and a lot of sprite work that never really took off I would make small Platformers with a cool character just cuz I wanted to see the character jumping around I would never actually make any other mechanics or complete the games this next game is the last game maker game that I ever made before switching to other tools I only really switched because when I restarted my computer one day my license for the software gamemaker Studio was somehow lost and I didn't want to pay for the program again this game is called get apple it's a game where you get apples it's merely a walking simulator slash a monkey smoothie game but if if you play for long enough strange things start to happen after getting a 100 apples you get your first pair there are trash bags that can spawn that give you negative 100 apples and eventually you can even get bananas this was my first time really doing anything with like particles and also with shaders I use shaders to make seasons in the game I don't know why I did most of the things I did for this game but the seasons add a great atmospheric touch the game is interesting it feels really really fast because you're constantly getting apples but and the rate at which like interesting other things happen is pretty slow so there's a dog that will spawn you can get the dog there's a the season change I'm pretty sure these happen only every 10 minutes and then there's the trash bags which last a long time but the garbage man will come pick them up there's pears there's apples there's bananas and eventually there's this old guy who really throws down like he really throws down let's have a moment of silence for our old man but but any who that's good apple I had one course in college that was called game Concepts and techniques this course actually talked about designing a game and this is really where I got inspired to start taking it seriously the game I made for this class was called tomato taxi tomato taxi is a game where you drive a car um on the surface of a tomato as if it were a planet I don't really know why it was tomato but the game was super fun to make and it's still pretty fun to play there isn't a ton of gameplay you just pick up passengers and then stack them on the stem of the Tomato but the concept was eventually the people you brought back to the stem would create a bridge to the next vegetable or fruit to Traverse it's got music it's got sound effects it has a little grading system where you get a worse grade the more things you run into but overall it's just a chill little game I believe the next game project that I worked on was for the gmtk game Jam in 2019 this game Jam is super fun to participate in and I've been trying to do it every year that they host it since the theme was only one and so you have only one inventory slot and you have to manage waves of enemies with slightly unique items it's an interesting game and pretty fun to play still but the hitboxes are pretty poor and that can make it feel pretty frustrating I did make it in gdau uh which I'm using now for my newest project it was the first project that I had ever really made in gdau in college I would do a series of game jams with friends as well which were always super fun here's a little bit of footage from those projects we made a small platformer with a really funny storyline we'd make a game like Warrior Weare with a lot of micro games and a game where you would buy and sell art in a subway station senior year for an independent study we would make a 3D platformer where you were a ghost using your own dead body to solve puzzles and defeat enemies all these were super fun to make and it was great to work with all these amazing artists and people along the way the next thing that I started to work on was a drawing program I think I think you could call it a drawing program at first it was sort of just an experiment the program that I ended up making is called sinewave and you can adjust different sliders to make the brush move around the screen in a mathematical way you can adjust different parameters like the size of the brush and the color of the brush and it is kind of fun because you can get certain results that I don't think any other drawing program at least to my knowledge can emulate at least without a lot of difficulty in recreating it it's also got a fully fledged drawing mode where the sinewave motion travels around the cursor and so you can draw things with the motion of the brush on or off I've done a few complete paintings totally within the software it was about at this time that I had come up with the concept for Bunny Hill I'd started working on Bunny Hill and you can find out more about that in this video but that was my next large project while working on Bunny Hill I ended up participating in the game makers toolkit game Jam again but in the year 2020 I would make a program called Gob online this is technically a game but when I was making it I was really influenced by simulations and procedural content basically you play as a wanted Goblin that traverses from town to town terrorizing the populace each time you spawn in you get a specific weapon with specific traits that are based off of the color and shape of the objects that make up the weapon some of the weapon specs include bullet spread bullet speed bullet size and things like that and the same goes for the people of the town they get two shapes and the shapes determine their attributes how long they spend walking around how quickly they notice a threat and how accurate they are in locating you the theme for the jam was out of control so as you progress through the quote unquote levels all of the stats get a little boost so the towns folk become faster your gun becomes a little bit more sporadic and everything slowly gets out of control there aren't a ton of real gameplay elements to interact with but I'm pretty happy with with this overall after finishing Bunny Hill I would go on to make a game called grot grot is a small 3D platformer with climbing mechanics I was very inspired by breath of the wild and I put a lot of effort into getting a cool style and atmosphere along with interesting mechanics I think this game is pretty fun the controls are a bit clunky but you can get the game on hiio I made this game over the course of 10 days for a game Jam hosted by the YouTuber goodus whom I'm also a fan of there are multiple different items in the game that you can collect and the best part of the game is this bird he's always like screaming too which is funny after Grotto I would go on to make a small mobile game about a frog that throws planes at Luggage in an airport definitely one of my best ideas but anywh who this is one of my more commercial projects it's on Steam and mobile platforms and I want to make a video about it soon it's basically a tower defense game where you play as the main tower you buy upgrades and upgrade yourself as well as getting more Towers to Aid you I think when I eventually get back to that game to Spruce it up I'll make a video detailing its entire lifespan by this point I had graduated college and I'd worked at a game startup as a programmer I'd say I was really starting to get a sense of game development as a whole and I was itching to do more and more game development of my own while at that startup job I ended up doing a game jam with some co-workers and we created a game called mini maxers it's a battle arena game where you roll dice for your stats this was for another gmtk game Jam this game is pretty fun it's on itch so you can play it and I think if you have enough controllers and a couple friends it's worth a play through about a year later at the creation of this YouTube channel I participated in another game makers toolkit game Jam I made a game called Cavern a rogue Lake Puzzler Sandbox game which turned out pretty decently there's a whole video on this channel detailing this exact game jam and this is the game that I'm currently transforming into a full steam release I'm hoping to have it released relatively soon but it is the biggest game project I've ever undertaken by myself you can follow the development of that game specifically in the devlog series that I've been posting for the past couple of months if you want to know more about the process I also did a game jam with my friend Calvin called grubo's map which is a 3D platformer where you chart the map of the level I also o worked on his game a quest to be the best which he put out on the App Store I did some of the art for the game these are not all but most of the game projects that I've been a part of my entire life it's cool that I've been able to retain some of the files and go back and sort of see how far I've come and I'm hoping that by sharing them with you you can come to realize that everybody starts somewhere and everyone's process is different no matter what game engine you're using no matter what style of art what style of game the key is to just make games and and have fun doing so I really think that the best way to get better at something is to enjoy doing it and part of that is enjoying the learning process I've come a long way and I still have a long way to go if I want to reach my Game Dev goals I hope that this video provides some insight into my Game Dev journey and if you're interested in getting into game development I hope it inspired you I hope that if you are a seasoned game developer you got a kick out of all the old projects and I hope that if you are an artist musician programmer marketer someone who plays games or somebody who watches videos about games I hope that you enjoy the process and I hope that you're not too hard on yourself when it comes to comparing the progress that you can see to the progress that you actually make thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: dogma.questlog

Views: 57,769

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Id: i67BQEGGK8k

Length: 18min 3sec (1083 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2024