1 Year Indie Dev! (2018 Results)

hey this is Jonas making games with you and I started getting serious about indie game development pretty much exactly one year ago so at the beginning of 2018 I started this YouTube channel the year has come to its end so let's have a look at everything I did this year everything I achieved this year and I realized this is a pretty me focused video this is me celebrating what I did this year hopefully you so you'll still be able to get some value from this I'll share what I've learned this year I'll show you all of my stats all of my YouTube stats absolutely everything so hopefully this will be useful to you as well and I'd say let's dive right into it first of all let's have a quick look at all of the games I made this year this one is over Snowville which I didn't finish because I didn't think it was promising really here we have Ouroboros which I made for jimJam this one which is a game I made in 10 minutes for break is 10 minute game challenge over charge the game I made from Ludum dare 43 will you snail which is the game I'm still working on right now and let's also not forget about the winter version of this game and finally we have a game I made

this summer as a university project with my friends the game is already entirely done but we decided not to show any footage yet so this early prototype is all I can show you for now unfortunately first of all yes this is about game development but I also started a YouTube channel and I think this is a very crucial part of becoming an indie developer is getting yourself out there building an audience if you plan to make indie games for a long time then building an audience is a very very good time investment and that really shows for will you snail for example I pushed out a demo and like 200 people downloaded the game right away and I got 80 responses for my feedback form so that is absolutely insane and absolutely something that would not have happened without this YouTube channel so just for those who were wondering what has YouTube to do with becoming an indie developer actually quite a bit will you snail already got 350 downloads which is pretty decent no it's nothing to write home about without these YouTube videos maybe would be at 40 50 downloads so YouTube

definitely makes a big difference here here we have social blade so halfway through the year we were at about 500 subscribers and now all the way through the year we are at 1.5 thousands of subscribers so definitely seeing some exponential growth here which is very satisfying and very promising for the future I mean obviously I started a Twitter account as well that one hasn't really taken off 200 followers on Twitter I think I haven't figured Instagram out yet this is doesn't look all that good yet so goal for the next year is definitely to invest some more time into Twitter and Instagram to hopefully diversify a little bit because you never know what's gonna happen with YouTube article 13 and whatever I mean let's just hope YouTube stays alive let's actually have a look at my first videos because I think this is a really nice cringefest let's see where this journey started one year ago

so this is the very first very first video I made for this channel let's have a look hi there I'm gonna say create video games for everybody for an amazing adventure starting a business creating a video game so sorry about so why should you subscribe you should subscribe because I'll show you how to be so just be aware of the fact that at the moment I haven't really done anything and I'm kind of a nobody so together you should subscribe because I want to motivate you I want to inspire you don't let your dreams be dreams okay so this video is kind of cringy well it actually it's not all that bad I wonder why I didn't do some color correction on this look this other colors almost looks black and white did they just ramp up the contrast and the saturation a bit Jonah's also really funny look at how

short my hair is I literally haven't been to the barber since then isn't it beautiful I can't believe this is just one year ago it's absolutely crazy let's let's look at another one so this is when I was still making daily videos for example here oh my god I have a video where I where I designed the thumbnails for my videos it looks alright who watched this mean would that feel super boring oh my god when I started this channel I was making this game right here YouTube just with the left mouse button keep DubLi over Sonova and this game later evolved into something like this year i have an arch Deathlok so I don't even know how I managed to upload daily what the hell this seems so crazy to me right now I didn't manage to do everything on my list for example I

didn't have time yeah kind of a shame that almost Nova was not really a good game can really see me experimenting here in those early stages just because something is fun does not mean that it is motivating and just because something is motivating does not mean that this activity is fun as an example let's take doing push ups because I'm motivated to do that but empowerment social influence unpredictability what the hell am I talking about here I already forgot about all of that that looks confusing doing YouTube and indie games for two months now let's talk about what's going and where we want to take this first of all thank you very much for sticking around I highly appreciate it and I would use this opportunity to get some feedback from you so I feel like you can already see me being a lot more confident talking in front of the camera because at this point I've been doing this for two months at the beginning it felt a little weird now feels a bit more natural though

that's a nice improvement okay but let's let's move on let's move on here oh my god what did I do here all kind of crap music then you're logging okay but it's already 14 o'clock so I'm finally having my morning shower hmm these videos are not as bad as I expected maybe I should should make one of these again kind of kind of cool to see the snow tears where I started getting into weekly videos and you can see the quality of thumbnails and the diversity of the thumbnails starts increasing quite drastically here and this is also surprise surprise where my rather few numbers of these videos start really skyrocketing so before that maybe I reached 200 300 views on these daily videos of Emily if I'm lucky and here on

those weekly videos which had a much higher quality because I had longer a longer time to produce them the average was more like 1,000 I made these videos in Berlin while developing a secret unannounced project that will hopefully come out early in 2019 that's basically also one of the reasons why I switched from daily to weekly because I was working on a game with some friends and that took about three months then I moved back to my home town and I kept that weekly upload schedule but what I added was the daily live stream so I've I thought there was a nice middle ground in between where I can still put some content out every single day but I still have those high quality videos every Friday that starts right here these unfortunately these live streams really cluttered with a channel quite a bit so I put all of them to unlisted you can still find all of them in the live streams playlists another block this is how will you snail looked back

then probably edit the down quite a bit if I I was asking this today but in general you can see that I get a lot better at editing and at talking in front of the camera yeah this is a video I'm really proud of my game dev journey what the right images execute this is bonus man one of the first games I've ever created and this is will you snail the game I'm working on right now in this video we're gonna have a look at every single game I've ever made all the way from crap like this to really cool

stuff like this very nice video a very heartwarming video for me at the released so what's what's been my experience being an indie developer for about one year now so far I absolutely love it it's still fun it's still super motivating it's obviously freaking tricky to make a living as a game developer and I expected to take a couple of years for me to get to a point where I can sustain myself luckily I'm living at home with my dad so I don't have a lot of expenses I can probably keep doing that for for a couple of years at the very least so no no big pressure they're open two or three years from now this will be in a very stable place so here if you look have a look at the watch time over the entire lifetime of the channel this area in the beginning right here is where I uploaded daily obviously this the watch time dropped down here when I started doing weekly videos and here when I started the live streams it obviously goes up

quite rapidly the demographics are also quite interesting I mean pretty much 100% male audience so am I not attractive enough what's going on here or our females on YouTube still not interested in game development I don't know so I feel like this is something we should fix if possible maybe I don't know get a pink backdrop no sir I don't know what this is this is so extreme I have never seen something like this this really literally 0% females absolutely crazy so audience retention is a pretty good indicator for the quality of your videos I'm pretty happy I'm over 4 once again at the very top writing a game engine why and how Travis thank you for making the best video on my channel so there any anything

interesting obviously earnings so far absolutely zero I haven't started monetizing in any way yet so there's no patreon there no ad revenues from YouTube 2019 is where I'll start ramping that up slowly and I don't expect a lot of returns that gotta start somewhere right now I have a really important question for you and that is what do you want to see in the next year what do you want to see in 2019 on this channel what should we talk about what should we cover leave a comment what you what you'd like to see you let's see where all of this goes and I'll definitely keep sharing my results keep sharing my mistakes and what I've learned this is Jonas making games with you have a happy new year and thanks for watching if you I want to kill an arsonist and last year