10 Steps To Making a Successful Game

here are 10 steps to making your first indie game successful based on this book game dev by vlad marquis the creator of the indie game dark if you're currently working on your first game or if you think about making one keep watching because it's book summary time imagine being born in belarus surrounded by poverty being able to escape to poland without knowing the language your parents end up having a horrible divorce that makes headlines in the local newspapers and because of that you develop some severe stuttering you are completely bankrupt you can't put any food on the table you have no heating in winter because that is exactly the situation ludd found himself in i think i've been making games in easy mode all this time holy hell that's insane he decided he wanted to become a music composer who went to the united states and managed to get a full scholarship at the juilliard school which seems to be one of the most prestigious music schools in new york basically there he started his career as a musician and then eventually decided he wanted to get into game dev without knowing anything about game development

just three and a half years later he released his first successful indie game dark [Music] that story really shows the importance of mindset the most important thing about mindset is taking action like every action you take works like a free lottery ticket the more lottery tickets you have the bigger your chances of winning you need to take responsibility of your life you need to stop the excuses don't blame your circumstances if blood managed to do it so can you once you're ready to start making games the first step is pre-production that is the point where you put in a lot of effort to research what are current trends what are your competitors doing look up some other games some other companies like what works for them how many people worked on each game what was the budget for their games that should give you a rough idea for what to expect for your own projects there are so many things to think about like the scope of your game the marketability the hook is the something people will want to share what is the core emotion of your game how long do you want to be the genre what are your personal strengths

in other words think and do your research before you get started it will save you a lot of time later on unfortunately it's almost impossible to make a game without spending any sort of money you'll almost definitely have to spend at least a little bit of money the best thing you can do is to keep your expenses as low as possible because that is easier than raising money and also it will make it easier to make a profitable game because the less money you spend the less money you need to make in order to be profitable don't rush to quit your job don't take that risk it makes sense to keep your job at the release for a while okay and then there are a couple of other ways you can try to get some money for your game for example patreon you can try to get a grant or personal loans crowdfunding publishers investors just be a little bit careful when signing with a publisher because not all of them have your best interest in mind so make sure you're getting a good deal before you move ahead with that if you're wondering how to get a publisher in the first place i can only recommend this gdc talk i'll put a link in the description development this is the core part of course all of the information and all of the tools you need to make games nowadays are freely available online all you gotta do is put in the work but also you need to make sure the process stays

enjoyable for you because let's face it it's not enjoyable you're gonna quit very soon get familiar with some game design basics like focus on one core game mechanic don't spread your focus too much on too many different things try to make a game that is easy to learn and difficult to master game design is a very wide and complex topic i recommend you educate yourself one channel where you can do that is channel of mark brown has some excellent videos i have a couple of videos on that as well the way you should make and design a game is using iterative design that means you try something out you make a quick prototype of something then you see how it works right you test it you analyze it and then you refine it and you repeat that process over and over again should also let other people test the game of course so prototyping testing analyzing refining repeat don't rush the release when your game is like 90 done you really want to take your time to put in those last ten percent which can take a long time but it's absolutely worth it you want to make sure everything works and make sure everything feels nice and is polished like those last ten percent can be the difference between a success and a failure so don't rush the release business

as a game developer you're also a business person now if you want it or not you have to get familiar with business and law at the very least a little bit sooner or later you probably want to register company for your game and it just makes sense to get a lawyer at some point as well for the end user license agreement for the privacy policy or the non-disclosure agreements in case you want to hire any freelancers you can get some help for setting up the work for hire contracts et cetera et cetera when it's about money arguments can easily arise stop those arguments from happening early on by setting the work relationship into stone with a contract when working together i remember being pretty scared of all of that stuff but then when when i finally got into it it was actually not that difficult so just do it once again it's all about taking action nowadays unfortunately making a good game is not enough as well you also need to worry about marketing and pr you need to build a community the best place to do that nowadays is on social media of course and if you want to build a following on social media you need to provide value in the form of entertainment or in the form of information just promoting your own stuff and expecting it to work

not a good plan at the very least for building an audience you have to set up some really good marketing materials screenshots gifs text and of course most importantly a good trailer good video footage of your game check out the video on how to make a good game trailer by mark brown absolute must-watch for every game developer and of course making good marketing material is a lot easier if you have a good looking game having good marketing material is of course essential for selling your game and another one of the really important things you need to do is you need to learn how to pitch your game to publishers to the press nice two-sentence pitch about your game it needs to really catch and hook people if somebody asks you what kind of game are you making gotta have a really good answer already basically williamson is a fast paced platformer about snail distribution nowadays is likely extremely easy especially on pc a little harder on consoles but pc and mobile pretty straightforward it can still make sense to get a publisher because they can provide a lot of services all publishers provide different kinds of services they can provide feedback funding quality assurance which basically

professional testing they can send your game to conventions and awards you can use their existing customer base they can handle distribution and reporting to other platforms they can help you with localization and community management it can still make sense to just self-publish your game though because that will allow you to develop your own skills build your own audience you'll have more control both creatively as well as over your business and of course it's also a little bit less back and forth which can also speed up the development process a little bit so basically you'll just have to decide yourself which route you want to go both is very valid prepare for launch you don't want to be unprepared for launch the most important thing is that you set up your store page early so you can start collecting a lot of wish lists especially on steam be careful about announcing a release date if this is the first time you make a game right make sure it's 100 finished before you do that all to be smart in big brain about when you want your release date to be don't release during e3 or during a steam sale if possible no no no and then just create everything you'll need for launch beforehand because launching a game is very stressful you want to have everything you need

ready when it's time to launch the game reach out to press about three weeks before you launch your game also give them an embargo date which is basically just you asking them the friendly way to please not publish their reviews before your game's out and that way you'll get more traffic on launch day if your game managed to build a lot of momentum it makes sense to get help for launch a couple of people that just look through the comments make sure game is working fine for everybody because you'll be very busy on launch day most likely for launch you want to have a step-by-step plan ready of all of the things you want to do on launch day all of the social media posts best prepare them beforehand the steam announcement you want to have the newsletter ready you want to send out to your email list in case you have an email list if you want to do a live stream so just having a nice to-do list i feel like for launch day it makes a lot of sense wanna look out for bugs of course make sure all of those stupid packs are fixed but also breathe celebrate you've done it congratulations whatever happens happens if the game doesn't sell as well as you expected that's just the way it is actually nowadays can still happen quite frequently that sales

numbers still go up after launch while usual usually a sales number looks nowadays it happens more and more often that the sales really spike a few days after your launch day because word of mouth is a really strong factor nowadays what's next because there's still a lot you can do after launch for example you can gradually increase discounts pretty much all games do this they start out with small discounts like 10 15 20 and gradually work their way up try to keep your game relevant by updating it by making some dlc perhaps even stay active on social media enter competitions do some giveaways maybe even host your own little contest think about parting your game to other platforms maybe think about selling some merch or doing some bundles and by doing all of that by staying active you can definitely make sure the sales numbers don't drop off too quickly be smart about the next game you wanna make make sure you leverage the resources you've built for example by making a game that allows you to use the same scripts that you've already written or by using the same player base you already have creatively speaking you can do whatever you want but in the best case scenario of course you want to build up some momentum

go faster and faster and you don't want to start completely from scratch every single time i really feel like this is the best game development book for beginners i've ever read link is in the description go check it out it is a piece of art i'm not sponsored i really just like the book [Music] i kind of knew you'd mess that up right before the end [Music] stop we need to do something really quick because in the last video i forgot something very important sock reveal in case you don't know what zog reveals i basically promised you that when we reached 10 000 wish lists on steam i would do a sock reveal i didn't do a sock reveal because i thought you probably don't want to see sock reveal apparently you do want to see sock reveals or here we go so this is my sock draw yeah there are not a lot of socks in there main reason for that is because i don't really put my clothes into the shelf anymore and for lazy to do that um i think it has some holes

so here we go here's another sock i don't have one hole yeah already if you wish to produce nail whoa that sock as well no it cannot be no oh yeah this one has a massive hole okay listen to me at twenty thousand wishlists we will do garbage reveal i will show you my garbage bin we just gotta reach 10k more wishlists the wishlist now we'll get there very quickly glossberry what do you think about people who haven't wishlisted will you snail yet i wouldn't go that far