2 Years of Indie Game Development

hi this is Jonas I'm an indie game developer and I would say have been an indie game developer for two years now during that time period I worked on two games Islanders and will you snail I've started this YouTube channel two years ago in fact which is why I thought a great opportunity to have a little look back and get you all up to speed with what's happened so far how is it like to be an indie game developer how is it going what are the plans for the future I'll reveal my YouTube sets and some rough sales numbers in short this is my 2019 end-of-the-year summary for you the basic idea behind starting this YouTube channel was to have a way to market my indie games because even two years ago I knew that marketing would probably be one of the biggest challenges I actually started with daily uploads I have no idea how the hell I managed to pull it off let's just say my quality standards weren't as high back then hi there I'm create video games for everybody who's up for an amazing adventure starting a business so why should you subscribe you should subscribe because at the point being my situations 2 years ago was I

decided to quit game school and I decided to start going into indie game development I was super scared and nervous at the time it doesn't really show on videos like I had a couple of minor anxiety issues for sure because people are telling me don't quit your studies that's a very dumb move probably because it is a dumb move okay don't do it I also knew that I wouldn't get that much more out of finishing my studies so I just decided to go with it start this YouTube channel yeah pretty scary so I was living at home with my dad by the way I still am still living at home with my dad the biggest difference is that back then I had zero income I didn't make any money of course with indie game development and now two years later I've actually managed to get into a financially secure State at least for the next two or three years and good the only goal the ultimate goal is to keep making games and at very least for the next couple of years I'll be able to do that which is fantastic huge thank you

to everybody who supported me my parents etc etc we'll get into how I managed to make that happen will we'll get into where my income is coming from for now let's just I was a lot of luck it was a lot of being at the correct place at the correct time sure back then I was working on a game called overs Nova this is how the game looks looked like it was a yeah obviously this is prototyping graphics right and the game had a kind of a cool concept but in the end it didn't end up working out which unfortunately and I noticed way too late here's one of the very fun videos where I tried out a couple of different art styles for that game it was was a fun game what can I say the main problem of that game was just that it wasn't marketable at all like it would not have been possible to zelda game much why it's good that I decided to make a little mini game called will you snail or you hear hear this new video is called let's make a viral game will you snails and pretty much started out as a joke right hey guys this John was making video games with you and I decided we're just gonna make a viral game today no problem at all I want to put my theories to the

test and I have an absolutely brilliant idea we're gonna make a rage game I was I hope I was kidding I'm pretty sure I was kidding there so this is how will your snail looked at the very beginning the main concept was there even this level still looks pretty similar notice it's a very simple jump and run game you play that snail here very easy to understand and you need to dodge those spikes that are coming out of the ground the hard part about it is that there's some sort of an AI and the tries to predict where you'll go next and that's where it will put the spikes actually it's way harder than it looks yeah and as it turns out that game was a lot more fun and I thought also a lot more marketable than what I was working on back then always Nova so over time I just tossed all this Nova and just kept working on will you snail and at that time I was still at game school at hgw Berlin studying game design and during those studies I of course made islanders two of my friends there hall and freeman where does this year start one year one

year are here okay that is very interesting here's the one year of indie dev so that is the video I made at the end of 2018 let's actually have a quick look at this and super curious 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've I did this year everything I achieved this year and I realized this is a pretty me focused video this mission celebrating what I did this year first of all let's have a quick look at all of the games I made this year this one is over snowball which I didn't finish because I didn't think it was promising really here we have Ouroboros which I made for Jim Jam this one which is a game I made in ten minutes for break is ten minute game challenge overcharged the game I made for 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 there of course ended up being Islanders 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 this is where this year started and I've made a lot of videos I'm pretty proud of this year the perhaps I can also use the opportunity to show you a couple of videos you might have missed that might interest you oh yeah of course 2019 started with a WoW a gem I hosted my first game gem this year 2019 and of course next year 2020 we'll start with another Wow a game gem you are hereby officially invited to the second game gem 17th of January 2020

you can join with a link in the description join in 17th of January and a little bit of a community service for you here I for the most part just want to finish up will you snail I really want to make some progress with release now but I just thought hey I'll take the time to do this with you as a little celebration so here are all of the game gem videos and here is where I published my first video about Islanders this time right here is where I went from 1000 subscribers to 10,000 especially this video right here game dev week before launch this Islander staff log here is what pretty much blew up my channel I mean not that it's super huge right now or anything but this is exciting first time any of you hey welcome this is Jonas from grizzly games and I'm super excited to announce Islanders the game is already completely done I cannot make the game without telling you anything about it oopsie but I'm absolutely willing to share everything now I made the game with two of my friends this was not a

solo project I really want to stress that you can see the full team here although big shout out to the University and our professors that helped us out what kinda game is it it's a strategy / puzzle game [Music] now that I see this video I can remember that so well there was that was really exciting especially the time before launch where we published the first trailers then one of our tweets on Twitter completely blew up and tons of people wishlist the games that's really exciting yeah what a fortunate situation to be in like I'm have said I'm really lucky I don't really want to take too much credit for what I've been able to achieve I was lucky I mentioned that I was just lucky probably hey this is Jonas and our indie game Islanders literally launches in just a couple of days so I thought I'd show you what I've

been up to in the morning I meet up with the team for a little conference call in Trello we collect all of the things we still want to do and discuss and then in the morning we just go through our to discuss area here so that was a pretty fun Deathlok actually can recommend one of the videos you should watch if you've missed it and then another video you can definitely watch if you've missed it is making of islanders where's that here how we made islanders this pretty much a fool making off where i show a lot of the old prototypes hello this is Jonas for year this is how the game looked like at the beginning this is how it looked like at some point and of course in the end it look more like this oh yeah a lot of people have asked how like how well has the game sold I won't give you the exact numbers but you can have the rough numbers so far as it says it has sold over two hundred thousand times pretty insane does that mean I'm a millionaire right now no unfortunately not because steam takes a big cut you

pay a lot of taxes and also the game doesn't belong to me the game belongs to gorilla games to this little grizzly here first of all and co-owner of grizzly games now which is a pig chrisley games is of course the game studio we used to publish Islanders I joined their team after they made super flight and that is what I've meant with I've been at the correct place at the correct time because those guys had already made a successful game on steam before they knew a little bit of what they were doing I was able to join their team which basically means I was just pretty lucky and I think I definitely contributed a lot to the success of the game as well however without me finding the team it would have looked entirely different like I would still be sitting here with basically zero income let's just face it so that's what I meant with being lucky right I was at the correct place at the correct time and also in general I have to say I can't really take too much credit for how it went so far because I've just had absolutely perfect starting conditions right I'm able to live at home with my dad pretty much

zero pressure and don't have to pay any rent got a lot of support from my parents not to forget about all of the support our team received at game school and htw Berlin very much the perfect starting conditions I know that a lot of people don't have that a lot of people are not as lucky man that is that is a shame I'd like in the end that's one of the reasons why I have this YouTube channel so I can hopefully help you get there as well and of course will you snail kept evolving during the time I kept working on the game for every game developer who this was thinking about starting a YouTube channel as well this video is for you how to design anything I think that's a super useful video how to design a decision super interesting game design video I really like a lot of the videos I put out this year and you can see now we're at we have arrived at the part where I'm I'm celebrating myself yeah yeah yeah yeah so many great videos here at the end of the year we had a super fun four week series where I made a dev vlog every week documenting the progress on will you snail the main challenge was to finish will you snail

within just four weeks I actually did it but the game will be snail is still not finished like there's still so much more work to do I keep finding new bugs I keep finding new things that I still want to put into the game I want to translate the game into a couple more languages when I put in more story more Easter eggs more content more settings like I wanna do a graphics overhaul like I'm starting to get really scared because in spring I want to start the next game project with grizzly games we'll make another game with the Grizzlies until then I'd really like will you snail to be finished completely 100 cent done however that's gonna be pretty tight I want to make sure I'm really happy with this game when it finally comes out because I've put so much time and effort into it already and I feel like it has a ton of potential and I feel like if I don't finish it properly now then all of that more or less could go to waste because I feel like making a good game nowadays not good enough will your snail is a good game now but I want to turn it into an excellent game and that of course takes a little bit of extra effort and a

little scared Willy snail it's a solo project of course right I'm making the game alone which feels a lot different than making games in the team it's a lot slower as well you have to do everything yourself I don't have an amazing artist in my team as I did with Islanders like freedom and just made Islanders look epic and now I'm struggling a lot more myself with the visuals of will you snail because I don't have an artist in general to be honest I'm kind of worried about the launch of will your snail I feel like the game does not have nearly as much a peel as Islanders per se my hope is that streamers and content creators will pick it up so I'm assuming that would probably be one of the main events in 2020 bringing out will you snail I hope that will happen in 2020 really hard let's hope so I keep ramping up the quality of my videos which unfortunately also means they take me longer and longer to produce more people are watching them I feel more pressure to produce some watch quality videos which stresses me out a little bit and which

also takes a ton of development time away which is let's just integrate that announcement right here okay announcement I'm Wu unfortunately this time it's not a super pleasant announcement but I think it's something I have to try out and that is getting rid of the upload schedule for now I've been uploading one video a week I feel like if I want to finish my indie game we'll use snail on time that is too much costs taking too much time to make all of these videos and I need to spend more time on actually making games right now and more importantly I want to spend more time on making games right now I'm not creating YouTube what I am doing is trying to move this entire game development and this entire YouTube thing into a long-term thing right I've proven that it can work short-term in this two year period the next step for me personally is making sure I'll be able to do this for the next 10 to 20 years if I really think about what I want to be doing five years from now ten years from now it is not spending fifty percent on my time on making YouTube videos I've been consistently uploading

a video every single week for two years I feel like now's the time to switch that up a little bit something you will benefit from as well by the way because that way it'll be more likely I'll keep making videos in the long run and we'll see how that impacts the channel etc etc and as you can see here I'm currently making 250 bucks per month off of YouTube which is great that's quite a bit of pocket money started monetizing this YouTube channel this year as well I don't think this number will move into a territory where I'll be able to live off of it any time soon boss the second part of this story is that I don't want to be that guy who's teaching people how to make games and how to make money with games or whatever without actually doing it myself so that is one of the other reasons why I feel like I need to focus a bit more on game development right now because as it is right now I'm actually spending more time on teaching game development and actually practicing game development and I feel like it'd be it would be a lot better if you could actually learn from a practitioner from

somebody who's actually making games who's going through all of the required steps himself that is essentially what I want to offer to you and in order to be able to offer that for you and need to reduce the frequency of uploads a little bit ok so let's have a look at your subscriber growth or stuff like their like where where are these dads yeah that's pretty much how it looks like this was the first year and this giant spike right here is a service where we published Islanders who would have thought I think that gave me a big credibility boost as well right before that I was just a random kid sitting at home making games without any success and then here's where I've made Islanders I think people started accepting me as a little bit more of an authority although to be honest a game probably gave me quite a bit of a confidence and ego boost as well like before that I was really unsure and scared that what I was doing was the correct thing to do and this is the point where I was like okay I guess it's

working I guess I can be a little more confident now and of course after that you can see the fuse going up and down perhaps with a little bit of a tendency upwards here at the end generally nothing I've worried about too much because fuse go up they go down they go all over the place if you obsess about the numbers too much it can really drive you insane they can't go all of the time and general display epic I've been off to a good start over the last two years which is mostly down to very good starting conditions and now in 2020 the exciting part will be can i replicate the success of islanders like can I make another successful indie game either alone or in a team with grizzly games that is going to be super exciting to find out I'll make sure to document the development of the next game properly so I can show a bit more of that on this YouTube channel being an indie game developers awesome I've enjoyed that tons of our thanks for all of your support thanks so much for watching my videos it's highly appreciated I I don't take you for

granted pretty epic I'm happy and I'm very curious to see where this journey leads me let's find out and you ever ask yourself why you're here you taught me how to manipulate that skill on your behalf so that's what I did [Music] and everybody is how you catch a volleyball [Music]