3 Things You MUST Do When Making Your First Game!

in this video I chat with the creators of outbound an indie game about living off the grid it currently has over 100,000 wish lists all because of the developers focused on three things before starting the creation of the game and if you stick around to the end of the video My Hope Is that you can replicate exactly what they did for your game too oh and by the way if you're like me making a game like outbound seems kind of like a pipe dream but I have a free Workshop below that will guide you through creating your very first 3D game without any 3D modeling and with just a tiny bit of code click below you're going to learn a ton this is totally free I just want to see you succeed just to give a quick summary for people listening outbound looks incredible and I think the reason why outbound is getting so many wish lists is because of three things the first thing is the mechanical hook being I get to soup up my van and live off the grid that's a really really cool hook for the mechanics of the game the second reason I think it's blowing up is because of the visual hook it kind of looks like firewatch firewatch has a very unique

look and I think you guys have just killed it with that look the story Hook is again it's very similar to the mechanical hook which is I'm going to go off the grid I mean that's that's a really cool narrative to experience and so I think you guys have just killed it with outbound because of you've just really focused on a very strong and precise hook now my question to you is was that the intention with outbound did you think very precisely about those hooks or did you just or did you just say oh that sounds fun let's do it no that was that was definitely the intention we had a lot of lessons learned from above snakes and then we started doing prototypes of these little games these little ideas and eventually you know this was all basically bathed in just market research really looking at okay what do people want what it exists out there right now and eventually you know finding a niche that you're very excited about yourself but also that people still want that that's

a product that's not out there and you know eventually we came to this idea and we were like wow this is this is a fantasy of our own owning one of those vans and just going out there but we're you know making games so why don't we make a game about that and then that just sort of like took off and people loved it so much being able to turn that idea into a vis visual hook and then very early on creating that trailer that just did did very well for us and how many views did the trailer get uh yeah IGN posted it on their Channel and it got like over 400,000 views up to date so yeah that fre amazing guys that is so good I love that see here's the here's the problem there's a lot of purist game developers out there and it's totally fine to be a purist it's totally fine to be you know motivated purely by your joy of making games which I think is great and I'm motivated by that and I'm sure you guys are as well however my question is do you feel like it's profitable and and just a good thing overall for game

developers to think about and to focus on if an idea is marketable yeah I mean yeah I mean that's kind of where we came from after above snakes like we had a little kind of like like a diagram where we had like a couple of points where we said okay this is important to us because the the the the joy of creating games is also the joy of seeing people enjoying the game right I mean if we would like create something and it ends up on Steam with like the negative reviews or something or nobody even plays it I mean then that's not really something we would enjoy so yeah we were very intentional about we have a couple of like points that we think that people really want to see in a steam game nowadays and so we try to check these boxes and also combine it with a fantasy that was really strong I mean not just for us but also what we thought is strong for for people and I think even more importantly we found this niche of where we have like there are a lot of open world crafty games right now right I mean is just a trend uh currently but

we found a niche in these games where normally you have a home base somewhere like in let's take valheim for instance you you create like like a cabin somewhere in the wood and that's your home base you bring your your your stuff to that base and build and whatever and in in outbound the big difference is you can take this base with you and you can travel with that base so you're not bound to one location yeah yeah and and the funny thing that we just realized like over the last couple of weeks when we did our first play test is we are still out Mound is still suffering from that idea that so many players have is that they need to return to their base they need to walk out and they need to return to their base and they forget to drive which was such an interesting find players just forget it how do you fix that is there a way to incentivize it and make it part of the loop yeah yeah that's what they're trying nudist here and there bigger goals trying to deplete uh certain things in the area

giv that's a good idea yeah I mean we're trying to all kinds of different things right now yeah yeah you hear we we're in the middle of play testing at the more the first play test for the demo yeah how's that feel yeah great right I mean first time seeing the game being played I would Define it as so fun and stressful it is so stressful it's kind of like I I don't know this might be a little bit too extreme but it's like being butt naked and having somebody like critique you I'm I mean that's that's how it feels for me we're having um internal play testing right now for Twisted Tower and actually one of my good friends the creator of cultic um his name is is Jason he's also playing Twisted Tower as well and it's tough you know cuz like not only do you have a thousand items you you still haven't even finished for the game then you've got play testers going hey this is a priority this is a priority this is a priority and so they're they're creating more stuff for you and it makes it that what they're saying feels is way more of

a priority than all the other stuff you originally thought was a priority because it's actual players who are playing the game how do you order like if one person says something is that enough to make a change in a game for me I weigh this is going to sound terrible I try not to show favoritism uh in my life like if somebody's successful I try not to show them favoritism cuz I used to do that and I think that's just a terrible way to be a lot of like social media influencers and like business people like motivational influencers they say um surround yourself with people more than more successful than you the problem with that is you basically are just a leech with game development I think it's really really good to surround yourself with all kinds of different people so for one you you surround yourself with players just people who play games right then you surround yourself with people who are developers who are very very successful and so for me I found that during internal play testing so like the very very very beginning of play testing it's probably best to get the top tier game devel velers friends in your circle who

have created a game in your Niche that's super duper successful so for me I think Jason the creator of cultic he has overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam so in my mind I'm like I'm going to listen to that guy U for now for now and that helps you prioritize the real big glaring issues cuz it's one thing for a for a beta testing audience to pinpoint bugs it's another thing though for someone who's testing your game to say hey there's like 20 things that are wrong with this game G but I can tell you the one thing that's going to get you mixed reviews on Steam and here it is bang and so for you guys maybe during testing you find the guy or gal who made a game that's wildly successful not necessarily in its financials but just successful in its reviews that got a good response we're wrapping up the development of Twisted Tower and I'm like okay I've got 400 things that are wrong with this game what do I prioritize for my team and my budget I I'm trying to say okay there's 20 things wrong but I really can only focus on a few things that are going to help me

avoid creating a disaster and I'm curious if you guys have found that there's just a couple things that you have to get right for outbound for it to be a successful game not in the marketing but in the actual launch have you found that one thing I think what I would answer is that there's a big Variety in things that that you're allowed to do and hopefully successfully allowed to do in a game because what we're seeing and you know we haven't we've we've had a couple of uh other game Des play but we've also had just people from our community play we always ask them like hey what kind of a player are you or what kind of a games have you play normally do you play Survival Craft games do you know some people really pick up on the visual language that we give him of all right chop a tree pick up pick up a a rock and and go build with that but our game outbound is really so or we try to make it so wide in in the things that you can do you know we really see these explorers they

immediately want to go out and then see what the world is we see these Builders we see these men maxers of okay how can I automate so much of it that I you know make my life easy and there's just cozy Gamers that just want to build the van and I think you know if we do that thing correct that we have that variety that's one to what's going to make players happy but you know your take yeah probably the Reon tough is because it's it sounds expensive it's like I have to make a game it's like five children it's like you have five kids and you're the parent and one kid hates peanut butter and jelly the other one loves peanut butter and jelly the other one wants a turkey sandwich and then the other one is vegan you know so it's like what you have to make it for everybody and that's that's the thing about these sandbox games or not sandbox games but like um uh crafting games May yeah maybe even that that makes it tough right cuz you got to you got to balance the game for all kinds of different players with different strategy yeah of course and and still I mean we

we're having these discussions like non-stop where we try to like keep the scope as small as possible while creating something that is as enjoyable as possible making a game like outbound seems kind of like a pipe dream but I have a free Workshop below that will guide you through creating your very first 3D game without any 3D modeling and with just a tiny bit of code click below you're going to learn a ton this is totally free I just want to see you succeed