Brackeys Is Back (And I Have Some Things To Say)

so brackes you know inspired millions of game developers and inspired me as well not only on my game development Journey but also my YouTube Journey um and I'm actually really close friends with Andreas Andreas was one of the producers with the channel um before bracki stopped posting content um well I'm super excited because brackie posted I think it was yesterday or the day before I just got back from vacation so I wanted to just first off say a huge congrat ulations to braies um for being willing to take a break honestly and also a huge congratulations and a welcome back uh to the YouTube Game Dev space and it's a different space than I'm in currently because I'm still working with unity I'm still going to be working with unity it's not as uh glamorous and exciting to tell people that you're going to stick with unity but I'm really really excited for brachy on their gdau journey and so we're going

to watch this video here and just see what brais is up to and honestly there's one thing that I wanted to share with you um at the end of this video and tell you the one thing that I think brais is doing so well that I just haven't done well and that we can learn from um so stick around to the end of this video because I want to share with that one key piece of insight that I've been learning right let's go I've been thinking of something that I could say to try and break the ice but I think I'll just go ahead and do it all right now that's out of the way hello everyone it's been a while I hope you've all been well the last time we uploaded a video was over 3 years ago and I think it's safe to say that a lot has happened since then both in the world and in The Game Dev industry personally I've been taking a break from video games and to be honest I wasn't really planning on making any new videos

anytime soon I think for a while that some of the harsh realities of the video game industry had taken away some of the joy that I used to feel when making games from the lack of unionization in Tria to the real challenge of keeping an indie game Studio afloat I think that's an ever increasing pressure on developers and I wanted to say this really quickly um I have always been really inspired by braies because to to have a wildly thriving Channel I would say bracky was the most successful game development Channel like true game development Channel like you've got Danny who took a break um but Danny was making more like infotainment um game development videos whereas Brack's made like actual Game Dev tutorials and that that channel was exploding and just coming from somebody who I'm I'm monetize my channel right and I sell courses and I sell my own games um and I've taken sponsors ship I

know how much money comes in for my channel and I know the potential of income that bracky they probably had but could have had had they decided to really go crazy and monetize their Channel um and sell a bunch of products but they didn't do this and even crazier they just quit they just said we're we're done we're not going to make videos anymore and that was a a a brave and courageous step honestly courage that I've not yet had with my channel it's hard for me to just say you know what I I want to take a break out of principle I'm tired I'm exhausted I'm burnt out or the game industry is is not appealing to me anymore so I'm just going to back away that takes a ton of Courage that's not easy to do um so kudos to braies for doing that okay let's keep going did in the Game Dev space very young with simple and probably naive ideas of what it means to make video games these reties simply took it out of

me for a while but recently that changed a bit not because I discovered some cure that will magically make these issues disappear because unfortunately I haven't and they won't but simply because I saw something that made me excited about making games again in fact you could say that it's been a game changer pun intended and I know that a lot of you feel the same I'm of course talking about open source let me explain I've long been a huge fan of blender if you don't no no blender is an incredibly powerful and now very popular 3D Graphics tool it has capabilities in modeling sculpting UV mapping hugely powerful rendering and the list just goes on and the thing about blender is that it's 100% free

when I started using blender so something that's interesting about blender is uh it is 100% free there's no like gimmicks right um and it used to be a kind of a clunky tool to learn it was very very difficult to learn and one of my first videos that I did on YouTube I actually just flat out said I didn't like blender I hated blender um and that's because it was difficult to learn and other tools like Unity at the time or let's say I don't know a 3D tool they could have been a little bit easier to learn because they've got this massive Corporation behind them they've got a huge team built to help create documentation and to build kits uh and tutorials but blender didn't have that at the time and so I immediately said that blender sucked but the truth about any open-source software is that the initial product is going to be difficult to learn and it's not going to be squeaky clean and polished um but I

think what brais has learned here is that tools like blender and gdau eventually become more accessible to a much wider audience with just good documentation and updates to the software so that's something I didn't really realize about blender and even now with gdau I don't want to adopt gdau because I don't want to go through the the growing pains with the gdau community to be completely honest because we've got games to make we're working with a public 3D Realms on our game Twisted Tower we're going to be working with Publishers in the future and so we've got to get games done quickly and ensure that they can be ported to console and are commercially viable um again props to braies for Having the courage to stick with the gdau community and help sort of spearhead that I think that's awesome okay let's keep going it was still pretty small and not even close to comparing to the mighty industry standard Autodesk Suite but since then it has become a huge contender in the

world of 3D Graphics preferred by many professionals as well but how can something that is free ever compete with a hugely complicated software suite that costs thousands of dollars in subscription fees well at least part of the answer is that blender is what we call free and open-source software also known as Foss this means that instead of a company owning and controlling the software with a private code base the software is publicly owned and has a public and open code base that anyone can access and contribute to if you don't like something about the software or you would like to add a feature to it you can simply download a copy of it and modify it to suit your needs and then if you like the result you can re-upload it to see if other people would find it useful too perhap keyword there simply download and change it uh people like me I I can't do that right I don't know how to download a piece of Open Source software and tweak it and change it not smart enough so that's just something to keep in mind right with open source software

um you most people are going to rely on the community to do this most people aren't capable of doing this so there is a sort of um what's what's the right word uh there is a a nature to open source software that requires patience and it requires you know being principled and waiting for this stuff to for the changes to occur and and relying on the community to do that and they and they do do that because it's a very Democratic process it's very open however people like me you got to be patient again per my previous point I don't have the time to wait for a software to update and become well like a a kit or an API to be available to port to console right I need to rely on Unity to do that and they've done it very very well despite all the all of their stuff last year related to the price in

um Unity has a a great tool toolkit available to to port to to console perhaps merging your changes into the main program one of the great benefits of this is that it helps ensure that the software development is driven by the needs of the people who use it it's a hugely Democratic way of organizing development on top of this open source makes it possible to utilize volunteer work and donations to fund development this means that the software is free from ties to any single entity and makes it possible for anyone to use it without having to pay subscription fees or owing Away part of their revenue and open source is actually not as niche as you might think Linux for example went from a small hobbyist tool in the early '90s to powering Enterprise server systems also so many of the completely mainstream products of our time are built on top of Linux such as software for cars televisions and all Android phones it also Powers most of the internet and the world stock exchanges so open source is already an integral

part of the digital world we live in today now I mentioned that I started making games when I was still very young but looking back it feels like the industry was as well in just the past decade third party engines like unity and unreal have become huge and Industry standard a big difference from before where game studios would develop and use their own in-house engines also India development has gone from something that very few people even knew about to a huge Community where hobbyist and professionals alike publish successful game titles largely because of how accessible these third party engines have become and the game industry as a whole has become the largest entertainment industry in the world far surpassing music and movies put together now this is a lot of change and not in a lot of time and while huge growth like this of course creates issues I think it's important to remember that it also brings a lot of positives perhaps most importantly making games has never been more accessible than it is is now and

also large open source projects like a modern game engine require a lot of manpower to develop something that wouldn't have been possible with the small gamedev communities of just 10 years ago in fact just before taking a break from gamedev I was aware of a few open source initiatives but I didn't think that they were viable alternatives to commercial engines but holy wow A lot has happened since to convince me otherwise and huge props to the Game Dev Community for making that happen first of all a bunch of new have popped up and just like with blender previously Niche software is starting to gain massive followings with many contributing their time and donating to hire full-time developers just for full clarity here um when you're when you have a contract so for example when you have a contract with a publisher um so for me I always I tend to work with Publishers right um I don't really just patiently release my games I have a schedule I have a team I have a budget and I I hit every platform

um this this time around we we want to hit every platform if we can for Twisted Tower including consoles and so when you have a schedule like this and you have a budget like this it's really really difficult to have the patience for something like open source or a new platform so on one hand I'm super duper excited about platforms like gdau on the other hand I can't be because we have contracts right we have games that we have to get out so as an entrepreneur as a game developer or owner a game studio um you have to sort of be balanced in your approach right um but to Brack's Point here yes there are a ton of Open Source uh engines coming out and blender is a great example of an open source engine in Linux is a great example of an open source engine that because the community was patient and worked with those open source softwares they now have become industry standard we use blender right alongside unity all day every day for our game Twisted Tower

and so it is certainly true that gdau is probably going to become industry standard however it's difficult to adopt it now for Studios who want to port to console and Studios who want to make a commercially viable product for every platform I'm not saying it's not possible I'm just saying it's very very very very um difficult and the growing pains are real let's keep going the largest example of this being Gau Gau is a free and fully open source game engine that a lot of developers have recently turned to and the timing really couldn't be better for this gdo has actually been around for a while but in March last year gdo 4 was released which was a huge rewrite of the engine in my eyes making it a great choice for a lot of game projects and of course Gau is now riding on a wave of new users developers and a huge influx of donations to the Gau Development Fund I've been turning around with it for the past few months and I've been well loving it while many parts of the Indian of course have a

ways to go it is overall much further than I was expecting and perhaps more importantly for me it forced me to learn new things and reminded me of why I fell in love with making games in the first place now as for the title of this video I'm of course in no position to predict the future of the huge industry that now is game development yes you are you are in a great position so why don't you tell me but I do think that part of making that future the best that it can be is to realize just that game development is huge now and while this of course brings a lot of negatives it also means that there are more game developers than ever before who all share a love for the same thing and that perhaps a part of this future is software that is open source democratically owned and Community funded now I want to be totally clear here I'm by no means encouraging you to stop using third party engines like Unity onreal or game maker I'm really really glad he said that being completely open and honest here I get

kind of annoyed when game developers quickly reject one platform over the other and then sort of treat it like religions or Cults right um instead just use the tools available to you and make a wise decision like weigh the options weigh the positives and negatives and just use the platforms right I'm not a Gau guy and I'm not a Unity guy I'm just going to make games and whatever platform engine is going to help do that I'm going to use that so I really really appreciate the transparency there with braies nor am I saying that you should all use gdo or any other open source engine for that matter I've been using Unity for many years and made well over 400 videos on it so it's safe to say that I like the software in the end a game engine is a tool and you have to use the tool that is right for you and your project all I hope to do with this video is to inform you that there are many engines out there and hopefully to inspire you to think of the possibilities of what can

be achieved through different ways of organizing software at GDC last year one of the co-founders of the Gau engine Juan lki gave a talk titled Gau as an open ecosystem with a lot of sharp observations about open source in The Game Dev industry it goes into detail about how open source can be beneficial for the industry as a whole and I highly recommend you check it out so in the spirit of Open Source we'll be releasing some new videos on Gau I've been hard at work learning the engine and while I'm no expert yet and things are a bit different this time around there's no team there are no Patron supporters no ponytail we aren't in an office in fact we're recording this from our home I with the help of Sophia have done our best to create a couple of videos on the most essential parts of gdau the first video will be a Mega tutorial on making your very first gaming gdau and should be out next week the second one will be a complete overview of the GD script language and will'll be out with within a month definitely going to be

watching these uh and trying to learn I'll be completely honest with you guys even though me and my team are going to continue to use Unity gdau is in the back of my mind at all times unreal is not um for variety of reasons mainly because I think I just don't like it I don't like unreal it just personally I don't like unreal it's it feels clunky it feels heavy um and I don't like the Paradigm um whereas when I've I've opened up gdau and I I love how it feels it feels very similar to Unity so I'm definitely going to be watching these videos I encourage you guys to watch them too even if you're not going to abandon Unity um watch the videos learn about gdau at least have a understanding of gdau we really can't wait to share them with you and we thought that since so many things are different this time around we might as well try something new so the new videos will be in Danish [Laughter]

hello everyone and Welcome to our first video on good and by the way I can't tell you how many Danes I currently work with um actually I probably could there's like six but also I love braies and also the team at braies Andreas is a good friend of mine um who worked with braies three years ago uh he's also Danish Danish are incredible people and super duper excited about the English videoos coming out even though I would love to watch a video in Danish okay so I told you guys I would tell you why I'm excited or what I've what I've really the one thing I've learned from bracky the one thing I've learned learned from brais is

consistency um brachy from the YouTube channel side of things have always been consistent um he has always had a very similar style uh in terms of the photography of his videos um the way the information is presented the format of his videos um when they're scheduled to come out all of it was very consistent and I found it really ironic and funny uh that 3 years later later the video that comes out has a the same style with the black backdrop the the crisp audio the same kind of lighting that is what makes braies on a on the YouTube side of things so um so like profitable um for us but also for the channel right the YouTube channel channel has 1.72 million

subscribers and I believe it's because of consistent high quality content on the YouTube side of things and so it's just something that I've I've learned not only for my YouTube channel but also my games consistency always wins being consistent in the kind of content you're creating for whether you're doing a YouTube channel or your social media accounts for your games or just your games themselves being consistent in sticking with something i' I've learned that from bracky and it's it's funny because it it was so consistent of the the quitting was even consistent when brachy quit it wasn't like hey here's a video every once in a while it was no we're we're quitting and it was three years of no videos and I really really appreciate that um brachy is a a very principled YouTuber and that principle translates across to everything the the thumbnails the the the quality of the content the

photography of the videos the way the information is communicated and i' I've learned a ton from that and I'm going to continue to learn thank God from brachy I'm really glad that he's back recording videos so let's just give a huge welcome in the comments to braies welcome back and watch the videos be sure to subscribe below to braies Cheers guys