How I Started Making Games with No Experience

I uh I'm 25 years old and I quit my job um 3 weeks ago. Um thank you Kickstarter. I make video games from the comfort of my own home full-time, but this didn't happen because I knew somebody or because I went to school for it. Now, I had zero experience when I started. But there is one thing that I had to do over and over and over again to get to this point. I'm not good at being social. Whenever I walk into a room with more than two people, my stomach immediately ties into knots. So, you can imagine how much I hated school, especially middle school. And that was back in 2002. This anxiety was why I would rush home and jump on my Windows Millennium Edition Dell after school, and learn to animate in Flash, which was basically the early 2000's version of Unity. Nobody told me to do this. It came from a place of wanting to say something without being in a room with more than two people. I'd spend countless hours every single day illustrating and animating in Flash. Looking back, I think I made like 50 or

so animations. I'd even do some voice acting with an old PC mic. And I tried my hand at directing films with my older brothers. [screaming] I tried being funny. That didn't work. Being horrifying, that didn't really work. And apparently I tried creating the first bad lip reading ever before it was cool. Did you notice my ears are big? I uploaded a few of these animations to Newgrounds and honestly they weren't half bad, right? I don't know. But 90% of them were truly cringe and some of them frankly I have no idea what I was trying to do. And if you're currently thinking most of your work is also cringe and you're too embarrassed to show it, I want you to keep that fact in mind. This cringe factor has everything to do with that one thing that will propel you to get to where I am today, and that's making video games full-time. I also got into music production in high school using Audacity and eventually Apple's Garage Band.

[music and singing] [music] break and seeing if I could make some money making video games. This started in about 2007, my junior year of high school. I made games using Flash and Action Script, which is basically C. It's just worse and more horrible in every way. I started with creating menus. I don't know why, but apparently that was what I was into. I think it's because it was the easiest thing to create. My first real game was this game called German Invasion. And then I made a game called Flash Geometry Wars. And this, by the way, is called Copyright Infringement. Then Pans apples, Coma, Skinny, and then Steve Jobs killed Flash. Steve Jobs killing Flash was kind of a big deal. This was the moment Unity became a thing because honestly, it was one of the few alternatives available to us. So most of us just switched over and

that's when things started to get unreal. [cough] That's when I started to make money. I spent five years learning Unity and working on a game called Pinstripe, which was the culmination of everything I'd learned, vector art, Photoshop, music, storytelling, animation, code, and even film, which ended up being worth a lot of money. More on that later. I made Pinstripe in and throughout college and also while working three years at a marketing firm. And during this process, I learned the ins and outs of marketing. Well, at least the basics of marketing. With that knowledge, I crafted my first Kickstarter campaign. Hi, Kickstarter. [music] My name is Thomas Brush, and I've been working on a game called Pinstripe for almost [music] four years, which raised over $100,000, and I eventually released Pinstripe to glowing reviews. From there, I actually recreated my first successful flash era game, Coma, you see. You're so funny.

And I eventually signed with a publisher and Apple Arcade with a new name, Never Song. Even stranger, I got into film making, including creating YouTube devlogs about my games and built an audience of over 300,000 subscribers. By the way, thanks guys. My early teen years of doing cringe voice acting and film making on an old camcorder paid off and I could speak to a microphone in a camera and I could come across kind of cool despite being not so cool in real life. And remember those bizarre animations? Those evolved and manifested into live action horror films that have now been purchased by Alter and Crypt TV with over a half a million views in total. Now I'm working on my third commercial release which is called Twisted Tower which again is a culmination of what I did best from my teenage years and that's bizarre atmospherics and unashamed almost cringy dialogue that somehow players are finding funny. I also run an online school and teach people how to power through self-doubt to make video games. Okay, so what's the one thing that got

me here? making video games full-time with no formal training or experience. Well, I used to get super embarrassed about just about anything when I was a teenager. My cheeks would always turn cherry red. I'd clam up. I'd shut down. Feeling ashamed was something I was really good at. But I remember a distinct day as a teenager that I decided I was done with that. I was determined to make and release cringy stuff regardless of being well embarrassed. My portfolio is a pile of bizarre and embarrassing animations, songs, games, and films. But without them, I wouldn't know how to do any of what I do now. Nor would I know what my voice or my style is. And honestly, that cringy pile of strange, artsy garbage is what got me a girlfriend who is now my wife and mother of my two kids. She saw something in that garbage, and I'm glad she did, and no other girl did. Ultimately, that one thing that propelled me to full-time gamedev status

is shamelessness. If you want to find success as a game developer, stop being ashamed. Release cringy, embarrassing content. Ignore the comments. Blaze forward with confidence. You got this. Cheers.