How To Actually Finish Your Game

hey guys my name is Thomas brush I'm the creator of a game called pin strike which was released on Steam in April this year it's gonna be released on console in January and next year if you have a question about the game industry how to make games or really just entrepreneurship or anything really creative or digital write those questions in the comments and I'll answer it for my next video ok so I got a really great question that I really enjoyed on Twitter yesterday what are some of the first steps you take to start creating a game once you've got the concept mostly planned out first off it's a great question and the answer is really deep and there's a lot of moving pieces I think I want to focus on a single layer of that question ok so big problem a huge problem with starting a project is you're likely to quit and that's a huge thing that everyone needs to realize is you're very likely to quit on this project so it's important to create sort of mental steps in your brain so that you don't quit this project so here are 5 steps to start a

project and not quit it so the first way to start a game right is to establish an emotional connection with your character so some games don't have characters but I think most games especially the kinds of games that you guys probably gonna want to make will have some form of a protagonist or a main character what you want to do is make sure you have an emotional connection to that character for you but I can't kill you [Music] so for me what I do is I'll sit in sort of just silence so I'll put myself in a room and I'll just sit on the couch and I'll spend hours establishing an emotional relationship with my so in the case of pinstripe which you can take a look at pinstripe if you want in the description it's on Steam now and it's on sale for ten bucks so for Tanny I spent a long time and this was early before I quit my job so

early in the mornings before I would go to work I would spend about an hour in my office and I would just write down and think about things that gave me a motion towards my main character Teddy so I wrote out his personality traits and you don't even know the personality traits in the game when you're playing is Teddy but it was important for me personally to know the personality traits of teddy so let's make up a character let's I guess let's make up a game for this video okay let's call the game lost dog okay and it's a game about a lost power and it's about a dog that gets lost in the woods okay what are some things that could give us an emotional connection to this lost dog well let's give him a name first let's name him Tim what if Tim is the dog of a rich rich powerful mayor and he lives in a big huge mansion up in the hills and all he does all day is eat

food and sit in front of the fire and sleep so Tim is a lazy dog and he is proud but he's very insecure deep down and he thinks that the world owes him something and that he doesn't need to go on adventures because he's the proud dog mayor well this is interesting because now we kind of have an emotional connection it may be a negative emotional connection but we can turn it into a sympathetic connection because we have a flaw the dog is proud but he's also a weak now if this dog gets lost in the woods and that's the adventure we have this sort of emotional center point of the game that can sort of hold the game together based on a simple fact that this dog is flawed now it also gives us room to make this character dynamic and as a developer and as a storyteller it's really exciting to see a flock protagonist and want him to

change and become a better person at the end so this is really cool because it allows us to ask developers and ask storytellers it makes us want to see change in our character so maybe at the end of the game him the spoiled rotten dog of this mayor of this rich mayor becomes adventurous and humble and helps others find their way home as well so there's just a small type of emotional connection you can make with your character the really reason this is really important is because when we have a friend or a relationship with someone it's a lot harder to let that friend go and if the same is true with with a protagonist a fictional character in a video game or a story so the second thing is plan for success this this is sort of been a mantra of mine for years and I read a book called them thinking Grow Rich it's this old book but it's like we're put on the top business books

or something and basically this book is it's kind of a think positive type book but it also it gives you these really cool tools mental tools to ensure that you don't quit projects and one of them is to plan for success to write out how much money you want to make or what your product is and when you're going to complete it so create very tangible goals that are very specific in your mind and to focus on those and to prove to yourself that you will achieve those goals so for pinstripe I did plan for success and this what this was a after about three years of development I finally said know what I'm gonna finish this thing and I'm gonna make X amount of dollars on this thing and I wrote down how much I planned to make and I pinned it to my wallet now it's not always about money but in that case I wanted to quit my job so I knew I needed a certain amount of money to be able to work on games full-time so I wrote down the number and I put it on my wall and let's

see if I have it here it is this is kind of cool to look at actually this is I wrote this about four years ago three years ago and it says I will underlined will make $60,000 in May by offering a perfect unique gaming experience and will market it through 2015 okay so there was a very specific goal here now the goal was achieved a little later than expected but it was achieved was achieved in 2016 not 2015 and the goal was actually doubled and that was the Kickstarter so it's very important to plan for success now that this does not mean to plan for like these lofty dreams that you can you can be the most famous person in the world and suddenly everyone will bow down to you and you'll have a million bucks no that's not what I mean by planning for success so what I really mean is in your mind not doubting yourself at all really plan that you can

actually achieve what you look like and it's okay if you fail but plan for success now that brings me to my next really big point about not quitting on your projects starting them and not quitting them and this is number three and that is playing for failure now this is an interesting thought because planning for success sounds like you should never plan for failure but I think you can merge the two of those and actually have sort of a healthy way of starting a game I can't tell you how many times I failed with pinstripe over and over and over again a lot of these failures were public so I would tell all my friends that I submitted my game to IGF or indicate or all these cool festivals every time I'd submit I wouldn't get in I got in a couple times to some smaller ones and I got in to indicate as like a showcase editor but point being you know like nine times out of ten I never got it that was failure right well a really cliche and silly way to think about

failure but it's so true is to basically say there's no such thing as real failure especially if you're thinking about failure in the right way so not only do you say I'm going to succeed long-term that's number two plan for success on the journey to that success plan for failure so a lot of us myself included are deathly afraid of failure so we have friends we have family parents even ourselves tell us that we can't do something and that we shouldn't try because we're gonna fail well something that kind of noticed is the people I really respect in life like the hotshots and the people who've made it quote-unquote those people understand that failure is inevitable in pursuit of success you're going to fail nine times and then I'm a tenth time you're gonna succeed that's just kind of the nature

of career that's the nature of life so in game development when you're starting your game just know just plan that you are going to have failure in the process of making this game things aren't gonna go the way you want that's okay that's the way it has to be especially if you're just starting out so for me pinstripe was one of my first games I made a couple before that but it was really my first commercial game and I didn't really plan on having that much failure and it took five years for me to realize that all those failures led to success and that was really cool to learn and I'm still learning that now when I launched Pinstripe I felt like a failure for some reason and so I went through several months of like deep depression but I learned so so much through that failure I learned basically grew emotional muscle to be able to deal with your failures in the future so imagine this if you can grow failure muscle imagine

how much more success you can find if you grow that muscle and continue to allow things to hit you and not faze you and that is why you should prepare for failure because failure does indeed make you stronger so that's number three number four this one's really exciting number four number four become inspired okay this is kind of similar to the finding and emotional connection to your protagonist you want to be inspired by other people's work and you want to apply the emotional connection you feel to that inspiration into that work to your own work now this is great because it kind of gives you an excuse to copy no you don't copy directly but you take things that inspire you and you say hey can I see how that works with my project

and I did it with pinstripe I've dealt with a lot of my games and everybody's doing it with everybody's work it's just the way it works we're all inspired by each other's work so it's okay to get inspired and to take that into a flat to your own work I had a co-worker when I worked in in marketing and he had this folder called inspiration folder and he would spend a lot of time in that folder he would be on Google and I was like wasting your time man you should be working and she'd be get it's project done but he would take his time just sit back relax and drink a cup of coffee and and he would pull down images things that he felt were emotionally connecting him to the project that he was working on and I've learned that this is absolutely crucial because the worst thing you can possibly do when starting a project is spend so much time actually making the thing without even feeling inspired while doing it and then suddenly you're three months into the project's development and you realize you don't even like it

you don't like how it looks or sounds or feels and you wish it felt like something that inspired you okay number five this is like the most important thing maybe all of these I've said they're all important but this is super important number five tell everyone about your game now this is kind of like setting yourself up for failure or success you're pretty much locking in humiliation or success in front of you're in front of your peers and that's that's huge that's really important so I would have quit Pinstripe had I not told my dad my mom my brothers my wife everyone I knew I told about pinstripe and I told him it was gonna be the greatest game that was ever made and this is gonna be a million-dollar game it's gonna be the coolest thing ever I basically forced myself into a commitment outside of myself because a lot of us we want to make a commitment to ourselves and we think that's fine I commit to finishing

this game well that's not enough in my opinion I think that we need to commit to others that we're gonna do something that deep down we know we want to do see what's funny is we know oftentimes when we have a moment of like clarity we know exactly what we want and we want to commit to something well unfortunately those moments of clarity don't stick with us for five years straight and it's up to the people around us to remind us of that clarity so tell your friends and family about your project let them know that you're gonna finish this thing so thanks for watching my name is Thomas brush again I'm the creator of a game called pinstripe which is coming to console in January next year but it's on Steam right now in the description you can check that out and supports me my studio and my family and it's also going to be really cool to kind of take a look at what I've made and kind of connect my points that I'm making with an actual product it's also on sale right now so you get the 10 bucks pretty cool anyways if you like this video you're learning

something subscribe and if you want to learn more please comment below ask questions and I can't wait to answer them thanks guys