Making Your First Game: Practical Rules - Setting (and Keeping) Goals - Extra Credits

all right so last time we gave you general tips for starting your first game scope small build around your talents ask the internet if you get stuck and don't give up this time we're gonna dive down into the nitty-gritty there are a lot of tutorials out there that cover how to do the programming or create the art for your first game so we're gonna stick to giving you the best practices for how to actually approach the project itself so for your first game tip number one don't plan a project that you think will take you more than a month remember you're gonna be getting better with every game you build and you'll actually often be better off just tossing your first project aside and starting from scratch after you've gotten it out there and learned all you can from it tip number two it's gonna take you more than a month but don't sweat it you won't have much frame of reference when you're planning that first game you're gonna create and even the most hardened professionals have learned over time to just take their best scheduling estimate and then add 50% to it because surprise has always come up in game development and each

game presents its own unique challenges so if you overshoot your one-month deadline don't panic it happens but if you're coming up on three months well you probably scoped too large take what you've learned and start something smaller next time tip number three don't worry too much about the design of your first game it kills James to say this but don't spend weeks designing systems or mechanics that you don't even know if you can implement yet just get to building something as quickly as you can the experience is way more valuable than the end results this time around tip number four set milestones this one sounds obvious but it can be so easy to ignore on a small project if you estimate your project should take you about a month set yourself a milestone goal for every week tip number five take those big milestone tasks and break them down even further as you plan any tasks that you've listed as taking more than a week is probably best broken down into smaller tasks this is true for pretty much any game you'll ever build build graphics engine or complete character art are way too big to be tasks

implement Hardware instancing or rig main character those are at least closer even those can probably be broken down further having a granular task list will help you plan better keep you on track and make you feel like you're really a cop wishing things as you take them off the list tip number six send yourself producer emails at the beginning of each week send yourself an email saying what you did last week and what you plan to do this week then compare that with last week's email this is a quick and dirty way of making sure that things don't fall off the production schedule and it will help you organize your time each week tip number 7 review your game at least once a week even if life gets hectic if your job or school gets in the way of you making a lot of progress on your game make yourself at least to look at your game just for a half hour once a week it's really really easy to let two weeks slip by without touching your game and then when you finally get back to it finding yourself totally lost and not remembering what you were doing or where you are at this is the point at which a lot of people quit don't let that happen

to you tip number eight don't worry about production values a lot of people get derailed by trying to make their first game look or sound good don't worry about that if your game plays amazing you'll have plenty of time to work on the Polish later but unless you're adding one of those polish touches just to learn how to do it none of it matters for your first game keep in mind there are a lot of great games out there that are made of nothing but moving squares tip number 9 don't spend more than one hour trying to do anything yourself if you find yourself stuck on a problem take a stab at it because it'll help you learn but you shouldn't be spending more than an hour on any individual problem in your game given that it's your first game everything you're trying to do probably has an excellent tutorial out there for it use those resources one of the most common quitting points for first-time developers is spending a week making no progress on a problem that the world at large could have helped them solve in minutes I know that many of us myself included want to solve everything ourselves but take advice from someone who's learned this the hard way don't

try to do that and finally tip number 10 make people play your game I know that we mentioned this last time but this is incredibly important you will learn an unbelievable amount just from seeing how people play what you've created it's easy to be embarrassed or shy about these things and it's easy to look at other games out there and say wow my game does not measure up to that I'll show people my game once I have something that does but trust me the path to making great games is marked by all the real you'll have from people actually playing your earlier work don't deny yourself that incredible resource hopefully these guidelines should serve to help you get your first game out in no time well three months at most if you find yourself struggling cut stuff find the smallest possible game you can make make that once that's done find one or two new things that you'd like to experiment with and base your next game around those ideas if you keep things small and you can keep blazing your way through these projects you'll find that by the time a year is out you'll really be able to make games that let you experiment

with a huge range of design ideas and game types and if you're wondering just how to keep your game small join us on the next episode for a dive into prototyping and the idea of Minimum Viable Product see you then [Applause] [Music] [Applause]