Making Your First Indie Game (5 Tips!)

[Music] hey guys my name is Thomas brush am the creator of a game called pinstripe I'm also working on a game called once upon a coma you can take a look at those games and the links in the description so I've got a time-lapse here of artwork of me working on our work for a once upon a coma my current game and I'll try and relate that to those 5 tips that I'm going to tell you about making your first game alright so the first thing that I do when I start any game is I want to make sure that I get inspired so whether it's taking a look at you know video games that I love or screenshots from movies or artwork from various illustrators that I respect I usually compile a list of various things that really inspire me that I want to try and put into my game so in the case of once upon a coma here you can see me going back and forth back and forth between screenshots and videos of Resident Evil for Gamecube that game made a huge impact for me in my life especially when I was a teenager me and

my brother would just sit and play that game all summer long and that game has an incredible mood incredible environment and it's certainly inspiring just to look at so as you can see I'm sort of taking a look at those screenshots taking a look at video clips of that game and seeing if I can put them into this 2d environment for Once Upon a coma this level here is the insane asylum it's the last level for once upon a coma and as you can see I'm taking some colors and also some architectural elements from screenshots from Resident Evil and seeing if they work in my game it's really really important for you to be humble and realize that you're not perfect at everything so I'm really good with landscape art but when it comes to interiors not so much and that's where getting inspired and looking at other people's work and seeing how they did it and seeing if you can do it yourself is crucial to ensuring that you start up your game on the right foot so the second tip I have for when you're starting your game is to be sure that

you define the rules that means that you can take a look at maybe a text file and write down all these different rules for your game maybe look at other games and how those games what those rules are for those games the games that you really like I kind of said that weird but yeah just look at other games that you like see what those rules are so in the case of once upon a coma here with the artwork specifically there's a rule that I have at the very beginning of this project and that was if the ground is black especially on interiors you can jump on it that's a rule and I had to sort of learn this rule the hard way with the first game that I made in the showcase my first game and with my first flash game it was called coma it's actually sort of the prequel to this game I was at GDC showcasing coma and people were very frustrated because I hadn't defined a rule about what could be jumped on so

a lot of people thought you could jump on things and you really couldn't so if I would have clearly defined those rules it would have saved me a ton of headaches in the long run when working on the artwork so the next step or the next tip for making a great game especially making great game for your very first time is to build for scale so as you can see in this time-lapse I use a lot of repeated objects over and over and over again so in this case right here I'm actually working on a railing system for the interiors here so what I could do is sort of make the railing look unique by starting from scratch and building the whole thing out but as you can see here what I do is I build two different sets of railings and I duplicate them across the board and I'll save those railings just two railings I'll save them in the Adobe Creative Cloud library and just duplicate them throughout the whole level so what makes them look unique in the long run is

going through the polished phase which we'll talk about at the end of this video so all of my graphics here are repeated you know I find myself duplicating objects more than actually creating new objects and I think that's really important when you're working on your first game especially when you have a really small team you want to make sure that you're building for scale and that means that you can reuse objects reuse code reuse classes we use gameplay mechanics as much as possible while keeping the game unique and again that goes to our polish phase which we'll talk about in a second so as you can see here I've got textures that have created various wallpapers for the walls that I've created I've even got brushes that I use so the moss at the top of the scene is a simple brush so I was building for scale and all those things most of the things in this scene were created at the very beginning of the project so the fourth tip is to lean into your talents and this is a really scary thing to do because I think a lot of us don't really know what our talents are so obviously

just test the boundaries see what you're good at find people you trust so whether it's family members or friends or just people close to you find out what your talents are by just asking them you know what am I good at and even if it's something subtle maybe maybe you're you know pretty good with math or good with maybe engineering maybe you can be a great coder for your video game and you can lead into writing really good code really clean simple code that allows your game to maybe have a lot of stuff going on while keeping you know the CPU and the GPU pretty low that's one alternative to maybe if you're not so great at graphics you can lean into code or for me I'm really good with atmosphere and ambience so with my games even though I a decent artist I tend to focus on ensuring the mood and the ambience of a game of the game is really special so for this scene here adding a

lot of shadows adding a lot of darkness especially in the background so you can see that dark blue at the sky makes it feel really moody really dark and having these Sun shafts come across the scene really allow the scene to be ambient moody and Atmospheric I was sort of born with this skill and I decided that I was gonna lean into it and it really paid off so whether it's music or maybe you're a great storyteller lean into those things and don't be afraid to reach out to other people maybe friends or you know fellow students who are good at certain things that they can lean into their talents I think that's the best way to start off on the right foot when you're making a game as opposed to making a bunch of generic stuff that maybe it's generic music generic code generic artwork lean into your talent and find other people who have talents that you don't have and this is a certain certainly a humbling experience but it's really gonna help you make the

best game possible so finally budget for polish and this is something that I can't stress enough a lot of times that the final 90 percent of your gamed games development is actually really like the final 40 percent and you just don't know it you think you're done with your game and you're not and it's frustrating because you thought you were gonna be done you thought you were going to ship maybe even thought you're gonna have some potential revenue maybe in two weeks but in reality it's gonna take you you know three or four months to polish out your scene or polish out your game excuse me so for this scene here the polish is really just adding in small elements to areas that seemed a little blank so there were empty walls empty wall space where I'm adding candles here and again I'm just building for scale so I've got one candle I'm gonna set it to be a prefab in unity and I'm just gonna use that candle across the board so here I

am also adding shadow to add depth to the scene and I'm also referencing again the very at the second step in this video and that is I'm referencing the rules that I set up at the very beginning so in this case I've got the rule that says if anything is black you can jump on it this rule has been kind of muddied a little bit because the scene is so dark there's so many shadows and oftentimes so much going on especially in these moody atmospheric type games this is really hard to see that rule play out effectively and so that's why I'm adding the slight polish elements of fog and shading with gradients like heavy lighting coming up from the ground to allow the contrast for the black areas to be jumpable so this is me just referencing rules that I've established at the very beginning so make sure your

polish phase is is referencing the rules that you set up so here I am just adding little story elements and this is a great time to add story elements let's say you're really good at you know making a puzzle game well it couldn't hurt to in the Polish phase add in a little bit of story elements that help make your game a little bit more special add a little bit more value to your players throwing in tiny bits of story and revelations maybe about your character can go a long way so a good game design rule to follow is if you're ever leading the player down a path or they beat something make sure you reward them so in the Polish phase this is a great great time to add it there's plenty of areas in once upon a coma where we're not rewarding the player at all they walk down a hallway nothing's there well in the Polish phase I don't necessarily have to add an item that they get at the end of the hallway I can simply add a story element and you can see that in the clock there's there's a hidden message and I can also add

characters to the scene that maybe give you some backstory so those are my five tips for working on your very first game if you really like this video please hit subscribe if we can hit 12,000 subscribers by November first I'm gonna do something that I'm really scared of I'm gonna face one of my biggest fears and that's jumping out of a plane and I'll take you with me I'll record a video jump out of a plane and I'll also try and relate that to video game development because video game development can be scary so please leave a comment I'd love to answer your questions hit subscribe if you want to see two more bonus tips see the rest of this video just head on over to my patreon page become a patron and you can watch those final tips thanks guys