Should You Learn To Code For Your Indie Game?

as a full-time game developer who's been doing this full-time for about six years but i've really been making games for about half my life i'm 31 about 15 years just making games i can say confidently right now that you don't have to be the world's greatest coder in fact you don't even have to be good you could be just adequate and i say this because i'm a pretty bad coder i live stream my game develop my games all the time on my channel and you guys will will tell me in the chat how bad my code looks but i have games on every platform uh i make money selling games i bring in enough income to support my family just from my games so how is it that i write really bad code but i'm able to actually make games and i actually got a question about this on my youtube channel the question i asked if you guys had any questions here and the top voted question from i'm so sorry hair dunkel height um

i'm sorry i i know i mispronounced that the question is high thomas i'm afraid of programming and of higher i'm learning how to code for the last six months and although i feel confident enough to make basic things i know i'll need some help at some point with more complicated mechanics my problem is i've decided to hire a programmer on fiverr but i feel bad about it i feel like i have to i must code the game myself i'm not gonna learn anything and if i can't do something as important as that i'll never be a successful indie game dev i know i sound like a drama queen but that's what i feel so what do you think about hiring a programmer to do code for me is it okay i would like to focus on other tasks that i really enjoy dude like that's totally fine you don't need to worry about that at all um i will say this first and foremost i think it's really important that if you're going to be a full-time game developer if you're going to do this full-time and you're going to be in the in the independent sphere the independent arena aka not work for aaa not work for a studio and have one niche job but rather do a lot

of jobs you probably should have an understanding of c sharp so if you're using unity you should probably have an understanding of c sharp or unreal i believe you can learn blueprint which is kind of like a ui or a gui system for c or their coding system i don't really know unreal point being i feel like you should really have a good understanding just a decent understanding like a c plus if that was your grade and you took a test a c plus in your c sharp skills that's because that's just coming from somebody who's doing that right now my skill set is probably a c plus i'm not the best coder but i understand the basics of code and i actually am working on my own system for one of my games it's about a little doggy the little doggy game that i'm working on is a code base that i worked on completely from scratch there's one little element about rolling a ball around that i took from unity's tutorials but everything else is coded from scratch

my other game father i hired somebody like you did i hired somebody aj his link is in the description i hired him to create the core code base so let me sort of talk about both methods okay this method over here the one where i hired aj it's great because you get a core system ready to go but the problem with that approach if you are not as smart as the developer and you have sort of a rudimentary understanding of code like me opening up that code to make my own changes once the contracted hire is expired and that's no knock on aj that's just what happened i hired him for one thing and now i can open up the code and make some edits myself but once that happens once you need to dig into the code it can get a little uh weird it can get time consuming it can feel confusing and you can feel lost and you can kind of feel chained to your

inadequacy because you're looking at code that you don't understand whereas if you have a general understanding of code and you create a game uh from scratch with your code then it's actually a lot easier to dig into the code and make changes so in terms of preference for a bigger game you kind of have to hire out people for help it's just the way it goes but for smaller games i feel so much more free and so much more comfortable again this isn't a thing about aj this isn't aj's problem this is my problem because i don't have adequate understanding of more complex code whereas aj does so my systems are super simplistic in my games and so those systems i can iterate on and scale because all i'm doing is basically a bunch of conditional if then statements a few arrays audio sources audio clips game object references and that's about all i'm doing right so all in all you don't need to feel bad

like this is the thing is sort of my third point here is stop identifying with your game in that way uh your game is not some entity that determines whether you're good or bad at something it's not really related to you i know it's more of a philosophical discussion but you shouldn't have put your identity in a project you're working on that's kind of silly it's just a silly project so you shouldn't be identifying with it like that so you don't need to feel bad about it and you don't need to think i'm like you said here i must code the game myself well instead of thinking about what it means to you think about what's the goal what is the end result here for me the end result the end goal of whatever i do whether i hire people or whether i write my own code is to make a great game and get it done fast that's that's actually really my biggest goal get it done fast

if that's your goal then who cares how you get there one thing i've learned especially once i you know i've been live streaming game development for like four years now what i've learned is there are so many wrong ways to do something and so many right ways to do something that at some point it's all relative like at some point it really doesn't matter it maybe mattered a decade ago or maybe even 20 years ago doing really nice code but when you're making an indie game don't worry so much about the code being from scratch or having the best code and the best understanding of code so all in all i recommend you learn to code i recommend you get a c grade when learning c sharp okay that means you don't have to be advanced just kind of mediocre i think that's totally fine once you have that knowledge then you can hire out coders and you can

make code yourself if you're making a small game make code yourself i would recommend just doing it yourself if you're making a bigger game you might need to hire somebody out because there's a lot of work to do anyway if you really enjoyed this guys and you want to save time and maybe you don't want to code a game from scratch feel free to check out my 2d game kit below and also check out my 3d course below totally free course on how you can get started making a 3d game in unity with no knowledge of modeling all right guys i'll talk to you later cheers get over here [Music] hey thanks for watching by the way if you haven't downloaded that free 2d game kit below click below it's my treat to you i used this game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in 14 days and actually got to play it with him in front of his audience which is really cool this game kit is totally free it's my treat to you and you can use it however you want you can make a commercial game and make a million bucks off this game kit i don't care or you could just use it for a hobby project it's my treat to you and

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