Solo Indie Dev - 2. Month Review

okay hey guys I've been doing YouTube and indie games for two months now so let's talk about how it's going and where we want to take this first of all thank you very much for sticking around I highly appreciate it and I want to use this opportunity to get some feedback from you I know you give me a lot of feedback but honestly it's the best way to improve volute like we did last time there will be a little III can in the corner here a little info card click on that and there you will see the questions I'm interested in let's talk about the real quickly which of my videos are you most interested in why you come to this channel I know maybe it's a mixture but just pretend you can just have one of them then another thing I'm obviously really interested in what do you want to get out of this channel why do you watch this channel we want knowledge entertainment a sense of community or are you just curious and then whenever it happens that you don't want to watch one of my videos or that you don't want to continue watching one of my videos I wasn't really interested what's the main reason for that so I can fix it once again I know it's probably

different reasons it's not always the same thing yeah those were the most important questions you can also give me feedback in general on what you would like to see more of just put that in the comments and feedback on this channel what we need to fix I'm not quite sure we have found the correctness yet I don't know if my videos provide enough value to you yeah I'm starting to creep in a little bit maybe you have seen this beautiful graph I know Jim razmik made also made a video about this but I've seen this in a lot of different places because it's so true I have a lot of great projects in my lifetime because I like doing projects I like to impress stuff has proven to be right time and time again so this is pretty much your excitement your mood over the course of a project it starts very high you at the beginning you're super motivated and then slowly but surely doubt starts creeping in and just start wondering this is harder than I

think I don't know if this will work a lot of people are doing this way better than me I'm not good at this there's not good in math and it basically goes lower and lower and you're starting to feel really demotivated but you're you keep going and then here is what people call the Dark Knight of the zone where it basically decides either you keep going either you push through those negative feelings and it starts to stabilize again and you stabilize at a level after that it can continue going up and down whatever burden anyone that stabilizes and can you can go kind of direction but this is the part that is pretty much always the same when you do a new project it's kind of hard to tell where I am on that curve maybe maybe here I'm feeling a little more neutral about what I'm doing and I expect it to go further down honestly that's not all that much you can do about it it's just the

natural curve goes and I hope we can push through it so that's that's just something to keep in mind and I'm super self-aware about that that sort of stuff because as I've said I had a lot of creative projects in my lifetime and it's it's really it's pretty much always the same and then the problem is obviously sometimes it makes sense to quit not every project should be finished sometimes sunk cost fallacy is the only thing that keeps you going so you've put so much time into it you don't want to quit because you think all of the time will be for nothing but sometimes it's just better to quit if it doesn't make any sense but let's try to get to a point where it makes absolutely and stupid and one thing I think really that really keeps me going is just simply the fact that what I'm doing is easy anybody can do this anybody can take a camera and record videos like these these are not hard to make anybody

can do a bit of Photoshop and create a bit of music that's not hard but what's the hard part is doing this every day and doing it for a long time and that's that's the part that keeps me going just reminding myself that simply making videos and simply making kind of crappy games is not difficult there are thousands of people who do exactly the same thing but pushing through that to keep going here that's the difficult part that's what not everybody can do and we'll see if I can do it so that's my little rant about that it's a very normal thing very nothing you should be too worried about every project it's nothing that scares me it's it's completely normal but as I said doubt has started creeping in I don't know if what I'm doing is interesting to anybody but you honestly the growth rate of the YouTube channel is fine and all that sort of stuff so we

just see where it goes and maybe it works maybe doesn't I would love to provide a little more value to you it always feels like I'm getting a lot more out of you than you're getting out of me I don't know if that's true I would absolutely love to change that and find ways to provide you with a look a little more value I'm not sure I've quite figured it out yet which kind of content we should make on this channel I'll probably mostly stick to documenting because I'm not an expert in anything yet really I can't teach you all that much about design about making games because I haven't had any successes yet cuz unfortunately there's probably not all that much value I can provide you with at the moment I'll try my best and I'm completely self aware that I need to gather a lot more experience before I can really start teaching you things I like teaching you things so yeah I share my knowledge anyway I'll share what I learned on the way I feel like when I talk about game design I often make it sound like I

figured it out I know everything about this just keep in your mind this is absolutely not the case I'm not an expert yet I don't want to pretend that I am one because that's evolution so I'd love to talk with you about this channel and where we want to take this where these should go in the end that's my channel so I I will decide what's gonna happen but I loved him well beyond the discussion so that's this so far it's gone really well there's not too much I can complain about let's have a little look-see into the future because as you can see here on my time timetable we have January we are February those two months are done next month I want to create a playable demo of my game so basically a vertical slice a more or less finished product that people can play that I can send to let's players and it's obviously not gonna be feature complete because look at that the development process will be a lot longer at least it should be something fun and

playable and something that represents the final product somewhat so I'm gonna work really hard on that this month and then you can see a giant gap right here for April March June July there are no milestones in that time so what's happening there you might wonder and Juicy's and then I go back to Berlin and when I continue studying I wanted a project with my friends there and I'm really looking forward to that no worries I will still be doing YouTube I'm probably gonna be involved in different in a different project which means my game project always Nova will be on pass during that timeframe or during that time period maybe we can continue a little bit but probably the development will be more or less paused and then also one thing I'm not quite sure about is if I can keep posting daily during that period of time because as I said I want to develop another project with my friends there in Berlin and I don't know if I can still do daily

uploads with that I'm sure gonna try ok as I've said anybody can make videos what's the only thing that's hard about it is doing it every day for a long period of time so I definitely want to continue making daily videos but I I'm not sure if it's the smartest approach or if it would be a smart approach to try maybe one quality video per week or maybe two videos per week probably would be smarter to stick to daily uploads because let's be honest the only thing YouTube cares about is watch time it once more watch time so it would probably be the better strategy need to do daily videos I don't know what's more important quality or quantity maybe we should try quality for once I mean we have tried quantity now maybe you should make an experience and try to go for quality now but I think honestly you need to do both anyway you need to make good videos and you need to make a lot of videos if you want to succeed you need both I mean you're really sweet can

be interesting but can you do this this month firstly the YouTube channel has grown by another 40 subs has to have slowed down but that's not surprising because most of my initials lapse came from my old youtube channel so that's nothing to worry about so far I'm jumping between topics but I think the main issue with my content right now is that it's not very searchable nobody's gonna search for over Sonova Deathlok something something sound update so nobody's gonna find that by themselves that's a problem because that makes it really hard to grow nobody is gonna find these videos on the youtube search while my old game maker tutorials on the old channel got a ton of traffic just from from from the search results they ranked really high there so yeah just a random thought then we obviously made huge progress with the game of

almost no but firstly we decided on the name which is really good because that means we can start building that brand and start getting that name out there and we reworked the gameplay a lot it feels already feels a lot better model but there's still a lot of problems we need to fix I watched my sister play the game it was really much really boring to watch it's not an exciting game at the moment I feel like some bears there's more work to do yeah I don't know where all of this going hamster slowly starting to figure things out what were its how to write good reddit posts how to get traffic from reddit and all that sort of stuff it slowly but surely starts making sense I'm getting really familiar with Twitter I still haven't figured out how to use Facebook correctly oh yeah did my first streaming attempts which was pretty citing as well check that out if you haven't seen it I didn't manage to reach

my milestone which is 200 subscribers but honestly who cares you only care if you make it than you're happy and you don't make it then who cares how about - dance milestones are stupid I also wanted to found my company this month officially start this business I also haven't done that because that's not really any good reason to do that yet it's just more work but I have to do it earlier later so maybe I should do it sometime soon also maybe that would be a good commitment to stop me from quitting will probably be a smart move then a word or two to my calendar wall right here haven't used that in ages this to do wall right here haven't used them ages it's just sitting there and looking kind of dumb so I think we can take that down it's really not that useful because my my daily routine is not really about finishing to deuce it's just about making comes and making comes

and many more YouTube content and then obviously also continuing to work on my gamers most of the time it's pretty obvious what's the next logical step what's the next thing I need to do so at the moment this to-do list right here is a pretty useless and also this calendar right here doesn't really get used as often as it used to in the beginning because in the beginning I was experimenting with a lot more different things and I wasn't really sure how I should structure my day now I already know how I should structure my day I kind of figured that part out and yeah I'm still continuing to use my walls here for example for getting feedback stuff it's still really cool to have that stuff on your walls it makes a nice atmosphere makes you feel kind of like a crazy scientist and it is a nice aroma I like using the walls as you can tell but I think we have to take the useless stuff down sometimes moon because what good is there in having this giant wall if I don't use it pretty useless okay

for the final words what I absolutely need to say is I'm so thankful for having this opportunity I'm so thankful for having you as my viewers I don't take any of this for granted and I'm still happy I'm still motivated I want to keep going and let's let's see where this goes let's just see where this goes we'll try to figure it out together and just make the best of it cool so that was my two month indie dev slash YouTube check in with you talking a little bit about how it's going how we want to take where we want to take this we do that again in one month let's just do that every month I think it's a cool tradition I call habit to think about all of your actions and all of your plans once a month have an amazing day make the world your playground and see you in the next one peace