Starting A Full Time Indie Game Studio At 20 YEARS OLD

hey guys how's it going my name is thomas brush and i make indie games for a living and so does daniel and jed daniel and jed are the owners of skookum arts and a lot of you probably seen this game or played it they're the creators of the pedestrian it's an amazing puzzle game and we're going to take a look at it in just a second while we're chatting all about game design game development guys how are you doing today good good thanks for having us on yeah no problem this is daniel and this i'm jed yeah i'm the uh um the artist and designer um at skookum arts and jed you are i'm the programmer and uh more technical back-end stuff all right cool so uh jed you're c-sharp and unity i'm assuming it's unity right that you're using yep c c sharp unity uh dabble with some other stuff like python and um uh houdini uh i'm just getting into that and sweet those kind of things

awesome well guys thanks for coming on um this is gonna be a really fun podcast i'm really looking forward to this one because i've jed i don't know if i ever talked with you but i talked with daniel a long time ago i think it was like a 2016 dude yeah and you and i were both sort of like is indie game development as a full-time career is it a thing is it possible we didn't really know and i remember you just called me and we just talked on the phone yeah because we were sort of both feeling a little lost um and then we both did kickstarter campaigns things went really well for i believe y'all's campaign was funded right yeah i was successful yeah and so it just i guess we've sort of been parallel tracking alongside each other um and you you guys now have a youtube channel as well uh so that's by the way if you guys want to subscribe to the youtube channel click the link below um and you're just starting that out so i'm really excited for you guys so there's a ton we're going to talk about today we're going to talk about three

secrets to starting your own full-time game dev studio i'm talking to the audience right now three secrets and and skookum arts you two are gonna share those secrets at least what you've learned in starting your own indie game studio and guys be sure to stick around because we're gonna talk about general ballpark numbers um and i'll share mine as well for my games and i have a feeling skookum is probably doing a little bit better than me because pedestrian is doing pretty well i mean it looks like it's doing pretty awesome and you guys have another project we can talk about so we're going to talk about all of that guys i'm going to run an intro really quick and i'll see you on the other side [music] by the way guys feel free to download my free 2d game kit below it's totally free it's my treat to you [music] i used this exact 2d game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in 14 days and then i got to

play it in front of his subscribers which was really awesome so download that use it however you want it's my treat to you yeah okay okay so daniel jed tell us a little bit about yourselves and just a brief overview of your games and then we're gonna quickly talk about how it all started so really quickly give me a brief overview of your studio and your games so skookum arts we kind of established ourselves officially back in 16 2016 something like that because we knew we wanted to do video games we weren't quite sure if it was going to work out but we're like hey we're young might as well uh shoot for the stars well we still have the chance um and uh yeah so i i've always been an artist um you know i like ever ever since you were like 10 years i mean even before that i always wanted to do something with art what kind of art was like your normal thing was it digital was it sketching painting like well to be honest um our parents

had always been very leery about um computers and video games for that matter we never had a a gaming console until we were like teenagers yeah um and so i was very limited to what i could do so i did a lot of oil painting just drawing with pencils and whatever so i i really tried to perfect my art skills with uh traditional mediums and then uh transitioned to digital as soon as we got a family computer got photoshop and a wacom tablet and i ham on that and then slowly transitioned into 3d art and everything after that and at the same time i'm learning all that jed is like yeah you know going to the library getting programming books while i'm getting like comic books and stuff [laughter] yeah i i kind of started um with kind of web stuff html um then i

transitioned to i did some some java was messing around with that and this was all on our old family computer so i did some java um and i was just kind of trying to mess around make a little games and uh i i was trying to i remember i was making um this index or like a like a library program for all of our movies because our is really big on movies we watched so many movies when we were kids yeah and we had this huge shelf of all these movies and so i remember trying to create a program to have it so we could input all of our movies um in this program and then people who because we had a lot of friends who would borrow our movies so then you could check out the movie and you know yeah we keep record of it and everything um then i remember i was moving on to uh xna i did a little bit of that um and then i would say kind of when we were in our late teens um we had another friend who actually helped us with pedestrian uh joel hornsby and we were very close friends

um with with the hornsbys and um i was doing programming daniel was doing a bunch of art and joel was just getting into some 3d art um and so we kind of just were like oh we're all doing something that's we have like all the pieces in order to make a game we have the art we have the programming and we have the 3d art um so at that point is when we just started getting together and working on little side projects yeah yeah it sounds like uh it sounds like your family was really pretty awesome um we were talking before we started the podcast are you guys comfortable sharing how freaking big your family is yeah for sure [laughter] it's nice uh yeah so we have uh eight well there's eight siblings in all and we have two very supportive parents and uh i i would say if it wasn't for the majority of our family being very

supportive and saying hey you know you can do this yeah uh it would be a lot harder if not impossible for us to actually you know muster up the motivation to actually see this through to the end um having um having a support team is really important so i [clears throat] think so i i was i went the moment i saw you guys i was thinking something like in my head said my family would probably get along with their family uh because my i grew up with three older brothers two very supportive parents um and they're sort of just this sort of it's it's kind of sad because it's not fair because a lot of a lot of people watching right now don't have supportive families but when i'm when i'm with people like you guys there's sort of a glow of like it's almost like i i sense confidence in you and there's no there's no sense of like you're you're making a mistake you shouldn't be making games you're insecure about it um there's just this confidence and and i feel it too because

i never deep down think my family thinks i'm dumb i always think no my family thinks i'm doing something pretty cool and even if it's not successful they're proud of me regardless and i think it's super duper important for you guys as you're starting your youtube channel again guys link in the description go ahead and follow skookum um and in my youtube channel it's like super important because i think probably the majority of the people watching our channels they don't have that support network and they don't feel confident and so i want one of my goals is just to confidently uh encourage everybody who's watching and just say you're not an idiot and and the truth is even if you fail you're not an idiot you're actually pretty brave for being willing to fail and oftentimes it's publicly you know yeah and i would i would add to that actually something that we found even more helpful you can only go so far with your family of uh people that

don't really get what you're doing they can be like hey you're doing a great job uh but then we we got to a point where we're like we need to see if we can find some other people that are like they get it they get us and they're they're alongside us in the struggle and so we literally just googled like um game dev groups game dev groups and and we found a really great local game dev group that met at least once a month and that made a really big difference too because then at at least every month we would be meeting other people that are showing off their other games they would be like hey i really like this game here's what i think about it and it was a ton of valuable feedback i feel like that's something that anybody watching um could take advantage of no matter where you're living there's most likely going to be a group of people that meet up somewhere and you can join alongside them and encourage each other

to you know keep pushing yeah i totally agree that's really cool you know i never really did that um it wasn't until until i started a youtube channel and being more front-facing that i started to build a community um the same is true like something like fitness so this is more of like a metaphor but like i don't know if you guys are into fitness or anything like that but for me i i've been doing like weight training for like five years and it wasn't until i joined crossfit um that all of a sudden it sort of doubled my output because i it's suddenly you're like looking at other people and you're thinking oh i'm not an idiot or i'm not alone and there's a lot of people a lot of people who are better than me and so you suddenly your expectations for yourself double right and suddenly that it gives you this weird energy and the same is true with game dev it's like i'm looking at you guys i'm looking at people like um david david whaley who made the first tree

and jonah's tie roller looking at what they're doing and suddenly your expectations for yourself double and also i i feel like your confidence will double because you see other people doing it and you you share a common background you're the same age so you realize oh no i'm capable of a lot more than i think i am yeah i think uh healthy competition is really good yeah and that's that's one thing i will say that i've noticed um especially indie game development it seems that um it's very indie indies tend to get along well with each other and they're at least from from what i've noticed there really isn't a kind of um you know doggy dog no there's a lot of there's a lot of atmosphere with indies it's it's very it's very cool to have so many other indies that are so supportive and um are you know willing to share stuff and help each other out and it's it's really makes a big difference just as an

example you know when we were um researching how to launch our kickstarter uh we reached out to you know multiple people including you and i mean to be honest the feedback you gave us was uh very invaluable and uh you know just seeing that like almost everybody that we reached out to that we saw had a successful kickstarter or seemed like they knew what they were doing in the business they're like yeah here's what you need to do here are the things that i think your your kickstarter page um needs improving on and it was like they didn't they didn't even question to help out so it's really cool to see that like the indie game dev community is very supportive yeah it really is and i want to encourage everybody listening um to let let go of your pride and let go of not wanting to be embarrassed

um and not wanting to be sort of i don't want to say put in your place but when you when you start out making something building a career or building a project um it'd be silly to assume you know what you're doing like of course you don't know what you're doing and that doesn't mean you know uh well it means that there's a lot of things that we don't know what we're doing and in particular the business side of things the market marketing side of things those are huge yeah a lot of indie game devs have no clue about that and uh the moment where you connect yourself with somebody who's done it it's going to double triple quadruple the time it takes for you to hit the end goal and i know the end goal for a lot of my audience is becoming a full-time indie so it like if you guys want to go full-time you really need to do what skookum's done and it took me a long time to figure it

out as well which is just get to know people and if anything you know if they don't want to put you on their shoulders which is honestly it should be a goal is to be able to elevate your career with the help of someone bigger than you if that doesn't work out then at least you can get some good advice from them and that'll really change things one of the biggest career moves i made was alongside selling my games providing training material for my audience as well so it's been a really good frankly a really good business decision um and the reason i bring that up is because i would have never done that had david whaley one of my friends who's an indie game developer had he just told me really quickly hey by the way this is actually not that hard to do and you can throw it in and make some supplemental income from that so learning from other indie game devs is probably your greatest strength and it requires humility because it's really

embarrassing feeling small like you don't know anything but it's it's the truth you know it's true that you don't know everything so might as well just accept it and you'll probably get stronger in the long run if you're just willing to accept it yeah yeah i mean i can't even count how many times we've like we're about to make a decision on something and then we're like well what did playdead do [clears throat] or like you know so we like reference all of these other like what what we see as the perfect uh uh game studio and see what they did and we try to replicate it yeah um so yeah well let's let's move into um i want to hear a little bit about the early days like i think jed you mentioned you're 21 22 years old um and daniel i think you said you were 24. when you started your pedestrian

and you were you were trying to figure out if you're going to do your kickstarter campaign so really quick before you answer this question or tell your your story here think about my audience my audience is listening right now and a lot of them are in that exact moment and there's a there's insecurity there's frustration they feel small they feel silly so how did you guys feel i think that's a really good question how did you feel during that that moment when you were starting uh i mean it felt like an impossible mountain to climb um and i think uh we kind of [clears throat] we realized that we had to pretty much forget about like the end end goal there at the beginning because we knew it was so big and so um intimidating we just kind of had to

focus on the initial like okay let's just take one small step at a time and look at those small those small wins and that kind of encourages you to take the next small step and then you keep climbing that mountain one small step at a time so yeah what about you jed how did you feel um i think starting out um it was it was definitely part of that but then also uh i think i think we were a little naive in in uh knowing like how long and how much effort it would take which to be honest is actually a blessing i think um yeah because if we did know how difficult it would be i don't know if we'd do it so that's not that's understanding say what i feel the same way exactly the same way and that's not very encouraging for your audience obviously but [laughter] all

right guys we're done with the podcast thanks for watching just give up uh [laughter] i think uh that that brings up a really good point that um what were you saying it was we we didn't know how how hard it was going to be there it i think it's very helpful to have a certain level of like um pride and invincibility yeah you're like what whatever you know i wanna i wanna do something ridiculous i'm gonna just do it and yeah not not really thinking about like maybe the long-term consequences of it in a way i mean that sounds irresponsible but like no i totally agree with you i i i would call it something like the i'm just coming up with a name here it's like the entrepreneurial paradox it's half of your body is incredibly proud and cocky but that cockiness is a result of

humility because you're humble enough to go i don't really care what people think i don't i don't even think that great to myself either so i'm gonna go and do something and i'm going to do it amazing and i don't care if i fail so it's a mixture it's a weird mixture what's that uh quote that jim carrey had um he has a lot of good ones yeah yeah it's not from a movie um no no lately he's like a philosopher oh yeah he said this one like years ago and it was like um you're you're very easily gonna fail at something you hate so you might as well try it something you love yup yup i've seen that one it's very good it's very good i totally agree and i don't think that attitude uh if that attitude is absent and you don't have it it's very unlikely that you're gonna be able to power through the just the insecurity of it all like you said it's like in a way you recognize that the mountain is massive and and you force yourself to

not look at it and you just look down at what you're doing you know okay oh yeah i mean uh i mean i guess it's fine for me to mention that i mean we got to a point where i was so um stressed i i literally put myself in the hospital for like a week wow dude because i was looking at the top of the mountain yeah [laughter] yeah uh yeah but yeah it it it can be too overwhelming if you try to think about the whole thing was the was the stress i'm curious about this because uh about a month ago i was pretty rock bottom in terms of anxiety um was your stress a result of legitimate things like we're running out of money our game isn't going to do well there's a ton of bugs or was it something that was more abstract like generalized anxiety where you can't stop your brain and it's just running running and

running and you you can't stop working yeah yeah i think it's a combination of everything i mean one it was like our funds were running dry um we were really restricted because we didn't really have we didn't have barely anything to our own name yeah we were living really cheaply yeah um say what do you have family wife kids um and that was one of the other stressors [laughter] yeah so um i i my wife and i we wanted to get married and i told her not until i finished the game yeah because i'm like i i really i really want to put myself in a position where i can confidently support a family yeah and i didn't want to you know i mean you know there's a lot of complications to you know trying to start a family and a business at the same time so i'm like could we just wait a little bit and so the pressure of that

was really um bearing down on me and uh you know just you know all the stress of trying to launch uh your first game yeah thing as well and the just the enormous amount of time that we oh yeah we were working on these healthy hours i do not recommend it we were doing like 14 15 hour days every single day for years i know the feeling i do because i wasn't doing that but i was doing eight hour days while working a desk job and then three hours after that yeah so it was uh it was hard to my wife my wife and rightfully so i don't judge her for saying this she would say your game is your second wife that's what she would say and she wasn't like bitter or resentful about it it's just it was like obvious it was it was always on my mind and i'm so grateful that i didn't have kids at the time because i don't wanna like my wife can deal with that right me she could she

can say okay thomas is gonna be in his head for three years she can deal with that and she did and it paid off things are good now i'm not always in my head because i'm not stressed but um with kids you can't do that you got to be present with your kids because you know the clock's ticking they're growing up right you know so there's a there there's a season like there's a season for every one of you listening and so the recommendation it's really hard to recommend like should you work 14 hour days i say well if you're 20 and you don't have a family go for it you know who cares you know you're probably going to lose out on on going to the bar with your friends or watching netflix and drinking beer but who cares right but when you've got a family the problem isn't necessarily oh i'm going to be up in my office working on all night or all evening or all day and i'm not going to be with the kids the real problem this is for me i'm curious how you feel about this

the problem for me is when i'm done with work and i was playing god all day aka making games and building worlds it is so hard to get out of that mindset so you go downstairs you're with your kids you're with your wife you're with your family it is so hard to stop your brain from working because it's like a different job like some people are engineers they do their work and they leave the office and they sit in traffic and they come home but for me it's i'm i'm being an artist i'm being a coder like you jad um i'm being an entrepreneur a business owner i'm a marketer i'm a youtuber and and you guys are all those things as well how do you turn off all those engines running on overdrive you know yeah i don't think we've mastered that at all [laughter] i mean it is such a tricky thing because i like to romanticize what like

the artist's life is and the artist's life is very um kind of selfish i guess and um they like you said they never turn off in in order for you to it's like find that inspiration it comes at random times when you're trying to change your baby's diaper and you're like oh i gotta write this down stay right there baby i'll be right back hey it it's it's really hard to find that balance nowadays um because yeah you know life happens and you have to let life happen and not let other things get in the way like your inspiration well that's that's the big thing isn't it it's um well it's recognizing that the mountain is big it's a massive mountain going from nothing to a full-time indy is it's a big journey it's a long hike up this big mountain but the truth is is it's has just because it's big doesn't mean

it's value is um it's great to do what i do it's i'm sure you guys love your job but it's nothing compared to your family so don't don't let that get in the way and you just gotta work on it being an entrepreneur the way i the visual i can think of the sort of personification i don't know if that's right word is if if people could see smoke coming out of my ears that's what it would look like all day because the gears are just grinding all day in my head um it's it's really tough your your your you're work you're your worst enemy uh and go me going from working for a boss to being my own boss i thought like you said you said you uh you romanticize it i thought it was gonna be walking around in my jammies all day drinking coffee i'm gonna go sit outside i'm gonna go relax i'm gonna go chill i'm gonna go for a walk i knew none of those things i'm like

hardcore it's it's get the game done get the content done and i'm at a place right now where i'm ready to force myself to calm down and i'm curious if you guys have to force yourself to stop and take a breather yeah oh yeah for sure and that's another reason why jed and i working together is really good because um very often jed will be like okay let's stop and let's go take a walk yeah because i just i just get too worked up about something and we'll just be like all right you know we'll we'll figure it out in a few minutes it doesn't need to be right now when you're this stressed out yeah i i would say like one of the really big pivotal things for us uh when we were starting out um is we were working in the in the same house that we were living wow and that was really really hard um just like getting up from your bed and like walking four feet to your computer

and working on your computer all day yep being in the exact same room is really really tricky so one of the things that we did was this is our garage so we just set everything up out in our garage and that made such a massive difference having that separation between your living space and your workspace and trying to set and maintain um like work hours yeah is really important because there at the beginning we would we would work until three in the morning then we would sleep late and then we would get up and then we'd come out uh where we would go to our computers and we work all day and just repeat and it just it becomes this this massive um like everything blends together and it's very hard to kind of get perspective and you're just always in this kind of fog right but it's like a fever yeah yeah and we we actually we got to a point where where we're like okay this is unhealthy we're killing ourselves and

we need to come up with a better idea and we started researching stuff and we found this like amazing video um it was an interview of raul dahl i don't know how to pronounce his name the the the children's book author the charlie and the chocolate factory and oh okay he uh uh there was this interview back in the 70s and he was basically explaining how he had a little shed out in his backyard and for two hours in the morning he would go out there and write and once the two hours were up no matter what he was doing he would stop live his day out and then in the evening he would go back out to his shed work for another two hours and then he'd be done for the day his entire career was just those four hours every day working and his point with that was and it's different with every person yes you meet a certain point where your productivity level diminishes and just working longer

doesn't get things done as fast so he found his sweet spot where like okay two a two hour increments is the perfect amount of time for me to get the just the right amount of work done yeah um and so we kind of implemented that same thing where we would put a timer on our phone and um as soon as the timer went off uh no matter what we're doing we're like okay we're gonna drop everything we're gonna go outside for a walk we're gonna go work out whatever we'll come back set another timer and do that the whole day until the day was done um and it was an amazing difference um in terms of health and the morale of the project uh everything improved because of that yeah it's especially true it's especially true with creative projects and i think i think 90 of the people listening right now that is totally relevant uh devil's advocate here and i totally agree with you i think that by the way that's something along the lines of the

pomodoro method i think is what you call it uh the tomato timer yeah yeah i used to do that um the reason i stopped is because once you move into the when you go from the creative to more so the entrepreneurial business side then it then it comes to okay i know like for me i know exactly what to do to keep my business running um it's like there's a system in place and all i gotta do is like plug and play um and so what i found is there aren't enough hours in the day to to get all the stuff done i need to get done so i want to move back to the creative side because i've been doing so much business stuff right now um because i'm basically acting at this point as creative director and like ceo of my studio at most games um i've got people under me doing creative stuff um and i'm doing like some code and and

also obviously art direction but i i i'm so exhausted because i'm doing so much business stuff and like i said there's just not enough hours in the day for that um yeah i hear you yeah because there there are like uh the the chapters of developing a game are very big and some of those chapters of developing a game you can't just follow those rules of like i'm just in the creative process so i can have these chunks of time sometimes you gotta answer emails sometimes you've got to do things that you know they just need your attention and you can't avoid it so yeah it you can't follow the the whole you know two hour increments um the whole time but when you can it is helpful yeah and yeah i think chapters is a great word it's chapters um don't ever guys don't ever think i'm

talking to my audience now don't ever think that the development of your game is always going to be like this static type of development it's it's always changing because like you'll you'll do this thing where for me what i'll do is i'll i'll get the vertical slice done or the demo or like that the 15-minute hyper-polished game and then i'll go into two months of like purely business stuff marketing the demo capturing email addresses emailing my audience emailing publishers emailing press doing a kickstarter campaign and that's a totally different function like you're totally different person during those two months and so i often used to wonder why do i feel terrible in the fall and then i feel great in spring or why do i feel terrible this summer but i feel great in the in the fall and it's because i'm i basically i started a new job you know what i mean you're a totally different employee for what you're doing right

yeah you have to wear so many different hats it's it's kind of crazy yeah it's a blessing and a curse because you never get bored you have a lot of variety but yeah it gets overwhelming for sure so let's talk really quickly about the kickstarter campaign so those were your early days right you're scrambling you're working your butt off and then you did your kickstarter campaign right what was that like what are some tips you can provide my audience well i i will say um the main reason i think we launched the kickstarter was we wanted to put out a feeler to see if there was enough interest in the game to merit us finishing it that's a great question seriously yeah that is a good thing i think for anybody making a game like maybe don't do kickstarter do a youtube channel find some way to prove that the game you are working on there is an audience for it and they're interested yeah

yeah um i would say just some like general kickstarter thoughts um i would say first get a lot of feedback from people um set up your page well your well your kickstarter is always gonna take longer than what you're thinking so prepare for that get a lot of feedback um from other people um be very careful with your rewards because we kind of learned the hard way that like some rewards trying to they're not worth it if you if you can avoid doing physical rewards just up yeah i don't know unless let me let me do a little side note here i'm at the point in my career where physical rewards sound amazing because if you've got the money just pay someone to distribute t-shirts because what my rewards were for never song it was all effort on my part like for example creating creating playable characters for top tier backers right they would send me a portrait and then i would make their

illustration yeah and then you could have a playable character or portraits of of backers in the world like a custom portrait of their face that stuff is free but it's really not because it takes time so you gotta weigh that you know do you have the capital [clears throat] to pay for t-shirts then do that but if you don't then you're gonna have to work your butt off late into the mid into into the night uh doing free work essentially yeah yeah the uh we we had one um more high tier reward um where the person would get a statue in the game yep and then uh he would he also had um he could design three levels and um i can't remember exactly what else it was but thankfully we got out really easy because this guy was super easy to work with oh he was yeah he was great he was really um really supportive he's patient yeah

he he wanted the game to be better not necessarily just to get i want his stuff yeah so that i feel like we kind of dodged a bullet with that oh yeah you do need to be yeah i don't know very careful i mean you've had more kickstarters than us so you can probably speak to it better than me but um i think we really lucked out with our kickstarter we had i don't think even one negative comment because we launched our kickstarter in 2017 and we didn't launch our game until 2020 and that's a long time for people to wait it's like where i gave you money where's my game and everybody was just so supportive they're like take as much time as you need we understand this is taking a while and they were very excited about all of our updates yeah everybody was really supportive so i don't know if that was just uh a unique case or if most kickstarters go like that i think i honestly i think people care more about social

social ramifications than they do about getting what they want uh so a social ramification this is me just speaking purely from a business perspective but a social ramification would be they send a really nasty email to the creators of a project that they really like it's like you don't want to send a nasty email to to um to the the guys that scoop them like you don't want to do that that's that's you don't want to be not their friend right so i've found that with kickstarter everyone's very friendly because they like you the moment you turn the project into something that a business would do like we're only gonna pitch the pedestrian as a game we're not gonna introduce ourselves we're not going to be personal in the kickstarter then you actually set yourself up for a lot more uh well thousands of people wielding pitchforks wondering where their game is so it's really good to be personal um

yeah next to to that note um i will say um that is very true and i think one of the things that really helped us keep um keep the kickstarter positive was we had a lot of communication um we released i don't think we missed an update we we released an update for kickstarter every every month for three years yeah um and and they were very substantial updates too we we didn't leave anything out to make sure um our kickstarter backers knew all the nitty gritty and it's like hey this is exactly why it took a little bit more time this month for us to get this thing done you know like i think the more honest you are with them the more they're willing to be understanding i think so i think so too i think it's really good to be honest they're they're i don't know about you guys but there were moments where i i was like this isn't ideal but i'm going to make a decision here and it's going to piss off a few people

but it's too hard to pass up the business opportunity so what happens here's an example what happens with a lot of kickstarter campaigns is you're in the midst of this 30-day campaign and you're so excited because you're raising this money you never thought it was it's a dream come true you never thought it was going to happen and then you start over promising we're going to make a switch game just we need 10 grand more and we're going to do it on switch we need 10 grand more and then we're going to release it on ps4 right you start doing all these uh what you would call um what what do you call them guys like tears or whatever yeah stretch goals goals yeah and you reach those goals and it's not a kickstarter function it's just something you can do with the updates you can post an update that says if we if we raise 10 grand more then we'll do a switch copy for me i did that with pinstripe and i i promised i got excited and i over promised i promised an ios version i was like okay we can do ios i just need 10 grand more well you don't know how much this stuff costs you have

no idea um when you're starting out i don't know about you guys but i had no idea how much it would cost to port to ios reporting in general is a nightmare oh i know it's crazy especially ios i mean ios is particularly rough and it took me i did follow through on my promise admittedly i planned on backing away from it um because i was just like this is impossible um but we ended up releasing on ios last year so the campaign was in 2016 and so it took me 16 17 18 19 20 21 like five years or whatever [laughter] five years to finally get started on the ios version uh yeah and we didn't bring any money like we we made like five grand so we actually made less than we put in because it cost seven grand to port it to ios there's other there's other opportunities so this is just a warning for all of you listening to not over promise here's another example uh you you this one's big though but if you

promised a steam version and then epic games comes to you and they say we will give you 200 grand to do an exclusive license with us plus residuals you're going to have to decide do i want to go to my kickstarter camp like ooblets did this is that the game ooblets um yeah they had to figure out that they took the the business decision of we're going to take the money from epic games and we're going to give you guys an epic version um which pissed a lot of people off primarily because it was poorly worded they did not do a good job with how they updated their audience one thing that happened with me here's another example is apple came to me and they said we want to partner with you and we want to do it's not exclusive but it was kind of exclusive it was you can only release on google play i'm sorry apple the apple store you cannot release with google um you can still do steam totally fine but you you just can't do google so i

kind of dodged a bullet there because it didn't affect steam at all right yeah and i got to to make a substantial amount of money from apple uh because we didn't promise an android version so this is just really important advice do not over promise if you don't have to you can say we'll release on mobile but you don't have to say we're going to release on google or ios can you imagine guys if i had promised to my backers i'm going to do android and ios i would have lost out on the best business deal i have ever done which was apple arcade so it's just keep it in mind now it's really hard it's really hard to say no steam keys like you can't from the beginning say no steam keys on a kickstarter campaign because steam is like the default if you don't offer a steam key then what's the point of the campaign at all you know right yeah no that's that's that's a really good point did you guys ever run into a situation

where you had to turn down a deal because of the promise you made not because of a promise we actually turned down apple arcade yep yeah well but it was simply because like it seemed like a really promising thing and um it was right before they were launching i would assume they reached out to you the same time it was about decisions i'm sure they were just they were just kicking it off yeah it was like maybe four months before they were going to launch and we were like dude this is some good money but we're gonna have to ship a subpar version yeah exactly yeah our our game really wasn't ready and if we had gone with apple arcade it would have been we would have killed ourselves to get even kind of a janky unfinished version of the game done yeah yeah it's uh i was really lucky the reason i was lucky was because my publisher took on that burden

so we we split the money and i won't say split because it wasn't 50 50 but i can't share the rep share um but we took the deal and the reason i took the deal is because i'd have to do anything i just i just art directed and my publisher they had a developer in-house and they ported it to ios which was a huge deal yeah that was a massive deal so i look back on that deal as the luckiest moment in my entire life that and doing a video with pewdiepie um the two luckiest moments i have no idea very providential no idea why those things worked out but they did um so all in all just to my audience guys be very very careful over promising when it comes to to kickstarter so how much did you guys raise on kickstarter uh 30 31 something like that our goal was 21 i think i think so yeah so we went over um and it was it was pretty rough because

uh it looked like we were pretty much not gonna make it yep and um we may have like just barely hit our goal in time but uh like a couple days before the kickstarter was over jacksepticeye uploaded a um playthrough of our demo that we had on io yeah um and that blew up you know it got uh at least a million views and that right there just like just you know within like 24 hours or less than that it just took us you know way over yeah the number did you reach out did you reach out to jack or i guess his name is sean did you reach out to him or did he just play it yeah i i did um during the kickstarter i was just frantically emailing anybody like a complete crazy person good for you and i just i'm just like ah i'll i'll give it a try and uh he actually responded he is

such a nice guy and uh yeah he he played the game he was impressed and i think that really helped with people being interested in in the game and i mean he did what he could i i i almost wish the video had launched um sooner yeah because you could see all this traffic coming in and then the kickstarter ends yeah so it's like who knows how much more we would have raised if that uh if that traffic coming from jacksepticeye um we would have gotten all of that come in it would have been a lot more but you know yeah no yeah we we we definitely can't complain yeah no anyway yeah it was an amazing situation i don't know if you know this daniel but i owe you 20 grand [laughter] because you told me you called me on the phone and you said dude jack just answered my email and i was like what and yeah and i said can i email him where's his email and you sent me his email

and it's not private it's public yeah what's crazy about we call him jack but sean is um what's crazy is he he has his public email address on his channel and he answers those emails which i don't understand how he does i have no i have no idea i guess he's got to have a pa but yeah um but but what's funny is that i reached out to him a year later to play never song when i did my never song campaign just out of the blue and he played it and that thing i'm pretty sure that video raised 20 grand um it just because he pointed the traffic to the kickstarter campaign people clicked the link in the description and then like that day 20 grand came in so i owe it to you i'm not going to give it to you but i owe it to you [laughter] it's people like jacksepticeye that really um really help um catapult indies like us

because i mean it was just out of the goodness of his heart to you know promote us and to promote you yeah um and he's having fun we're we're able to do what we enjoy because he's helping out you know it's it's it's a really cool situation that there's people like that on youtube yeah i mean if you if you if you had had jack play it probably on the first day of the campaign i can imagine you would have you would have gone from 30 to like 60. yeah because other people would have played too because the thing about your game i'm looking at it right now i mean i think he has vegeta hair now the character um he's got like goku hair he's got really tall spiky hair um but there's a whole level of polish here including like the character looks different i feel like i remember the campaign i remember the campaign because you called me to i think i gave you some advice on it um at it did not look like this the game looks so polished and so good

now and so i am curious what would have happened had you done the campaign a year later or something um how much did you change the graphics from you know the kickstarter campaign to to release everything yeah [laughter] it really looks totally different it's beautiful the demo the demo and the trailer everything that we had that we presented with our kickstarter was not we we rebuilt the game from the ground up probably at least three or four yeah for sure um just because it's like you know when when you're learning game development you get to a point where you're like okay i have stuff buried in this project that makes no sense and it's five years old and it's five five years old and it's it doesn't it it doesn't actually work with the kinds of things that you should be doing so and that's just that's just the nature of learning something so it's better to just cut your losses and start from square one now that you know what you're supposed to be doing

um and so yeah we had to do that a couple of times it's definitely the nature of starting something but i would argue it's the nature of just making games in general uh if you're if next year or the year after you're not a better game developer than the year prior you're doing something wrong right um and so i've i'm currently doing this right now uh me and my team member felipe we're working [clears throat] on a silly like dog game where you play as a little dog and on his schedule um and on my schedule is a two-week overhaul essentially of just scrubbing through the entire project and fixing stuff and breaking stuff and fixing it again and cleaning and renaming and deleting so always scrubbing your project clean and almost starting over it's sort of this nightmare that has to happen through the development of your game yeah i've definitely felt that for sure

it's it's tough but i i wouldn't i wouldn't want my audience to feel bad if they're doing it because it's like that's just the way it goes you know yeah for sure yeah it hurt it hurts to do it especially when you're like well there goes six months of work [laughter] um but ultimately you're doing yourself a favor yeah i think i think that i've got i've gone to bed some nights feeling guilty that i scrubbed or removed not only my own work but my team members work like there's there have been many times i don't know if you felt this way uh daniel or jed one of you says we need to delete what you did and it took you two weeks we needed to delete that dude all the time i'll like meticulously work on some stupid thing like and generally like what is what is this i've worked on this [laughter] for a week and it's in the corner and it's only like three pixels [laughter] but it's a masterpiece yeah daniel i wouldn't i wouldn't say it's a problem it's his strength but it can be a

problem is daniel tends to obsess over things yeah to like the nth degree so he will he will make like a little can just like perfect and it's like it's beautiful well and and then and then we're like okay well we don't actually need the can we can actually just use this can then [laughter] gotta get a close-up of it yeah because we did have a high priority um when making the pedestrian that everything was handmade yes so no assets nothing was store-bought yeah everything was made from scratch by me let's take a look i'm looking at it right now and i like let me move to one of the scenes i think it's gorgeous like these leaves i'm looking at a scene right now where there's just this beautiful ivy over a close-up of a like a chimney or something yeah and yeah i was looking at the ivy and i was like how did he get that rim

lighting it looks like the ivy is a mesh is it an actual mesh or is it a texture it's just a an image card with uh yeah and it has just alpha alpha cut off yeah it looks amazing there's just so much here that i was thinking wow they found a really cool asset pack but yeah we tried as much as daniel's our asset pack yeah [laughter] um it is a tricky thing and i i don't fault anybody for using um asset store stuff it's it's an incredible resource um but at least for our project we wanted something that stood out visually and looked unique and unfortunately um most everything on the asset store is a little um it's it's hard to have uniqueness and continuity if you use the assets yeah yep continuity is what i was thinking as well and man guys like i i preached my audience to use assets but

with lately with my projects i end up always end up going back to i'll just do it from scratch you know i'll tell my my artist felipe he's my 3d modeler at the studio i'm just like just just make it from scratch and i'll scrub through the asset store and i'll find beautiful trees like trees that look better than the trees we're putting in our game but in the end we choose our trees because it just fits the tone and the brand of the game there's cohesion yeah not to mention i i will admit i've i've uh given in a couple of times and i'm like you know what i don't want to have to make this car or make this bush i'm going to get it off the asset store i got it and then a week later of me trying to fiddle with it and make the wheels spin or optimize the mesh or fix the texture i might as well just made it by myself anyways because the the asset store assets are made for a very specific reason and

most likely a reason it's going to be different yeah man that's so true that's really good a really good piece of advice i i compare making a game to to marriage like it's you need to know you're if you're gonna have a successful marriage you need to know your spouse very very well uh the ins and outs all the idiosyncrasies yeah and i've tried to make a game where i just sort of rented a spouse and it just doesn't work it's it you're like wait how do i how does the save system work here like how how do i load a level of what's going on yeah um i don't know if you felt that way jed have you ever worked with code that's not your own yeah i i kind of avoid it like the plague um because i've had a lot of bad experiences with uh using other people's like plugins and everything um and it's it's mainly for for the fact that that that you brought up which is i would say one of the biggest

challenges with programming a complicated game is managing everything and if you have if you have things that you don't understand it really makes it tricky and hard um because asset asset store like code and everything it'll be running and doing something that you don't know about and then it'll come back to bite you when you're trying to optimize and you're like wait what the heck is this thing doing or it's talking to a different script in the wrong way and you don't know so it's it it is very tricky there have been a few um assets that i've gotten and i'm just like dude this is beautiful it's like perfect so uh there's a an asset store called uh um asset called uh rewired okay and that is just perfect the guy that made that is made everything uh just work beautifully um and that is i think i think that is one of the only assets that we shipped in the pedestrian um that has code that isn't mine pretty much what's what's

really quick just what is rewired what does it do oh uh it's a um it's like a controller uh remapping um so or just it's it's an input system well i mean unity has a new one now i don't know if you guys have seen it it's very so unity it's kind of funny unity tends to see what assets are working well it's like what valve does and i think they buy them to be honest i think they buy them up that could yeah they do that a lot yeah and then they they either buy them or they just make their own um it is very very similar to the new unity um uh input system gotcha gotcha yeah that's one that i had to use um i didn't use rewired i used something called easy control easy i can't remember what it was called but i did it for pinstripe and it was pretty pretty pretty straightforward but there's some assets out there like the dialogue system it's called the unity dialogue system there's another one called the character controller ops ops of opsi ve

character controller for like third person character controller first person character controller and man they're robust you can reach out to the developer the developer is super helpful there's forums but at the end of the day it's like i didn't want to learn a new system i wanted a system that just works and that's kind of a fantasy you're gonna have to learn the system and you better hope and you better pray that that system is still relevant in three years when you finish your game and that it's still it's not suddenly um abandoned by the developer you know yeah i will say like starting [clears throat] on a project and you just want to get a prototype up and going so that you see like okay this idea i had it's working next week because i've just used asset store stuff that is a really powerful a very powerful thing to just throw a bunch of asset uh asset store stuff together to get that concept out there to feel if it's good or not

but ultimately i think everybody should have the priority of getting to a point where you are an experienced enough developer that you can do that same type of fast iterative work yourself yep um where you're like okay i know how to make a character um controller i know how to make a quick animation i'll just make it myself and now i know exactly how i made it and i'm in complete complete control of improving it from there yes it's a it's a great great conversation to have if you're starting out making games you really need to have an idea of the how you scale your game scale scaling your your project is i think one of the most overlooked things when creating some a game design document or like a vertical slice is how are we going to scale this right because something can look beautiful something could be

something you can you can make a 3d game i'd say pretty in particular 3d games because there's a lot of 3d assets out there you can make something look gorgeous but it's always always incomplete and to make it complete means it has to be scalable what you've put onto a polished little demo you need to be able to scale it and oftentimes it's kind of impossible to scale a lot of these assets because they're not made for scale they're made to look really pretty in a screenshot but that's about it right agreed yep okay guys let's let's wrap up here really quickly here again guys be sure to stick around to the end of this video because we are going to talk about ballpark numbers about how you guys are doing financially only if you're comfortable uh talking about that are you still cool giving us just a rough estimate of how things are going oh yeah okay cool um let's fire off really quickly here i wanna fire off we're gonna do two secrets for jed and two secrets for daniel and these secrets are let's pretend you have

a son and he's 24 years old and he says i want to start my own game studio guys you really want to see this guy your son succeed so what are the two secrets the two things that you're going to tell him to start his game studio let's go ahead and start with you uh daniel hang it [laughter] let's let me think about this uh you have a daughter don't you what your daughter wants to start a game studio what do you tell her you don't do it [laughter] i love you too much uh you go first okay um i do have one that i just thought of um i would say persistence and discipline um i do not think that we would be where we're at if we were not incredibly persistent and i'm not saying that it's just it's it's i'm not saying that we're intelligent because you know we're persistent we are just more more than anything we are stupid

because we're we will beat our heads against the wall until it works right there's there's people far smarter than us yeah but they're just like ah what's the use yeah um we're just i guess we we really like pain yeah [laughter] so get used to um being frustrated and uh yeah hating life for a short period of time yeah um yeah so i uh the the first one is definitely persistence um i think maybe the next one is your the people that you're around that's what i was gonna say um i would say that finding someone at least one other person to be with you that knows the pro like that that is on the journey with you is very important i don't think i could like both daniel or i could not have

made this project alone like on a solo team that that would have been horrible um so having someone who and daniel and i think we we really complement each other because we're very very different in the things that we um are good at yeah and so having someone else who is the yin to your yang who can work really close and you have a very good dialogue with them and who's excited about stuff and you can kind of feed off of each other's excitement and and thankfully like it's happened multiple times where either of us are kind of like at what's the use maybe we should just give up at least the other person was like no let's keep going and then we'll go back and forth you know every once in a while at least one of us is like no let's keep going and encourage the other yeah so i would say those two things persistence and having so having someone else in your corner that works with you uh yeah those are my two it's almost like the

the persistence is fueled by the community that you build you can't be persistent unless you have something allowing you to be almost blind to how hard it is yeah you know yeah sure yeah because we could give all kinds of tips on like oh this is the kind of software you should use and yada yada you learn all that with uh with time i just thought of another one uh but the the most important thing is in order to learn all of that stuff you've got to have the healthy foundation to work off of so okay what are your two that was what what you can't steal i was gonna say the support system so okay well i i have another one i just thought of go for it um i would say which actually i think i think you just kind of made me think about it was uh learning i think being [clears throat] able to learn is really important because there's i think what what you were mentioning

earlier thomas making a game involves so much more than sitting down and thinking of some cool game mechanic there is such a huge variety of skills that you need to learn um and having the ability to sit down and learn something new and be able to have um uh be be able to to roll with the punches is very important yeah um you get to enjoy learning yeah yeah enjoy learning yeah it really does require humility it really does um i think if you guys if if like we got to work together for a week you would be like what on earth is thomas doing like because my method of doing things and how i learned to do stuff is not the right way and so what i've learned is um there's a million ways to do something and my way of doing things is

particularly inefficient but all that said you cannot you cannot expect to always learn things the right way and always learn things exactly how they should be done especially now where technology there's like a million options out there on how to make a game right so to my audience i would encourage you to to learn and be okay with learning it the wrong way and learning it in a slow way in an inefficient way and doing things wrong um and and like you said daniel you said you're not the smartest guy and i think most indies aren't there's plenty of indies out there that are geniuses but most of us are kind of moronic and we don't really know what we're doing but just have the humility to sit down and just start learning don't be scared about learning it wrong just start learning i think that's a really good piece of advice yeah i i would say to to build off of that um

uh i've always been of the mind and that it doesn't really matter how you came to a conclusion as long as you get to the conclusion so if you like like you said that maybe you the way you learn in the way that you do stuff may be inefficient but that's fine because you got to the goal that you wanted and so i think that that's a lot more important than having you know perfect code that's just beautiful or having um you know being really efficient with your modeling as long as you have a goal and you can get to that goal yeah then it doesn't really matter how you get there that's that's especially true so i sound like an old man but these days like it's especially true these days because um like reddit is a great example but any any of the social media platforms essentially everyone gets to project that they're intelligent and that they

basically project their best selves and so in places like the game development community there's always this feeling of like oh i'm everyone's smarter than me i'm stupid how did they know how to do that and then you'll read comments on reddit and everybody seems to know something really smart and so what you do is you you go okay that comment was really smart they seem to know everything so you just assume that they know everything but the truth is is we're all sort of like spinning around blindly in the dark and the people who are successful they're the ones who follow your first tip jed which is they're just persistently stupid like they just keep going um and so i i hate that i i would hate to give that advice like blanket advice to everybody because there's some of you who are listening who probably should not do this because maybe it's just not maybe it's just not good for you to do because you're just

not an entrepreneur maybe you you would freak out maybe you can't handle the pressure but at the very least it's important to try and be persistent for a little while and see what comes of it yeah yeah you won't know until you try so yeah be willing to be an idiot be willing to fail be willing to look stupid people out there um you know elon musk is a is a i like the guy but he's controversial so some people don't like him but at the very least you got to be willing to be hated to be significant to be influential to do something great you got to be willing to be hated and this is true no matter what side of the political aisle you're on or cultural aisle you're on no matter any part of your your life uh you if you're if you're always if you're always getting positive feedback but never negative feedback it could be that you're just [clears throat] doing mediocre things yeah the moment you start to make

enemies and you get pushback it means you're actually probably moving forward because people don't like to see other people succeed unfortunately typically typically that is true yeah they don't like they don't like seeing people make progress because progress indicates that well most people aren't making progress it's really sad but like there are people that i know who are still the same now as they were five years ago and it's like what what what have you been doing um and it's those people who are likely i think more likely to gatekeep in the game dev community and say well this is how i do it and here's how you should do it yeah and what i always say is prove it you know what do you got what do you got to show me [laughter] right well great guys this has been really really fun let's finalize this conversation with how are things going financially with your studio is it going well

um yeah just ballpark yeah yeah i it it definitely has and um i will say when we this is just a little warning for people who are just releasing their game you need to be very careful with your expectations and need to wait a little while to see how things play out because when we first released our name [clears throat] we were very down in the dumps and it because we didn't really know how things were going to play out yeah and it's very much kind of a slow burn um with releasing your game and the amount of money you'll get um so we were looking at like the first you know couple weeks and we're thinking oh man dude we're done for the same thing this isn't good um but then over the course of these past three years it's just like consistent it's like every every every single month there's a certain amount of money and um it just you know during sales we get a lot of deals pop up with with other companies

and everything so i just say be very very patient um and try not to jump to conclusions whenever you like right initially release your yeah because we we uh when we launched we thought it was the typical like you get the big spike at the beginning and then it tapers off after that and that's it and that's why it felt so dire to us it was so depressing because it's like well i guess that's it that's all we're getting but that long tail is [clears throat] a thick one yeah and actually our launch was actually worse than some of our sales oh yeah oh yeah no it's a huge misnomer i thought the same thing i thought you better do a good launch or else you're screwed yeah and if you look at if you look at my sale numbers it's like it's like pop at the beginning and then wait and then a pop every like four weeks it was a pop because we're running these sale events and then you get a big pop from like humble bundle or you get a big pop from uh from like a daily deal with steam so

the the the your game's longevity you got to learn to think in terms of three years like i think three years is probably three to four years as a games lifetime or at least an indie game maybe you guys disagree but how much are you gonna make in the lifetime and it could it's very likely that it could end up being 300 to 500 000 um or more you know so just it's really good to keep that in mind the long-term uh financial uh opportunity yeah right um so just some and yeah we i don't uh we thought about it before and you don't just share anything you don't want to guys yeah and we we don't really know i think i think it's maybe just that thing where uh you know don't tell your co-workers yeah your your your your salary kind of it's a great um so we'll we'll we'll just stick with some some general numbers but i think

across so we released on steam in 2020 and gog oh yeah steam steam and gog um mac windows mac and linux mac was a a mistake yes correct yeah true so windows mac linux on steam and gog in 2020 then we released on playstation in 2021 and then we released on xbox in 2022. um between all of those platforms and there's a little caveat with xbox we've sold i think over 100 000 copies yeah at least just incredible incredible guys that's so yeah and and it's it's public knowledge that we were on uh xbox game pass yes so like you were saying with your apple arcade like uh it was amazing opportunity i mean it's same with us like they just reached out to us and we're like well heck yeah it was like xbox game pass was the perfect timing

for us because we were uh last year last summer and fall i was working on porting to xbox and as i was porting it i was it was just like the the perfect timing i was working on it and then xbox emailed us and said oh do you want to be part of game pass and we're like yeah because it was just it just worked out beautifully so i i worked ported the game and then we just went launched directly into game pass yeah um uh with with our launch onto xbox yeah um and so these sales from that are kind of separate um so that because i don't know exactly how many people we've had play our game on game pass but it's something like a million or something yeah it's just amazing it's just amazing and i think yes a lot of people might be wondering right now how do i ensure that happens

and my correct me if i'm wrong here i feel like it's going to happen by default if you have a decent game like if you have a i would say a good game be a good game if you have a good game it doesn't be great just a good game you're gonna get those emails do you think that's correct yeah i think it really helps when you have a i mean and this is we just really lucked out with this as well because we worked so hard on the game we have a good steam score we have a good meta score um like when somebody at xbox is like oh do people like the pedestrians should we reach out to them and they see those those numbers that's very telling of the game it really helps yeah yeah so building building a good reputation um around your game i think is one of the reasons why we've had uh our game has had the longevity that it has had um because

people go on steam and they they they look at um our steam score and they're like oh look at all these positive reviews of people loving this game and i think that that really helps um your your future sales yep um yeah man that's that's so great like it's got me thinking here i'm [clears throat] looking at the game right now and if this game were just this is no no slight to you guys but if it was just the platforming and there was no camera moving around this beautiful environment like do we agree it probably wouldn't have sold well yeah exactly so what you've done here is what what i've been kind of recommending to my audience which is take something that's solid that already works aka a puzzle platformer and then add a um gimmick to it and that could pretty much guarantee [clears throat] not guarantee but you have a much higher chance

of being successful if you take something that's already successful and give it a gimmick what do you guys think about that yeah something i i think it really helps especially in the day and age of clips and sound bites um having a game that can explain itself in a gif is very helpful yep um so there's there's that aspect of it but then something that judd and i had a high priority on was let the visuals bring the people in and let the gameplay hold them there yeah um and so that's what we really tried to do because visuals can only take you so far um people get bored of just looking at good visuals you got to have something really engaging to keep them playing and being like oh i wonder what happens next so you really have to have a high prior priority on both i think it's 50 50. visuals and gameplay yeah there was um

it is funny that that you bring that up um about you know our game just being just a simple puzzle platformer because that is something that throughout development we had a lot of comments from people um mostly on reddit because reddit's means people is the worst yeah but uh we we had a lot of comments saying like oh this is just um the this game is a stickman game i played on my web browser 10 years ago yeah yeah and it's like why why why would i play this um and it really comes down to uh for us is the experience it's like yeah you you may have played something similar yeah but we are offering you a different experience something that um something that that that makes you for lack of without sound of pretentious that makes you feel something in a way yeah it's a real experience and it's like would you rather watch star wars or read the screenplay

yeah yeah i totally agree and the star wars screenplay i've been doing this thing where i read screenplays a lot i love horror [clears throat] movies um i don't know if you guys like horror movies but one of my favorites is um the witch by robert egger oh i've been i really wanted one and then also hereditary by ari astor and i've been reading those screenplays and it's no offense to either of those directors they also wrote their movies um but what i found was there's nothing here yeah like there's well there's something but it's very little it's a lot less than than you would think after watching the movie what makes the movie so special is they've taken a core a core story element for example that works it just works it's always worked since the beginning of time or maybe since shakespeare right or even prior to that these classic story arcs that just work they just connect to human beings for some weird reason they just connect

and then the garnish the set dressing the lighting the mood the music is it's just fluff but it's what makes the thing but it's got that course that core engine right and so what i'm looking at here and this is true for all of all video games you can take something that just works and then dress it up with a with a with a gimmick and that's what that's what i've been doing for all my games my games are always they're basically just legend of zelda mechanics fetch quests go get the key go get the ability move on to the next level but it's kind of linear it's not like metroidvania but it's more linear that's basically what i do for my games that's it's even our third game we're working on this dog game and also father our other first person game we're working on same sort of mechanics um so don't complicate things you know right yeah yeah and i mean i will say um

something also very special about the indie game field is large aaa studios they need to make their money back and a big amount so they're like okay we have to we have to make sure we're doing these kinds of mechanics because uh you know analytics they're tried and true analytics prove that an open world game where you have waypoints and you have uh all uh all of this stuff that's gonna sell uh copies as as an indie game you it's most likely it's just yourself or you and a couple other friends making a game the overhead for supporting yourself is so much smaller you don't need a big audience to make your money back you can do something very niche and very experimental yeah something that um i think is one of the biggest advantages to indie games and that's why people play them is because they want to experience something new

yeah something cutting edge and even if it's just something as simple as a a a unique character or some kind of little mechanic that um nobody's ever really explored or it's in a different it's in a different way yeah yeah just the i i think that is really important because you can't compete with triple a games if you're going to make a shooter game you can't compete with call of duty you're you're gonna have to have some some kind of spice in there that makes people interested in playing that over call of duty i think that's such a good point daniel because instead of focusing on such a good point instead of and this is good for me to think about instead of focusing on having all the right ingredients that a aaa game might have yeah instead you're like no we're just making we're making a hot tamale of a game we're not making a meal it's a hot

tamale that's all it is yeah it's that one little spicy thing another way to think of it as your it's a tiny little diamond that's what you're making see i think my audience something i want my [clears throat] audience to understand is and this is something i'm still learning you're selling a game for the price of a of a a big mac meal at mcdonald's yeah right so you're not selling a 50 game a 60 game you're selling something that most people are willing to spend to consume something like a hamburger and crap it out in the next two hours and it's trash or worse right and that's what [clears throat] we need to remember so don't overthink your game don't over value what your game is just make something small and it's not that hard maybe you guys correct me if i'm wrong i don't think it's that hard this might surprise my audience it's not that hard to make a hundred grand off of a game like over the course of a year or two you can you can make a decent game

that's five ten dollars and it'll probably bring in a hundred grand over the course of its life and i know that sounds crazy to a lot of people in my audience but as long as you make a decent game it's not that hard yeah and for sure be honest and and make make something honest and be true to something that interests you make something that is unique to you yeah don't just try to copy someone else because you saw it was successful or copy someone else because you thought it was cool make something unique to you that excites you and it's gonna it's one gonna help you keep the project going because it's something you personally are interested in but it's also going to have a unique voice because it's you talking about this making this thing that is you know special so absolutely well guys i think we should wrap up because you just won the longest podcast award

[laughter] i believe we're at an hour and a half wow i could talk for three hours with you guys i i really connect with you in a lot of ways um and you remind me of my brothers uh so and that's a compliment um [laughter] some people you know i don't really like their brothers i really like my brothers and this was so helpful guys i'd love to have you on again if you if you want maybe another time this year absolutely and you know again to my audience guys they've got a youtube channel obviously they're very grounded um honest guys you guys seem to have really fun personalities so be sure to check out that youtube channel link below there's also a link to the pedestrian below be sure to support these two very talented indies guys thanks for coming on any other things you want to plug really quick any other any anything you want to plug really quick guys

what do you think i said where did you say anybody want to applaud [laughter] i didn't follow daniel i'm gonna take the fault for that one because you both misheard me so i must have said it wrong is there [laughter] i'm just going to get a gif of you guys clapping that's it's going to be like a meme um is there anything you want to plug i think it's i mean we we've just started our new game uh it's been a long time coming but we finally have all the pedestrian stuff out of the way so we're just starting our new game and we want to make sure that we are documenting it as much as possible on our youtube channel so skookum arts on youtube that's where we will hopefully be doing at least monthly updates on the progress and uh yeah that's about it i think alrighty guys well i'm gonna run an outro here it's gonna be awkward because you're not gonna see the outro but i'm gonna run the outro thanks everybody for listening

to daniel and jed at skookum be sure to click the link below to subscribe to them and i will see you guys on discord hopefully we can talk yep yep all right cheers thank you bye get over here 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 [music] 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 can just use it for a hobby project it's my treat to you and by the way if you haven't clicked like that would mean a ton to me hit subscribe and also this is important hit that notification bell here's why [music] if you get notified of when i'm live you can watch me make my next game and [music] let me know in the chat what you think about the game or any

ideas you have [music] and you might just show up your chat might just show up in the next video that i upload all right i'll talk to you later bye i love you too