Stuff They Don't Tell You About Game Development

Okay, so the goal of today's video is to say as many spicy statements as I can about game development. Specifically, eight things that they don't tell you about making games. I make games full-time. [music] And the first thing I'll say is that if I'm going to spend all of my time working in this office making games, I want it to be cozy. I want a standing desk. I want my lights to instantly turn on. Alexa, studio lights on. I want automated blinds that go down. Hey, I want candles. It's really, really important to have a perfect environment. And obviously, you can't just go and buy all of this at once. But for me, I've been I've been doing this for like I think maybe a decade of making indie games. I want it to be cozy. I want it to be fast. I want to be able to make games and then instantly do a devlog. I can't light this candle. Oh well. Point being, I want it to be a perfect work environment. So, don't be stingy about your work environment. Make it cozy. Make it awesome. Okay. Number two, 1 million warnings inside of Unity editor

is totally fine. It's okay to have a ton of warnings inside of Unity. Trust me, I know that this is controversial. I said this on Twitter and I had several people very angry that I didn't clear out my warnings, but the truth is it's kind of like hurting cats. If you fix all of your warnings, the next day you'll open up Unity, you have some. It's just the way it goes. Number two, UI is the hardest aspect of game development. I think there's a number two and number three, which is enemies. Enemy AI. That's number two. Number three is doors. For some, for some reason, opening door or creating doors in a first-person shooter or even a third person game is so difficult. There's always problems with doors. But UI is particularly hard. And the reason why is you have to figure out how to match your 2D to your 3D. So, that's number one. And number two, the integration per platform. See, it's not so hard to make UI for a Steam game cuz you can just have the user use a mouse or a keyboard. But the moment you want to get it on console, Switch, Xbox or PlayStation, or even iPad or iPhone, you might be

thinking, why would I do iPad or iPhone or even Apple TV? Well, you might get a deal from Apple Arcade, which I was able to do with my game Never Song. So, if you want to launch on all these platforms and god forbid do a SIM ship, it's going to be very, very difficult to ensure that your UI is navigable, if that's a word, with every single device. a gamepad, a keyboard, a mouse, touch, a controller, a remote for your TV. For some reason, you want to play a game on your Apple TV. I don't know why you would. You have to build it out for all of these devices. This is a huge challenge. Number four, without post-processing, most games look like trash. What is post-processing? It's basically, well, it's an Instagram filter. That's that's really all it is inside of Unity. It's called post-processing. You create this thing called a volume. You put it in your game and anything inside of that volume is going to be able to have bloom which creates a cool glow effect or motion blur. Everybody loves motion blur. That's sarcasm, by the way. Color correction. You can bring the shadows down to the blue or the teal. And then you can bring the midtones up to the orange. This is called teal and orange, by the way. It's a common color grading

technique with films. You can add noise. You can add film grain. You can add vignettes. And also ambient occlusion. Now, that's not necessarily post-processing. That's really a screen space effect, but they're kind of one in the same post-processing and screen space. They're happening after the game art is rendered. They're not actually occurring on an object. It's really just a filter going over your game. So, this is what a game looks like without post-processing, and this is what a game looks like with post-processing. So, if you go inside of a menu of any video game and you change it to lowquality settings, they're probably going to knock off all the post-processing effects. Number five, if you want to make a 3D game, you're not going to release it unless you understand light mapping or you can call it baking. Now, I understand what a lot of you are thinking. Well, I use Unreal and all of my lights are real time and I don't have to worry about light mapping. If you want to launch on PlayStation or Xbox or Nintendo Switch, you might might be able to get away with real-time lighting if you have a few, but most of the time you're going to need to bake your lights. And baking lights is well,

there's UI and then there's that's the hardest one. And then there's baking lights. If you bake your lights, your game is going to degrade in quality, at least on your first try of baking lights. That's because you're going to paint shadows and paint light all over your scene. And then those real-time lights are going to be removed. So, your shadow quality might go down. Most objects in your scene are static. They can't move. So, all those cool flickering lights, moving lights, objects casting shadows, and moving around the scene, that's all gone with light mapping. And the problem is is that platforms like Nintendo Switch, they basically are just toasters. I mean, that's about as high-end as it gets with a Nintendo Switch. So, if you're going to try and run real-time lights and especially have them cast shadows, shadows are particularly bad for the CPU. You're not going to be able to do it on Switch. You're going to need to bake those lights. Number six, the first level of your game is the most important level. Now, I'd argue that the last level is very important as well if you're making a linear story game because, well, you want them to be satisfied at the end of your game. But that first level or you can think of it

as the first 20 minutes of your game being super super important. That's because number one, all of your players have a ton of other games that they're going to be playing. So more times than not, they're going to play your game, they'll leave a good review, and then they won't keep playing your game. And so they got a great experience on the first level, but they didn't finish the game. Also, this helps with refund rates as well on Steam. If you have a really solid experience at the beginning of the game, players will be less inclined to ask for a refund. And then finally, you need to be thinking about your demo. A demo is so important for Steam games. If you launch a demo during Steam NextFest, you can get a ton of wish lists. I've had friends who have gotten 100,000 wish lists from Steam NextFest, which ultimately converts to sales of the game. But also, a demo is going to help you pitch it to publishers if you want to secure funding from publishers or you could pitch it on Kickstarter and get crowdfunded as well. If your first 20 minutes or that first level kind of sucks, well, you can't do any of that. Number seven. Is that seven? Yeah. Your game idea is bad if people can't come up with ideas about your game idea.

[laughter] How do I say this? Um, your game idea sucks if people don't have ideas about your idea. If you pitch your game to your mom or your dad or your friends or your family, if you say it really quickly and they go, "Well, okay, it's probably not a good idea." Even people who don't play games, if you tell them an idea, a good idea is going to spawn more ideas. Oh, that's a good way to put it. A great idea is a seed. And when you plant it, it should sprout more ideas. Here's a great example. I'm pitching a game idea to my mom. Hey, mom. I have a game idea. It's about a duck that has flown across America and it you can fly and it's it's a talking duck. That idea will probably not spawn more ideas. Your mom will probably say, "That is so sweet, honey. I'm so proud of you. Now, alternatively, hey, mom, I'm going to make a game about managing a cult. Now,

first off, she might say, "What are you talking about? Don't do that. That's horrible." But also, she might have some cool ideas. If ideas generate from those ideas, it's a good idea. Number eight, your game sucks until 1 month before launch. Now, this has just been true for me, and it's also been true for a lot of my friends, including Jay Armstrong, the creator of Cult of the Lamb. He mentioned that it wasn't until months prior to launching where the game actually started to feel good, where it was actually fun, and it just felt like it had its own personality and that it was right. The same is true for me right now with my game Twisted Tower. It's been years where the game just never really felt it never felt like its own person, but now it has a strong personality. I tell my team a lot, I want to be able to smell the game. I can smell the game. The game smells like cotton candy and popcorn and dead bodies. That's what that's what the game smells like. It's got a very unique sharp [music] flavor and smell. It's got a very unique personality. I don't know why this happens. I think it's just this sense of urgency that as the game

approaches launch, subconsciously, you start thinking about the audience. You start thinking about the reviews and you think about the press and who's going to play the game. And suddenly, I I guess for me, the adrenaline kicks in and you start to pin down all of the things that make the game marketable and tighten those screws as fast as you can. and suddenly you've created a highly marketable product. You're you're basically just tightening up the package so much so that you could present it to your audience. It's so difficult to do that when there's no sense of urgency. Also, it's just time, right? When you work on your game for 2 years, 2 years later, you're going to know what your game is. And the process of going from day one to day six, what is it? 700 6, what's 635 or 365 time 2? Jordy, it is 730 days. 730 days after starting my game. All those days in between were guessing and checking and guessing and checking and building and and scrapping and and sketching something and then concepting something and then bringing it to life and then killing it and then resurrecting it. It's not only that you

you scrap stuff. Sometimes you scrap stuff and then you bring it back. And all of that guessing and checking, that tweaking is worth your time. And that brings me to a bonus secret that nobody tells you about gamedev. In fact, they tell you the opposite. And I I've been saying it, too. Feature creep is generally a bad thing. But what I'm about to say is feature creep is actually a good thing. What? Now, here's why. I found this to be true with me. So, I'll just speak for me, but let me know in the comments if you find this to be true. Feature creep is really how you find out ideas. It's how you find out what's great about your game and what's not. If you don't bring in new ideas to your game and try new things and new mechanics and you're constantly only sticking to your game design document, you may actually be leaving money on the table or ideas, great ideas on the table. One thing that I found with Twisted Tower is originally when I started the game, the idea of moving hallways and moving floors and and and shifting bedrooms, all of that was cool, at least on paper. But slowly

over time, we scrapped the core idea of the game and actually started introducing what was more feature creep. Without feature creep, without testing that out, without trying stuff and feeling guilty while I did it, I wouldn't be where I am today. So obviously you want to be careful with feature creep, but also it can help you in the long run. So those are nine things that they don't tell you about game development. And this is just coming off of 10 years of gamedev experience. Uh thanks for watching. It was really really fun.