The Secret To A Million Dollar Game Idea

in this video me and my buddy Gavin the creator of Cho Choo Charles and his next game cuff bust discuss in my opinion the single most important question every indie game developer should be asking how does he keep coming up with his million-dollar game ideas look it's no secret that Gavin is a wildly successful indie game developer with some of the most impressive viral game ideas under his belt Gavin's ideas are so catchy that his new game cuff bust was featured at summer gamefest where millions of people watched his debut trailer resulting in over 100,000 wish lists in the snap of a finger how does this 22-year-old do it he and I discussed this and hopefully you'll learn how you can do it too in your next indie game so my question for you is how did you know that this idea was going to work or did you know this idea was going to work well I'll I'll say right up front I don't think you can really know an idea is going to work cuz there were times where I really didn't where I genuinely thought that it wasn't going to work I

guess I I'll kind of just quickly go through the timeline of like what kind of how I came up with the concept and how I decided like uh you know I I guess I'll start working on this and I think we should side note really quick because a lot of people probably thinking the game's not out how does how does Thomas or Gavin know it's good true what we're talking about is marketability right now we're talking about holy crap Gavin got 100,000 wish lists how did he know how to do that because you only do that with a good idea and you only do that with a really good trailer and so that's what we're talking about we're talking about about the process of creating a prototype and something that can go viral and you did that and you've done that multiple times so go ahead sort of sort of I will say when it comes to like the trailer and the virality of this one summer gamefest was probably the the biggest reason for that it this game didn't hasn't really gone viral yet hasn't really gone viral but relative to the people listen relative to the people listening though it has because I look at your Dev logs people would kill mostly within just my existing audience

do you feel like you were able to to to get a a significant amount of wish lists from your own Audience by the way if you're like me and you always dreamt of making an indie game as a full-time job I have a free webinar below that goes into exactly how to make six figures with just a demo I was just like you for years I thought I had to make a game in its entirety before getting a paycheck but there's actually three ways to make six figures before even finishing your game I've done this multiple times so check it out below if you do want to go full-time Indie otherwise let's continue I mean yeah probably 10 or 20,000 it would be kind of my estimate I don't have specific stats but that would be kind of my guess cuz it hasn't gotten yeah the devlogs haven't done nearly as well as like my my chooo Charles yeah so with the concept stuff initially I'd finished up the original version of Chuchu Charles it was out on PC and I started kind of thinking about new game ideas and so there was this one day where I was I was going on Steam DB to check stats on some game or another and um I saw that Prison Architect was

trending and I was like Prison Architect man that that's a that's a pretty cool concept you know that you can like make a prison and then I was just sitting there and I was thinking man it really would be cool if like you could actually just escape from the prison like I was like why why hasn't somebody just made like a really good prison escape game and I was like oh wait a minute I could do that um so that was the initial kind of spark but from there it was kind of a matter of I guess looking for reasons that it could succeed my first thinking was okay well prison escapes are a fairly popular concept it's it's popular in like movies and TV shows and stuff and you know it's popular on like Roblox like there's so many massive roblo or maybe not so many but I know that there's at least a couple really really really big Roblox games about Prison Breaks you know because of that it's got a little bit of you know kind of nostalgia in the same way that Thomas the Tank Engine and uh Chuchu Charles formed that sort of Nostalgia well did

you watch the prison break show um or sha Shank Redemption or any of those I did watch uh sha shank I have not watched the the prison break show a bunch of friends were telling me like bro you got to watch that one that's a great one but I just the first just the first season after that that's that's what I was hearing yeah in any case yeah so was kind of just looking for reasons that it would succeed so things like that seeing like okay it's it's popular over here this is another concept that I I think was pretty smart and I think it would make sense to to to do it on a wider scale there's this other game called a way out and it's sort of a a doublea maybe kind of AAA I haven't looked too much into the developers but it's a multiplayer prison escape game I think it's split screen where you have two players and you work together and you try and break out of a prison oh it's EA and by the way EA yeah yeah and you know it did like from our perspective as Indie developers solo developers or or just you know General Gamers you know it's probably made tens of millions of dollars

yeah on Steam yeah so we look at that it's like wow that's that's insane that did so well for EA 1020 million that's probably not that much you know that might that might be like just barely breaking even you know so there are certain Concepts that I think they're not quite big enough they're not quite profitable enough that like a AAA company could go and put like aund million behind it and then be super profitable with it like it's Concepts like they're not going to hit quite that high of a ceiling but for Indie developers people like ourselves we might be able to take those sort of failed AAA Concepts do it on an indie scale and be able to kind of pick up you know some of these like larger crumbs that AAA Studios don't really see enough value in but would be super valuable for people like us so you know so I was looking at games like that it was you know it was moderately successful but there still wasn't anything that kind of fit sort of that more like light-hearted bastic like it's a a way out it's a very

serious kind of a gritty you know it's it's a AAA campaign game so um when you say when you say create it but in an indie scale that I really I would really love for you to break down what you mean by that obviously there's it's a budgetary thing it's just not a lot of money yeah and and what does that mean in terms of production right in terms of Assets in terms of mechanics what do you mean by that it really just means simplifying that's the biggest thing you know obviously as Solo or small Indie Studios we don't have the people or the time to make you know 100 individual photo realistic characters with map animations we can't do that that's so that's that's a nice start you know so instead we make a single Jalen model that's kind of stylized with Goofy animations and everybody plays as the same jallen character and then like that that simplifies it a lot that cuts the the time and budget down by like oh that's probably like an easy half a million dollars off the budget probably an easy

mons of development time cut down simpler environments keeping the the prison smaller you know making use of assets being okay with things looking not perfect you know that's one of the things when you're making commercial games you can't do everything to the highest you know like possible quality because pretty much any competent solo developer is probably capable like like I could probably if I spent enough time on it I could make a AAA quality character model I could do that but it would take me 8 months every developer is capable of making really really high quality stuff but you kind of just have to decide how much time you actually want to put into your project and just be okay with certain things being just not that great like getting it to a level that's competent and you know maybe I don't want to say like above average because then people start you know comparing too much and it's like you know at a level that you're comfortable with I guess would be the main thing well how do you triage that you know it's like um I've I've compared

in my own mind I compare indie game development to being like the emergency room in a hospital where it's like you really do have to triage what's important and what's not what comes through the door and what you work on is emergent or it's very important or it's high value now the question is a lot of game developers people listening right now they focus on what they like and what they enjoy making and what they want to spend their evening working on if especially for hobbyist game devs they're going to be triaging what they like not what's important MH and so my question for you is when it comes to scaling down and and you know not making a prison break game like a way out how do you scale down and decide the spoon is very important the soap is very important the sewer is very important how did you decide that I mean I will first make a quick distinction like we've got the features that you as a developer want to add and the features that are important to players or that'll

make a you know a difference in the the game itself I do think it's very important to have some time like take a set amount of time maybe it's like 10% of your time or 20% of your time and put that towards features that like you really like you know be careful not to like you know overdo your your budget right but like I think it is important at least for me I like doing this you know if you're trying to be like really really businessyoutube yesterday I spent the entire day uh working on a vending machine just just putting a vending machine in the game it's not necessarily A A Monumental feature yeah but I just I I like vending machines bro I me is it part of the is it part of the economy or is it just for fun kind of yeah I mean like you can you can go up to the vending machine and like put coins in it to like get different items out so like it is it's a thing that has a gameplay application so yeah I I I think it is good to take some time to to do some interesting stuff just to make sure you are still enjoying working on your project but beyond that

majority of the time should be spent on the most important things kind of the way that I generally try and think about it is if I don't include this feature will people write a negative review saying that I should have included it or like if I don't include this feature will anybody notice that it's not there well that sounds like it could make a lot of people paranoid you know like I I think that way too and it's like I'm always like well you know I got to include this and I got to do that to this level and add this kind of uh this kind of asset because people will get frustrated that it's not there yeah I think it mostly comes down to like I mean just reading a lot of Steam Reviews just read Steam Reviews just see what people get mad about you know I mean usually it's going to be stuff like um oh like there's no key bindings so like stuff like that like obviously that's a very very important feature every game should have that you know when it comes to like more gameplay related stuff it's like I guess in those scenarios right cuz it it really does depend like cuz I think often times there are features that are good that um you know it's not necessar that somebody was going to

write a negative review if it wasn't there like I'm trying to think about like like Chuchu Charles the pickle Mission it's just a goofy mission that I added where you try and uh go find a jar of pickles you know a lot of people liked it and it was good you know there there were some some funny clips that came out of it some some viral moments but I don't necessarily think that people would write a negative review if there wasn't a pickle Mission like if that just never existed and people didn't even know about it people probably wouldn't be angry about it so it's it's kind of a nuanced sort of thing I don't know I don't know it is kind of hard to know it's really just about boiling it down and and trying to simplify things where you can you know not trying to overco complicate things I think a lot of developers they'll add big complicated features like a a massive skill tree system that isn't really necessary like yeah you could have a skill tree with 100 different skills or you could have like a basic upgrade system with like three different stats that you just upgrade over time so I think there there are ways to simplify complicated features