Watch THIS If You Want To Make Games (And FINISH Them!)

at the end of this video my guest ziver says something that's probably going to change the entire way you're thinking about your game uh I know it changed the way I think about making indie games and by the way Olivier Nelson Jr is the creator of strange scaffold games he made a game called click holding uh I am your Beast El Paso elsewhere and he has a totally different way of thinking about game development and that approach is well I'll give you a hint it's small I mean I talked to a lot of students uh I I'll do guest lectures and interviews and so on and one of the things I say is well if you have a game Jam that does well like don't spend the next six years on it your next game is going to be the best game you make and the next game and the next game and the next game so you finish it you finish it and you move on uh when you're pitching a game yes you'll run into trouble if you aren't at whatever is the arbitrary scale a publisher decides is the only thing that

will make money right now but when you run into that situation uh like you go in with the game that you can survive either making or pitching and put no more into it people are like okay but what if I put like just another like week into my pitch deck and I make it like really interactive and has cool transitions it's like no you you you're a father of two make the pitch deck in a week put together if you can't afford to put together don't put together a demo and make the situation you survive if you've got a friend who never picks up their phone if they can if they have never ENT uh like responded to a text in less than 72 hours don't start an indie studio with them like I'm I'm recommending High practicality to approach a world of nonsense I see I wonder what it is about

game developers indie game developers and also Publishers where they feel like they don't have to do standard business practices like every other industry well restaurants in particular restaurants are really difficult to start and and be profitable so what instead what you should do is I don't know find a a a make a chain that you know is proven right so or at least start small start catering to your friends because they really love your food and I think I've talked about this in a previous podcast where it's like if you've got that small prototype that works you're like you make really really good beef stew and you can cater it to your friends and then just scale and scale and scale you can do it slowly over time until you actually have enough money to start paying rent for a place in an actual restaurant an actual building but with Indie Games it's like that that that mentality isn't there the mentality is I'm just going to go all in in for 3 years and hopefully it makes

its money back um I think I learn I learned that I was doing this all wrong I think I learned it from Jonas Ty roller I don't know if you know who he is um but he made a game called fall he's he works with the a lot of the grizzly game guys and they have a very practical way of making indie games um it's like they they do like five to 10 prototypes and then whichever one performed the best just on a g purely on the loop or like a simple mechanic then they pick that one and then they move forward it's like this sort of Sci approach that's also what free lives does over in South Africa um people are like man free lives doesn't miss and it's like they do dozens and dozens of game jams a year and only when a project gets massively validated and they know exactly how they ship that game like they also even if a game Jam does great they don't start production on the full game until they know the road like what the SC will be and how to finish it and

then they release that game in Surprise it does well for them basically every single time yeah but it's it is as you said it's very it's very reasonable and weirdly enough when you s when you try to do reasonable things in games it's you sound like the crazy crazy one yeah yeah you know it's something like um like my my dad was uh and I I have a question to you about your your business model but really quick my my dad was um was a CPA when I was growing up and he started his own CPA practice and uh the way he did it was he started in the smallest basement the the rent was like nothing and he slowly made enough money and built and built and built and then he built a building and then he was running he had a a team in the building and notice how he was making money while building the thing right I mean Super Giants is a great example where like

they always did they make big leaps yes but they didn't make Hades as their first game and when I talk to an indie or to a student uh especially someone who starting they're like oh yeah I'm gonna make something like Hades I'm like Hades is the product of 10 years of making games that's why they that's how they have money to make Hades they have expertise to make Hades that's how they understand right that what they have what Hades is even special and what's special about it which is why they're able to make Hades 2 in Early Access such a success where you see sometimes that sequel especially in Indie statistically we see that it does not do as well as the original yep yep and I just looked it up it looks like their team is like 20 people so it's uh I don't know if that was the case during production initially with it certainly wasn't the production uh on Bastion right right and how how big was that team let me see

here I think it was something like five like it was a it was it was a much smaller team yeah but regardless it a seven people but that's Google's AI but you never know uh if it's if it's correct but seven people so that's still that's a big team you know for an indie bigger than my teams have ever been I just want to encourage everyone listening to to treat your game like a normal business it's like make that small minimum just minimum viable product and see if you can make money see if you can make money off of a $2 game on hiio see if a prototype actually works if people respond to it or it's as simple as posting a screenshot on Twitter and it's like do people seem to like it you know if they don't then maybe you shouldn't go all in for three years so my question to you is do you approach Game Dev that way I mean for me one of the big things what and I'm very thankful for this in

hindsight was I always at every step of my Game Dev career asked myself what I needed out of this so started as a games journalist then I went into game writing because I was like this fulfills more of my soul and then I went into narrative design because this fulfills more of me I don't want to just be a writer and I was like I don't care how good the story is that involves the expertise of a lot of people actually what I care about is the game coming out so I multiclass into production and bizdev ended up running a studio and that's all and this weird mix of skills I have and all the things I do now are a product of at every in Step intentionally saying does this give me what I need and is this sustainable can I keep doing this and uh what I'd say at this stage for me how I make games is uh I never want to start a game that I can't survive finishing