What I Learned After 10 YEARS of Game Dev

I can pretty much guarantee that at the end of this video, you're going to at least learn one, maybe even five. All five of these secrets are going to blow your mind. So, stick around to the end of the video to see if these secrets are something you've learned or maybe you just didn't know, and they're going to help you out in your indie game journey. The first secret, and this is what I've learned in the last decade of making commercial games, two commercial indie games, 2D platformers, but also I'm working on a third game as well, and I've learned a lot with that one, and that's a first-person shooter called Father. The first secret is if you're failing, you're doing something right. Failure is your best friend. It seems counterintuitive, but the people who are releasing indie games full-time have released a ton of crap games. They've done it over and over and over again. This means they got bad reviews on maybe itch.io or Steam or even Nintendo Switch. Maybe they got bad reviews from major [music] press outlets. It's embarrassing. It's not fun. But one, it builds a thicker skin for you so that you can actually not be so afraid to

release your next game. But it also means that you're going to learn from the critique that you've [music] got. See, I got a bad review on GameStop and they they they gave a five out of 10 to my first commercial release, Pinstripe. And I was kind of frustrated with the review. I I remember reading it and thinking all the things that were in the review were wrong. But looking back, a lot of what was written in the review was correct. and I've learned a lot since. So, don't avoid failure. In fact, I would I would embrace pursuing failure. It's kind of like ripping a band-aid off. Get it over with because it's going to help you in the long run. The second thing I've learned in making indie games for the last decade is build your audience as early as possible. Let's say you've just designed a square and all you know how to do is design a square in Photoshop. That's your only indie game knowledge. You should post that on Instagram. You should post that on Tik Tok. You should post that on Twitter. And you should just tell people, "Hey, I'm beginning my indie game journey." And you should start

targeting two different audiences. The first audience you should target is game developers. It's totally fine to target game developers. What does that mean? [music] It means your hashtags should be indie game development focused. And actually, you can go to best hashtags.com and find those. But you should also be targeting the actual audience that's going to buy your game. Game developers aren't necessarily going to buy your game. They might, but the majority of your audience that you should be targeting is [music] gamers. Specifically, gamers who love indie games. So, you should be targeting on every social media platform that audience. Now, when you're building an audience on social media, you should try and secure one followers. So, build up your following to maybe a couple thousand followers on Twitter, Instagram, [music] maybe YouTube, maybe do some devlogs, uh Tik Tok, all the social media platforms, right? But you should also be building up an audience of wishlisters on Steam. But there is a third audience you want to be building and that is when you offer up a free demo, let's say in the

description of all your social media platforms with a link. When you offer up a demo to play your game, you can collect email addresses and that's another set of wish lists. And that's a wish list set that you actually can control and email whenever you want. Steam, not so much, right? You don't have control over that [music] list. But if you have an email list, you can target that audience whenever you want. When maybe you have a sale event or maybe you have a collector's edition that launched. And actually, we just had one for Never Song. The OST original soundtrack. Oh, I hit my thumb. [laughter] Is that really what it is? A pen? Yeah. Look, it's a pen. You can put that on your purse. Why would you not put that in your purse? When you have any product launch available or any sale event available, you could target that list and you can also target your social media list. Steam, not so much. I think wish lists on Steam are great and you definitely want to be pursuing those, but I think

people forget about these two, social media and also email lists. So, you should be targeting all three. And the the trick here is do it as early as possible. And the reason why is because you don't want to launch your game with 200 followers. You want to launch with a total of about 10,000 people who are interested in your game. And you create that interest slowly over time. And you generate these warm leads with content that's related to what they're ultimately going to purchase. So, for example, you offer up a free demo to the the email list that you want to collect or you offer up a great trailer on your social media platforms or animated gifts about your game. The list goes on and on of ways that you can target that audience and slowly build [music] it up. Ultimately, I call it an army. You need to build build up an army of followers that are going to support your game when it launches. Don't wait [music] till a month before launch to do this. Now, the third trick that I've learned in the

last decade, and this is specific to 2D games, but I've noticed that it's true for 3D games as well, because I'm making my next 3D game, and that's called Father. Modular assets are your best friend. [music] Use modular assets in 2D games and 3D games. They're going to save you a ton of time. And this is coming from somebody who didn't use modular assets for Pinstripe and Neverong, my two commercial 2D platformers. A modular asset, if you don't know, is an asset you can use over and over and over again. Don't be afraid if your Unity project is just full of thousands [music] and thousands of assets. That's actually okay. What you want to do is create a wall piece or a ground piece or a looping tiling sprite in the background. Maybe there's four or five layers. Those are all modular assets. Trees, coins. If it's reused even just [music] twice, make it modular. I made everything handdrawn in Pinstripe and that game took five years [music] to

make because I didn't really understand what modular assets were. I treated everything like it was a story book or like a graphic novel. So, I I drew everything from scratch. Now, this is cool and it's definitely a pure innocent way to be a developer, but the problem is is it took 5 years. That was a huge risk and I don't want you guys to take that risk. Making indie games is risky. I've talked about this before. It's a risky endeavor and so I want you to be making it as less risky as possible. And using modular assets or buying some on the asset store is totally fine. And this is true of 2D games and also 3D games. The fourth secret I've learned and this is one of my favorites is people don't care about your game as much as you think they do. It's called the spotlight effect. You can Google it. The spotlighted effect is this psychological sort of selfishness we all have. We think that everybody is looking at us and everybody cares about every little mistake we make. I get a lot of questions when I'm doing live streams in the chat. People asking me questions about what if people see me using an

asset or what if people see me using a story that's similar to another game. The list goes on and on of people worried about what people think. The truth is nobody cares. They just want to play your game. Don't worry. don't stress so much about everybody caring about you because they don't and they're not looking at you personally necessarily unless you put your name, you know, fatten in big bold letters on your game. And I've done this like Thomas Brush's pinstripe. Unless you're doing that, your game is your game, right? And people aren't really associating you with your [music] game. And they're not even looking at your game with as much of a critical eye as you are. So, what I've learned is, well, first, don't worry so much and just start launching games. Don't feel so stressed about everybody critiquing you. And even if you do get critiqued, it's no big deal. And that goes to our first point. It's failure and it's good. The second reason why it's good for you to realize that not everybody's looking at you is you can look at your game a little bit more objectively. I recommend that you actually try and look at your

game as if you were a player. [music] Just play your game as if you were you had an hour to spare, but you're worried about your bills. You're worried about your relationships. You're tired. You feel kind of sick. Maybe. [music] These are players. They're just normal people living in their normal life. They're playing your game at a small point in their day. So, they're not hyperfocused on your game and critiquing it. You are, and you shouldn't be, but they are not. So try and get into the head of your players and you'll realize it doesn't have to be stressful and it doesn't have to be something you worry about all the time. The spotlight is not on you. So just relax, have fun, and fail big. It's totally okay to fail big. And that goes back to our first point. This fifth point is maybe a little bit controversial and I want to hear what your thoughts are in the comments. Marketing is king. Marketing is king. And this channel I specifically focus on how to make money as an indie game developer. And that's what I teach my students over at Fulltime GameDev, but that's what I teach here as well. We talk about how to make money and how to be an entrepreneur, but also be an artist at the same time. It's a balance.

Well, what I've learned is you can focus on marketing actually first before you even begin your game. If you're if you're worried about making money and you want to do it full-time, marketing should actually dictate the game and not the game, the marketing. So, what I like to do is think about what makes this game pop before I even build out the game. Before I even start the concept art, I think, what makes this game pop? What makes it sellable? What makes the thumbnail and the title something that people can search for? How is this game similar to other popular games, but maybe with a twist? You should be thinking about all these, I don't want to say clickbait, but it's kind of like that. Offering up a title and a genre and a headline and a tagline and the screenshots. What about all of that is going to make your game clickable? you should really be thinking about that now. And again, this is solely related not necessarily to being an artist, but it's it's specifically related to how to make money. And believe it or not,

here's what's special about what I'm saying. Just because you're thinking about the marketing first, doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to be an artist when you've got your concept ready to go and you actually start making your game because you're going to think about marketing anyway. So, why not do it first? And just [music] think about how you can market your game because I have a lot of students on my program who talk to me about, well, I have this game idea, but it's really hard to sell. And I'm thinking, well, you should have figured out how to make it sellable first before you went all in and started making your game. Again, making indie games is risky. I don't want you guys spending too much time on something that isn't going to sell. [music] Obviously, if you want to be a purist and you want to be, you know, a pure artist, an innocent artist, then go for it. I've done that, too. But if you want to make money, think about the marketing efforts first. Doesn't mean you plan it all out. You just think, how is this game marketable? And is it marketable? Who's my target audience? What's the genre? What games is it similar to? Does this thumbnail

catch people's attention? That's the ideas you should be thinking about before you actually start making your game. All right, guys. Thanks for watching this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe for more videos like