Why Making Games is so RISKY! (+ Fixes)

I think we can all agree that making indie games for a living is quite risky you have to invest a lot of time and potentially money and you don't know for sure what you're going to get out of it at times it can certainly feel like traveling through a very long and dark tunnel without knowing what's on the other end there are three big reasons why Indie Games fail three big filters you either don't manage to finish your game or you fail to Market your game which means nobody will even know that your game exists but even if you managed to Market your game maybe you just didn't make a good game and nobody will like it obviously this is a very simplified model it's not as black and white as this but the message Still Remains you invest a bunch of resources potentially multiple years of your life and the risk of getting filtered out by one of these filters is very high now that might sound depressing at all but it doesn't have to be cuz once we're aware of these risks we can try to do something about it in short the solutions are finish your game make sure a lot of people know about your game and make a good game that people actually want to play I would even say those are the three three pillars of game

development if you manage to nail all three of those you will probably make a successful game if you mess up just one of these points however your game will fail the good news is you have quite a bit of control over every single one of these points but there's still a lot that can go wrong so what I want to talk about in this video is how you keep the risk in game development as small as possible the reason why I've been thinking about this is because I'm currently developing a game as well it's called will you snail I'm about to invest a bunch of time into it so it's in my very best interest to keep the risk small for starters the easiest way to keep the risk small is obviously to keep the stakes small you need to make sure that if your game fails you'll be okay because that is a very possible result I for my part just moved back in with my dad so there are no big bills to pay and if this game fails I'll still have YouTube I can still monetize that if I want so I think I'll be okay what I want to do now is going through these filters one by one and seeing what we can do to reduce the risk of getting stuck there the first filter is

definitely a mean one and honestly it's one a lot of my games have ended up in ha you thought you could slip through think again finishing your game takes a lot more dedication than you'd expect I think the Paradox thing is also that a lot of beginners don't even consider this a risk whereas it's actually the biggest risk they're facing or maybe I should say the most immediate one luckily there are a couple of things we can do to keep the risk as small as possible first of all always spe up your project so you don't just poof lose everything when one of your hard drivve crashes start with the smallest game possible I think every game has a kind of a smaller game inside it that you can make first for example in will you snail I want to have all of these awesome storytelling Z levels and all of those dark exploration levels but what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut all of them for now and just focus on the main levels the core meat of the game and if I still want to keep going after that if the project still looks promising after that we can still make all of the story based side levels just

create the smallest game possible first the minimum viable product and if that's fun if that's up and running you can still expand your game into a bigger game then next up also regularly cut unnecessary features for example there's a feature in will you snail where thei gets a handicap when you keep losing too often damn here comes my first handicap I hate this mechanic I think now that feature is kind of unnecessary because we have difficulty settings so we don't need another feature that controls the difficulty of the game of the game the handicap mechanic needs a lot of voice lines and additional work that still needs to be put into it so let's just cut the handicap mechanic from the game just scan your game for Unnecessary features all the time cut everything that's not necessary to make your game fun and exciting this way the chance that you'll be able to finish your game is a lot higher the only two things that can stop you from finishing your game are the end of your life and giving up giving up usually has to do with a lack of motiv ation and the end of your life

usually has to do with not being subscribed to this YouTube channel let's just agree the lack of motivation might be the bigger problem I can't really tell you how to stay motivated I think that's something you'll have to figure out for yourself what I can tell you is that you need to find a way to make the process fun you know what's usually fun getting results so one more reason to keep your scope small keep in mind that for finishing your project motivation management is just as important as time management go for an idea you know you can execute I think a lot of beginners do it the wrong way around they have an amazing idea in their head and then they're trying to learn everything they need in order to execute that idea on the plus side you'll probably learn a lot but often it will feel like this so I'm pretty convinced in terms of motivation management this is a bad approach but what about doing it the other way around you have a look okay what can I do what am I good at and then you come up with a game idea that you can do with the things you're already

capable of doing in short don't try to make your skills fit your game idea try to make your game idea fit your skills that doesn't mean you can do some learning along the way it's awesome if you keep learning if you keep improving all I'm saying is that this is definitely the lowrisk option okay let's have a look at the next big risk which is that nobody will even know that your game exists this filter scares the out of me and you know what I've never made it past this filter my games have never gotten more than two or 300 downloads so what the hell can we do about this Please be aware that we're entering speculation area now invest enough time into marketing and showing your game off basically this entire YouTube channel here is my marketing machine okay so I spend basically 50% of my time on marketing on creating YouTube videos the strategy I'm going for this YouTube channel is one that will probably pay off in the long run the cool thing about growing a community is that it will not only help you for this project but it will also be super useful for all of your future game projects so if you're like like me and you want to

keep making games for the rest of your life this is a good time investment the disadvantage of growing an audience is it's a big time investment if you invest 2 years into making a game then better make sure your marketing material and the presentation of your game and the store Page of your game look absolutely perfect it feels like such a small part of the development process but if your marketing and your store Page and your presentation Zuck then all of your effort goes down the drain make sure your game idea is appealing and easy to understand you play as a snail and want to escape from un eval AI thei can play stps in front of you and you need to dodge everything there's also a unicorn that wants to save you and blah blah blah blah blah blah if your game ideas have allall of text like this the first thing you should do is reduce it down to one sentence to One Core idea that makes your game interesting not only does that sound a lot more appealing to others but it also gives you a lot more clarity about what the core of your game idea is for will snil the pitch would be

something like an evil AI tries to predict your next moves and placees traps in real time oh that looks promising not now it's a lot easier to judge whether your game idea is actually good just tell it to a couple of people and see how they react if it takes you 3 hours just to explain to somebody what your game is all about your game idea might not be all that refined yet committing to the wrong game idea at the wrong time can very easily lead to getting stuck in the second filter so be careful don't don't create a worse version of a game that already exists because chances are you're probably not going to be able to compete with that so better find your own Niche then one thing you probably also should try to do is confirm there demand for your game is this something people want to have is this something people are looking for and I've got to be honest so far I don't know a lot of good ways to check whether there's real demand for your game I mean it's probably so far is probably more of a gut feeling thing how people on the internet react to your game one thing you could do is a Kickstarter and let

people vote with their wallets if they're willing to pay money for your game then then that's obviously a good sign that they'll be willing to pay money for it later on but even for that I'm not sure if that's a brilliant solution because running a Kickstarter is a lot of work it's a high time investment and it simply might not be worth it for a lot of games but then once again I don't have any experience with kickstarters so don't take my word for it would you rather play a game that looks like this or like this the point I'm trying to make is people will judge your game based on how it looks that's why the visual quality of a game is a hugely important marketing Factor so just make a beautiful game the third big risk is just making a bad game that nobody wants to play I know that sounds like it shouldn't be that binary maybe some people like your game maybe some people don't but as a matter of fact if the game is not what people expected it to be it will heavily tank your review scores and obviously bad review scores mean significantly fewer downloads so on top of everything thing we just talked

about you actually need to make a good game the risk of making a shitty game is absolutely there so how do we avoid that first of all make sure you have some fun core gameplay before you keep expanding your game in Thousand directions you don't need a million new mechanics to make your game more fun what you need are a couple of simple interactions that feel satisfying and only after that should you start expanding get enough feedback let a lot of people play your game watch people playing your game see what they struggle with listen to what they've got to say if you want you can even create a feedback form just encourage people to give you honest feedback then always try to experiment with different solutions usually the first thing you try is not necessarily the best solution for a problem be willing to do something just for the sake of an experiment CU often times that's the only way to find out what works and what doesn't there are a couple of awesome ways to make your game even more fun and they require almost zero effort if you want to find out about those I suggest you experiment with clicking on this video right here

and another one of my videos that is very closely related to what you just watched is this one how long does it take you to make a video game because it's actually a lot longer than you think and this video explains why now let's take those three stupid filters and kick their ass [Music]