You MUST AVOID These 4 Game Dev Mistakes

so I'm not sure if anybody noticed that the game industry kind of sucks right now did you see Jonathan blow's tweet I think he mentioned something like it's really really hard right now humble games shut down it's just been it's been hard lots of layoffs lots of confusion it's kind of hard to sell games right now on top of all of that my own game Twisted Tower we finally sent out some testing for the game and we allowed about a dozen or so people to play the game this game working out for 3 years hundreds of thousands of dollars spent finally 3 years later we finally got some feedback and it was the hardest 3 weeks of my life I'm not exaggerating here it was insanely difficult some of the feedback was incredible we basically got around an 8 out of 10 score on average from players but we also got some really painful feedback looking back it's kind of bizarre that we missed these huge mistakes when making our game so here they are there are four major mistakes we made and I think these are going to be four huge major mistakes you might

make and I want you to avoid them so stick around through the entire video because it's going to help you avoid these huge costly mistakes with your game 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 check it out below if you do want to go full-time Indie and thanks for watching the first mistake is I didn't get feedback sooner okay now this is really strange I don't know why I avoid getting feedback actually I do know why the reason why is because it hurts getting feedback and so all of you making your game right now you don't want to get feedback because well it makes your stomach hurt like for me my stomach just it's in butterflies for weeks because I'm waiting for it's like waiting to get an essay back every morning you wake up

and you look at your phone and you look at your feedback so what we're using to get feedback finally is we're using something called air table and so we have our feedback here and right now we have nine people and they've given some great feedback but sometimes you get some constructive criticism right and it's painful like sometimes you'll get a seven out of 10 and you're like ah what did I do wrong here and you'll also get most people finding the same sort of issues and everyone's sort of finding one little thing so for example a lot of people felt like the level design and the enemies were were a problem in this game and that's a big deal because it's a first- person shooter right so me and my team scrambled to get the enemies feeling much better and making the level design feel much better but it also when you do when you do beta testing like this or even Alpha Testing or like pre-alpha right or even just a demo right all of that testing is so important because it tells you what the Forte was that's so important and what do we have here the atmosphere is our

huge sort of it factor for this game what makes this game really really valuable now that we know what makes this game really really valuable for our audience what makes it fun and exciting and what makes them interested now that we know that it's the atmosphere number one we can lead into that but number two we can also say okay well we've got that in the bag now what do we focus on that's weak so it's really important to get okay here's our Forte and here's our weakness there's no way to know that those are your weaknesses and fores without getting players to actually play your game the hardest part of feedback and then we'll move on to the second mistake I made the hardest part of feedback is actually watching players play your game because you're sitting there I'll do it on Discord and I'll watch him live on Discord I had a friend of mine play Jason and I was just watching him and he played till like midnight and I the whole time I was just like go in that door get the key the key is right there or stop looking at the

ground look up look up and the thing is is that it seems like it's just that player but it's not every player's probably going to do that exact same behavior you won't because you made the game it doesn't matter whether you're making a 2d game or a 3D game third person first person top you doesn't matter players are going to play the game very very differently than you because you made it it's kind of like parenting I don't know if any of you have kids let me know in the comments but as a parent you might treat your kids differently than you treat other people's kids you might think other people's kids are misbehaved and you would do it so differently you would do it so differently as a parent but you're probably going to see all the blind spots or you're not going to see the blind SP spots as a parent of your own children the same is true with your game because you love your game because you've been nurturing your game for a year two years three years you're just not going to see it the same way so get testing ASAP number two and two three and four these are mistakes I learned because of number one because I finally got feedback creative feedback not just bugs but creative feedback I was able to

get mistake number two three and four logged into my brain so I'm going to give it to you number two we designed levels sort of by the seat of our pants not random but like we just sort of went with it we didn't really plan out the levels we just sort of started making them and we would set dress them while we made them set dressing meaning you put in assets and lighting and textures and colors and you're just sort of doing it as you go this is kind of like um free association writing it's kind of like that and sometimes you might really get some cool poetic stuff or you might get a really cool level every once in a while and we did we got some really cool levels out of it but maybe a third of the levels they didn't work and the problem was is that those levels the bad ones the ones that weren't working were at the front end of the game and so if you have players in the first 30 minutes playing a free association level design and they get lost they're going to feel like the game is what boring well the game isn't actually boring it's just that that level didn't have a big idea so what we're doing now is all of our

levels that had this issue we ended up scrambling and we we reworked them and any other levels that we need to finish up for the game we're using a very strict level design process we start with a sketch and we start with a list and the list is all of our design tools available to us that's like abilities Keys locks levers weapons and enemies and then finally I'm top of that we have a big idea what's the big idea of this level so we know what we can use in the design with the design elements we know what the big idea is and we sketch that down onto paper like literally just draw it on a sketch pad and then once that's green lit by me and I give my stamp of approval what do we do next we set dress no we don't set dress we block it out and this is true for 2D or 3D it doesn't matter you got to put the abstract shapes and platforms and colliders and enemies and box and keys everything

that's actually gameplay it's blocked out it's called gray boxing or blocking out very very simple do not put textures down do not put artwork down don't do it you're going to be tempted to do it don't do it okay once that is played like you literally hit play inside of unity or maybe in your case unreal or gdau and you can actually play from start to finish until you can play start to finish I don't want to see texture or set dressing that's what I've learned here's why this is important if you don't plan it out and if you just set dress while you do it there's no room to fix problems with design now you might think that having design problems in your level it means you're not a good designer no it just means that's the way it works that's why you block out or why you gray box you might just miss these giant landmines for example you might put a key before a locked door by the way that's a big problem you shouldn't give a key and then find the locked door you should find the locked door first and then go find the key you might have

issues like that that you just couldn't foresee and you really need to play through the level before you could actually see them that's why gray boxing is so important you can fix these issues quickly and you don't have to spend a lot of time doing it it's cheap to do this once that level is fully playable start to finish then and only then do you start to add textures assets and set dressing you know what's crazy I didn't do this for a decade my game career never included this process which if you look back on my games the design was the problem and by Design it's not like graphic design game design the actual mechanics of the game the level design where enemies are placed and when what they do how they function where a puzzle is located where a key is all that stuff I just sort of just did it I didn't even plan it out please plan it out it will make your game design or your game so much funner the player will feel like they understand stand your game Loop but

also it makes it cheaper okay and what I mean is you're going to rework stuff in your game it's just going to happen but make that rework as cheap as possible by using gray boxing third mistake we assumed players were as smart as we were and that sounds egotistical but what I mean is when you're making a game you just assume players are going to be like me I like games I like firstperson Shooters I really like halflife 2 or Bioshock I like those games so I'm a good target market so whatever I like and whatever I understand I'll just put it into my game I think you should assume that players are onethird as smart as you are especially in the beginning levels of your game assume that they're onethird as smart as you are and here's why it's not that you're generally a smarter person as a human being it's that as you create the game you become much more intelligent about the game than anyone else in the whole world and you don't even realize it it's this slow process year after year let's

say you've worked on your game for three years like me by the time you're in the third year you're way up there and players are here it's not that they're they're not smart it's that you're a genius about your game you understand every mechanic every idiosyncrasy everything about the game loop everything about the story about the world about the characters you get it so you need to try your best to dumb yourself down to Baseline that's a challenge how do you do it mistake number one why watch people play the game that's the only way you can do it final mistake number four if you're going to get wish list for your game if you're going to have players want to beta test and play your game and play the full thing if you want people to buy your game and not refund it if you want players to buy your game and leave a good review even though they only played 20 minutes you have to hook the player with a strong introduction to your game number one most important thing I would say of all these mistakes if you're going to do one thing give a strong

introduction to your game now you can do this cheaply like I did I did it very very cheaply I worked till 3:00 a.m. one night there's a lot of 3 A.M but one night I worked till 3:00 a.m. and I got a cut scene done I quickly made a cut scene I hired a voice actress the next morning she did it in an hour it was like 500 bucks scrambled to get great voice acting and that's our our protagonists love interest in the gamer name is Charlotte and she spoke the lines and I just had the player riding on a boat towards the Twisted Tower what did that do well it made the game look really polished cuz it had a cut scene no that's not why we do cut scenes cut scenes are something you should only add to your game if it's really necessary cut scenes are a great efficient way to give the player motivation context a setting those elements are so important if you want the player to trudge through your game especially if your game has some weak spots if you're an indie game developer you're going to have some weak spots probably so if there are weak spots in your game give the player at the very beginning a strong motivation

AKA let them know who the character is and maybe make that character sympathetic but also give us a setting right give us Moody music give us some strong almost cinematic introduction letting us know why we should play this game now I'm a big big fan of this book called story and it's all about screenplays it's how to write a really strong screenplay and honestly it focuses on tropes and it focuses on pretty traditional story arcs and characters but I'm all about it see what's funny is that in this modern era of Storytelling in Hollywood being tropy is actually not tropy it's Unique to be tropy everyone's trying to subvert expectations I don't want to do that with this game I want to lean into some really strong solid traditional tropes I'm all about it and so that's what I did with my cut scene just leaned into tropes gave the player motivation and man does it feel so much better the game feels so much better because we have motivation all right so those are the

mistakes I've learned in this difficult season of My Game Dev career let me know some mistakes you've learned in your Game Dev career in the comments below and just remember hey I love you guys I want you to succeed and just because you've been in the game industry for 10 years like I have it doesn't mean you're not going to make mistakes making mistakes is part of the process and you need to feel okay with failing a lot when you fall in your face kind of try and smile about it and laugh about it and get back up and believe me I didn't do that I was pretty anxious but that's a whole other story I'll talk to you later cheers 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 and thanks for watching and