Your First Indie Game Should SUCK

hey guys how's it going my name is thomas brush and i make indie games for a living i've been doing this for a long time i've been making indie games from my bedroom from my parents basement from my college dorm from my desk job no matter where i go in my life i make indie games now i do it full-time it's my job i've released several games i'm working on my third commercial release and my job is to show you guys how to do it so be sure to subscribe leave a like and leave a comment and hit the notification bell do all that cool stuff if you want to participate in this community learning how to make games now specifically with this video i actually want to show you an email that i got from christopher christopher is basically asking about how to start making games what is the process of making an indie game i'm going to sort of skim through this here but he says when i look at it all i get a little overwhelmed with what to do all i ever wanted to do since a very young age was to create video games this is my passion he's currently looking at c plus plus

and using unreal so i'm not going to recommend either of those but what i'm going to do is sort of give you a road map here chris and hopefully this will help you guys out a road map here of how you're going to make indie games and here's the trick we're going to get to the last stage here i've got all my tabs set up to show you the path what's interesting is you're actually going to go full time before you finish your game i know that sounds really really weird i'm going to show you the path here really quickly if you guys want it to be a little bit easier i have a couple tabs open here this is from my website full-time game dev i have an easy 3d course it's called easy 3d it's how to make it a 3d game with no code and no models totally free to enroll click below or i have a 2d game kit if you're into 2d game development there's a 2d game kit below totally free i'd recommend signing up for both of these there's no

reason not to you can use them whenever you want however you want to and then i also have a webinar on how to make six figures selling your indie games these are three three totally free resources that you can take a look at feel free to click the links below while we talk about the first step okay here's the first step you know nothing about making indie games right you know absolutely nothing about making indie games the first step is to go to steam and look at the games that you really love go to your library or go to steam or go to go to any platform of choice find the games that you really love okay i need you to narrow it down to two okay find what makes those games really great i highly recommend being inspired by indie games because their budget is probably going to be more similar to yours your budget even if you're not paying yourself your budget is tiny it's like 10 grand and again you're not going to spend this money but just imagine you have an hourly rate okay you're working on this

game as a hobby project in the evenings or in the morning or through your lunch break or in school while your professor is talking about stuff you don't care about like i did you'll make your game on your laptop that's all going to happen you know and you're going to be doing it without paying yourself that's totally fine but you still need an hourly rate an imaginary imaginary hourly rate what games on steam match that budget something like 10 to 30 000 is going to be the amount of time you spend on your game okay find those two games that fit within that budget that you're inspired by use those as a reference point now that takes us to our next step the game design document believe it or not guys i've been doing this for a long time half my life and i always find myself googling game design document template and i usually end up clicking this one here okay it's a study lib okay and it looks like we have an issue with

the page here that's great very convenient okay there we go i always download this and i use it guys the game design document is just going to help you flesh out your game help you really get your game idea solidified the mechanics the look and feel the music the genre that's super important because really you want guide rails you want limitations especially as an indie game developer we don't have an unlimited budget so stick within a genre and also this is super important to target audience all of this don't skip this step do not skip this step and i say that because i've done it and i wish and i always go back and i end up doing it because it's so important it helps you stick to your schedule all of these elements here need to be filled out it's going to take you a while fill out these elements get your game design document beautiful print it out maybe even sign it almost like it's a

contract and have it handy and start your game alright so now we're actually gonna start our game let's go to the next tab here and all these links are below guys all these links are below every step of this process the links are below we're going to use unity now i know you said you want to use unreal that's totally fine too unreal has the same kind of resources we're going to discuss here unity or unreal they're competitors they're both going to be our platforms of choice and they're going to take our assets assets would be artwork 3d models sound effects code bring those into one software and then port that game to various platforms i prefer unity that's what i love so that's what i'm going to recommend i'm a huge advocate for unity but you can use unreal as well but if you are interested in following my channel and you want to sort of be part of the community community

we're mostly unity developers here at my channel so unity is what you're going to use here so you're just going to click start for free and you're going to download the unity hub the unity hub is going to allow you to install any version of unity and just keep up with the latest updates now you're thinking okay i just downloaded unity now what do i do well we need to learn unity go to learn.unity.com and guys there's a ton of stuff to learn here it's incredible it's all free okay now obviously you can go to fulltimegamedev.com which is my website and learn unity from me but i'm not gonna pitch that right now you can go to unity or learn.unity.com and i highly recommend you just like we did with the game design document we're not gonna skip steps here guys

be consistent be disciplined and go through each course here i think maybe unity essentials and unity junior unity junior programmer is about all you really need to look at you could definitely do creative core here um but these two are super duper important now if you want to make a game fast which i highly highly recommend you make a game fast your first game should be crap it should not be great you should get it out of the way get it done so that you can check it off your list and say i made my first game release it on itch io itch.io link is in the description release that game it's going to be a crap game and the way we're going to do it fast the way we're going to get this out of the way and just get it over with again you want to get your game over with because your first you want to get your first game over with because your first game is going to be crap so might as well just release it okay you're not going to make much money off of your first game that's okay spend a couple weeks to three months working on this

first game release release it on hi oh and you're going to build that thick skin that thick skin is going to help you know or have the strength to actually release games most of you watching this video i hate to break it to you most of you watching this video you're not gonna release games you're gonna keep making games but never finish them so i'm gonna challenge you right now finish your first game get it done it doesn't matter if it's good get it done because there's a little bit of a psychology game here you get kind of a rush it's almost like taking a hit of a cigarette i don't know something something like that it's a rush and it's like wait a second that felt good and you're gonna keep doing it and doing it and doing it more okay it's addicting releasing games so here's how we make games fast once you learn unity once you take these pro classes here totally free here we're going to go to the unity asset store now if you want to make a 2d game we're going to click on

2d and guys there are so many assets on the unity asset store for 2d games it's unbelievable there's kits okay so i offer you know a 2d game kit right and i use this game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in 14 days or you can you know you can let's see here you can download assets so there's kits to make a game really fast you know it's got the infrastructure there ready to go you just follow their documentation or there's just like let's say assets like if you really needed you know a pixelated goblin enemy it's five bucks right to download this goblin enemy now here's what you're probably thinking you're probably thinking well this is going to make a really unincohesive muddy game and the answer is correct but again we're trying to release our first game here let's get it done fast it's okay if it's muddy and incohesive let's just get it done all right we can focus on making a highly polished game for your second and third game i know a lot of you don't like

hearing that really you need to do that you need to make a crappy game first just get it out of the way just get your game done i promise you it's it's you can't really skip that step okay now if you want to make a 3d game um there's 3d assets as well let's let this page load here yeah there's 3d assets as well and it's a lot easier to make a 3d game that's cohesive in style i don't know why i think it's just because most 3d models regardless of their style kind of look good together especially because you can put lighting and shadows and post processing effects and that's just making your camera it's like an instagram filter basically you can make things look good even if they're from a variety of different packs and again there's um there's templates for games like if you really wanted to make a ball roller game a roller ball game there's packs for that isn't that cool there's just packs here

um ball roll yeah there's all kinds of packs here look at this swipe ball controller so no matter you don't have to build on this from scratch it's pretty amazing um and then it let's say you're like well if i'm making a a rollerball game or a marble game what if i want some trees like some beautiful trees while i'm rolling a ball around let's type in trees and now i have all these 3d trees this is also really helpful using assets it's really helpful to use assets because what it's going to do is you're going to actually be able to study what people have already made and so instead of trying to reinvent the wheel you just download trees and you go oh that's how they made that tree or oh there's the texture on that tree actually i kind of understand texturing a little bit that's definitely true for me i just started downloading assets i've got a ton of assets guys i've been doing this for a really really long time okay i've been making games for about half my life look how many assets i have and this is just after the past like

three years four years it's there's 194 assets i've downloaded and i make commercial games my games are on playstation xbox nintendo apple arcade steam so i release games and i do this full time and i make a good living and i'm using assets so don't ever be ashamed to use assets so download these 2d assets these 3d assets and start putting them into your game a lot of you are thinking thomas i'm going to make custom assets that's great if you want to do that that's great i think you just need to get your first game done so that's just my recommendation so once you've got this demo done for your second game now i just skipped a step here release that first crappy game get it done it's like two levels you're like this is crap i hate this game release it on hio call it a day congratulations

you just released your first game now that you've done that now's the time to really make your real first game your first commercial release okay now that we've sort of practiced a little bit we're gonna make our first commercial release the funny thing here is is we're not gonna make our first commercial release i know i'm throwing a lot of weird tricks at you you're actually gonna make your first prototype your first commercial release prototype so once you've released your crappy game on hio now we're going to make our first prototype for our first commercial release a prototype is they call it a vertical slice it can be a demo it can be called a pitch right it's actually a variety of things and the reason we're going to make this hyper-polished vertical slice this demo this pitch is so that we can secure funding okay so just like a job interview see most of us know how to get jobs right why is that because we're taught that at school

we're taught how to get a job but as my father-in-law would say he's a landscaper he would call it he wins jobs because he runs his own business and he wins jobs he goes to somebody's house he pitches his services he pitches his price and then he wins a job as opposed to gets a job you get a job when you get like a boss and they give you a paycheck winning a job is getting paid to make something right you get a lump sum cash advance for a product you create and that is what the pitch is for this is a website i made on squarespace okay this is my pitch for my game father okay i've got a big trailer here that i spent a lot of time on with the demo graphics and the playthrough of the demo i've got plot summary i've got a link to

the demo on hio i've got the ability to wish list but this isn't really for wish listing isn't excuse me really for publishers i might actually delete that wishlist button we've got screen screenshots we've got me saying hello look at this this is like a beautiful honestly this is a really great pitch and it worked by the way you know a lot of publishers reached out um but me introducing myself um being salesy uh all of my credentials beautiful artwork here of the guns ideas about the gameplay the hook the project scope scope meaning what how big is this thing how big is this game and this isn't done none of this is done the game that game doesn't have nine enemy types the game doesn't have eight weapons yet it doesn't have six ascending levels yet this is the pitch okay so that is what you need to create get your demo done get a trailer done

and you would use adobe premiere for your trailer and you would capture graphics in unity using the unity record feature which is in the package manager you would put all of this together into your pitch one website with all of the links all of the trailers all of the graphics you introducing yourself everything is in one website and then you send that to a list of 100 to 200 publishers okay here's an example this is curved games right you guys know about a lot of publishers right um there's there's plenty there's team 17 there's bloober there's a ton of different publishers with devolver there's tiny build there's a ton of publishers there's hundreds you reach out to them with your pitch and you say hey i need a hundred grand to finish this game can you imagine if you pitched your first game that crappy game you made with all those assets and you barely knew how to make games this is why i recommend don't don't use that first

game as your pitch because i don't want you guys to make you know let's say you do convince a publisher well you just you pitched them a garbage game that you didn't really know how to make you really need to know how to make games before you secure six figures plus in funding okay so these publishers are gonna pay you a paycheck they might do it monthly they might do it in one lump sum they might do it in milestones they're gonna send you a paycheck and you're gonna quit your job and go full time and it's all with a very simple demo that you created using the knowledge i just shared with you again i highly recommend you release your first crappy game before you do this because you're going to learn a lot in releasing that crappy game okay that's it and then you make your game you finish it right because once you've made that vertical slice once you've made that pitch once you've made that demo well you just rinse and repeat and

finish your game now a lot of these publishers what are they going to offer they're actually going to offer a variety of services that make things so easy for you let's see here what do they got our company partner with us tell us what you do they don't tell us what they do a lot of publishers will tell you what they do they should but what they do man they don't tell you what they do come on guys um most publishers are going to tell you sorry most publishers are going to tell you hey we handle porting to consoles hey we handle marketing we handle localization so you pretty much hand off the steam build the pc build to a publisher and they'll do the rest and that's it guys now if you want to make things easier obviously check out the asset store but be sure to check out

my programs below this is totally free guys this is not gimmicky it's just going to send you enroll you in this course easy3d also if you're into 2d games i have a 2d game kit totally free use this to make a game for pewdiepie and i got to play it with pewdiepie on his channel i made a game in 14 days for him using this game kit and then also just my top three secrets on making six figures there's a whole other way to make six figures besides just publishers and i talk about it so plenty of resources here guys i hope this was helpful um if you like this video be sure to leave us a leave a subscribe leave a like subscribe hit the notification bell leave a comment below if this was helpful i really want to hear your story i want to know kind of where you guys are i love reading these comments because it helps me get a better idea of where all of you are a lot of you are actually full-time game developers i love hearing stories about this so let me know below your story and who you are and what you're working on all right that is how you start making games i'll talk to

you later cheers