5 Mistakes I Made Making My First Video Game

Made a video talking about the 5 biggest mistakes making my first game, first video so I was a bit nervous, let me know what you guys think!

 

Text version for the luddites?

 

1. Not having a lot of replay-ability.
2. Not releasing all platforms at the same time.
   
3. Not enough marketing and social media presence.
4. Not having a consistent testing and bug-fixing schedule.
5. Not thinking of the first video game as a business.

The reason behind each of those points is explained in the video as well.

 

Nice. I'l check out the rest tonight when I get home from work.

 

Good stuff. Looks like it points out the reasons most indies fail.
Numbers 3 and 5 especially. There is also great GDC videos on youtube covering these topics. But I'm at work right now.

 

Helpful info! Thank you!

 

Thank you guys, hopefully some can learn from my mistakes!

 

I'm really not convinced that this is a mistake for someone's first game. Is it about the money or is it about making games?

 

"My aim is always to create a great video game that people want to buy so that I make money."

Not my personal stance but there are people who feel that games for the sake of games is a bad move. There is a benefit to the business mindset. Dont be a stupid indie game dev

 

I want to do both, so it was mistake for me. It may not be a mistake for a hobbyist gamedev.

 

I recommend checking out the following article. Instead of trying to monetize your early games the article suggests you focus on acquiring a fan base for your games and once that has been established then you start working on monetizing.

Because with the sheer quantity of games that hit the various markets there is very little chance of your game being noticed, but a fan base will regularly check up on the titles you release and provide word of mouth advertising.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SasaStublic/20150401/240243/Dont_monetize_your_games.php

 

Like you said in your intro, here is one thing you did perfectly fine when releasing your first game.
1 - You released a game!

I think it's a great accomplishment to have released a project to the public, and something anyone should be proud of in itself. This is a hurdle that challenges a lot of users, and there is a massive amount of people who will never get to this point. Once you take a minute to get over how great of an accomplishment that is, take a step back and look at what you did well and what you could have done better.

Let's pull out these two specifically.

I don't think anyone creates their first game and has it turn into a business overnight. I do think that there are creative ways you can deliver a gameplay cycle that can supplement business model or monetization model.

What was your core loop? How can you develop a business model that supplements your specific core loop?

 

%100 agree with you, I need to work on this and really ties in with marketing/social media to build that fan base.

 

On the bright side ... now that you have established yourself with a game, you are better positioned to begin building that fan base.

 

Having a fan base too early can be a terrible thing if you can't deliver fast enough. Those fans start to demand more and special features and you will end improving details over and over again instead of releasing. Your own expectations to the game will grow with the number of fans. And there are always one or two psychos when you have a few thousand fans.

 

Why do you want to do both? If you've not made a game before then how can you really know it's something you want to do as a business?

I'm not trying to discourage you, by the way. I think it's pretty awesome, and "think of games as a business" is advice I often give. But, I've also often repeated that metaphor about learning guitar vs. charging for concert tickets...

You should absolutely make games. And if/when you're good at it, you should absolutely commercialise them and build a business around them. But the market is ultra competitive, there's a heck of a lot to learn, and this is a creative pursuit as well as a professional one that needs to be driven by passion as much as finances. With all of that in mind, I don't think that commercialisation is something I'd plan on for a first game.

Consider that if your game is free and unmonetized then it's easier for you to finish it and has lower barriers to entry for people to play it. This means that you can get experience in the release cycle and get feedback sooner, which helps you make better games faster. Compare the value of the experience you can build to, and what that will add to future games, against the income your early (likely inexperienced games) might generate.

As I said, I haven't seen your video, so I could easily be missing your point, and this is really intended as general thoughts rather than anything specific to you. In any case I wish you the best of luck!

 

Haha that's something I want!

Well I want to be able to make more money then my full time job, you may think I am crazy but I believe I can do it. I do agree with you that I need to get "good" first, that's the hardest part. Getting good at a trade, then showing the world your work. Thank you for the feedback.

 

Thanks! I highly appreciate your experience

 

@JakeOfSpades out of curiosity, what game did you release?

 

Maybe...I worked for a game with 100k fans on their forums. The fans wanted everything and then some. The feature creep was horrible mostly because the manager, a great guy, btw, was not experienced in this sort of stuff.

If we made changes, the fans complained. If we did not, they complained. I was very involved with the community, made some great friends, and loved every moment, even the unhappy ones. But...it was not a good way to develop a game.

Best to wait a little bit until you have your design down and can share something about your game with the fans. Also..one never knows where a game will go while in development. Things change. Start small with the community, a blog or youtube channel and then later open the forums.

 

Seems great

 

Hey Dustin! The game is : https://squarz.io/ although servers are going down soon Working on a new game!

 

Perhaps looking at mistakes as mistakes is, well, a mistake?

There is no "one right way", therefore there are no mistakes, only choices. Not even wrong choices, just choices. There are choices that don't contribute to your desired end. Of course, this depends entirely on your perspective. Perhaps a year from now, your perspective will change and you will feel that this game was a success. Ultimately, the fact that you are working is what matters. Now, if you stop working--that would be a mistake if your goal is to make video games, I think anyone would have to agree with that.

Of course, these are just ramblings of a person who has seen too many different perspectives of life and ambition, of greed and of yearning, even of loss and failure--to the degree that I can honestly say that it makes no difference what the particulars of your external circumstances are, but rather the feeling that you get from the work that you do.

Money is nice, but a single, simple, completely random incident can place you, or me or anyone, for that matter, into bankruptcy. No, it's not a mistake to make a game because it is a passion. And making money through game development will not make you a success.

As long as you are still adventuring, still earnestly seeking the satisfaction of yet unseen territory and the promise of brighter tomorrows, it makes no difference in my view whether you make a dollar or a million dollars. You will be the same happy person either way and, I think, that is no mistake.

 

There are definitely mistakes.

Just because there isn't "one right way" for some things doesn't mean that there are no wrong ways, or ineffective ways, or ways that are wasteful of time/resources, or ways that flat out don't even get the job done. Those are all definitely "mistakes".

Here's an anecdote to demonstrate: In one of my early client projects we had a game/sim, where the player basically did an activity with a particular object in the scene. We didn't have an editor back then (this was ages ago) so our "scene" file was a C++ class that placed all of the core parts of the scene as required. When I got the focal object's model I stuck it in the scene with an identity transform. It was off center and rotated, and I didn't test it against any scale reference. Here's the mistake: instead of getting the artist to fix it, which would have taken a couple of minutes, I moved the scene camera so that things looked right. For the rest of the project I was manually transforming every single object and position around this one, non-centered model, without the aid of a visual editor. As you may be able to guess, this ate many hours of time over the course of the project.

So yes, there are mistakes. That one anecdote has at least three pretty stand out ones, despite the fact that we got the job done, the client was super happy with our work, and so on.

Two words: "Continuous Improvement".

If you're not actively looking for mistakes and trying to do better next time then you're straight up not going to reach your potential. Getting the job done is the start, not the end goal.

To be fair, not all "opportunities for improvement" are "mistakes". You could do something well and still see a bunch of ways to do it better. But generally you want to eliminate mistakes as much as you reasonably can before you start refining things that are already pretty good.

Edit: Lots of mistakes in a post about mistakes. Who'd have thought?

 

One useful definition of a mistake is a choice or action that doesn't contribute towards your intended end.

Nah, that only works for uncivilized barbarians.

 

I guess where the distinction becomes visible for me is when you start labeling failed attempts or steps in the wrong direction as being mistakes. In my case, I often intended to do that very thing I did, that someone else might say "oh well, that was a mistake". In many of those instances, I knew what the end result of my actions would be and committed to those actions, consciously. I have come to see life as a laboratory, myself as a scientist of sorts and the actions I take are my experiments.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I have problems with scope creep, and commitment, in that order, and the latter is exacerbated by the former. I have started perhaps hundreds of games which, if completed, would certainly be viable in their own right but finished next-to-none of them. From where I sit, these don't seem like mistakes, any longer. None of the life choices I have made that have led me down roads I didn't desire to go down were mistakes, either.

Now I may be mistaken, here, in the way I am defining "mistake"--splitting hairs for no reason--but I see mistakes as things that are done unintentionally when intending to do something else, due to ignorance or simple mechanical error. In the example you gave of placing all of the objects farther from the camera rather than scaling them, I would be hard-pressed to believe that you did not, at least on the unconscious level, know that what you were doing was not the best approach. Did you tell the team what you were doing? I would imagine that if you had, they would have said "don't do that." And changes would have been made. Rather, like the 00 agent that you were, you concealed it, surreptitiously, and then continued concealing it for the duration of the project.

A bad decision, yes. A mistake . . . perhaps, perhaps not.

One thing we know for sure the penguin holds many secrets.

Therein lies the kerfuffle.

 

"Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn."

 

...

I think the video would be better and more informative, if we were shown what the game was and what it was trying to achieve first. Because those "mistakes" are not universal and heavily rely on what kind of game you're making and what you're trying to achieve.

And for the record and maybe some extra perspective, we did (almost) all those "mistakes", it worked out well enough for us.

 

Yeh but sometimes, functions will work in the Unity editor, but when you export / build the game, the functions break.

 

Do you have an example of this?

I'm aware of plenty of cases where it's happened. In the vast majority of them it was code depending on or assuming something that it shouldn't have, such as being frame-rate dependent.

 

Thank you for the relevant contribution to this thread.

 

Not having a lot of replay-ability.

I would argue with this one. The reality is that most players don't finish a game, so replay-ability really isn't an issue. Sure we have a few games we play over and over like minesweeper, or sudoku or something, but most games we are going to play once through. It's a lot more important to have increasingly interesting levels and possibly a story if it's that type of game to hold the interest of the player. I've found replayability is something talked about by hardcore gamers because it's more of an addiction with them. The average game player isn't very interested in it. He wants increasing challenges on a theme.

 

Great point. I think it depends on the type of game, though. I made a match-3 game where replayability would be a big deal - it's all about repeating the game in attempts to get increasingly high scores. On the other hand, I'm currently working on an open-world exploration/puzzle game. Replayability isn't a big deal there, because exploring something you're already familiar with isn't particularly entertaining, and nor is re-completing puzzles you already know the answers to. In that case it's far more important to make sure the first time is interesting.

 

I was thinking about this a little bit, with regard to something like a visual novel compared to an action or fighting game. Why is it boring to read through the same text again than it is to fight the same group of enemies in exactly the same way? Even if we swap out the former for more active pursuits like doing a puzzle or something, this is still the case.

To be sure, the fact that combat has almost infinite potential variability and extremely high responsiveness to player choice plays a huge part. But even absent this advantage (if we look at games like Bioware RPGs, with a great deal of dialog choice), I've found that combat...has a less steep drop-off of my interest in doing it repeatedly, if that makes sense. I don't really understand it.

 

Combat probably taps a more fundamental/primal circuit in our brain. If we're "threatened" then we want to defend ourselves, and that's intrinsically engaging in a way that plenty of other things aren't.

 

No examples, sorry. But I fixed my problem. It had nothing to do with code. It had to do with box colliders being a hassle. Fixed it by adding yet another box collider at the bottom, telling the one above it to stop. Don't ask me why it worked. Don't ask me why it broke in the 1st place. I have no answers for why colliders just changed their size or whatever, on export.

 

Thank you guys for all the feedback and I am glad I can start some discussions on the topic. I sincerely appreciate it.

 

I think #5 is a bit subjective. It is valuable, even from a business sense, that you go through the learning process. Most importantly, developing the 'finishing skill' that is so crucial to shipping could be considered a primary business goal. One can be forgiven for not fully thinking through the business aspects like monetization, because the experience lead to learning the key lessons, which will increase the chances of success of the next game.