Could I make a living being an Indie Game Dev?

I definitely agree the constraint of short time is very powerful. It helps give laser focus and greatly reduces scope creep. You put it well... it "cuts out the crap". I haven't done a game jam yet but I always am aware of time and almost always set a target time for my projects. I might not make it but simply having set a "limit" on hours for a project makes me much more efficient.

I set a target for 100 hours for my current game and am at 101.75 hours after tonight's dev session. Haven't done much on it the past week but tonight I worked a little on the super weapons from collecting power ups. I will finish this enhancement the next dev session. I think I can still wrap it up by 110 hours so I can release it for a couple dollars and switch focus to marketing and maybe think a bit about the next game. If I hadn't set the 100 hours I almost certainly wouldn't have stayed as focused on the core experience and design goals.

 

Indeed, but you won't expect big content and polished game as many popular indie games, that's the difference, not saying a game jam game can't be fun to play or be very appealing graphics and story.

Yeah, like anything you have some advantages and you must do with disadvantages, most important is the advantages must more important and make disadvantages not a problem.

Yes you can, there is tutorials everywhere, there is also products like Construct for non coders.
But game jams are tiny games, you can't make the same content as someone working lot more than a week.
Anyone experienced could create a basic pong game in one or two days and call it done.

 

Definitely scope will be smaller as development time is smaller. So for 2 to 3 weeks a person couldn't make a game with a lot of content just piles of art and dialogue etc. But a lot of content doesn't automatically make a better game and less content doesn't automatically make a worse game, right?

There are some very successful Indies who make their games in 2 to 3 weeks. Tiny very solid enjoyable experiences. One in particular used very simple art. The dev is a programmer not an artist so intentionally focused on making art they could complete. More importantly he focused on making a very solid gameplay experience put it on Steam for a crazy low price and sold over quarter of a million copies. Quarter of a million very happy owners and $100,000+ after Steam cut for a very solid 2 week game. He spent the same or maybe less time on his second game and that seemed to be headed toward the same kind of success. Third game.... etc.

That's the ideal imo. In contrast many people labor for 8 months or 2 years or more and have less than 1,000 happy customers and less than $5,000 after Steam cut.

Not that success is a given by any means but the many cases like this show it is definitely a viable approach for building a highly successful Indie game dev business. And it's smart really. Your investment is super low. Your risk is super low. You can get on to the next game or focus on marketing to make the just released game more successful.

Sometimes I just don't quite understand what devs want really. Lol

 

Obviously ... multi million success

Mind, many games are done by single devs in only spare time.

 

I believe that. LOL I think many people really do think about making millions of dollar from their game. We know sure there is some tiny microscopic chance that can happen but it isn't likely. This also seems to me like people aren't even looking at it like building a business and instead seeing a game as a lottery ticket. Like make a game release it make $5 million retire or something. Lol

Yeah I mainly pay attention to the successful part-time solo developers and after that the very tiny 2 to 3 part-time people teams and after that full-time solo developers etc. Everyone can have a fluke for good or bad so I like to see a series of successes with the odd one doing poorly. Not millions but realistic success.

Success is different for different people (some want thousands many want millions) of course. I look at it from a business perspective. From that perspective if I spend 100 hours creating a game and another 50 hours on marketing and support and that game makes $10,000 total that is a huge success. For Steam that would be about $7,000 after their cut. This is a very worthy goal to strive for imo. Basically doing something you enjoy working about 4.5 days per week and making $7k per month.

Again I wouldn't expect that in the beginning. Talking about building a business here. So that is a goal to build up to. In the very beginning with no to very little presence and connections if a person can hit $1,000/$700 from this scenario I think that is a huge success. It's a starting point and can build the business up from there.

 

Those fast sucessful tiny games reminds me a lot thos studio companies copying existing games to make money as much as they can.
I enjoyed a lot a game like Horizon on PS4, while i tried some third person tiny indie games an i just uninstalled the game, quality ,immersion is not the same.There is also lot of crappy games among the tiny games.
But yeah, there is audience for quick made games like fast food LOL

There is people want to put time to make a good game and they enjoy making it, could it take longer.
When it's an indie studio, i can't say if they take more risk making small game that could not work, or less risk taking more time to make the game with more content and polish.
In number sales, perhaps the games with more work, more polish, been worked longer perhaps reach more players.
It's all a matter of your goals trying to reach more players or only need a niche of players.

Tiny and quick made does not mean better, i played a good graphics style game , dungeon based, top down 3D game, the game has some base and you can run on dungeons to win loot and money.
The big problem is combat is really bad, player attacks are too short, sometimes it's like the attack miss, and enemies ai attacks are too fast and hard to predict, sometimes it's like they do automatically a counter attack. This destroys all the fun and you just want to uninstall the game LOL
I think they didn't get feedback and was just interested in publishing the game.


Anyway, there is many ways as you said , tiny games can be a successful way for some people.

Another cool game
twitter.com/EricRetro

 

I can understand that. There seem to be a lot of people making games seemingly very quickly just throwing them out hoping to make some money and get on to the next. I don't know if that is really true it could very well be the developer(s) actually spent many months or even years making some of these games. Just because you or I or someone else could make it in less than a month to the same scope and quality level doesn't mean the people actually making them didn't spend much longer developing the game. Possible.

But the games I am looking at are not like this as far as they aren't just thrown together to make a fast buck so much as the developer is simply making intelligent choices and playing to their strengths to make very solid games in a short amount of time.

Bit Blaster XL is a game I have posted here in the past years. It's a great example of a developer playing to their strengths making a quality game despite the game being made in only 2 weeks. Over 250,000 sales on Steam alone. And had similar success with their second game that was made in less than 80 hours. And their other games all seem to have sold well over 1,000 copies as well. I don't see the scope of their games increasing but I guess this is just their sweet spot for development scope. But clearly they are focusing on the gameplay experience and making very solid games.

Well I agree just being tiny doesn't make a game better. Now it absolutely might make the game better for a certain audience who are looking for tiny games simply because they don't have the time to put into games that are bigger experiences.

It's also true that tiny and quickly made doesn't automatically mean a game is worse than a game that is large and took a long time to make. Just because a game is large and very slowly made does not mean it's better than a tiny game made in 2 to 3 weeks.

From a business perspective I think there is definitely less risk starting out modest in terms of ambition and scope making good choices of what to focus on what to cut, etc to lower the expense of developing the game while still making a very good game. That doesn't mean staying there forever but just a starting point. As a developer continues to develop and actually complete games they improve at making games and releasing them and marketing them. Their games and the business should improve and grow over time accordingly.

Basically I think most people aren't ready to tackle anything beyond tiny games. There are valuable lessons to learn about managing scope what is important to focus on what isn't, how to maximize the gameplay experience when you have only a little content and modest visuals and so forth to work with, how to market and reach their audience, growing their reach and fanbase over time and so forth. These are all things that can scale up.

If a person thinks the only way they can make a great game is to make a huge game with every idea they can think of crammed into it I think that is showing a lack of game design or development experience. Of course, if we can offer "100 different character classes each offering a unique game experience, 1200 different weapons to choose from... for each character, 175 different vehicles each with completely realistic physics available to drive, 3000 unique NPCs each with advanced AI, cutting edge graphics and audio, etc, etc" that will be likely to get people's attention and playing for an hour or two even if the game actually sucks. To be able to do the same with 1/100th of that scope and using simplistic presentation is a very different story. But if you can pull it off I think you will do a much better job once you scale up 5 to 10x and be able to make large games worth playing. Games that are very impressive.

Yeah, hadn't seen this one before. Seems to be a remake of the ole Atic Atac game with the viewpoint changed. Looks quite good really.

 

When the scope and sales work for you, yes keep doing it the way you find is the best for you.

Sure, i enjoyed lot more Iconoclast than Ori, as i enjoyed lot more Zelda BOT than RDR 2.
Best graphics , or lot more npc doesn't mean the best game for everyone.
Another example is Fornite doing better than PUBG.
You'll have to know what graphics, how much content and how much time you want to put on making the game.

 

Well I was mentioning game jams as a pragmatic answer to the concrete problem GarBejamin was presenting with team!
- Game jam is a socially established practice everybody know about, or can learn, and has now some cachet, ie it's battle tested idea that don't need more proving, which mean it's easier to make it accepted as a practice.
- Making a game with a game jam start by overscoping and ruthlessly cut down, and in the end being amaze that this cut down version work better than expected, even if it's not the best game. Basically it make people focus on the CORE of the production (not necessary the core of the game)
- Gamejam is basically a way to mask prototyping and MVP into something socially acceptable, to be an achievement on his own, and not a pityful necessary state of a game, game tend to be expended and polish after the jam phases
- It allow to test team member with a short time and how they deal with pressure and working together, and since it has an expiration date you don't have to stick together if you don't like it.
- It allow to have both closure and anticipation, closure to have one thing done for good, and anticipation of what could be better and improved
- it's not about small games, it's about laying and proving the fundation before going crazy

I'm keeping on my theme of finding production solution to what I think is a production problem

 

That all makes good sense I think and yes exactly that's it.

Good luck hope you are making great progress on your goal. I got some more development in tonight. I rarely play tower defense games. Think I mentioned I am not into the popular ones but have played a few tiny basically unknown TD games that I found more interesting. I think at least one was just a prototype. So I wanted to make one that I would find more interesting to play.

Anyway one of the things I did tonight is I finally had enough of the waiting on the first level for enemies to get out so added an option to about double the speed of the first 15 seconds of each level. Seemed like real innovation then I remembered... ah you know... I am pretty sure I remember some of those most popular games actually have a Fast Play option and probably for the same reason. They probably stuck that in for their own dev testing and then realized hey players will probably love this feature too.

Ah well. That enhancement was born out of necessity wasting precious seconds when playtesting but I am trying to innovate a bit here and there. The other enhancement (not done yet obviously) is enemies occasionally drop a powerup, click to collect and add the corresponding super weapon into inventory. Then whenever the player wants click on that weapon to unleash mega destruction...

This game has a lot of speech in it. All of them are me from the upper command with his gruff voice to these two fellas responding to the call for support with the big attacks. Having fun at least. lol

 

Oh! There is one other important part I was going for about the tiny games (including game jams or non-game jam projects). I definitely think a person shouldn't feel the need to stick with tiny games forever but they certainly can if they want to. Anyway... in addition to all of the concrete benefits you listed from approaching a tiny game project as a team in a game jam there is a ton of value in just doing tiny games even solo.

First, in most anything else a person would do whether it is doing an exercise program or learning to be a carpenter or just whatever... typically you don't see people trying to start out at the high end from the beginning. I think everyone knows that just makes no sense. Maybe you start out going to the gym twice per week or maybe you start out just walking 15 minutes per day. Maybe you start out building a bookshelf or a foot stool. As you gain experience and your skills increase you are prepared to tackle bigger projects. For some reason with game dev it seems like people want to start out training like a professional athlete or start out building a house. Most any person would fully expect to not only fail but to not even have learned as much as they could have from tackling a variety of smaller projects where they were able to actually complete what they set out to do. Or at least take them a good ways to completion. Enough to pull as much design and development buffs out as you can.

Second... and this is related to the first point... is that in anything else it seems like people understand the concept of quantity over quality in the beginning because quantity is how you naturally get to quality yet in game dev I see people continually going on about quality over quantity. Which is very interesting because it is opposite of basically everything else. What I mean is not that people don't care about quality in other areas of their life but that in other areas of life people seem to be able to recognize that quality comes from quantity. Meaning the more you do something the better you will become at it.

In game dev for some reason it seems like many people have this completely backwards view like they look at all of the tiny games people are making and many quickly sum these games up as low effort garbage or something along those lines. I don't know... it seems like maybe some people do not understand it is a process like anything else. The person who completed that tiny game has gained a lot from doing so. If two people start at the exact same place experience and skills wise and one of them completes a dozen tiny games before starting a bigger game and the other person starts out working on the big game the odds are the person who completed the dozen tiny games first will have much greater odds of completing the bigger game. There are other factors that come into play of course such as sticking with it but in general I mean.

And it goes beyond that for building business. The person who completes and releases and does some marketing for those dozen tiny games will be gaining even more experience so again when the time comes even if both they and the other person complete the bigger games the one person will have much more experience on how to market it. They've already been through the process a dozen times. And it is even better for the bunch of tiny games person in that every time they make a game & release it that keeps interest on them that helps them to build up a following over time through completing their games.

I don't know really to me it just seems like these things are common sense to nearly anyone when it comes to anything else but for some reason they approach game development completely differently.

Alright sorry for the long ramble it's just something that I have found interesting for quite a while now.

 

Here's another great example of someone working in a niche. What an awesome trailer a laser focus on the target audience and setting expectations for a unique game.

Seem to be doing very well as this is listed as one of the top sellers on itch.io (available for a payment of $10 or more), rated 4.4/5 (36,341 ratings) with over half a million downloads on android, and rated 3.8/5 (488 customer reviews) on Amazon. Looks like they are using Unity now too although from what I read on their website it sounds like they have been around making edutainment games for about 20 years.

 

OMG you right, that trailer is lazer cutted, great pacing and all.

 

The game isn't too bad either. It's a little janky from an implementation standpoint, but it has a lot of charm.

 

The game is well done and enough polished.
It seems they use simple flat lighting, no terrain normal maps or not noticeable, no post effects, no fur shader that would have enhanced it a lot for players with modern hardware.
Fortunately Unity new terrain and shaders and new rendering pipeline should have lot better graphics by default
I don't have time to write more, work on a new game is priority LOL

By the way, another game with great unique style
https://twitter.com/hashtag/smileformegame?src=hash

PS One graphics racing game
https://twitter.com/JLSGames

GameBoy graphics Zelda like
https://twitter.com/Siltocyn

 

This is great! You are truly obsessed. LMAO Seriously It's interesting how you are so obviously looking at the video through the eyes of a game dev or more specifically an artist. This is the kind of thing we were discussing back many pages or so I think. I laughed when I read that because I envisioned another video with a split screen and as the trailer was playing on one half text appears with thoughts of someone in the target audience and the other half your thoughts appear.

cool a game where I can be a wolf! ..... simple flat lighting
Seems I can hunt and scavenge! ..... no terrain normal maps
I am free to explore where I want! ..... no post effects
Wow I can even play with & defend the pups! ..... no fur shader

LOL! It really was a perfect example of different people views when looking at the same thing. All depends on why you are looking what you are looking for.

I understand that. How's the game progressing? I finished the super weapons and now need to finish up those end of day story snippets. Think I have about 9 left to do.

I didn't get much out of the couple of gifs and screenshot I saw other than "wow the vehicle physics/suspension system seems highly detailed for a PS1 era game." I like vehicle combat games better than racing games but seems good I guess for a 40-day game jam. I just don't see much to base an opinion on really.

That game looks good. Graphics are very readable and seems to be a good amount of interaction available.
Based on the two games they have released on GameJolt I think they should do a good job on it.

Also... here is a great example of how a "normal" person (as in someone not into game dev probably not a programmer or an artist) views a game. This is a let's play of one of the devs previously released games. NOTE: If you hate occasional swearing then don't watch.

 

while not making a living I enjoy the dev stream of Craig Perko whom is an obvious trekkie
https://www.youtube.com/user/craigp223/videos

 

It's another one from scratch, stylized 3D graphics with some Zelda inspiration.
I think i will start prototype with cubes for characters while create models for environment and change characters when the base gameplay and HUD are working good.

They tried the realistic look, but realistic with actual graphics means tone mapping and better shaders for example.
Old games had colors very toned down, total lack of lighting contrast, textures lacking color and contrast, i don't know why , but it's how most games looked like.
There is many mobile games still looking old school (i don't play mobile games on my PC)


Stylized would look better about colors and lighting with better contrast and colors.
Go stylized or use new graphics when the game is for PC.


Anyway it's matter of style choice.
Just saying their game would look lot better using modern graphics touches, or going stylized with brighter colors and contrast.

It's kind of game i don't play, too frustrating lol
I prefer some Nes game instead like Batman or Zelda.

 

Old game look washed out as a way to hide visual artefact created by close mip level, low aniso, low resolution and low dynamic range, basically as a way to control the image frequency. Today we supply a lot of high frequency data with shader light, turn off the light and everything look even flatter.

 

The important thing is the game looking like it does hasn't stopped it from being very well rated selling and downloading well. It's on Steam, itch.io, Amazon, Play store, ios and who knows where else. I think on Steam it had 500+ reviews as well. Typically from what I have seen 1 review is posted for about every 40 to 240 sales. Quite a range but it does seem to fluctuate that much.

Anyway I think that's an important thing to keep in mind. I think it looks very good visually and is certainly more interesting than many Indie games as far as the topic and what the player can do. I mean sure looking at the game video as a developer I can see many things that can be nitpicked and waste hundreds or even thousands of hours trying to make it look perfect. This kind of thing is mainly us thinking of ourselves not the player. It's perfectionism which comes from inside the developer. And that is some bad stuff. Probably the biggest game completion killer of them all.

As far as development and implementation go I think the main takeaway here would be that "perfect" is never needed and is a waste of time trying to achieve that could have been put to much better use. Spend those hundreds of hours adding more content more things for the player to do. Odds are they will appreciate that a lot more than "hey look we were going to add bathing, swimming and catching fish for the wolf but instead we spent that time and got the feet of the animals to not go into the ground". Lol

 

That sounds like a solid plan. Interested in seeing what you come up with.

 

It's amazing how much work goes into making even a tiny game. I just finished up another dev session writing story snippets for the end of each day. Had many more to write than I thought. I was going to write half of them previously but I decided to only write the ones needed for the 3-day (in this game each day is the equivalent of a level) free demo version so I could get it out for playtesters. I forgot about that until I started writing more tonight.

At this point I have burned up 105 hours. I knocked out many story snippets tonight. Still have 4 more to write. Will get those done next dev session. Like I said I did finish up the special weapon attacks and am happy with those. Of course, enemies will drop these powerups rarely otherwise it would completely throw off the balance. They just completely wipe out the enemies on the low levels.

They do make a big difference make the tower defense style of game more interesting and arcade action like for me at least.

I'll have to do many playtesting sessions just to find the best drop rate for these. This is the kind of stuff that always has hidden costs. You add in some cool enhancements the players should really like that weren't designed for in the very beginning as far as game balance goes. So then you need to go through and balance it all again. But it should make for a better gameplay experience overall.

One thing I could do is originally I had considered adding in boss monsters like one special boss monster halfway through the game and then a stronger boss monster on the last day. And that would help to balance things out plus make the game more interesting. But at this rate I am thinking will the game ever be done? Not if I keep adding stuff.

I think I will file that away for the next time I create a tower defense game. I will already have all of this stuff done that I developed for this game so I could make a sequel just changing the enemy and turret graphics and then focus from the very beginning on adding the enhancements for different modes of play as well as mini bosses and a final boss.

It's more important to just get the game done I think at this point. Get it out there so anyone interested can play it.

 

You could enhance the background a bit, add some grass pixels just a bit brighter to not distract too much attention, make road borders pixel lines with a brighter brown color, background looks flat compared to other sprites.

I really don't like the big "cannot upgrade" in fullscreen. Instead display some flashing icon
with small font message in lower window, don't interrupt window gameplay like that LOL

I don't like retro pixel games using retro pixel fonts most of the time, because it's not very readable most of the time, while people could use retro pixel graphics , but modern small fonts like some games do. It's lot smoother.

You could made less, and present some stages with a title only.

Some people code ai perfect player and accelerated gameplay to speed up playtest.

Only towers shooting enemies is boring.
You could create some unique usage ability like a giant mecha walking the same pass in opposite direction damaging enemies when he walks through them.
Or some unit with low armor driving in opposite direction placing road blocks in the path , they do damage before get destroyed when enemies run on them.
Another unique ability usage freezing one unit, others unit behind are blocked, or turn one enemy unit into ally.
There is endless possibilities.
Give enemy special ability also , this would balance the game and make it lot more interesting
.
Stay minimalist, don't try to make the best game and the most complete, release a first version already.
Keep new ideas for some patch or for a new game.

 

Yeah that's what I mean... it's a good amount just to get solid framework with solid "normal" gameplay. I think it definitely has its own unique brand although yeah more varied gameplay stuff as far as enemy behavior would be good now. Lol

I will focus on that next time when I do a sequel or something. The large text fillng the screen displaying info that's part of the uniqueness. The player is in control... if they don't want to see tower info then don't mouse over it. The interface is designed to be very streamlined and simplistic.

Anyway good ideas for sure. It's always easy to see things to change etc but I think it is a great little defense game as it is. Does that mean I can't see things to improve or to add? Of course not. But it hits the primary design goals I set out and it is unique and innovative in its own way. Ultimately there are a lot of people who will appreciate what I've created but I need to find them. That's the main thing. Maybe I will find 5 maybe I will find 500. lol

Yes I definitely put more effort into it than absolutely needed for a minimal thing but that's because I'm releasing this for sale so I looked at it like i should put more effort into it than I do when making a game for free and releasing it. And in many ways it is still minimal and simple but at the same time it has a lot going on quite a bit to it overall. Which again was a big part of the original design goal.

Anyway I am keeping this short because I don't to break the focus from the thread with my game project. I just threw that out as far as the bits that connect to the thread which is all of the things a person has to think about when making the game including making that critical decision on when to say "no more" development stops here and release the game. For my personal case it is about 99% of the way now and I have a 5-day weekend break coming up for Thanksgiving so I expect with all of that extra time it will be completed by end of the weekend.

 

$24,000 usd iin marketing for 555 clics?
That's impossible, the CPC is set by you, and should never exceed $2 unless you are Nike or Coca-Cola,

In terms of marketing, what have worked for me is to spend small quantities per day over a lot of money in short intervals, for example $5 dollars per day which is i
Actually the minimum on Reddit, that's $150 instead of $150 in a single day, this is my golden rule for for all campaigns.

As per sales, I rather install Firebase and get meaningfull metrics like Retention, Play time, installs, uninstalls over sales.

I spent about a total of $400usd on Nukes of Bastion in marketing, including a Video I paid to a Freelancer using Freelancer.com, and have made $40 in total out of in-app purchases, the game is free, so I lost cash but have learned a lot after 2 years of development.

Long way to go, by the way this is my 14th game, and the first one I get real cash from, so success will come eventually.

 

Seems like a unique game. Looks like you did a great job on it adding a lot of stuff to do. Two years seems like a lot of time to spend though. You said this is your 14th game so I am guessing you started out much smaller and shorter dev cycles and worked your way up to this point? Or you were working on other games during the 2 years you created NoB?

 

Thanks I appreciate your feedback.
Previous games were simpler and targeted for kids. I made my mind on audience and went for a more mature one.
Yea about that taking into account bug fixing and content addition, and doing it solo while having my daily job, wife, and kids took a lot to do on my spare intense time.

 

Hello. Yes you can - if you will create 1 mobile game with some good number of daily active users. You can earn money on advertisement. It shouldn't be AAA world wide super popular game, but it should have some active users every day. It works pretty much like YouTube - just need some users to use your "art" every day.

 

I get that completely. Always so much else to do. Thanks for the quick reply. Oh and I do the same with paid advertising. Set it to $5 max per day and let it run. That's how I did website marketing. I mean of course that is one of many different things but that is how I approach paid stuff. It's all a job in itself. Get a hundred (many times I work with about 50) impressions change the headline run again or in Adwords and some others very nice because can run split test with ad versions alternating.

Then need to do the same thing with the landing page. Testing against x visitors. Change. Test again. Which converts better? Keep and test again. But yeah dev is just one piece, right? Then at least the same amount of care & effort should be spent on marketing. Although I won't spend same amount of care & effort I will spend maybe 20 to 30% of the dev time on marketing activities. That's minimal but it should be enough to have some tiny positive impact.

 

It was just ideas for your next game in case you lack inspiration lol

Good news.

 

I appreciate it they were good ideas!

 

When the goal is money, that's a way.
I prefer passion before money, otherwise it's like assets flippers with money goal whatever the game is good and fun or bad. There was many using ultimate survival plugin who published right away games without adding lot of work lol

It's similar to some people quit something doing lot of money for things doing less money but they enjoy lot more. It's sad for people putting lot of work in games with goal is more money instead of passion.

Some people have better ideas
https://twitter.com/i/status/1063174693941903361

 

I saw that on my Twitter a day or so ago! Yea I really liked that. This is what I mean by "crazy" just something "different". It can be outright "crazy" weird enemies or something as simple as this which is really a brilliant idea in its simplicity.

I mean I see people making all of these top down TSS for example and to me they look like they are basically all the same game that has been reskinned with different graphics & sounds. I am sure some have some uniqueness when you get into them but they more or less don't stand out in a video etc.

But this is very cool... if it was a humaoid character running around collecting key etc it would seem like "same ole same ole" and take a lot more work to stand out. Just replacing humanoid / animal character with a car now it is suddenly something unique. It is just a cool twist driving around inside a dungeon maybe can do a bit of drifting even who knows but at any rate it is immediately "unique".

This is why I am a huge believer in the importance of ideas. This is a perfect example. One simple idea has more impact than not having that idea and doing twice as much work to try to stand out.

 

Well I always hated seeing so many people pouring into game dev just to make money too because for me it has been a hobby & passion for decades.

BUT... if it weren't for people chasing money we wouldn't see nearly the number of people into game dev making & releasing games, right? I think absolutely we wouldn't.

The majority of people tolerate their job at the best and absolutely hate their job at the worst. So of course having a chance to be able to be free from something they don't like people seize it.

And then it seems like a lot of people hope to make one game and get millions of $ from it too like a lottery. But again... people need money to live and people don't like the way they currently make money and making games for money is very appealing in comparison. From what I have seen the dream for most people isn't so much to make interesting games as it is to BE FREE! To make great money as an Indie Game Dev and tell their boss you can shove this place up... lol

 

There will always be games made with passion first, HyperLight Drifter, Axiom Verge, Iconoclast where not about money, it took 5 or 6 years to make the game in their free time.

lol

Yeah, have fun first
https://quotesgram.com/sid-meier-quotes/

Yeah, like Rocket League, drone racing games and others.
Most will be made by indies people or studios.

Most triple A studios , only make character based games. It's like movies, it's mostly character based.

 

I just found this , how to make a (empty, micro , not fun) game in 10 minutes

Anyway, without doing assets flip, unity has great game templates to let you start your game right away focusing on content and later modify code or add features as you wish.
This is another great option among many to make games faster.

 

I saw that a couple weeks or so back on Twitter and Sykoo also did it. Probably many more have by now. I think there is a lot of value in it for testing yourself and just getting stuff done. I used to do that a lot where every game I made I pushed myself to work as fast as I possibly could. I still do it to a large degree just not wasting time... when I am doing game dev I am super focused on doing game dev and getting stuff done but I am not pushing myself to work and type as fast as possible constantly.

I also think it is a great way to start out on any project just hammer it hard and fast and do as much as you can as fast as you can. All of the progress is a great motivator.

I gotta say though 10 mins... I think I am very fast but not sure if I could do much of anything in that time. Well probably a space shmup is doable. Particularly with just rectangles or cubes.

A person needs to have mastered the tools they work with and programming to pull this off I think. This guy could probably be a successful Indie game dev if he wanted to. I think he mainly focuses on making Unity tutorials doesn't he?

IIRC Sykoo was stressing because he hadn't opened Unity yet and was waiting for it to load like come on open already!!! LOL

 

That's not the same doing all from scratch or using a good code base you already have and used on other projects.
But seriously, 10 minutes you'll get a very minimalist game , most people won't care; you should better create new code you need or new art instead of trying a whole "sort of" game without menus, objectives dialog and at least some levels.
I would call it "making a prototype of a very small super minimalist game", because you don't have time to make something good enough.

One day making a game would result in something already lot more good.

It's lot more easy to make tutorials focusing on small things or using available assets instead of making a full coherent game from scratch.
Perhaps you would do more money making retro games tutorials

 

LOL! They're not trying to make games in 10 minutes to release at all. They are just having fun testing themselves to see how good they really are.

I see it like making a game any actual full game well playtested and balanced etc takes a good amount of time and work so the more efficient of a developer a person is the better. Come out of the gate hard working fast and make some great progress. You'll slow down soon enough anyway but that boost at the beginning is a big help for one it gets them focusing on the right thing actually trying to get something somewhat playable done. With the tiny bit of core they have done now do that a few more times speed sessions and make a big difference. Then work ar a normal pace.

Most people would be messing around for 10 mins and have accomplished absolutely nothing. Heck even hour or more and still nothing. If they focused on actually getting $4!7 done for just one hour like this then spent 2 to 3 hours messing around doing whatever they'd be a whole lot more productive!

 

He is a popular dev already, he make video about making game, which is a smart way to monetize game, they don't have to be finished and fun

 

So he should change the title and not name it "making a game"

Anyway, non character based games
https://twitter.com/i/status/1060201653880737794
https://twitter.com/i/status/1063802129683546114
https://twitter.com/i/status/1005397608268025861

Retro dungeon
https://twitter.com/i/status/1055110067266166784
Custom level editor
https://twitter.com/i/status/1053605440070864897

Exactly lol

 

Yeah that's what I mean they of course aren't trying to say hey look we made a game in 10 mins gonna launch it on Steam tomorrow. Lol. They are just seeing if they can make a game any game in 10 minutes. And yeah it is a great publicity stunt as well but I am sure they do such things off camera too. I used to do these kind of things a lot. Not 10 minutes for a game but what can I can get done in the next 30 mins or 1 hour? Basically just set a short time and push hard as hell to see how much I can do in that time. You learn you improve you get better and faster when you challenge and push yourself.

 

These are good impressive stuns.
But I think in general, such quick runs are ok for generic games, with relatively simple mechanics.
Not so good, when brain storming is required. You can not fast forward it

 

I can also make a game in 10 minutes :
1) Buy template on Asset Store
2) Install
3) Change game name
Done LOL

 

I think is still valid point, even is different type of challenge.
But you could at least also slap post processing on top of asset, to change colors

 

Exactly, it will look like a totally new game , this is called "good asset flipping"

This N64 game is lot of fun, someone should do a remake keeping the fun gameplay

 

I seriously considered to build a game about a donkey and his owner. I would have called it "Ass & Flip".

 

The only thing stopped me to do so that I couldn't find a donkey character for free...


Disclaimer: all puns intended.

 

Since I will need training to "makBIGgam" I will go on youtube selling my competance in training as each step are crossed, that's actually an idea I should do! instead of "hey I finally figure out how to make the menu", I will do a video "how to make a menu like a pro" Then I will announce a devlog, pick all the small validation prototype, put them in a single game, then call that the real prototype, then polish and do a kickstarter with the community amassed ... That's the most risk free business plan ever!

 

The things about these kind of games is now graphically it looks quite good and I definitely am all for sure take advantage of this stuff to save time. But what I don't get is so many times I see people making games using nice graphics assets and kits and the gameplay looks so boring. To me anyway. I would rather squares and triangles and have a little excitement. Add some uniqueness to the stuff.

Maybe the video is only showing the very first level or two or something I don't know. But it just doesn't look like it would be much fun and all that engaging to play to me. Needs a focus on the gameplay I think. Just my opinion of course. And of course I get that people can use the graphics and even the kits I guess any way they like I just am saying I don't understand why people use the assets and then make like the same exact things that have already been made like they look the same they play the same they just have the exact same "vibe" as a dozen or more games I could find on GameJolt, Itch.io and Steam. I don't get it. LOL

And also I think all of these games coming out with graphics like these from very good artists to me and again I get that I probably represent like 1% of people but to me it's like so many games look basically all the same these days. Sure they look good but what I mean is they all look kind of similar like they don't stand out visually don't really seem as creative or different now simply because I see games that look like them every day. Not literally just like them but I mean I see like the same say half a dozen styles of graphics or whatever there are but they have been used across thousands maybe tens of thousands of games even in game jams. I don't know how to word it really. ha ha

Well that is probably it. It's probably more to do with me checking out a lot of games so I have come across games that look so much a like they just all blend together after awhile even though the art is very nice. So to me it stands out in a good way when I see like cubes and rectangles or stick figures or like if I saw a game that looked like this it would stand out to me visually in a very good way... and if someone actually made something like this all around with the atmosphere, audio, gameplay that would really stand out to me.

So you come across say someone playing that game...

and then you come across someone playing this game (these are from the later days / higher levels)

This is exactly why I made this defense game. Wanted something different. Something that plays different. Looks different. Is different.