My Indie Game is a Complete Disaster | Devlog

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Chapters :
00:00 - intro
00:23 - everything I did wrong when starting my indie game dev journey
04:10 - some things I did right when starting my indie game dev journey
07:18 - conclusion

Indie game devlogs on YouTube usually cover the positive or cool aspects of game development process. I decided, I wanted to highlight some of the less glamorious side of the whole game dev and devlog world.

Now game development is very hard. And if you are starting to learn game development, that probably does not sound super suprising. In this video, I go through all of the mistakes I made when trying to make very first indie game. I fell into a lot of common pitfalls that indie game devs do, so I try to highlight those problems so you don't have to!

I also feel like I did some things right when it came to my indie game dev journey. Learning indie game development is filled with ups and downs so its important to not only recognize the game dev mistakes I made, but also some of the game dev successes!

If you liked this video, here are some similar ones you might like!
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ByteOfMichael - I Spent 100 Days Learning Game Development
PolyMars++ - He stole my game and made it better
AIA - This one mistake is killing my game
AIA - 1 Year MAKING an OPEN-WORLD game
Thomas Brush - How To Make A Game Alone (In 2024)
BiteMe Games - Roadmap to becoming a gamedev in 2024
Goodgis - Making a Game in JavaScript with No Experience
Sasquatch B Studios - How to Start Gamedev in 2024
Randy - I found the BEST attack animation... and it's only 10 lines of code

c r e d i t s 🎵
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d i s c l a i m e r
I do not claim to own any or all of the pictures/footage that may be shown in this video.
All of my opinions are entirely my own and do not represent any company I work for or am affiliated with.
Any financial topics discussed are not financial advice.

Channel produced by Rainy Sunday LLC.

[ByteOfMichael]

Gonna do a 30k subscriber QnA, comment any questions you have below!

[SkidesGames]

Enjoyed this video, related to the part at the end of not quitting your day job to do game dev full time. I actually worked hard to find a day job with a lot of down time for me to be able to program while on the clock and kill two birds with one stone.

Good luck with your game!

[zejugames]

Have you experimented with paper prototyping? I finally gave it a chance and it really saved me a lot of time in my video game work. If you're making a deck builder, you can learn a lot by making paper cards and playing it as a board game (as much as is possible).

[myrrysmiasi]

I have an opinion of the 'no 0 days' thing. I used to work on my first proper game project way too much. 10+ hours a day and at most I would take saturday off, but I just couldn't keep away from the project for two days in a row. This led to me getting less effective little by little and eventually having to take a whole week off to recharge. Rinse and repeat. I've found a much better rule to be '2 days off each week, but not one after the other' usually for me it's saturday and wednesday. That way I don't get too overworked (or at least get less so), don't need to stop myself from working when I actually want to and 1 day isn't long enough to lose momentum (at least for me). I still sometimes skip an off day if I feel like I haven't worked enough lately, but it's always a bad idea and leads to a cycle of ineffectiveness and skipping rest days.

[SolidFake]

Not a gamedev, but when I was still doing level design I had pretty much the same conclusions why I failed. It is always the same it feels, no matter the medium.
Not starting small enough. Not having a clear goal with clear boundaries. Falling into the optimization and details trap. Making updates to people taking away actual time from the project. Technology decay.

[tristunalekzander]

That's very strange, Unity is a 3D rasterizer, so it shouldn't mess your pixels up at different screen resolutions, it should look exactly the same in all resolutions without any extra work, unless you are using some kind of pixel filter, which you should not be doing in a pixel art game

[PaahtimoGames]

I did many of the same mistakes and fixed them with my new game. For my first game I didn't do any design or planning and it clearly showed as the game had no plan. My current game has a plan and it is clearly progressing much better. For my new game I decided to use Monogame instead of Unity so I have much more skills in case Unity decides to burn the company to the ground. Game dev is a learning journey and hopefully in the end we all learn from our mistakes.

[minilabyrinth]

I've made 4 major unreal projects in the last 7 years, all over 500 hours of development and abandoned them all. I have slowly amalgamated the best parts, features, assets, and ideas from each one and I know the engine well enough at this point that I said "enough" and am making my dream game now, nothing downscaled or held back, and I will either finish it or die, no other options!

[eyerly]

5:55 the way you mention playing games was not sarcastic at all because after spending so much time in tutorial hell I could actually start seeing the games I'm playing as how they were possibly built which then led me to more ideas for my own game. Playing games to help make your game is actually not a terrible idea.

[hanyelsafty-zl]

I'm actually in the tutorial hell for about 3 years, I made small prototypes and I want to commit to actually finish a fully brushed game even if it was small, Having a full time job as a 3D graphic designer is helping me to produce art to my games, and having a family with two kids is also fun but this is shorten the time I can spend on learning or working on a game, I'm eager to make game development as my life and career but I get frustrated easily and I feel like it's a thin thread that I'm holding in order to continue and to feel motivated, I wish you all the best and I look up to game devs like you all the time.

[View]

Not quitting your job to work on something you have little or no experience in seems like a pretty obvious point.

Especially when said field is highly volatile and doesn't always reward your efforts. Even with a comfortable amount of savings, it's a dumb choice.

I'll never understand why people decide to do it.

[thepokekid]

I mean like... so many devs call themselves lazy or others lazy or even just feel lazy, and it's often not true at all. Most of the time it's fighting burn-out. There are a lot of issues with a toxic culture of really overworking because A) this is a product of passion, love, and dedication (even if it's more of a "for the money" project) that makes us undervalue our efforts as well as be enthusiastic about our efforts like many other Artistic careers, and B) it's still in the tech industry. I don't know if it's just me, but sometimes just being transparent about taking breaks and needing to take breaks, helps me a lot better from wanting to take a major break, or loosing passion and getting distracted. (Especially if the project is indie and you don't have anyone really looming over your head)

[zenbrandon]

Your channel (and this video) give me such great motivation. Both for game dev but also for pursuing a computer science degree! Keep doing what you're doing man. I look forward to playing your game whenever you're ready to set it free!

[Konitama]

The thing about pixel art spazzing out in Unity... because Unity wasn't designed for it, it's trying its best to just scale things according to window resolution, camera size, etc. You have to basically help Unity along, by making sure you work with proper camera settings/ratios, and most importantly, proper zoom and resolution.

A major reason for pixel art looking stretched and funky in Unity is because you're trying to view your game at some weird zoom level. If your game is designed to fit something like a 960 pixel span, and then in Unity your zoom/camera settings are displaying 1000 pixels across the screen, all Unity is doing is awkwardly stretching your 960 pixels across 1000 pixels. This means each "pixel" on screen is taking up 1.04% of the screen, so it's "stretched". The alternative is to anti-alias... which obviously is going to look bad for pixel art as it makes everything fuzzy looking.

[michaelpease]

Anyone else feel that part when he said, "I go through waves of massive progress and waves of massive, err, procrastination"

Don't feel too bad about the struggle process brother. I got my degree in exercise science and pre -physical therapy - not exactly helpful for game development. The saving graces are the Photoshop and web design courses i took my freshman year - which led to me learning a few creative workflows over the past ten years including FL studio 😁

[GrzegorzKiernozek]

what is the strategu/economy game in 2:55?

[codeman-dev]

Nice work not just repeating the same material as everyone else making videos on this topic. So yay! Give yourself a pat on the back.

Personally, I'm very must _just_ starting out.

[AaronQ]

Im in proper tutorial hell but im trying to take notes as I go and make it an education I hope ill retain for future needs. Also treating it as a chance to learn some c# which will be handy for my day job. Those who quit their real job are nuts

[Ryöken]

Something like "making a 2D game in a 3D can be worth than making a 2D game in a 2D world" ( like casting shadows, but lot of things you can do better with a 3D world sometimes)

[Greedable]

I definitely agree with your point about YouTube, having to stop all development momentum to spend a couple days putting together a video is disorienting