How to get started Making Games (My top Secret Tips 🤯)

A lot of you have asked for tips on how to get started making games. Today I share my best tips for how to get started with game development - Great beginner's courses, how to stay motivated, how to land a job, how to make money with indie games and other tips I wish I knew when I first started out.

📜 Courses I mentioned in the video*

00:00 how to make game
17:24 beard

❤️ Social

🖱️ My Gear*

🎵 Music
I get all my music from Epidemic Sound - Check them out!

*Note, above links are affiliate links which means I will receive a small commission if you decide to buy a course. The price will be the same for you, no difference. Thanks for your support!*

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[Johnny-Chase]

The best piece of advice I've ever been given is that you don't, and cannot, rely upon MOTIVATION to finish a project. You rely on DISCIPLINE. You need to form solid habits to make progress every, single, day. Even when you really don't want to, you force yourself to sit down and do ONE thing. Create a single variable, update a configuration, add a TODO card, something. Building this habit, and discipline, is far more important than trying to bottle lighting, or capture motivation. Progress is made one small step at a time, not going leap to leap. Hope this helps someone, it has sure helped me.

[MythicLegionDev]

Me agree with these tips

Also there's no need to hide the truth Ponty, we all know that you actually traded your eyebrows to get that beard

[CodeMonkeyUnity]

Great video, lots of great advice! I definitely recommend starting small and more importantly actually finish!
There's many things involved in making a game more than just basic gameplay, if you're constantly jumping between prototype to prototype there's a lot you won't learn. So stick with a project and finish it!

[phileon]

Hey, professional game dev here to say that this advice in this video is actually pretty good. One thing that wasn't well explained is that visual scripting is still coding in tge end of the day, just presented differently. That's why learning code is important, because you'll be doing it in some shape or form in thr end.

[williampopmie]

A few vids ago I commented the idea for VR, but then I realised: this game would be perfect for nintendo switch and then I remembered, you have a switch! I think it would also fit the game really well, because the style is also cartoony-type and it's family-friendly nature, so maybe... also love ur vids!

[imraninfrarote]

"You probably won't make money making games, so do it because you enjoy it"
Love that tbh

[SunShine-oert]

Ponty: Don’t learn 3D games in the beginning

My 15 year old self: am going to pretend that I didn’t hear that 👀

[vizionthing]

My single point of failure was sticking to one game, I only wanted to create this one awesome game, and if I completed it I would be set for life, I started this back in 2003, Its still not finished, I doubt it will ever be finished, the importance of making small games and lots of them cannot be overstated, the full cycle, all the loose ends needing to be tidied up to finish a game will give you experience found no where else, put your big ideas on a back burner and prove you can finish ten - yea TEN small games, be them copies or original, whatever before tackling the the big one. and if your big idea flops, you have a ready made portfolio.

Another point I'd raise is the game engine doesn't matter, because sooner or later you will need to swap to one of the others, its the experience that counts, I suspect porting the ten games you already made to a new engine would be a great start.

This is the video I needed eighteen years ago. - now go and watch it again!

[Kynolin]

Honestly good advice. I've been learning Unreal Engine and Blender for 8 months (mostly UE), and I have nothing close to a game. I can do all sorts of things, and lots of things very well, but there was no goal, so there's no game. For me that's fun, but if you want to make a game, planning and understanding scope is definitely a skill you should include.

[spring]

YES, finally in your true OP viking form

love the beard ;)

[jonesy_b]

I mostly agree with this video apart from that you have to start with 2d, you know, I started with 3d and you can just get a crazy amount of free 3d assets so you don't HAVE to learn 3d modeling software like blender, i started out with doing stuff like level design with free megascan assets with ue4 and got interested in rendering and watched The Cherno (very nice guy btw) and it wasn't sp hard to make a tiny game in 3d with a template and adit it to your own likings and learn 3d like that and i love it its not THAT much harder as 2d

[yannisdewulf]

I really liked this kind of video. I think the best tip of the video is to start small. It doesn't matter if your first game has bad art, has simple mechanics, or is boring. What matters is that you made a game. Now you can keep making and finishing games that will get slightly bigger and better everytime. So start simple and work your way up.

[AndyRealFish]

My first game was actually a flappy bird clone (Flappy Bomb...). It really teaches you a lot to finish your first SMALL game. Not to mention the feeling of accomplishment and the motivation it gives to tackle bigger projects. Then I went on to follow a loooong tutorial on YT that teached me how to make a game completely from scratch in Unity. Created a total of 10 games before I am now starting to learn Unreal. My prior knowledge from Unity really helps me understand Unreal quicker.

[deepsleepsounds]

"Motivation comes and goes", having a drive, working regardless of circumstance or feelings and being determined to finish it and enjoy the journey, that's what it takes to make your vision a reality.

[GHOST-dgtk]

I started programming when I was 8 with just the most basic programming language, Scratch. What I would recommend is starting with that just to wrap your head around how computers work and "think", then start making games in unity

[jaklegacy]

There are tons of free and / or very cheap 3d assets out there that you absolutely can re-material / re-texture in engine (at least in Unreal) to make the assets unique. Esp if you're doing something that's 3d and lofi.

[AlphaEndgame]

Starting to make games when you already had a job takes courage. I can't help you much, so here's a comment to help you with the algorithm. Can't wait to try your game, thank you for all the great videos!

[jannikbock]

I am totally with you on the first question. There are only two kinds of people: Those who dont ask others what game engine to use and those who should use Unity ^^

[SPLICY]

A benefit of starting a small project and finishing: You get to copy a *ton* of your code to the next project. Menu system, inventory, character motion whatever... odds are the next thing you work on will use some things from what you've already made.

[fritztk]

This video came right on time! I've been discouraged and genuinely lost these past few days in regards to how I was going to learn how to create games efficiently, and this video cleared a lot, if not ALL of my confusion.

I am truly grateful 🤝