3 Things You NEED to Know Before Starting Your Indie Game

Unlock essential insights to propel your game development journey forward. In this video, gain valuable knowledge and practical tips to navigate the challenges and maximize your potential as a game developer.

Whether you're a seasoned developer or are brand new to the game dev scene, this video has some important tips to get you through some hurdles that all developers face eventually.

If you're new to our channel, we're Brandon & Nikki from Sasquatch B Studios. We sold our house to start our game studio, and work full time on building our business and making our games, Veil of Maia & Samurado.

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#motivation #indiegame #gamedevelopment

[marcmustermann]

I have decided to instead of fixing bugs, I focus on creating new ones. Works like a charm.

[coreymatthews]

Something that crosses my mind when working on a prototype is seeing new game announcements of a similar thing and it bums me out that it looks so good and I end up comparing my idea more than focusing on it. I need to just remember the quote "Comparison is the thief of joy."

[MarcLange-wk]

I have no idea how many videos of yours I've now watched in a binge .. thank you <3

[sealsharp]

Post #1: So let's talk about the bug list.

I think storing bugs in a list is far better than trying to remember them, but keeping a big list of bugs is not a great idea.
Building more stuff with bugs present is building on an unstable foundation. Bugs not only need to be archived but also judged by their potential impact. If a button blinks in the wrong color, no problem, but let' say your game allocates too much or has rare framedrops or some physics element glitches out. This could be because a core system's assumptions do not fit the requirements or what's practical with the engine. If you keep that in while producing content, you may produce more and more instances of the error, or you base design and work on wrong assumptions.

Errors become more costly as time goes on. One of the biggest problems i see in indie dev is people being overwhelmed by ignoring little issues. Not only now and in Unity, that happened 23 years ago in good old RPG Maker 2000. It's not new.
Bugs breed, do not let them.

[troyharris]

Gotta say, this is EXACTLY how I've been feeling for the last few weeks. I've had an inkling that this could be a normal thing, but my inner demons were telling me that I just wasn't able to do any of this justice. Thanks for the timely pep-talk!

[sealsharp]

Post #2: Compare yourself or not

I may have posted this before, but play demos once in a while. It gives great insight into how the competition actually performs. It's like what going to a dollar store instead of browsing instagram is for your self-image. The real world is not all perfection and polish.

Everyone's cooking with water. A guy in a local forum creates a shitload of games and i was shocked how much more productive he is compared to me. So i played his games and put a few of his Unity-Assemblies into ILSpy and it's basically all assets.

[HeavensDisciplesGames]

This channel keeps it real and the info is relatable no matter what engine you use and what genre your game is in.
At some point my game felt like it was put together with duct tape and could fall apart and break if I add new features.
There were times I would add a new feature that would introduce a bug that I had fixed a while back.
But I now block out time each week to fix bugs, starting with some of the major ones and now my game feels a lot more stable.
I also comment a lot in my code so I can prevent re-introducing some of the bugs in the future.

[zombienationz]

The best advice i could give is to actually just watch many many YouTube videos involving the programs you've chosen to use. Learn their functionality and you can master the art. Cuz i have no artistic talent for 2d only 3d so i sculpt characters 3-4 million poly and turn it into basically that but 30k or less and they looked great. Then one day i fell asleep and had a dream about modular characters and everything i thought i knew suddenly changed. This has happened like 6x now but the more i learn the more combine that knowledge and speed up my own abilities to learn and ultimately get what i want out of blender and unreal 5 more accurately and more importantly faster because without progression that feeling of burnout that feeling of i would rather be doing something else is basically inevitable. I would most definitely not attempt making your own engine first try though unless you really honestly know how. I'm exceptionally gifted at collecting information and that's how i plan to succeed. Its what brought me here and to several other channels on YouTube. So i can skip ahead days or weeks at a time because learning takes time and time makes everything routine and boring. Yesterday i didn't know I could make 1 long attack string with points that transition to different animations by pressing a different button or continuing the string if i keep pressing the same. Had i tried on my own to aquire that information while working my shitty factory job I'd lose a week or more guranteed. This is the age of information. Abuse it.

[keeganmcfarland]

Awesome video, man!
If any indie or AA game developer are watching this, don't make a MMO rpg game or a deck-builder game or a mascot horror game or a open world game or a rouge-like game (especially Vampire Survivors clone) as your first indie game that you made.
Instead, try remaking games or make a knock-off version of a game like pac man, snake, angry birds, or better, make a fan game of Fnaf, Sonic, or Dark Deception.
Start something small, then build your way up to improve your creativity/coding/3d modeling skills.

[kazukitakamura]

When I am making a scene or gameplay mechanics I try to squash enough bugs so it can actually run. Then every so often I take out a notebook, run down all the bugs I run into (sometimes I have to fight the urge to squash until the play session is over). After I done with the playtest session I go through the list the squash any bugs I found.

[dbweb.creative]

Stay away from over-engineering and making everything generic. Of course, if a system can simplify a whole lot of your development, OR you just want to explore an idea of making a robust generic system to run your mechanics through it - go for it, BUT OTHERWISE, just make self-contained units/pieces of code that do things on their own, even if it means code duplication. This will prevent road blocks and make it easier to go further. Also, if you get a lot of duplicated code - just put it somewhere into a singleton or a static class and call it from there, that's fine too, as long as you don't couple things together too much.

[abdou]

I’m loving those wisdom bombs! Those 2D tutorials are lifesavers i really hope you plan on making more of those.
Have a great day!

[RobLang]

My advice would be: cut out as many features as you can. Cut cut cut. Only that way will you finish. Everything takes longer than you expect.

[hawkgamedev]

So true! gosh I sometimes think I'm going crazy, thank you! as much as you plan it feels like this.

[ss]

If you are just getting started, better fix the "bugs" early on, might be that there are things you are not aware of yet and you are simply doing some things the wrong way... a "bug" might a sign of some bigger underlying design flaw.

[apollodavis]

Hi, these videos have been really helpful and I've been following your channel for quiet a while. But I was hoping you would also post some devlogs about Samurado or Veil of Maya. We would really love to see the progress!

[fabienclotilde]

Tu as entièrement raison. On ne peut pas faire un jeu qui plaira à tout le monde. Il suffit de s'accrocher et de s'amuser tout en continuant d'apprendre.

[teed-ztge]

I am just starting my indie game dev journey. I final have a high level game design doc that I am satisfied with. I know I am going to use Unity for the game engine …. Now what ? 😂 I feel stuck! 😅

[shinkouhai]

0:16 yep. very true why? I kind a hate my game now... the problems? THE STORY IS TOO LONG, and of course long story is good, but my story is just long without context... which actually yeah bad. so... any advice for making a long and rich plots story?

[GnastyMusicTV]

idk if your running out of ideas for videos, but it feels like you've covered these topics before. Either that or ive seen the same advice from other Game Dev YTers before you.