New video in the works
44 - 2
Is uncertainty stopping you from making a game?
If you've always wanted to make a game but, for whatever reason, you just never did it... why not?
What's really stopping you?
It might feel like there are a lot of reasons NOT to make a game, like feeling that the market is already oversaturated, that it will be too difficult, or that making anything worthwhile will simply take too much time and too much effort.
Which is fair...
But, what if you knew for sure, with 100% certainty, that you'll be able to finish your game, that people will love it, and that people will buy it?
So, making your game would still take time, effort, and money, but at the end of it, if you DID do it, you would definitely get what you want out of it.
You'd do it, right?
Now, that's a pretty wild guarantee but, as it turns out, it's not quite as far-fetched as you might think.
Because all we're really talking about here is risk.
The risk that you can't work out how to make part of your game.
The risk that it doesn't turn out the way that you want it to.
Or the risk that no one wants to buy it.
And the great thing about risk is that you can reduce it.
Sometimes you can even remove it entirely.
The general idea of risk reduction is that you decide what the most important problems to solve are and then you work on them first, before you spend any time, money or effort on anything else.
So if your game has a technical feature that, if you can't do it, means that the game will be impossible to finish, you work on it first, before anything else.
Or if you want to know if people are going to like your game, then your priority is to get a playable version in their hands as quickly as possible, to find out what they think.
This can save you, literally, years of work.
Because it takes those 'moments of truth' that might normally happen at the end of your project, like finding out if your game is fun, or if it works, or if it will sell, and it moves them to the start, where you can actually do something about them.
So let me know, what's the biggest risk that's stopping YOU from making a game?
And how would you feel if that risk was gone?
37 - 3
Why did Activision run ads for a game that doesn't exist?
You might have seen an Ad recently for Crash Bandicoot Brawl, a game that you can't buy, and that you can't play.
And the ad is... just awful. AI generated slop that, at a glance, kind of looks right, but as soon as you look closer, looks terrible.
So why did they do it?
Put simply, it's a risk reduction exercise, to test the market for a game that they MIGHT make in the future.
Now, I don't love this.
If I'm being honest, I hate it.
But there are lessons to learn from this that you can apply to your game project.
I think it's fair to say that, as a first time solo developer, the biggest obstacles to making a game are likely to be:
1. Can I finish it?
2. Will people like it?
3. Is it going to be a commercial success?
And sure, there are other reasons to make a game but, ultimately, if you want to make a living from game development, this is probably what's on your mind, so much so that it might be enough to stop you from getting started in the first place.
After all, if you knew, for sure, that the months and years you'll spend making game would definitely pay off, you'd do it right?
That's where risk reduction comes in.
It's a technique to prioritise your tasks so that the biggest risks to a project being successful are evaluated first, BEFORE you spend time and money on other parts of the project.
For you, the biggest risk might be being able to actually make the most important part of your game. For example, imagine making Portal, but leaving the portals until last, only to find out that you don't know how to make them!
Or it might be testing your concept to see if people are interested in it, by making a demo, doing early access, or just sharing your ideas.
Which sounds obvious but I've seen brilliant, talented developers fall into this exact trap, where they make the rest of their game, only to have the project be derailed by a feature that they should have worked out much, much earlier.
So. what's the biggest challenge to your project? What's the one thing that is so important that it's a risk to the whole project, because THAT is the problem you should be working on first.
Just maybe don't do it by churning out AI slop 👍🏻
25 - 1
One of the most useful pieces of advice I ever got, felt like a brutal dig at the time.
I studied commercial music at university, which involved a fair amount of live performance, which, admittedly, I was not great at.
One day, in a group rehearsal, I ended with an improvised guitar solo.
It was basic... up and down a pentatonic scale with a half-hearted bend in the middle.
Afterwards, the lecturer looked straight at me and said...
"If you can't do that well, you shouldn't do it at all".
Brutal.
Soul-crushing.
But honest and, in hindsight, really, really useful advice.
Because I didn't need to try to jam my lukewarm attempt at a guitar solo into the performance and, by doing so, because it wasn't any good, I made the whole thing worse by trying to do more.
This advice works for game development as well.
It can be easy to get caught up trying to add extra features to games that are really, really difficult to do well, like spoken dialogue, realistic animation, complex design features, and any kind of online multiplayer.
Huge tasks that, even if you do them half right, might still make your game worse.
Meaning that sometimes, if it's not the main focus of your project, taking something out completely doesn't just make your project easier, it might make it better as well.
So what's your embarrassing guitar solo? What are you spending time trying to make that you could just as easily take out?
And, being as honest with yourself as my lecturer was with me, will your project be better for it?
45 - 3
If you're in the early stages of a game project, one of the most useful things you can do is get your priorities straight.
What do I mean by that?
It can sometimes be easy to remove obstacles in chronological order.
What game should I make?
How should I make it?
What tools should I use?
How do I use those tools?
First things, first!
Which makes sense and, after all, there are some decisions you will have to work out before you do anything else.
But, some of the first things you'll do when learning how to make a game, may not be the most important problems to solve.
Instead, an important problem is one that represents the biggest risk to you getting what you want from making a game.
For example, if you want to make a game that is a commercial success, your biggest risk is spending years making it, only to find out that nobody wants to buy it.
Or, if your idea involves a big technical challenge, your first job is to find out if you're going to be able to actually build what you have planned.
These are risk-reduction exercises, and the idea is that they can help you to remove the biggest obstacles to success (whatever that looks like for you) in the shortest amount of time.
So let me know, what's the biggest obstacle to your game project?
42 - 4
When I was a kid, there were two things that I loved. Art and video games.
I didn't really know how to make games, so I drew them. I would make mockups of games in Deluxe Paint 3 on the Amiga, and then animate them to make them look real.
Which, at the time, felt kind of silly.
After all, I knew I wasn't really making games, I was just drawing them.
But, what I didn't know then, is that drawing a game can actually be the fastest way to design it.
When you draw a picture of your game, you fast-track the design process.
The really important design questions are immediately obvious to you, features that you thought were going to be important may not be, and it's possible to see what your game might look like when it's finished.
That's a huge amount of information from something that really doesn't take very long to do at all.
So much so that, in my opinion, the most effective type of design document is a one-page design, focussed on a drawing (a technique I learned from Stone Librande's GDC talk).
And the best part about it? Even if you do it badly, you're still going to learn something from it.
It's that effective.
For example, here's a sample of a design sketch I made for my supermarket game.
It's a bit of a mess, and not a great example of a GDD but even so, it's still useful, and answered a TON of design questions I had about my project.
So try it for yourself, sketch your game idea, it'll take ten minutes and you'll be surprised how much you can learn from it.
60 - 3
What's your game idea that got away?
I wanted to make a game about managing a supermarket.
The idea was simple, the concept was appealing, and I've even worked in a supermarket before, so I have real experience that I can use.
But, I never made the game.
I started it a couple of times for fun, but I never really took it seriously and, as a result, TEN years later, I still haven't made it.
Instead, I've been working on games as a composer, a sound designer, and as an audio developer. Which has been great, but I can't help but think about the game I didn't work on.
What's the game you never made?
Are you still going to make it?
And do you regret not starting it sooner?
23 - 4
When I first started learning how to make games, one of the biggest problems I had was that, while starting a project seemed to be relatively easy, I would always get stuck as soon as soon as it began to get more complicated.
It would reach a point where I wasn't sure what I should be doing next, and everything I did do just made the rest of the game harder to work on.
At the time, I thought that I just didn't know enough about game development.
However, after spending 5 years researching the basics of game dev, for my articles, for my videos, and for my course, and after analysing the real reasons behind best-practice rules and advice, I realised that there was one thing, one piece of advice that I was ignoring.
Keep your game project easy to change.
In all of the research for my game dev content, this is the one piece of advice that keeps coming up again, and again, and again.
It's THAT important.
A project that's easy to change is easy to work on, it's easy to iterate and, importantly, it's easier to finish.
Whereas a project that is difficult to change can easily become a mess of code and systems that don't work well together.
Meaning that working on your game stops being fun, so you stop doing it.
As a result, learning how to keep a project easy to change can be the single most useful skill you practice as a new developer. But, while it is incredibly useful, it's also very easy to take this advice too far.
In my latest video, I talk about what easy to change actually means for a game project, why it's so important, and how you can use it on your own project.
watch video on watch page
17 - 0
How long have you wanted to make a game for?
Is it a month? A year? Longer?
It's easy to want to make a game, and hard to actually do it.
I spend a lot of time working on games, and I've done a lot of work that I'm really proud of, but when it comes to making a project that is just my own, even though I've got a game idea that I really like, I've never made a commitment to finishing it.
As a result, my little supermarket game, which I work on every now and then for fun, STILL isn't finished.
Why is that a problem?
Because I first thought about making it TEN YEARS AGO!!
Which I regret, because I could have made that game and started another one by now!
So, I want to know, if you've got a game that you want to make... someday, how long has it been since you first thought about it?
Be honest...
And, more importantly, what are you doing about it?
32 - 11
Are you stuck in Tutorial Hell? and would you know it if you were?
Tutorial Hell is a term used to describe consuming educational resources without actually acting on them.
But it's not quite as simple as that...
The way I see it, there are two levels to tutorial hell.
The first, deepest, darkest level is taking tutorials that you simply don't need to take.
This can be pretty obvious, it means you're learning skills you probably won't use, and techniques that don't apply to the type of game that you're making.
While the second level is a little more subtle. It's taking tutorials you DO need, but then never acting on the advice you get, or the skills you learn.
Which basically amounts to the same thing.
So what can you do about it?
Well, if you're a spectator, meaning that you're taking tutorials and watching videos just because you're interested in game development content, but you're not actually planning on making a game, then don't do anything. Tutorial hell doesn't apply to you, so watch the videos, take the courses, and enjoy them.
But, if your end goal is to make a game, then spending time in Tutorial Hell can stop you from ever achieving that.
However, tutorials are not the problem, in fact, they're the solution...
To get out, you're going to need to reframe your thinking around educational content. So, instead of starting with tutorials, start with your goal, to make a game, and then ask yourself HONESTLY what's the first thing that's stopping you from doing that.
Chances are your biggest obstacle will be something like you don't know what game you want to make, or you have an idea but you don't know what it will look like, or you have a design already but don't know how to code it.
The trick here is to identify the real problems that are standing in your way, not the problems that feel like progress but don't actually move you closer to your goal.
Because you WILL have to take tutorials and learn things to make a game, even if you've done it before, so it's not as simple as "Tutorials are BAD", because tutorials aren't the problem.
The problem is WHY you're taking tutorials in the first place, and being honest with yourself about the roadblock you're trying to remove with them.
And while that can be tricky to get right, if you can do it, you'll be able to unlock a huge amount of time that you can spend working in the RIGHT direction, and escape Tutorial Hell.
34 - 4
In-depth game development tutorials and resources for beginners.