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Nu uh

Great video, what is the name of this game? 2:37

But there s no tiiiiiiime

Thanks for making this video! First because you make a lot of great points that I wholeheartedly agree with, and second because I've been thinking about making a similar style of video (video essay-like where I analyze other games before showing how I apply those concepts in my own game) but worried it would seem strange, so it's really cool to see another channel doing something like that. Great job, and you've earned a subscriber!! Also, a fun fact about Stardew Valley is that the developer was actually unemployed and working on it full-time (~70 hours a week). So while I definitely understand the feeling maybe not the best example to compare yourself with :)

didn't even need to watch the video to agree with the title.. this is a must in game dev and from the games i have looked at over the last year this seems to be a huge issue. I am learning to be my own game dev/composer/sfx person , been studying indy game sphere for the last 2 years. have over 1200 games in my steam wishlist. reason is i review how well games do after they release. not in videos or anything. i just review them for my own personal knowledge.. ppl are falling short on dynamic level design often and also enemies.. a lot of really good games have released that i was hopeful for but then find out their tiling is so boring, not the art.. the method of tiling..long flat, too many right angles. not dynamic enough... I play mostly 2d games. Another thing games are falling short on is enemies, i'll walk into a room and it's just too easy for me. more enemies more combat. more chaos.. hollow knight can teach alot about this... this is why games take so long.. A current unreleased game i have high hopes for is Emberbane.. the combat and movement is amazing.. but it could fail if they don't level design well or have enough enemy variation.. the game needs to be fun. i wish them all the best anyway. i hope it's a banger.. .my favorite indy game by far this year was The Last Medic.. he's a youtuber named Once Upon a Synth who made this game. and all the music.. a true gem of a game.. best game since Celeste.. i make Celeste mods and music for them, part of my game dev training, is how i just learned fmod, stylegrounds and pixel art. and good level design. i'm still working on that part with a few more mods. sorry for writing a book here lolol cheers.

This is true, but it's kinda problematic. Yes, you have to play a lot and constantly learn how games are made-what makes the flow and what the standard level of polish is at the time. But yeah, development takes a lot of time. Like, a lot of time. I mostly play games with my kids now, and I’m glad to have some time for that. But big RPGs? I can maybe play one or two a year, definitely not a lot. Most of the games I played were when I was a teenager. Now I’m a full-time developer and also an indie developer in my free time. It takes 8+6 hours a day, so there’s not a lot of time for playing-or even sleeping! But I love it anyway. I did level design, 3D modeling, and environment work for Hobo: Tough Life, I work as a vegetation designer for ETS2 and ATS, and I'm also developing my own game, Master Leaf Blower: Crazy Sim. You’re totally right, though-it’s just not easy to play a lot of games anymore.

Is there a way to play your Snake game? I think that people from r/incremental_games would like it

I also stand by this belief but If only making games doesn't take so much time as playing games. Time, Energy, Work-Life Health balance makes this extremely hard because of games being a mixed genre (Art Heavy, Technically weak developer here). Maybe if you are specialized in an aspect of game development + a team this would be easier. Some games take a while to fully show their mechanics too (Atlus games are notorious for this which is the ballpark of the games some of us want to learn from)

I've tried to communicate this to other devs too. It's baffling to me how many game developers think that playing other games is a waste of time. If you don't expose yourself to large variety of games, you'll have an extremely limited understanding of what's possible and how many different ways you can do things. Thanks for the vid!

Entering famous gamejams helps a lot too , to discover interesting mecanics that you can take inspiration you can play a lot in a little time and realize what would make a cool complete game

Great content👍

Understood. Downloading League.

its hard to put time into playing games when you dedicate your time to learning to develop and actually developing games. indie game dev is a very lonely road if you dont come from a job and most of that time is put to technical aspects of it. If you play games as an indie, most of the time they become lazy and dont learn the technical skills required to make a good game.

A lot of developers would rather spend their time developing since time is money. Some also just can't play games anymore since they start analyzing the game design and cannot focus on enjoying the game. Yes, this can happen for some devs.

I do think that if you're trying to actually sell a game, then you should play more games. But most developers are just hobbyists, and so they can do whatever they want. But if they decide one day to stick their finger out and say "I want YOU to play My game." Well if that's the case, you better know what kind of games I like.

Awesome video. Love how straightforward your style is

Devs should play less games and make more experiences outside games. Inspiration and creativity increase as you look out of your specific field.

Great video! Playing a variety of games is a good way to gain inspiration. Sometimes the best ideas just come from putting random things together that wouldn't normally be. My problem is not having the discipline to stick with a game project, even if the idea is good. Ideas, while important...are also cheap. I have dozens of unfinished projects from this year alone, and it's because I get bored and start a new one. Which, after a few weeks, means I look at those old projects and feel what I can best describe as a sense of mild dread/anxiety stemming from the complexity of what I created and having to re-aquaint myself with the whole thing before being able to make progress. And then that's when I decide to refactor the whole thing and start the project again, repeating the infinite process of unfinished game projects.

If your a game developer ufo 50 is a must play.

This advice is stupidly simple and yet I think it may be true that majority of game developers don't play many games. Maybe they know games from courses, watched some streams but they don't have that much free time or are burnt out from crunch and don't want to. I think it's why modern AAA games are interactive movies with lacking gameplay. Another issue is that game devs don't learn from each other. There are so many simple, stupid design decisions. If you don't have resources to develop your own mechanics, or your UI sucks, then steal design from someone else and change it a little so as not to cause copyright infringement.

like the content! it's very informative and give insights

Pls okay but someone buy all my wishlist. Only over 10k games :}

Hmmmm, I played 250+ demos just this year, but I kinda disagree :D I think there's value to outsider art (which honestly Balatro could be) and for similar reasons? Like, how many game would you have to play to find a Moon Cat? Most games aren't reinventing their genre or coming up with new solutions. Playing a ton of games would most likely result in you thinking "oh okay, *that's* how you do this thing" and do the same thing as everyone else. I think it's more valuable to play specific games while looking for a specific thing (or in Balatro's case, finally playing Slay the Spire to figure out how they did controller support) that you're probably not even noticing unless you're looking for it, than to just randomly play games expecting to absord knowledge. Also! A lot of time you don't even need to play the games, just watching footage of it is enough. I think ultimately there's still a lot more things to do with games, and even the concept of mashing things together is still limiting what's possible, since it relies on stuff that already exist. I've mostly just made jam games but I almost always tried making something new, and yeah sometimes it doesn't work as well, and it's often not stuff that could be scaled up, but I think there's a lot of space for new things, not just tweaks. And even in that space, most people's instinct is to recreate things they love (which isn't bad, but that's how you get to a place where games do a lot of the same thing). I think the main problem is dev being inspired *exclusively* by games. That being said, I also think it's important to look at what similar games do yeah, for example I've seen a bunch of first time puzzle games kinda fail or miss obvious stuff because the dev didn't try other games in the genre. I think that's what makes good creators at this point, since it'll not just be about playing games, but knowing what needs to be incorporated in your game or not, and like everything with games, it depends on your goals. Turns out going against every modern puzzle knowledge went pretty well for Void Strangers, so yeah, if people have a clear and strong enough vision, it might also work out. Edit: I forgot but also yeah, I'd say variety is more important than volume. It's more interesting to see how different genre solve similar problems, what their respective conventions are, etc. than to play 10s of games in a similar genre and nothing else. Basically: I think playing lots of games can be a good practice, but it has to be conscious, and as exhaustive as possible for one person.

what if you play more games and develop very little 😂

Does your game play well on Ubuntu/Linux Mint?

For the value of advice you're giving and the quality of this video, you don't deserve to have only 200 subscribers

Also, thinking about an hypothetical "game dev course", I thought: "In literature college, we have mandatory books to read. Would there be a "mandatory games to play" in a game dev college?" and while that sounds like a good idea, games can be experienced in very different ways. You could force someone to play Super Metroid, but one person might read the manual and appreciate the level design, while most people can beat the entire game without knowing what a shinning spark is. So... How effective would that be? I say the same as the video: just play more games.

That's why when there's documentaries from the 90s dev offices, there are arcade machines all around the cubicles. Those nerds LOVED gaming. Nowadays, making a game involves so many disciplines, that not all devs actually play games. But the best ones are still from nerds that wanna build something they'd have fun with.

They’d is exactly what I think makes Masahiro Sakurai a great game dev. He has played a TON of games of all different genres and quality, from retro to modern. And he has a deep understanding of the mechanics in said games. I’d also like to point out that the games don’t have to be popular or well received. Even obscure and/or “bad” games might have interesting ideas and mechanics to learn from and maybe even improve on.

Dont lock yourself ever to one genre, or even try a genre your not comfortable with, because in that you may spot something as a solution that those who are numb to the genre will not notice, but it is the risk taking thats involved!

I disagree. You just get the same things over and over and it becomes a feedback loop of arbitrary convention. The developers of Pokemon, Minecraft, and Zelda, for example, were inspired by real life, not other games, first and foremost. Your approach makes games stand out less because almost every indie game now is a quirki, "deep", shader-filled, genre-defying, hard-to-follow mess inspired by the same games every other game was. Celeste. Undertale. Minecraft. Hollow Knight. All with this fake sense of awe that you tell yourself these games make you feel. The more games you play, the more games stay the same.

To butcher a Quote, "I am not great man, I stand on the Shoulders of Giants" If you're not playing other games and seeing and understanding their good ideas, you'll be unable to improve them in your own game.

Crush crush jumpscare

I play a shitload of games :) good video!

Ive been in a game playing slump since starting on a project a few months back, but this video made me inspired to start a new one. def think its what i needed.

It's true. I've been told many times in my career in the industry that I have a very good "game sense", and that is primarily something that comes with playing a lot of games, thinking about those games, and particularly the mechanics and design choices of those games. Notice also that I specifically say games, plural, and not just one game for a long time. That could be useful if you are trying to work on that specific game, but you will have blind spots and may also miss a lot of lessons that could be learned from other genres. Unfortunately this "game sense" is not something that translates well to a job resume, and also is hard to justify to the head up share holders etc. So people are hardly ever hired for this ability. Once in, however, it will do wonders to set you apart.

I wish I liked creating more than playing.

100% agree. I've been a variety gamer for over 27 years, and a dev for about 6, and I definitely feel like it's been a tremendous advantage for me to have the gaming experience I have when it comes to developing my own game. I think it's kind of like tasting a bunch of different food when learning how to cook. By tasting a variety of different recipes and ingredients, you start to build a palette and a repertoire of knowledge on how different ingredients work, or don't work together. Then you can use that knowledge to improve upon an existing recipe, create a new spin on something familiar, or create a whole new dish entirely, and you'll be able to do it much easier than if you had only eaten a handful of different things.

I don't play many AAA games that I hear about, because money. But there are way many itchio games that are free and original.

Playing games is to developing them as laughing is to telling jokes.

2:17 yah 99.9% of devs don't care about this. The industry is overwhelmingly occupied by ground floor jobbers and non gamer execs.

I might go to the hang for what im about to say, but, technically, NFSW is a somewhat unexplored genre

Hard to NOT recommend UFO50. It is best game of 2024 for me. And candidate for a GOAT status in the future. I give it a almost 100% probability for that. it's content is incredible.

I really liked this video and your take! Super chill video and encouraging! I often have a hard time getting myself to play more games, but you've inspired me to look a bit outside of my comfort zone and to make sure to try some more in the future! Great job man!

We all have to work a shitty full-time job get a grip man

As hardcore gamer turned DEV this is so true. I partly became dev because i noticed in all genres especially now they will be outdated in one area that another genre has nailed down. Also defs agree so much with alot of this Like the whole segment at 4:30

It's great that people think about what can net them a hit in such an economically risky field but as far as I know there's no method that is known to work beyond just keeping at it, or the many million dollar games studios with around 1000 people involved still only know marketing and recognisability as working strategies despite being able to recruit just about any talent they want. I think doing a game that's "inspired" and thus like another game has a big downside as well: gamers have an unfortunately hierarchical view of games that I think many developers miss, they often believe that a game is "this but worse" in which case it hinges a lot on trying to upstage their prior love, which is significantly harder than just making something great. I do really agree that people should diversify their influences but also not to trust that it will work, there's thousands of failed indies for every big success. There's decades upon decades of game studies and afaik nobody knows how to get a hit beyond more recognition.

People who devlog on youtube are as much RUclipsrs, developing takes do much time it's difficult to play "enough" and if you're a youtube creator to boot you have far less time still. I think everyone wants to study the form a bit more but it's not really clear how to cram that in

bangers

I dont think they have barely any time to play games