To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/Acerola/ you’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription! #ad Had to put the monthly project on hold because some things came up so I decided to write a bit about some stuff I've been thinking about lately. I don't think there's anything particularly enlightening or deep in this video but hopefully it can put the industry into perspective for those interested in entering or prevent someone from wasting years of their life on a dream they aren't seriously actualizing. I suppose this is also an argument against the jack of all trades approach many try to take, but really, you can do whatever you want. Also, everyone that hated on me for my simple poll question can submit their apology forms to my twitter dms, thanks. See you all at SIGGRAPH!
I am final year high schooler (major math and science) I am doing some work on game dev. at Sundays, and I probably sir for 8 hour straight trying variety of things to make work a single thing and my code is getting less spagetied day by day.
Hey, good video, I also loved your video about Lethal Company's wacky rendering and I still come back to it sometimes. I'd like to note that development on Lethal Company started in April of 2022 with very little knowledge of multiplayer game code. But when I think about it, I didn't really make the game alone at all; I leaned heavily on assets others had made for me, whether it be the Unity game engine, the netcode framework/API, the tutorials and forums, the random level generation logic, or the textures and sound samples. My friends constantly playtested with me. And I was able to spend basically every waking moment working on the game as I still lived in my parents' home. If all those people didn't have my back, this thing would not exist. True solo projects are probably even more rare than it would seem.
Zeekers! Yeah, I think the "10 hours a day" lines you hear so often is often misleading. When people say this, it typically means a large number of things: 1: They might have had a place they can work on it without needing to worry about the cost of living. 2: They might have already had savings, an existing fanbase to support them / success on Patreon or kickstarter, or were already successful. 3: They weren't actually working 10 hours a day every day. I just think it's important because you also hear so much "I QUIT MY JOB TO WORK ON MY DREAM GAME" stuff and these people are often already huge youtubers with a massive base. I.E, their major skill is marketing / content creation, or due to other reasons can risk doing that. Solo dev is DEFINATELY NOT the place to put all your cards and I'd hate for someone to take big risks on it until they've gotten somewhere already. Solo dev isn't quite as solo as we think, and everyone lives totally different lives with different opportunities available or lack of. I published my first game, and it was both a mountain of work, but also completely unsuccessful. I would not have been able to without being able to live with parents.
Another factor that was only kinda hinted at is time. As someone who hypothetically has all the skills i would need to make the game i want to make, but also has a completely separate unrelated full time job, it is incredibly easy to burn yourself out. Doubly so if you dislike your full time job. Not having enough free time can be just as much, if not more of a hinderance than not having the needed skills.
@@Acerola_t sorry you definitely did. i just meant that regarding time you mainly focused on the time it takes to learn the skills and the amount of development time games of that scope took solo (or almost solo) devs. I was just trying to elaborate that if you can’t work on the project full time, that number gets way bigger, as well as the mental energy that an unfulfilling day job can also cause. I just worded that very poorly cause i was half asleep. You might have also mentioned this or something similar and i just missed it. Definitely didn’t mean to come across like i was criticizing the video you made a lot of excellent points.
@@BernierBrandonagreed. I’m a developer, artist, and writer, but I work in tech full time and am often doing 45-60 hour weeks. Finding the time to write, much less sit in front of UE for enough hours recently has been tough.. won’t give up though :)
It reveals a lot about you and your passions by observing what you do in your free time. I was a Chemical Engineer once and did not really like it. So pivoted to games. It has been a struggle, but a struggle I will happily overwork for.
Sick. The Stardew valley guy also had a girlfriend that paid all his bills for about 3 years. Even when you have a budget of $0, you are costing someone something.
I'm a little disappointed you didn't mention Cave Story. Developed by a solo developer, Pixel, in C++ from scratch in his free time over 5 years. The Quintessential Indie Game made by the Grandfather of Indie Game Development! He's such an inspiration
I remember Cave Story. Also, Daniel Remar's *incredible* work on "Iji" should never, ever be forgotten. To this day, the gameplay, music, bizarre extras, and "re-speccing nuances" rival those of 90% of present day indie games.
@@Novastar.SaberCombat Remar's work is amazing, but personally I'm a bigger fan of his much more minimalist Hero Core (and the earlier Hero to a lesser extent). The first time I saw the game on early youtube I was instantly hooked. The gameplay combined with the music and the aesthetic makes something amazing.
I saw an interview with the Stardew Valley guy where he said something like "yeah some days it was just not happening and I quit early, and some days if I thought of something I thought would be cool to add, I'd stay up all night to make it work". So he's still human like the rest of us and not a 10-hr-every-day machine, he just found a project that was really well suited to his skills, scoped appropriately, and fit an unrealized popular niche. Omori ended up in development hell for a while where people thought the game wasn't ever going to happen, and Omocat (seems to have) switched a lot of her focus away from the game and towards maintaining her online store because that was what was actually paying her bills. But I'm also pretty sure Pedro Silva never stopped making music while the game was trying to fix its issues because holy crap he put out some phenomenal music for that game. I know a number of people attempting to be solo game developers and the biggest challenge for everyone isn't so much technical because anyone can learn anything, but it's hard for everyone to stay motivated or not fall into depression when you've been working at it for a long time and are keenly aware of how far you have left to go. If you put a lot of early focus on art, you'll be well into the project and the game will feel too simple and boring. If you focus too much on mechanics, the game will feel like a toy/pet project using placeholder art for depressingly long. Also, Acerola, your style of art looks a ton like a game I've been playing called World of Horror, and I would totally play a game by you if you made something similar.
Yeah for motivation it's important to have a mix of programming and art. If I spent too long on programming sometimes I'll just add a bit of art to the game to prove to myself that yes I am still capable of making the game look good once the time comes to need proper polish.
I had an idea as I read what you said about the game being either a pretty but hollow prototype or all made of placeholders: what if you just prototype art and mechanics separately? So you draw your concepts and work on models in parallel to working on your placeholder prototype, but don't fully try to integrate them all at once?
Having started game dev and programming a year ago i was pretty shocked at how people underestimated how complex simple looking games actually are, especially after seeing the poll you made
knowing how much work something will take in games development is a dark art and only my coworkers who look like part of their soul has been lost seem able to estimate accurately
Yeah A lot goes into games, what seems like a simple feature could of had tons of hours of debugging. For my current game project My recoil system took a while to make fun and interesting. But now it causes the player to glitch through the map but only on *one* of the maps… and only when crouching… I think its how thin the ground. But hey, we learn.
My favorite example is how many indies think they can make their own Soulslike just because From's engine has technical issues and they reuse assets. They reuse assets because the games still require a zillion assets and animations even with a large team!
I made a UI-heavy game and I've expressed to some people how much making UIs: 1: Sucks. 2: Is much harder than it is assumed to be, because we like to assume things just work by themselves. A lot of people just don't get how a UI could be considered hard or tedious. I might have spent 2+ months on making UI alone. Like anything, the scope and context is very important. An HP and stamina bar and nothing else is fine. But making a whole unit editor and UI for a strategy game requires so many goddamn little icons and of course you have to program the functionality of every single button. I have two sliders that determine HP and speed of a unit, which also determines unit cost. Here's what that means: -Preset slider in UE5 (nice). -Easy positioning with UE5's widget system (nice). -Those sliders need text with it, of course, so add two more things. -Make the text displays actually update when the slider moves. -Oh, but the slider values display in 0.0 -> 1.0 format so you need to format the text first before it goes to display. (0.1 --> 10, 1.0 --> 100.. etc) -But the cost values are different, so you need to format both differently. This is basically just a math equation. -Make new text display for the total unit cost. -Make it update when a slider is moved. -Realize it only is taking account one slider, so change code to consider both. -Oh but now moving the sliders can cause that issue where if you move them just right, you can manipulate it into giving you free units, so you need to add safeguards. -What happens if they try to save a unit well over cost? -What happens if a unit is so cheap it's in the negatives? -Do these need to be hidden or locked at any point? (In my case no, as the entire menu gets revealed/hidden when needed.) -These values don't save themselves either, so you need to also be sure to save the final values to the save game. -But of course you only save it if the unit is valid. -The sliders don't just magically remember, you need to now load the saved value whenever the menu is loaded and update the sliders. -For some reason the slider being loaded from a save doesn't count as being updated and the text displays don't update. So you need a fix for that. Tons of bugs like this. ^That's JUST for some sliders in a UI that has multiple nested menus each with completely different functionality. It's not just "put a slider in and it works". This is EXACTLY how is it for the art side of it, too. You don't realize how many menu assets you need until you're right in the middle of making something. You don't have a mockup for everything, you think of new icons, new dropshadows that would look nice, entire new menus (that you need a new background for)...
10:47 Slight correction: Lethal Company actually begun development sometime around early 2022 according to Zeekerss’ patreon, so it took about a year and a half to make
@@alfonshedstrom9859More like massively impressive. Making a mostly feature-complete game with multiplayer, a decent variety of planets and monsters, and an actually fun gameplay loop in under 2 years is insane. AAA studios usually fail to pull something like that off, let alone a single indie dev.
In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook." But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist *can* come from *anywhere*. - Ratatouille's Monster, Ratatouille
I dont vibe with this though, "anyone can cook" does not mean "anyone can be a great artist". Anyone can cook, the level of artistry is not really important. It is a great sentiment, actually
@@stormillion5002 in the movie, both Chef Gusteau and Ego were talking about the kind of fine cuisine where artistry is the main aspect being judged in a dish. To most people, cooking is a useful day to day skill but to those two (and to the other characters) it wasn't.
@@falquicao8331 The dish that impresses the critic at the end reminds him of home cooking. I actually think that the movie is true to Chef Gusteau's message as it is home cooking that ultimately wins over elitism.
@@falquicao8331I don't really think that's what Chef Gusteau was talking about. He said it on TV (the one Remy watches in the beginning) and wrote it in a book (the one Colette sees at the end). A message that the general public sees next to examples of recipes. I think the intent is that anyone can cook this recipe, not that you might be able to cook my recipe, or maybe you can't, because you're bad
Like you said. Don't take "indie" and "solo project" at face value. A lot of "small indie teams" are actually not that small and received contribution from several temporary workers, even if they can't be considered AAA. A lot of publishers love to sell stuff as "indie" and "small personal project."
In general I wish more people were open to the idea of making stuff on RPGmaker and other similar programs to start with. Game dev isn’t easy, but it gets a lot easier if you start small. I think a lot of people forget that basically every breakout indie hit has a wealth of history behind it rooted in creating romhacks, mods or other, simpler games. If your goal is to become the next Toby Fox with your first game, then it’s no wonder it seems daunting - you’ve set a standard for yourself that you simply cannot feasibly attain. Start small and learn a little with every small thing you try and things get a lot easier
I was lucky enough to learn programming really early on way back in elementary school using scratch. It gave me a really good idea of programming and how to make games so moving on to oa game engine was pretty easy for me
Here are some facts that i know (i'm a rhythm gamer so many of these are from the world of rhythm games): - dev of DDLC started off as a SSB melee pro player and modder - the guys behind pump it up infinity later teamed up as anarch entertainment and created the NOISZ game series, which are basically bullethell + rhythm game games. - Cheryl Stelli was at a QA position in Anarch entertainment before making trying to make an RPG, cancelling it, then making Vivid/stasis, a rhythm game with arg elements. Assets from the rpg were reused, but where I won't tell because it's a spoiler. - Puzzles for Vivid/stasis were made by k//eternal, head of anarch entertainment. Just mentioning to show how building connections can get in handy. - k//eternal used to make levels at Lowiro for Arcaea, yet another rhythm game. - taronuke started out by making charts for stepmania, then NotITG (DDR modcharts), got a job at Lowiro for level design for Arcaea, and then left Lowiro and joined anarch entertainment again at a level design position. I may have mistaken here, or have missed out on something though.
the problem is i'm a gameplay first kinda guy, and RPGmaker gameplay is... not great, to put it lightly. you really need to have your narrative carry RPGmaker games.
I like that you mention the extra time to learn skills outside of the actual development cycle time. Its something a lot of people never mention and thus it sneaks up onto new people. A mechanically complex game could be made in 2 years, but it took 10 years of studying in or out of university, creating personal projects, and practicing on larger projects you eventually abandon to get to that point.
I think these should be included if you took them on for the purpose of making games, but otherwise I don't think time spent learning skills should be included. For example, you spend your whole life learning all sorts of basic skills such as language, that are used for the game but weren't learned for the sake of it. If you were already a programmer before becoming a game dev, the time spent becoming a programmer shouldn't be included.
i think the biggest issue with peoples expectations of making games is that they don't factor in the time it takes to make an enjoyable, cohesive, and polished experience. Making all the features and assets for a game like undertale seems like it wouldnt take too much time, but bringing them together, testing, iterating, and polishing these features to make for an enjoyable gameplay experience is what takes up most of the development process imo
Also there's so much stuff that makes up games that's either basically completely invisible to players but absolutely necessary or so seemingly "obvious" you'd never think to consider it a part of the game until you're the one in the weeds making it
You're underestimating the features and assets. Speaking as someone who is trying to solo make a game its the assets and putting things into the level which take the most time. Undertrale has like 200 minutes of music which even if you wrote and created each song perfectly the first time with zero rewrites is still a solid 100 hours to physically write. Then there are about 1000 sprites including many with small animations that play, both in the battle screen and in the overworld, which is probably another 3000 hours just to draw the pixels alone. Oh also you can't do most of this until the story is coming along because if you dont know the story and the art direction for each level and character then you don't know what to draw.
Iteration is vital and this video barely touches on it. All the valve games threw away several game's worth of content over their dev cycle as they zeroed in on what worked. That's why they're good. If Stardew Valley had used a design document and stuck with the first attempts, it wouldn't have been successful. This is why making a clone is so much faster than something original.
I love how half of the inspirational success stories on RUclips start with "So, I quit my job at [AAA Developer] and went full time!" I spent the past 3 years making deliberately small projects so I can have the competence to do something larger in the future. Properly estimating scope upfront is one of the most underrated skills for new indies, unless you have infinite money
You can make a whole ass game. That whole ass game will be relatively small. You should not start with your magnum opus. You should build and finish smaller projects first. And you probably want to make your first couple games an entire clone, but do it without following a tutorial.
@@blarghblargh I think that's 90% good advice, but honestly I don't think making a clone is necessarily a good idea. I'm wrapping up my first game now, and it's very much original and very much a doable first project. Unless you're just really excited and motivated to make a clone, I think it's ideal to always be creative. It can help prevent burnout and even inspire future projects. Keep it simple ofc, but I say use your personal limitations for inspiration Tl;dr Do whatever motivates you to learn as much as possible
I find it hard riding the line between trying to make people realize they are capable of doing so much more than they realize but also tempering expectation and bringing them down to reality. Its so easy to accidentally discourage people into thinking they cant do something when really they just cant do that thing right now.
Might sound weird, but this actually motivated me! I guess I've convinced myself I'm stupid for not being able to make my dream game in 2 months completely solo with no art skill and no budget and college homework and constant pressure to get a "real" job.... Sounds crazy when you say it out loud... So now that I have a realistic perspective, I actually feel relaxed and hopeful. Starting small will feel good this time.
This resonates with me a lot as a “solo developer” who made it with the help of a handful other people. There’s a whole other aspect to being an indie developer which is taking care of your life, partner, friends and money outside of making the game. Maybe it’s an obvious thing to mention, but once you start working on your game for all those hours, you start to cut down time and resources from everything and everyone else, and it becomes a precarious game of life balance. It’s a greatly overlooked factor of being a committed indie developer.
By the way, Zeekerss made all of the Lethal Company dev-logs on his patreon free-to-view, so you can actually follow the full development cycle of Lethal Company :)
Rather than demotivate me, this video allowed me to realize that the progress I'm making on my own game is actually going well. I was getting very bummed out that the first level of my game was taking several months, but considering I'm learning programming as I go, making all my 3D assets, texturing it by hand painting, and want the game to have very interactive features, I'm probably doing alright! Especially considering I work full time and can only dedicate 3-4 hours a day to it. Thank Acerola! Your videos are what keep me going on this journey(:
Holy heck you're doing well. I'm on the first level of my game and its been a year and a half. BUT if you're developing with good principles and making things scalable then all future levels become faster and faster. My first "level" is what I'm calling it but its more of a multi-room mini dungeon, and each new room takes far less time than the previous one did.
Your doing better than me. ive been off and on for a few years now on a project and still only have basic gameplay. Tho id say whats taking so long for me is trying to make the net code and not have the codebase fall into a unmanageable mess
you would love RPG Maker then, the feels of wanting to achieve something but the majority userbase doesn't even code at all, so no one to ask for, is incredible lol
Working at a AAA studio (a PSS one) on build systems and CI and automation and source control has made me wonder how on earth anyone works efficiently without all of the support you get from having a team who can focus on optimising all that stuff. Mad respect to indies who just about have enough people to cover the requirements and just have to get by with all the non essentials. Also: the piano piece sounded great! I have almost the same piano but mine is red 🔴
I suspect for an indie, especially on single-player projects, the scope is so much smaller that DevOps is beyond even "non-essential". To work towards it at all would be a direct waste of time. A regular git repository hosted on GitHub is all I can think of being needed. The default builds of these engines would be sufficient as well. Maybe you'd need a little more if your game had a commerce service in it, like buying skins for example. However I'm curious what you or others think; maybe I'm missing something.
Well CI and source control is probably not even used by people using game engines. Solo work probably does not even need CI, and if sb is competent and disciplined enough, he does not even need source control(maybe just for the cloud if it develops on multiple PCs).
@@xeostube older stuff still can be also, people have cracked them to avoid the always on stuff. but I don't use any adobe stuff, so I have no idea about any of it
Something that always affects people's estimation of time is that they often think about how fast it would be to "remake" a thing that is already complete. They can look at it holistically and see the extent of the project. If someone's goal was to just "reproduce" a game like Lethal Company and change 5% of it to make it their own it would take much, much less time. And I think that assumption is really common with people who rarely had to deal with the "blank page" problem. Where you can lose hours trying to come up with an ideal you like. Or even worse the "prototyping" problem, where you invest time in learning and creating something you think will be good...only to stand back and realize it sucks and have to start over.
Yeah, that's part of why his question of "how long would it take you to make a game like undertale" is kinda flawed because it's obviously a lot easier to make a game like undertale than to invent undertale in a world where it didnt exist yet.
Thats literally the premise for Landfalls Content Warning. Made by a small group (10 people ish?) in like a month for an April Fools release, and it's quite obvious it's a Lethal Company "clone" (made in good faith, since the Lethal company dev and Landfall both like eachothers games) but since they had a very clear scope and idea they could breeze through development
Semi related, but man I really hated the period where people thought it was cool to hate on GameMaker, mainly just because it's "too easy and simple" and it comes with its own coding language. There were a lot of egotistical programmers back in the 2010s acting like middle schoolers with how much they were trashing on GameMaker. The game engine doesn't matter as you still need to learn how to code and make a game either way 💀
I strongly suspect that most of the self identified programmers who hate(d) on GameMaker have never developed a feature complete project, let alone achieved an appreciable level of mastery in any language. The reason I say that is because learning new languages is just a skill you develop while working on virtually anything that could be considered a standalone piece of software. Sometimes, the language you know isn't technically suited for the task, or it's overcomplicated for what you need to do, or you need to develop supplementary tools in something with more granular control, or you end up shuffling onto another project, or you just really want to explore a new piece of tech that's only well integrated with a handful of languages you don't have experience with, and so on. After a little while, learning the ins, outs, and eccentricities of a new language is just the cost of doing business. There are rare exceptions, of course, but I'd be pretty hard pressed to take complaints about the accessibility of GameMaker or it's language, while also regarding them as an experienced programmer.
I am currently studying game development in universitys (us collge) and one of my own thoughs is that don’t think your weaknesses as obstacles but as oppertunities. If you aren’t good with 2D art or 3D modeling then consider usibn a simple artstyle or just simple shapes/polygons. If you are good at music then consider making a game where it is a core component of the game like a rythm game. If you are good at writing but not programming then make story the main attraction and use the bare minimum programming that it needs.
game dev here! I'd just like to note that the point at 9:38 about avoiding redesigns via a better game design doc is not quite right - any preproduction phase is likely to consist of a handful of design iterations/revisions which often only come about through actual prototyping / building the game (not a document). In other words, it's very normal to not get something right at the start, and in fact the entire process of pre-production/production it's very natural to be reworking things as you go. (Rather than it being possible to make a perfect GDD that'll somehow have you avoid the various revisions)
ALSO Marketing is a huge problem. You have hundreds if not thousands of games that release each month) AND you are in direct competition with multi billion dollar companies (yes, people will play the Elden Ring DLC over your short indie experience 9/10 times), so good luck standing out. Indie Game success essentially boils down to luck, as your time-to-market is way too long (i.e. Mascot Horror Games are very popular now in the indie world, but will they be in 2-4 years when yours is going to release?). A great example is Fear&Hunger, as the game was out for multiple years until SEPW picked up the game and Connor (CDawgVA) turned it into his obsession for a couple of streams before the game brought in any notable amount of money.
Lady Luck is the patron deity of any solo artist without outside support. You could make the best game of all time, but if it can't make exciting enough content for Markiplier to play it, you probably won't sell enough to make the effort monetarily worth it. You don't go into indie development for the money, there are much better and more efficient ways to make your bread, you go in because you feel like you will die if you don't make games and then maybe, with luck and the grace of God, you might make more than $20.
@@Jerryfan271 That remark wasn't wholly related to the luck factor, both are still true. You need to get unbelievably lucky to get picked up by a big enough channel and you need to restrict yourself to game design that lends itself well to internet videos if you want to hit it really big without a marketing budget.
That was the approach I took with the gamejam: super tiny scope, maybe something that would work as a starting point for an "actual" game. But all games count as games, whether they're little proofs of concept or fully-developed things that explore all possible loose ends. Had to teach myself a lot of programming on the fly, but it was a perfect opportunity to pump out a bunch of music which is where I have the most relevant experience. Piano soundin real good btw.
solo development is insane, imagine having a workload of a whole team with only one person doing everything. even if you have all the skills you still need too much time
if you want to know the most 'overscoped' project I know of, there was a man named Roman Opałka who set out to paint all numbers starting at 1 until infinity and did so for 46 years
Even experienced game developers often get gobsmacked by the amount of work they have to do ahead of them. I have thrown away more projects than I would care to admit, simply because the process of moving from preproduction to production is such a monumental shift. You basically have to decide on a quality standard for yourself for the next several years, and stick to it. People also underestimate how many unforeseen problems will worm their way into a project. Using a bad or unfamiliar architecture that will eventually cause you to have to throw out or remake massive chunks of assets and/or code happens frequently. Even as you learn and get better, this never goes away. As a developer, you must become accustomed to it, or you'll drive yourself mad with all the revisions you'll need to do to make something work. For instance, I spent the last 2 months just programming the tools necessary to build some of the systems I want easier because I know it'll save me hassle later down the line. 2 months just on tools that will likely save me 4-5 months 2 years from now...
Acerolla - Makes RUclips presentations on niche subjects that keep viewers watching for 15-40 minutes a pop. Also Acerolla, apparently - "Doesn't a very good writer."
even as someone who's been playing games since i was a kid and is in my 30s now, i honestly don't think i truly understood just how complicated game development was until i started working as a QA tester for a AAA studio. i loved that job, it was very enlightening and i did it for 3 years, and would still be doing it if not for how things are with the industry right now. now i'm working on an interactive fiction game. gotta start somewhere!
I have tried so, so hard to educate people that game development is not a smaller and simpler subset of development. It is a COMPLEX AND DIFFICULT SPECIALTY of development. You will have every single problem you would have developing any other large complex system, plus an extensive series of additional problems nobody else ever has. And if you don't have development experience, it's likely that you are catastrophically wrong about how large and complex your game's system is. Everything looks simple until you open it up and look at the insides.
Hi, game developer here! I find it quite entertaining that you spend the entire video explaining how complex all the different skills are that go into development of the game, yet that still doesn't even cover the complete picture. For me, for example, it is the most difficult part to let people know about my game (promotion & marketing).
There are all these great talented solo developers, and then there's Chris Sawyer, who made Roller Coaster Tycoon (sans graphics and sound) in 3 years by himself... ...in ASSEMBLER.
Great video. I just finished a duo project with a friend and in 7 months (nights and weekends) we completed just the barest of games. It's fulfilling to finish a project but honestly gives me even more respect for solo devs/small teams making huge projects and grinding for years.
The lot that tells others how easy game development is is the same lot that 30 seconds later offers their ULTIMATE ONE STOP SHOP GAME DEVELOPMENT 101 ALL INCLUDED, INSIDER SECRETS course for only 99,00.. One would assume if game development is so easy, why aren't they making games for a living, guess baiting wishful people into signing up for some blind leading the blind course that they came up based on their few shitty unoptimized projects in the past pays more! Bit of a extreme statement, but I definitely think there's a lot of truth to this.
@@IcarusFormaldehyde Every faucet of life. And you know what, for some cases, fine. The saying "those who can't do, teach" holds merit in some cases, you can be a good coach without being the best, but the thing is, all these cases require years of dedication and effort. And that's what sets apart those whose teaching has some virtue, and those who are just piggy backing 2 course deep making their own tutorials. (or in web development, your average node.js npm consumer only knowing how to "npm install express react" and copy paste from a guide (or heaven's forbid, chat GPT) making a video on why and how [insert another language here] sucks and why the only thing he has very little experience with but wants to profit from is the best thing to choose)
And that's why Acerola is goat, since he decided to take all his years of dedication to convert that experience creatively and express it in a way that's easy to understand and above all extremely entertaining. There has been many times I had some kind of an idea and thought to myself, damn, Acerola would cook up a quick shader for this in an hour, and there I am not even sure how would I do it at all whatever the implementation.
I honestly really enjoy working on my own game projects - not because I think it'll be easy and make me rich fast, but because I can just relax, set my own pace, and watch as my ideas slowly grow into something real and tangible. It's incredible, and hearing your take on how challenging it is to do in the first place only makes me feel even more proud and motivated, so thank you!
Eric was also a musician before he started stardew valley so he probably didn't have to learn as much music for the game. Don't be discouraged to make your game based on this, you can do it, go for it, but don't expect it to be easy. You will have to learn a lot to be able to make the game but the silver lining is that you will learn these skills. By the time you've finished this project, or given up, you'll be a more skilled person after it
I think one key to making solodev work is to learn two things: 1) how to quickly identify the 'real' game as quickly as possible 2) how to handle everything in phases so you always make progress and dont get overloaded. For 1, up until a certain point, you're really exploring a concept and trying to flesh it out. But the moment you have that skeleton down, it becomes a game of fleshing out and refinement which is much easier to do. Though it is grunt work. For 2, I've noticed that handling everything in discrete passes simplifies the complexity at least long enough to get something done. 1 month tackle the programming, next month tackle the art, next tackle the sound, and keep repeating in a pseudo-seasonal cycle. Doing it this way lets you focus on what matters at that time. The final piece of advice is to avoid feature creep like the plague. That will kill you. If you do find yourself accidentally bogged down, you have to mercilessly cut until you're only left with the core.
And be ready to work, then rework, then rework, then rework. It's often iterative but a clean slate may be necessary sometimes as you learn new ways of doing things that make the old ways obsolete.
I'v been working in my game consistently for the past 6 years, it dosen't make it easy that i have a "normal job" as a software engineer, but i will finish it.... one day...
Im on a half way releasing my 3D game to alpha version, and this video didnt demotivated me, but rather praised my hard work of 200 hours (Im a 3D modeler since 2020) and motivated to continiue my project! Thanks a lot for such amazing video!
I started an ambitious roguelike game project with a really cool concept, combat mechanism, and progression system. I learned a lot about world gen, (with some techniques presented by Acerola) but I rarely finish what I start. The art assets would be by far the hardest part for me to do alone. I'm actually an artist too, but the technical requirements of the environment art are very unique and challenging, and not the area of art where I excel.
I think one of the things that has always worked against me has been the feeling of failure that comes from not meeting my own personal deadlines. It's incredibly easy to underestimate the amount of work that needs to be done, and my ability to look into the far future is incredibly flawed and limited at best. This failure bleeds into frustration, and projects get benched for the rest of time as a result of thinking that I simply must not be good enough if I have yet to achieve my goals. Does not help in the fucking slightest that my dream game does in fact have the scope of god in like, too many aspects. Its a problem. I'm afraid to kill my darlings.
The best way to improve at game development is to make a bunch of prototypes and then scrap them once you hit a wall. But occasionally you should complete a game with a small scope that you know you have the required skills for just to get some experience actually finishing games.
but acerola, this video only encourages me more to make my game. I just began my game dev journey a few months ago after making my custom game engine. Your videos have been helpful to me with that. I identified myself in the 10:10. My visual arts, sound design, and music skills were lacking, and had to learn from zero (I am still working on it). Indeed we don't notice how much time and effort takes really.
Sometimes I get asked this question, but its more commonly phrased as "is it hard?" or even "isn't it just a lot of fun?" I always respond in the same way: You're asking if creating media which involves creating 5+ other forms of media and figuring out how to tie it all together is easy? Do you think writing music is hard? What about painting 3D objects? 3D modeling? Writing a story? Animating? Even if you're naturally inclined to doing one or some of those, at least one of them has to be "hard" to you, but making a game requires *all* of them and more - I didn't even touch on the programming or experience design aspects in that list.
That is so true, I started making games as a teen. Over time, you learn to do things faster, get the essentials of the game down, and then build from there.
12:47 Zeekerss actually made another awesome game between It Steals and Lethal Company, it's called the upturned(released march 23, 2022). If i'm correct Lethal Company actually reuses some of the AI and other things learned from the previous projects made by Zeekerss, which is actually a very smart way to make your games because why would you remake something that already works.
I've been doing game programming for 3 years now and I can say from confidence that even making low scope mobile games that aren't shovelware still takes quit a bit of time.
Dude THIS. Maybe it's just us but anything and I mean anything takes a long time for me even those "simple arcade games". It took me 4 days to make half assed version of tetris and I already had like 2 years of experience at the time of making it. Maybe it's my incompetence but I truly think it's just that hard.
@@stickguy9109 Part of it is that finishing a game requires a lot of polish. I could get tetris mechanics done in a few hours if I was rushing, but making a tetris game that looks and feels good with proper menus and graphics and special FX and sound etc. suddenly makes the finishing time way longer. Even the simplest of games can take a long time if you really want to polish it.
@@stickguy9109 tetris is a grid based game, you just take the grid positions of the piece and the direction of movement and check if there are already blocks in any of those spaces.
@@stickguy9109 I think the guy who made Tetris in the USSR was an indie dev who made it during his free time at work. I wonder how long it took him to make it
I spent the past 9 years working on a solo project. It absolutely should have been something that was made with a team, but it was super fun as a solo project and I don’t have any regrets even though it’s basically unknown outside of a very small community.
I think the thing that actually motivated me most to actually take proper interest in maybe developing a smaller project and then full, small scope story based kinda game, was seeing another person's first game. i'd seen a few of jam2go's vids on here and ended up picking up his game kitten burst and loved it, so seeing something that actually satisfied me for a few hours and took 'only' a couple years to make made me feel like it was at least like, plausible
11:55 I’m curious about the reference to Content Warning in this context - that game was made in far less time than lethal company was and as a side project, it doesn’t seem an example of “trying too hard” at all
Yeah if anything the problems with context warning is not trying hard enough in making the monsters interesting and balanced and the fact that dying is what makes funny videos but dying also makes it likely to lose the video, so the game very often results in no video or not a funny video.
@@NihongoWakannai that’s why defibs and huggers exist, you can afford to get beat up a bit as long as you can protect the camera for long enough to make it back
I've been learning graphics programming to better understand technical art lately. I know programming, music and SFX at this point, but not art. Figured learning to program art was my best choice. 😂 Also just lost my job, so I'm about to use my savings to give this whole indie game dev thing a try. Wish me luck 😅
You severely underestimated "have money". If someone says they worked "10 hours a day", between that sleeping, eating, etc they definitely didn't work a job with it (not to say it isn't a job itself, mind. Actually, I'm saying it damn well is a fulltime job!). One of these numbers is exaggerated. So, they had either a situation where they didn't need to worry about rent, or had enough money to make it work already (savings, patreon, etc). Sometimes you just don't have those options, unfortunately. Also, marketing.
Beyond the sharing of labor, I have always felt that working in teams creates better work overall. It's an entirely new skill set (one that a lot/most people underestimate), it can be frustrating, it means you have to let go of stuff you really care about. But with that comes a huge diversity of perspectives, experience, expertise. Giving and receiving feedback, having to pitch your ideas to a team, and being able to synthesize ideas from a group of people leads you to something more than the sum of its parts. I think folks hear about directors or creative leaders and think, oh, they're calling all the shots. Its their vision. I want to do that but don't have a team. While directors are responsible for carrying that vision though, they are using their team to do so. Chris Williams, a Oscar nominated director, described his job as primarily "connecting other peoples good ideas".
I've been working on a game myself for a while now, and even though it looks simple, it's agonisingly hard to code sometimes. months are down the drain just working on the engine itself. makes me glad to see videos like this that acknowledge how tricky it can be
ngl making your own engine is a waste of time if your ultimate goal is to make a videogame. Unless you're making a super niche type of game that REQUIRES things off the shelf engines just can't do. If you enjoy engine development tho then you just gotta realize it's gonna take a long time and enjoy the process.
Making video games is the modern equivalent of difficulty to Television Repair in the CRT era. The amount of knowledge required to be a competent TV repairman basically demanded that you know 'Everything' about electronics. The same can be said about game programming. There are plenty of good programmers out there, but only a portion will be able to program a game from scratch. Even when you change the topic to using modern game engines, making an entire game by yourself requires that a programmer becomes an artist or that a musician becomes a programmer.
completely unrelated to my past comment: congratulations, you're the first person in about three months to manage to get me sit through an ad read. Tbh if all ads had someone playing with a cat on the side I'd watch all of them.
The thing is, you dont really need to master every skill. In fact you dont even have to master any skill at the beginning. Especially in the beginning, one should find a "good enough for now", because you will change everything anyways. You just have to get you game somewhere, where it is possible to decide, if it is worth continuing and hiring other people to help you with what you cannot do so good. For example, if you are not good at drawing, just draw something crapy, just so that the idea can be delivered. And, when the time is right, you get someone to help you fix those things. Iteration is key and the realization, that the work you do right now will probably not be part of the final product.
Zeekers actually released two pretty damn big games in between It Steals and Lethal Company; Dead Seater and The Upturned (which are really good and you should play them!) But other than that cool video
Designing a game around saving work was one of the biggest paradigm shift for me that helped me the most. it's very tempting to do a brainstorming session and try to implement everything. Cutting features early saves a lot of work and can force you to reduce complexity without sacrificing too much depth.
14:35 This part is so true. Learning how visual artists do "Art Studies" to practice taught me how to develop my skills in programming & music quicker!
i made a 2000 lines of code program that literally just plays fart sounds when an online api node sends an event to a client and that took about 6 months to make and somehow had me stressing about it. programming on its own is already hard, i couldn't imagine trying something as insanely complex as a fully featured video game
@@arunachalpradesh399 ai is not ready for tasks like this yet trust me lol. plus i like to actually make things on my own and release them publically as my own, not pretend like i made it when a robot stole code from the internet for me
I wouldn’t say making a game is impossible, it’s definitely challenging, but extremely possible. I made a game in a little over five months with zero experience and it was pretty successful. You just have to really want it and be persistent. I’m currently working on the sequel and the coding is a lot easier than the first time around so is the problem solving.
There are tons of comments about the game is dev topic. So I would like to show my appreciation about the piano finale: well played for only 7 months of skill grinding :)
I've been working on my game for about a year now. It's a game I've concepted and made a few prototypes for a few years now, but I was too scared to actually start programming it on my own until last year and had been busy with college. Just today I got through my game's first full battle without any issues. I still have to add various things, but I'm very proud of my own progress I've made. I'm making it all on my own, and whenever I make small breakthroughs like today, I feel very happy : )
“Anyone can make a game” yea and anyone can paint a masterpiece, anyone can write a classic, anyone can play a hit single, with years of practice and experience and refinement and *effort*
as a solo indie game developer, to really make a successful game, a lot of time, effort, and learning goes into it. I personally saw this mountain ~ 8 years back, and said "Fuck it, we ball" and started my journey rolling this boulder up it. I have had to learn all of this: 3D Stuff: 3D Modelling Animation Rigging weight painting texturing UV unwrapping normal maps cinematography rule of thirds lighting camera angles 2D things: texturing color palette design Digital art drawing tablet skills color theory brushes Game Engine Stuff: programming model importing material swapping game system design and implementation scalability shaders asset optimization Sound stuff: sound effect creation music theory music writing music composition beepbox / tracker software setup good mic settings speech synthesis Story stuff: writing skills character design character dynamics plot Game design stuff: good boss monsters designing to prevent item hoarding good UI/UX design misc: NPC AI (movement) pathfinding databases behavior tree state machines player controllers dialog systems I am sure I am forgetting some stuff, but the last years have all been a grind, just learning beginner level stuff for all of these skills. I am STILL learning as well. but, I can say confidently that with my current skills, I could make a shiddy ~1 hour 3D story based game with zelda like combat, that would be on the level of an early GameCube/ Late N64 game. (maybe a vertical slice of a potentially full game)
Creating your own game is very hard! I'm a solo indie developer working on a story-oriented horror game called '7th Floor.' I've been developing this project for 6 months, and I'm close to finishing the demo. It would have taken much longer if I didn't have 10 years of experience in this field. As a solo developer, you need to handle everything-story, models, animations, sound, particles, post-processing, UI, level design, programming, and more. Finishing a game that combines all these skills is challenging and time-consuming. And if you don't have a publisher, you can add marketing to your skill set too! I would recommend working in a team, but even with a small group, there's no guarantee of success. By the way, your music was cool! :)
i think it's also about scale. everyone can make small simple games. the higher you set the bar the fewer people can make it. my goal is to keep raising the bar and having fun at the same time. if i want to make a big game i will need a team.
@@plebisMaximus You missed the point. Just because a sentence is *technically* correct doesn't mean it can't have different underlying implications. "Anyone can make a game" can also imply that people with any skill level and any level of commitment can make a commercially successful game, which isn't true.
It really isnt hard at all. It just takes time. A lot closer to digging a huge hole in your backyard. Anyone can do it, but it will take forever - especially if you dont know how to dig and dont know how to use the tools to make it go faster.
btw Zeekerss actually released "The Upturned" in 2022 before Lethal Company as well. Also I will say ConcernedApe admitted that on multiple days he would totally slack off (he's still more productive than me lol) so this idea of 10 hours per day for years is a little overzealous imo. Excellent video though thank you :)
Finally somebody who actually says it how it is. If game development was really THAT EASY then we’d have a new indie hit like Omori or Undertale every other week. I would like to make a game someday, I’ve been writing notes about game ideas for years now. I’d say that I’d be most proficient in Writing, Visual Arts and some of the game design but I am ass at programming, sound design and music… Will I ever make it? Who knows… But when and if I do start, I’m going to make something small. Then progressively work up to something bigger.
@lewsi9s If you wanna get started with programming try python , they even have game engines in python like pygame/pygame zero (it's not popular) , you could make a flash game or 2d style game with it though but most game dev is done in c++ or c#
As someone who has been making a multiplayer medium-big game on its own for the last year.. I suspect it might take another 2 years until a release, and then another 3+ years of just adding stuff. The hardest part is to be seen, my game dev vlogs have like 70 views. It's hard to stand out in the sea of indie games :))) But at least its fun and fulfilling. It takes a while to learn, for me it took around 5 years, but at the end its pretty fun and worth it.
@@ultimaxkom8728 It wouldn't be my first failed long term project.. :))) I've been making games for 5 years. Game dev is like playing the lottery, you never know if your next project is a success or not. For me, It's still fun either way.
My idea of a sensible scope for a solo developer would be a bullet-hell shooter in the style of Touhou. And even then you better assume that it's going to take a year if you want it to have any decent quality. The actual Touhou series then built on its foundations and probably didn't have to change much about its software anymore, so ZUN could focus on music, art, and enemy/level design. But getting the first title off the ground is still a greater task than one may think.
As an indie game developer on Roblox, I've always tried making games entirely by myself. Eventually I realized that any help was appreciated and thanks to this I have a small team that helps me with the different aspects of gamedev (mostly art). If there is one thing that I have come to realize after these years, it's that players are absolutely reckless and will shoot you down any opportunities they've got. They don't care how long it took or the effort put into the project to make it happen, they don't care about how financially struggling you were at the time and they definitely don't care that you went 300% and went past your own expectations, in only half a year. They will see the flaws, and dehumanize you because the project is not perfect how they imagined it. This circles back to what you said in the beginning of the video: games are granted to them and they see that as something easy to make. I'm proud of what I made, but just having to deal with everybody's AAA level of expectations and the absolutely hateful comments sometimes is pushing me to reconvert professionally. Being a gamedev sucks massively, there is no recognition & no respect at all.
I'm a solo Game Dev that is actually making games for 5-6 years. And I released ZERO games during this time period. I don't have any single finished project. And because of this, I was really depressed. But seeing this video gave me chills. Now when I look back, I see that I have improved my skills in many areas. I know how to program, make music, write stories, build universes, draw, model etc. This is what makes the process good. If I had released the game I am currently developing 4 years ago, I would have had a completely garbage game with the world's most disgusting graphics and gameplay mechanics with an extremely cliché Mario story. Personal development is the number one thing for game dev.
@@AnImmortalBeanI’m not but now there is so much ai generation for content and code, as well as creativity to come up with solutions to problems. Reddit can help fix issues, unless we are talking bigger scale games with “higher detail”. You can also use the thousands of games and look at it as a reference. And then youtube is very helpful too. And I’m currently a mechanical engineer, and I currently work more efficiently than you probably do. If everyones experiencing the same problems, there is probably a partial solution or a change of approach. Try process diagramming how you want your code to proceed, and everything will somehow fit into place, unless windows powershell tells you no by throwing you strange errors that you can’t entirely fix on your own.
To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/Acerola/ you’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription! #ad
Had to put the monthly project on hold because some things came up so I decided to write a bit about some stuff I've been thinking about lately. I don't think there's anything particularly enlightening or deep in this video but hopefully it can put the industry into perspective for those interested in entering or prevent someone from wasting years of their life on a dream they aren't seriously actualizing. I suppose this is also an argument against the jack of all trades approach many try to take, but really, you can do whatever you want. Also, everyone that hated on me for my simple poll question can submit their apology forms to my twitter dms, thanks. See you all at SIGGRAPH!
I'm gonna keep brilliant in my mind for the future
I'm already a brilliant multidisciplinary mind
Where can we get a sample of just you playing the piano at the end?
I am final year high schooler (major math and science) I am doing some work on game dev. at Sundays, and I probably sir for 8 hour straight trying variety of things to make work a single thing and my code is getting less spagetied day by day.
Jack of all Trades until I find an artist willing to work for a so-far indeterminant wage, in this economy
Hey, good video, I also loved your video about Lethal Company's wacky rendering and I still come back to it sometimes. I'd like to note that development on Lethal Company started in April of 2022 with very little knowledge of multiplayer game code. But when I think about it, I didn't really make the game alone at all; I leaned heavily on assets others had made for me, whether it be the Unity game engine, the netcode framework/API, the tutorials and forums, the random level generation logic, or the textures and sound samples. My friends constantly playtested with me. And I was able to spend basically every waking moment working on the game as I still lived in my parents' home. If all those people didn't have my back, this thing would not exist. True solo projects are probably even more rare than it would seem.
OHHHH congratulations on the success of your game!!
damn, the legend himself
Zeekers!
Yeah, I think the "10 hours a day" lines you hear so often is often misleading. When people say this, it typically means a large number of things:
1: They might have had a place they can work on it without needing to worry about the cost of living.
2: They might have already had savings, an existing fanbase to support them / success on Patreon or kickstarter, or were already successful.
3: They weren't actually working 10 hours a day every day.
I just think it's important because you also hear so much "I QUIT MY JOB TO WORK ON MY DREAM GAME" stuff and these people are often already huge youtubers with a massive base. I.E, their major skill is marketing / content creation, or due to other reasons can risk doing that. Solo dev is DEFINATELY NOT the place to put all your cards and I'd hate for someone to take big risks on it until they've gotten somewhere already.
Solo dev isn't quite as solo as we think, and everyone lives totally different lives with different opportunities available or lack of. I published my first game, and it was both a mountain of work, but also completely unsuccessful. I would not have been able to without being able to live with parents.
Congratulations on your success
Thanks for the transparency and congrats! Pin this Acerola!
Another factor that was only kinda hinted at is time. As someone who hypothetically has all the skills i would need to make the game i want to make, but also has a completely separate unrelated full time job, it is incredibly easy to burn yourself out. Doubly so if you dislike your full time job. Not having enough free time can be just as much, if not more of a hinderance than not having the needed skills.
?? I repeatedly stated this all takes a ton of time
@@Acerola_t sorry you definitely did. i just meant that regarding time you mainly focused on the time it takes to learn the skills and the amount of development time games of that scope took solo (or almost solo) devs. I was just trying to elaborate that if you can’t work on the project full time, that number gets way bigger, as well as the mental energy that an unfulfilling day job can also cause. I just worded that very poorly cause i was half asleep. You might have also mentioned this or something similar and i just missed it. Definitely didn’t mean to come across like i was criticizing the video you made a lot of excellent points.
@@BernierBrandonagreed. I’m a developer, artist, and writer, but I work in tech full time and am often doing 45-60 hour weeks. Finding the time to write, much less sit in front of UE for enough hours recently has been tough.. won’t give up though :)
💯
Working ten hrs a day on YOUR project for 4 years = you have NO job for 4 years. Parents house???
It reveals a lot about you and your passions by observing what you do in your free time. I was a Chemical Engineer once and did not really like it. So pivoted to games. It has been a struggle, but a struggle I will happily overwork for.
Sick.
The Stardew valley guy also had a girlfriend that paid all his bills for about 3 years. Even when you have a budget of $0, you are costing someone something.
Indeed! It sure paid off, though!
Yep, even those who were an actual solo dev, were never _alone._ We all need someone in our corner.
Lol exactly what I was wondering. How does someone chooses to pursue a hobby and not work for 4 years? It's crazy lol.
Yeah, I DON'T have the money
Damn
I'm a little disappointed you didn't mention Cave Story. Developed by a solo developer, Pixel, in C++ from scratch in his free time over 5 years. The Quintessential Indie Game made by the Grandfather of Indie Game Development! He's such an inspiration
I remember Cave Story. Also, Daniel Remar's *incredible* work on "Iji" should never, ever be forgotten. To this day, the gameplay, music, bizarre extras, and "re-speccing nuances" rival those of 90% of present day indie games.
@@Novastar.SaberCombat Remar's work is amazing, but personally I'm a bigger fan of his much more minimalist Hero Core (and the earlier Hero to a lesser extent). The first time I saw the game on early youtube I was instantly hooked. The gameplay combined with the music and the aesthetic makes something amazing.
Bro, he forgot the rollercoaster tycoon, it was made by 1 guy using assembly.
acerola seems more focused in 3d games. Also, was he even born when cave story was released ??? ;-)
@@xeostube not sure, but the fact that rollercoaster tycoon was not mentioned upset me the most .
He definitely is 3d guy
but acerola,
I dislike the T-Shirt, it's scary
but acerola 🥺🥺~
damn why do you guys always beat me to it 😔
oh my god people stop liking this and actually go watch the video 😭
It’s never not gonna be funny
I saw an interview with the Stardew Valley guy where he said something like "yeah some days it was just not happening and I quit early, and some days if I thought of something I thought would be cool to add, I'd stay up all night to make it work". So he's still human like the rest of us and not a 10-hr-every-day machine, he just found a project that was really well suited to his skills, scoped appropriately, and fit an unrealized popular niche.
Omori ended up in development hell for a while where people thought the game wasn't ever going to happen, and Omocat (seems to have) switched a lot of her focus away from the game and towards maintaining her online store because that was what was actually paying her bills. But I'm also pretty sure Pedro Silva never stopped making music while the game was trying to fix its issues because holy crap he put out some phenomenal music for that game.
I know a number of people attempting to be solo game developers and the biggest challenge for everyone isn't so much technical because anyone can learn anything, but it's hard for everyone to stay motivated or not fall into depression when you've been working at it for a long time and are keenly aware of how far you have left to go. If you put a lot of early focus on art, you'll be well into the project and the game will feel too simple and boring. If you focus too much on mechanics, the game will feel like a toy/pet project using placeholder art for depressingly long.
Also, Acerola, your style of art looks a ton like a game I've been playing called World of Horror, and I would totally play a game by you if you made something similar.
Yeah for motivation it's important to have a mix of programming and art. If I spent too long on programming sometimes I'll just add a bit of art to the game to prove to myself that yes I am still capable of making the game look good once the time comes to need proper polish.
I had an idea as I read what you said about the game being either a pretty but hollow prototype or all made of placeholders: what if you just prototype art and mechanics separately? So you draw your concepts and work on models in parallel to working on your placeholder prototype, but don't fully try to integrate them all at once?
Having started game dev and programming a year ago i was pretty shocked at how people underestimated how complex simple looking games actually are, especially after seeing the poll you made
yeah the point of the poll was just to show no one has any idea really lol
knowing how much work something will take in games development is a dark art and only my coworkers who look like part of their soul has been lost seem able to estimate accurately
Yeah A lot goes into games, what seems like a simple feature could of had tons of hours of debugging. For my current game project My recoil system took a while to make fun and interesting. But now it causes the player to glitch through the map but only on *one* of the maps… and only when crouching…
I think its how thin the ground. But hey, we learn.
My favorite example is how many indies think they can make their own Soulslike just because From's engine has technical issues and they reuse assets.
They reuse assets because the games still require a zillion assets and animations even with a large team!
I made a UI-heavy game and I've expressed to some people how much making UIs:
1: Sucks. 2: Is much harder than it is assumed to be, because we like to assume things just work by themselves.
A lot of people just don't get how a UI could be considered hard or tedious. I might have spent 2+ months on making UI alone.
Like anything, the scope and context is very important. An HP and stamina bar and nothing else is fine. But making a whole unit editor and UI for a strategy game requires so many goddamn little icons and of course you have to program the functionality of every single button.
I have two sliders that determine HP and speed of a unit, which also determines unit cost. Here's what that means:
-Preset slider in UE5 (nice).
-Easy positioning with UE5's widget system (nice).
-Those sliders need text with it, of course, so add two more things.
-Make the text displays actually update when the slider moves.
-Oh, but the slider values display in 0.0 -> 1.0 format so you need to format the text first before it goes to display. (0.1 --> 10, 1.0 --> 100.. etc)
-But the cost values are different, so you need to format both differently. This is basically just a math equation.
-Make new text display for the total unit cost.
-Make it update when a slider is moved.
-Realize it only is taking account one slider, so change code to consider both.
-Oh but now moving the sliders can cause that issue where if you move them just right, you can manipulate it into giving you free units, so you need to add safeguards.
-What happens if they try to save a unit well over cost?
-What happens if a unit is so cheap it's in the negatives?
-Do these need to be hidden or locked at any point? (In my case no, as the entire menu gets revealed/hidden when needed.)
-These values don't save themselves either, so you need to also be sure to save the final values to the save game.
-But of course you only save it if the unit is valid.
-The sliders don't just magically remember, you need to now load the saved value whenever the menu is loaded and update the sliders.
-For some reason the slider being loaded from a save doesn't count as being updated and the text displays don't update. So you need a fix for that. Tons of bugs like this.
^That's JUST for some sliders in a UI that has multiple nested menus each with completely different functionality.
It's not just "put a slider in and it works".
This is EXACTLY how is it for the art side of it, too.
You don't realize how many menu assets you need until you're right in the middle of making something. You don't have a mockup for everything, you think of new icons, new dropshadows that would look nice, entire new menus (that you need a new background for)...
10:47 Slight correction: Lethal Company actually begun development sometime around early 2022 according to Zeekerss’ patreon, so it took about a year and a half to make
Which is quite impressive for it being Zeekers first proper multiplayer game
@@alfonshedstrom9859More like massively impressive. Making a mostly feature-complete game with multiplayer, a decent variety of planets and monsters, and an actually fun gameplay loop in under 2 years is insane. AAA studios usually fail to pull something like that off, let alone a single indie dev.
@@catcactus1234Do you think with enough attempts anyone could replicate a success similar to that ?
In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, "Anyone can cook." But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist *can* come from *anywhere*. - Ratatouille's Monster, Ratatouille
I dont vibe with this though, "anyone can cook" does not mean "anyone can be a great artist". Anyone can cook, the level of artistry is not really important. It is a great sentiment, actually
@@stormillion5002 in the movie, both Chef Gusteau and Ego were talking about the kind of fine cuisine where artistry is the main aspect being judged in a dish. To most people, cooking is a useful day to day skill but to those two (and to the other characters) it wasn't.
@@falquicao8331 The dish that impresses the critic at the end reminds him of home cooking. I actually think that the movie is true to Chef Gusteau's message as it is home cooking that ultimately wins over elitism.
anyone can cook but not anyone can cook well
@@falquicao8331I don't really think that's what Chef Gusteau was talking about. He said it on TV (the one Remy watches in the beginning) and wrote it in a book (the one Colette sees at the end). A message that the general public sees next to examples of recipes. I think the intent is that anyone can cook this recipe, not that you might be able to cook my recipe, or maybe you can't, because you're bad
Like you said. Don't take "indie" and "solo project" at face value. A lot of "small indie teams" are actually not that small and received contribution from several temporary workers, even if they can't be considered AAA. A lot of publishers love to sell stuff as "indie" and "small personal project."
RDR2 actually was a personal project of everyone in Rockstar's skyscraper office building.
In general I wish more people were open to the idea of making stuff on RPGmaker and other similar programs to start with. Game dev isn’t easy, but it gets a lot easier if you start small. I think a lot of people forget that basically every breakout indie hit has a wealth of history behind it rooted in creating romhacks, mods or other, simpler games. If your goal is to become the next Toby Fox with your first game, then it’s no wonder it seems daunting - you’ve set a standard for yourself that you simply cannot feasibly attain. Start small and learn a little with every small thing you try and things get a lot easier
Agreed, just look at fear and hunger for example
@@teotab4293 exactly! these game maker softwares can really have it's limits pushed, its fantastic
I was lucky enough to learn programming really early on way back in elementary school using scratch. It gave me a really good idea of programming and how to make games so moving on to oa game engine was pretty easy for me
Here are some facts that i know (i'm a rhythm gamer so many of these are from the world of rhythm games):
- dev of DDLC started off as a SSB melee pro player and modder
- the guys behind pump it up infinity later teamed up as anarch entertainment and created the NOISZ game series, which are basically bullethell + rhythm game games.
- Cheryl Stelli was at a QA position in Anarch entertainment before making trying to make an RPG, cancelling it, then making Vivid/stasis, a rhythm game with arg elements. Assets from the rpg were reused, but where I won't tell because it's a spoiler.
- Puzzles for Vivid/stasis were made by k//eternal, head of anarch entertainment. Just mentioning to show how building connections can get in handy.
- k//eternal used to make levels at Lowiro for Arcaea, yet another rhythm game.
- taronuke started out by making charts for stepmania, then NotITG (DDR modcharts), got a job at Lowiro for level design for Arcaea, and then left Lowiro and joined anarch entertainment again at a level design position.
I may have mistaken here, or have missed out on something though.
the problem is i'm a gameplay first kinda guy, and RPGmaker gameplay is... not great, to put it lightly. you really need to have your narrative carry RPGmaker games.
I like that you mention the extra time to learn skills outside of the actual development cycle time. Its something a lot of people never mention and thus it sneaks up onto new people. A mechanically complex game could be made in 2 years, but it took 10 years of studying in or out of university, creating personal projects, and practicing on larger projects you eventually abandon to get to that point.
I think these should be included if you took them on for the purpose of making games, but otherwise I don't think time spent learning skills should be included. For example, you spend your whole life learning all sorts of basic skills such as language, that are used for the game but weren't learned for the sake of it. If you were already a programmer before becoming a game dev, the time spent becoming a programmer shouldn't be included.
i think the biggest issue with peoples expectations of making games is that they don't factor in the time it takes to make an enjoyable, cohesive, and polished experience. Making all the features and assets for a game like undertale seems like it wouldnt take too much time, but bringing them together, testing, iterating, and polishing these features to make for an enjoyable gameplay experience is what takes up most of the development process imo
Also there's so much stuff that makes up games that's either basically completely invisible to players but absolutely necessary or so seemingly "obvious" you'd never think to consider it a part of the game until you're the one in the weeds making it
You're underestimating the features and assets. Speaking as someone who is trying to solo make a game its the assets and putting things into the level which take the most time. Undertrale has like 200 minutes of music which even if you wrote and created each song perfectly the first time with zero rewrites is still a solid 100 hours to physically write. Then there are about 1000 sprites including many with small animations that play, both in the battle screen and in the overworld, which is probably another 3000 hours just to draw the pixels alone. Oh also you can't do most of this until the story is coming along because if you dont know the story and the art direction for each level and character then you don't know what to draw.
@@onlysmiles4949 UI design comes to mind with that.
Iteration is vital and this video barely touches on it. All the valve games threw away several game's worth of content over their dev cycle as they zeroed in on what worked. That's why they're good. If Stardew Valley had used a design document and stuck with the first attempts, it wouldn't have been successful. This is why making a clone is so much faster than something original.
That is true, non-artists have no idea how much work we throw away for a refined result, the process is built on iteration.
I love how half of the inspirational success stories on RUclips start with "So, I quit my job at [AAA Developer] and went full time!"
I spent the past 3 years making deliberately small projects so I can have the competence to do something larger in the future.
Properly estimating scope upfront is one of the most underrated skills for new indies, unless you have infinite money
I love how most other Acerola videos are so complex that the one about making a whole ass game is the one where I go: yea I think I could do that
Lol that's real
Haha, yeah I love this guy. Now that he's laid out how dumb I am, no no you just try lil buddy!
You can make a whole ass game. That whole ass game will be relatively small. You should not start with your magnum opus. You should build and finish smaller projects first. And you probably want to make your first couple games an entire clone, but do it without following a tutorial.
@@blarghblargh I think that's 90% good advice, but honestly I don't think making a clone is necessarily a good idea. I'm wrapping up my first game now, and it's very much original and very much a doable first project. Unless you're just really excited and motivated to make a clone, I think it's ideal to always be creative. It can help prevent burnout and even inspire future projects. Keep it simple ofc, but I say use your personal limitations for inspiration
Tl;dr Do whatever motivates you to learn as much as possible
I find it hard riding the line between trying to make people realize they are capable of doing so much more than they realize but also tempering expectation and bringing them down to reality. Its so easy to accidentally discourage people into thinking they cant do something when really they just cant do that thing right now.
Might sound weird, but this actually motivated me! I guess I've convinced myself I'm stupid for not being able to make my dream game in 2 months completely solo with no art skill and no budget and college homework and constant pressure to get a "real" job....
Sounds crazy when you say it out loud...
So now that I have a realistic perspective, I actually feel relaxed and hopeful.
Starting small will feel good this time.
You can do it! :)
2 months with only limited time is basically nothing. Even smaller games will take a couple hundred hours to make with required experience
This resonates with me a lot as a “solo developer” who made it with the help of a handful other people.
There’s a whole other aspect to being an indie developer which is taking care of your life, partner, friends and money outside of making the game. Maybe it’s an obvious thing to mention, but once you start working on your game for all those hours, you start to cut down time and resources from everything and everyone else, and it becomes a precarious game of life balance. It’s a greatly overlooked factor of being a committed indie developer.
I shall stay in denial and continue to over-scope every project I ever touch.
Based, keep pushing King
Is saying "racing games" beyond a single persons scope?
@@dageta7742 Not if it's a racing game like an old 2D top down racer or something like the old SEGA yu suzuki arcade games from the 80s
How's the universe simulator coming along?
@@MattTrevett Haven't started yet but I predict it will be out by next week.
By the way, Zeekerss made all of the Lethal Company dev-logs on his patreon free-to-view, so you can actually follow the full development cycle of Lethal Company :)
Rather than demotivate me, this video allowed me to realize that the progress I'm making on my own game is actually going well. I was getting very bummed out that the first level of my game was taking several months, but considering I'm learning programming as I go, making all my 3D assets, texturing it by hand painting, and want the game to have very interactive features, I'm probably doing alright! Especially considering I work full time and can only dedicate 3-4 hours a day to it. Thank Acerola! Your videos are what keep me going on this journey(:
It sounds like you're doing great!
Holy heck you're doing well. I'm on the first level of my game and its been a year and a half. BUT if you're developing with good principles and making things scalable then all future levels become faster and faster. My first "level" is what I'm calling it but its more of a multi-room mini dungeon, and each new room takes far less time than the previous one did.
Yeah that's a lot of work to do
Your doing better than me. ive been off and on for a few years now on a project and still only have basic gameplay. Tho id say whats taking so long for me is trying to make the net code and not have the codebase fall into a unmanageable mess
@@tux_the_astronaut is it multiplayer
The piano section has really impressive phrasing for 7 months
i love the endless struggle of game development
Reject modernity embrace masochism
i dont
you would love RPG Maker then, the feels of wanting to achieve something but the majority userbase doesn't even code at all, so no one to ask for, is incredible lol
@@_averageenjoyer_balatro enjoyer
One must imagine Sisyphus happy... (sorry I couldn't help myself)
Working at a AAA studio (a PSS one) on build systems and CI and automation and source control has made me wonder how on earth anyone works efficiently without all of the support you get from having a team who can focus on optimising all that stuff. Mad respect to indies who just about have enough people to cover the requirements and just have to get by with all the non essentials.
Also: the piano piece sounded great! I have almost the same piano but mine is red 🔴
I suspect for an indie, especially on single-player projects, the scope is so much smaller that DevOps is beyond even "non-essential". To work towards it at all would be a direct waste of time. A regular git repository hosted on GitHub is all I can think of being needed. The default builds of these engines would be sufficient as well. Maybe you'd need a little more if your game had a commerce service in it, like buying skins for example. However I'm curious what you or others think; maybe I'm missing something.
Well CI and source control is probably not even used by people using game engines. Solo work probably does not even need CI, and if sb is competent and disciplined enough, he does not even need source control(maybe just for the cloud if it develops on multiple PCs).
"Torrent Adobe Products". Caught me off guard. Was said with such normalcy 😅.
Pirating adobe products is moral
yeah most youtubers don't outright *say* it, even if they imply it
it is normal
Heh. Except now I assume the cloud products can't really be torrented due to their always connected status? Still, a good joke ;-)
@@xeostube older stuff still can be
also, people have cracked them to avoid the always on stuff. but I don't use any adobe stuff, so I have no idea about any of it
Something that always affects people's estimation of time is that they often think about how fast it would be to "remake" a thing that is already complete. They can look at it holistically and see the extent of the project. If someone's goal was to just "reproduce" a game like Lethal Company and change 5% of it to make it their own it would take much, much less time.
And I think that assumption is really common with people who rarely had to deal with the "blank page" problem. Where you can lose hours trying to come up with an ideal you like. Or even worse the "prototyping" problem, where you invest time in learning and creating something you think will be good...only to stand back and realize it sucks and have to start over.
Yeah, that's part of why his question of "how long would it take you to make a game like undertale" is kinda flawed because it's obviously a lot easier to make a game like undertale than to invent undertale in a world where it didnt exist yet.
Thats literally the premise for Landfalls Content Warning. Made by a small group (10 people ish?) in like a month for an April Fools release, and it's quite obvious it's a Lethal Company "clone" (made in good faith, since the Lethal company dev and Landfall both like eachothers games) but since they had a very clear scope and idea they could breeze through development
Semi related, but man I really hated the period where people thought it was cool to hate on GameMaker, mainly just because it's "too easy and simple" and it comes with its own coding language. There were a lot of egotistical programmers back in the 2010s acting like middle schoolers with how much they were trashing on GameMaker. The game engine doesn't matter as you still need to learn how to code and make a game either way 💀
Unfortunately the egotistical programmers never went away :(
I strongly suspect that most of the self identified programmers who hate(d) on GameMaker have never developed a feature complete project, let alone achieved an appreciable level of mastery in any language.
The reason I say that is because learning new languages is just a skill you develop while working on virtually anything that could be considered a standalone piece of software.
Sometimes, the language you know isn't technically suited for the task, or it's overcomplicated for what you need to do, or you need to develop supplementary tools in something with more granular control, or you end up shuffling onto another project, or you just really want to explore a new piece of tech that's only well integrated with a handful of languages you don't have experience with, and so on.
After a little while, learning the ins, outs, and eccentricities of a new language is just the cost of doing business. There are rare exceptions, of course, but I'd be pretty hard pressed to take complaints about the accessibility of GameMaker or it's language, while also regarding them as an experienced programmer.
@@gogauzenot gonna lie this sounds like such a chat gpt reply. bro really wrote a philosophical essay here
@@itsjustbusiness1989 it's really not much to write, and not even near an essay
@@bubbaboogsvr "hyperbole" and "joke" search that up
I am currently studying game development in universitys (us collge) and one of my own thoughs is that don’t think your weaknesses as obstacles but as oppertunities. If you aren’t good with 2D art or 3D modeling then consider usibn a simple artstyle or just simple shapes/polygons. If you are good at music then consider making a game where it is a core component of the game like a rythm game. If you are good at writing but not programming then make story the main attraction and use the bare minimum programming that it needs.
the fact that the ad for Star Citizen popped EXACTLY at the moment you said "a game like Star Citizen" is quite unsettling
Exactly 😂 Maybe not unsettling, it was quite obvious why it happened...
Revanced users 🗿
me @@abdou.the.heretic
Or is it? 😎
game dev here! I'd just like to note that the point at 9:38 about avoiding redesigns via a better game design doc is not quite right - any preproduction phase is likely to consist of a handful of design iterations/revisions which often only come about through actual prototyping / building the game (not a document). In other words, it's very normal to not get something right at the start, and in fact the entire process of pre-production/production it's very natural to be reworking things as you go. (Rather than it being possible to make a perfect GDD that'll somehow have you avoid the various revisions)
i am a AAA game dev so it seems we simply disagree
ALSO Marketing is a huge problem. You have hundreds if not thousands of games that release each month) AND you are in direct competition with multi billion dollar companies (yes, people will play the Elden Ring DLC over your short indie experience 9/10 times), so good luck standing out.
Indie Game success essentially boils down to luck, as your time-to-market is way too long (i.e. Mascot Horror Games are very popular now in the indie world, but will they be in 2-4 years when yours is going to release?).
A great example is Fear&Hunger, as the game was out for multiple years until SEPW picked up the game and Connor (CDawgVA) turned it into his obsession for a couple of streams before the game brought in any notable amount of money.
Lady Luck is the patron deity of any solo artist without outside support. You could make the best game of all time, but if it can't make exciting enough content for Markiplier to play it, you probably won't sell enough to make the effort monetarily worth it. You don't go into indie development for the money, there are much better and more efficient ways to make your bread, you go in because you feel like you will die if you don't make games and then maybe, with luck and the grace of God, you might make more than $20.
@@plebisMaximus If the game doesn't make for exciting content, isn't that a property of the game, rather than luck?
@@Jerryfan271 That remark wasn't wholly related to the luck factor, both are still true. You need to get unbelievably lucky to get picked up by a big enough channel and you need to restrict yourself to game design that lends itself well to internet videos if you want to hit it really big without a marketing budget.
I'm new to the channel. Putting your cat on the sponsor screen was a genius power move. I watched until the end and I didn't regret it.
That was the approach I took with the gamejam: super tiny scope, maybe something that would work as a starting point for an "actual" game. But all games count as games, whether they're little proofs of concept or fully-developed things that explore all possible loose ends. Had to teach myself a lot of programming on the fly, but it was a perfect opportunity to pump out a bunch of music which is where I have the most relevant experience. Piano soundin real good btw.
solo development is insane, imagine having a workload of a whole team with only one person doing everything. even if you have all the skills you still need too much time
I really liked the piano at the end, thanks for the video it definitely helps me feel better about my overscoped projects.
It's Arya of the Soul, from Persona's game saga. Absolutely amaizing piece of music
@@serahsquarepants Ah ok, thanks, I've been meaning to give that series a try.
if you want to know the most 'overscoped' project I know of, there was a man named Roman Opałka who set out to paint all numbers starting at 1 until infinity and did so for 46 years
Even experienced game developers often get gobsmacked by the amount of work they have to do ahead of them. I have thrown away more projects than I would care to admit, simply because the process of moving from preproduction to production is such a monumental shift.
You basically have to decide on a quality standard for yourself for the next several years, and stick to it. People also underestimate how many unforeseen problems will worm their way into a project. Using a bad or unfamiliar architecture that will eventually cause you to have to throw out or remake massive chunks of assets and/or code happens frequently. Even as you learn and get better, this never goes away.
As a developer, you must become accustomed to it, or you'll drive yourself mad with all the revisions you'll need to do to make something work.
For instance, I spent the last 2 months just programming the tools necessary to build some of the systems I want easier because I know it'll save me hassle later down the line. 2 months just on tools that will likely save me 4-5 months 2 years from now...
Acerolla - Makes RUclips presentations on niche subjects that keep viewers watching for 15-40 minutes a pop.
Also Acerolla, apparently - "Doesn't a very good writer."
Writing for a YT video and writing for a game\movie\book are completely different things though...
@@DarthBiomech it's certainly a skill in the right direction
@@DarthBiomechyeah, writing an entertaining 15, or 30, or 60 minute video is not the same thing as writing a game.
even as someone who's been playing games since i was a kid and is in my 30s now, i honestly don't think i truly understood just how complicated game development was until i started working as a QA tester for a AAA studio. i loved that job, it was very enlightening and i did it for 3 years, and would still be doing it if not for how things are with the industry right now. now i'm working on an interactive fiction game. gotta start somewhere!
I have tried so, so hard to educate people that game development is not a smaller and simpler subset of development. It is a COMPLEX AND DIFFICULT SPECIALTY of development. You will have every single problem you would have developing any other large complex system, plus an extensive series of additional problems nobody else ever has. And if you don't have development experience, it's likely that you are catastrophically wrong about how large and complex your game's system is. Everything looks simple until you open it up and look at the insides.
Hi, game developer here! I find it quite entertaining that you spend the entire video explaining how complex all the different skills are that go into development of the game, yet that still doesn't even cover the complete picture. For me, for example, it is the most difficult part to let people know about my game (promotion & marketing).
you should make games just to make games, if you are doing it for money you should do literally ANYTHING else
@@Acerola_t I suppose you're right. Would be awesome if I could live off my art, but as it so often goes, the art ain't where the money is made
There are all these great talented solo developers, and then there's Chris Sawyer, who made Roller Coaster Tycoon (sans graphics and sound) in 3 years by himself...
...in ASSEMBLER.
ermm ackshully he made several small games beforehand
@@kloa4219He had at least a decade of experience, not just "several small games"
@@kloa4219what are you erm akshully-ing about tho
He wrote it in assembly... good grief.
Yeah, impressive. But graphics and sound are non-trivial components of game dev.
Great video. I just finished a duo project with a friend and in 7 months (nights and weekends) we completed just the barest of games. It's fulfilling to finish a project but honestly gives me even more respect for solo devs/small teams making huge projects and grinding for years.
The lot that tells others how easy game development is is the same lot that 30 seconds later offers their ULTIMATE ONE STOP SHOP GAME DEVELOPMENT 101 ALL INCLUDED, INSIDER SECRETS course for only 99,00..
One would assume if game development is so easy, why aren't they making games for a living, guess baiting wishful people into signing up for some blind leading the blind course that they came up based on their few shitty unoptimized projects in the past pays more!
Bit of a extreme statement, but I definitely think there's a lot of truth to this.
Oh man I know exactly who you are talking about (or, perhaps there's a lot of them out there). Such a scam.
Same thing related with mental health courses, it's easier to sell the idea than the answer
@@IcarusFormaldehyde Every faucet of life. And you know what, for some cases, fine. The saying "those who can't do, teach" holds merit in some cases, you can be a good coach without being the best, but the thing is, all these cases require years of dedication and effort. And that's what sets apart those whose teaching has some virtue, and those who are just piggy backing 2 course deep making their own tutorials.
(or in web development, your average node.js npm consumer only knowing how to "npm install express react" and copy paste from a guide (or heaven's forbid, chat GPT) making a video on why and how [insert another language here] sucks and why the only thing he has very little experience with but wants to profit from is the best thing to choose)
And that's why Acerola is goat, since he decided to take all his years of dedication to convert that experience creatively and express it in a way that's easy to understand and above all extremely entertaining. There has been many times I had some kind of an idea and thought to myself, damn, Acerola would cook up a quick shader for this in an hour, and there I am not even sure how would I do it at all whatever the implementation.
Zero to HERO in 6 hours!
I honestly really enjoy working on my own game projects - not because I think it'll be easy and make me rich fast, but because I can just relax, set my own pace, and watch as my ideas slowly grow into something real and tangible. It's incredible, and hearing your take on how challenging it is to do in the first place only makes me feel even more proud and motivated, so thank you!
Eric was also a musician before he started stardew valley so he probably didn't have to learn as much music for the game. Don't be discouraged to make your game based on this, you can do it, go for it, but don't expect it to be easy. You will have to learn a lot to be able to make the game but the silver lining is that you will learn these skills. By the time you've finished this project, or given up, you'll be a more skilled person after it
I think one key to making solodev work is to learn two things:
1) how to quickly identify the 'real' game as quickly as possible
2) how to handle everything in phases so you always make progress and dont get overloaded.
For 1, up until a certain point, you're really exploring a concept and trying to flesh it out. But the moment you have that skeleton down, it becomes a game of fleshing out and refinement which is much easier to do. Though it is grunt work.
For 2, I've noticed that handling everything in discrete passes simplifies the complexity at least long enough to get something done. 1 month tackle the programming, next month tackle the art, next tackle the sound, and keep repeating in a pseudo-seasonal cycle. Doing it this way lets you focus on what matters at that time.
The final piece of advice is to avoid feature creep like the plague. That will kill you. If you do find yourself accidentally bogged down, you have to mercilessly cut until you're only left with the core.
And be ready to work, then rework, then rework, then rework. It's often iterative but a clean slate may be necessary sometimes as you learn new ways of doing things that make the old ways obsolete.
I'v been working in my game consistently for the past 6 years, it dosen't make it easy that i have a "normal job" as a software engineer, but i will finish it.... one day...
Best of luck, hope you make it big, man.
NEVER BACK DOWN NEVER WHAT
Im on a half way releasing my 3D game to alpha version, and this video didnt demotivated me, but rather praised my hard work of 200 hours (Im a 3D modeler since 2020) and motivated to continiue my project! Thanks a lot for such amazing video!
I'm gonna say it, Pizza Tower was a more significant offering from Gamemaker than Omori. Undertale probably holds the throne though.
Omori is RPGMaker though, different engine entirely
Wait pizza tower was made with game maker?!!?
How did I not know this?
@@ozzi9816 Did I mishear it implied in the video that Omori is Gamemaker? If he didn't say it explicitly it seemed implied
@@Bit_Crust3:50 has little subtitles that say it’s made in RPGMaker
@@ozzi9816 well, in that case, Pizza Tower is still, by technicality, a more significant GameMaker game than Omori
I started an ambitious roguelike game project with a really cool concept, combat mechanism, and progression system. I learned a lot about world gen, (with some techniques presented by Acerola) but I rarely finish what I start. The art assets would be by far the hardest part for me to do alone. I'm actually an artist too, but the technical requirements of the environment art are very unique and challenging, and not the area of art where I excel.
I think one of the things that has always worked against me has been the feeling of failure that comes from not meeting my own personal deadlines. It's incredibly easy to underestimate the amount of work that needs to be done, and my ability to look into the far future is incredibly flawed and limited at best.
This failure bleeds into frustration, and projects get benched for the rest of time as a result of thinking that I simply must not be good enough if I have yet to achieve my goals.
Does not help in the fucking slightest that my dream game does in fact have the scope of god in like, too many aspects. Its a problem. I'm afraid to kill my darlings.
The best way to improve at game development is to make a bunch of prototypes and then scrap them once you hit a wall.
But occasionally you should complete a game with a small scope that you know you have the required skills for just to get some experience actually finishing games.
but acerola, this video only encourages me more to make my game.
I just began my game dev journey a few months ago after making my custom game engine. Your videos have been helpful to me with that.
I identified myself in the 10:10.
My visual arts, sound design, and music skills were lacking, and had to learn from zero (I am still working on it).
Indeed we don't notice how much time and effort takes really.
Many many game devs need a reality check on how much work lies ahead of them.
Sometimes I get asked this question, but its more commonly phrased as "is it hard?" or even "isn't it just a lot of fun?"
I always respond in the same way: You're asking if creating media which involves creating 5+ other forms of media and figuring out how to tie it all together is easy?
Do you think writing music is hard? What about painting 3D objects? 3D modeling? Writing a story? Animating? Even if you're naturally inclined to doing one or some of those, at least one of them has to be "hard" to you, but making a game requires *all* of them and more - I didn't even touch on the programming or experience design aspects in that list.
That is so true, I started making games as a teen. Over time, you learn to do things faster, get the essentials of the game down, and then build from there.
12:47 Zeekerss actually made another awesome game between It Steals and Lethal Company, it's called the upturned(released march 23, 2022). If i'm correct Lethal Company actually reuses some of the AI and other things learned from the previous projects made by Zeekerss, which is actually a very smart way to make your games because why would you remake something that already works.
A lot of assets between Upturned and LC are reused. Fire exits, props such as cash registers, big bolts, lamps. If it aint broke dont fix it I guess
I've been doing game programming for 3 years now and I can say from confidence that even making low scope mobile games that aren't shovelware still takes quit a bit of time.
Dude THIS. Maybe it's just us but anything and I mean anything takes a long time for me even those "simple arcade games". It took me 4 days to make half assed version of tetris and I already had like 2 years of experience at the time of making it. Maybe it's my incompetence but I truly think it's just that hard.
@@stickguy9109 Part of it is that finishing a game requires a lot of polish. I could get tetris mechanics done in a few hours if I was rushing, but making a tetris game that looks and feels good with proper menus and graphics and special FX and sound etc. suddenly makes the finishing time way longer. Even the simplest of games can take a long time if you really want to polish it.
@@NihongoWakannai Don't know about you but those collisions took me a long time.
@@stickguy9109 tetris is a grid based game, you just take the grid positions of the piece and the direction of movement and check if there are already blocks in any of those spaces.
@@stickguy9109 I think the guy who made Tetris in the USSR was an indie dev who made it during his free time at work. I wonder how long it took him to make it
I spent the past 9 years working on a solo project. It absolutely should have been something that was made with a team, but it was super fun as a solo project and I don’t have any regrets even though it’s basically unknown outside of a very small community.
Acerola is one of my favourite guys
I think the thing that actually motivated me most to actually take proper interest in maybe developing a smaller project and then full, small scope story based kinda game, was seeing another person's first game. i'd seen a few of jam2go's vids on here and ended up picking up his game kitten burst and loved it, so seeing something that actually satisfied me for a few hours and took 'only' a couple years to make made me feel like it was at least like, plausible
was going to skip the sponsor but saw the cat and just look at the little fella
same lol
this truly was a OneShot
yeah that's a genius way to make the sponsor segment more entertaining
11:55 I’m curious about the reference to Content Warning in this context - that game was made in far less time than lethal company was and as a side project, it doesn’t seem an example of “trying too hard” at all
Yeah if anything the problems with context warning is not trying hard enough in making the monsters interesting and balanced and the fact that dying is what makes funny videos but dying also makes it likely to lose the video, so the game very often results in no video or not a funny video.
@@NihongoWakannai that’s why defibs and huggers exist, you can afford to get beat up a bit as long as you can protect the camera for long enough to make it back
I've been learning graphics programming to better understand technical art lately. I know programming, music and SFX at this point, but not art. Figured learning to program art was my best choice. 😂
Also just lost my job, so I'm about to use my savings to give this whole indie game dev thing a try. Wish me luck 😅
good luck!!
Thanks for linking your own video on someone's Discord. I really enjoyed these 18 minutes of destroying dreams.
You severely underestimated "have money". If someone says they worked "10 hours a day", between that sleeping, eating, etc they definitely didn't work a job with it (not to say it isn't a job itself, mind. Actually, I'm saying it damn well is a fulltime job!). One of these numbers is exaggerated. So, they had either a situation where they didn't need to worry about rent, or had enough money to make it work already (savings, patreon, etc). Sometimes you just don't have those options, unfortunately.
Also, marketing.
okay
Beyond the sharing of labor, I have always felt that working in teams creates better work overall. It's an entirely new skill set (one that a lot/most people underestimate), it can be frustrating, it means you have to let go of stuff you really care about. But with that comes a huge diversity of perspectives, experience, expertise. Giving and receiving feedback, having to pitch your ideas to a team, and being able to synthesize ideas from a group of people leads you to something more than the sum of its parts.
I think folks hear about directors or creative leaders and think, oh, they're calling all the shots. Its their vision. I want to do that but don't have a team. While directors are responsible for carrying that vision though, they are using their team to do so. Chris Williams, a Oscar nominated director, described his job as primarily "connecting other peoples good ideas".
I've been working on a game myself for a while now, and even though it looks simple, it's agonisingly hard to code sometimes. months are down the drain just working on the engine itself. makes me glad to see videos like this that acknowledge how tricky it can be
ngl making your own engine is a waste of time if your ultimate goal is to make a videogame. Unless you're making a super niche type of game that REQUIRES things off the shelf engines just can't do. If you enjoy engine development tho then you just gotta realize it's gonna take a long time and enjoy the process.
@@NihongoWakannai yeah, absolutely is a waste of time under most circumstances. not the kind of game most engines are good for, though
@@Splitleav Making a game engine sounds way harder than making a game , good luck with that.
Making video games is the modern equivalent of difficulty to Television Repair in the CRT era. The amount of knowledge required to be a competent TV repairman basically demanded that you know 'Everything' about electronics. The same can be said about game programming. There are plenty of good programmers out there, but only a portion will be able to program a game from scratch. Even when you change the topic to using modern game engines, making an entire game by yourself requires that a programmer becomes an artist or that a musician becomes a programmer.
completely unrelated to my past comment: congratulations, you're the first person in about three months to manage to get me sit through an ad read. Tbh if all ads had someone playing with a cat on the side I'd watch all of them.
The thing is, you dont really need to master every skill. In fact you dont even have to master any skill at the beginning. Especially in the beginning, one should find a "good enough for now", because you will change everything anyways. You just have to get you game somewhere, where it is possible to decide, if it is worth continuing and hiring other people to help you with what you cannot do so good. For example, if you are not good at drawing, just draw something crapy, just so that the idea can be delivered. And, when the time is right, you get someone to help you fix those things. Iteration is key and the realization, that the work you do right now will probably not be part of the final product.
But didn't he said something like that in the video?
Zeekers actually released two pretty damn big games in between It Steals and Lethal Company; Dead Seater and The Upturned (which are really good and you should play them!)
But other than that cool video
Designing a game around saving work was one of the biggest paradigm shift for me that helped me the most. it's very tempting to do a brainstorming session and try to implement everything. Cutting features early saves a lot of work and can force you to reduce complexity without sacrificing too much depth.
14:35 This part is so true. Learning how visual artists do "Art Studies" to practice taught me how to develop my skills in programming & music quicker!
I have about 2.5 years of experience as a solo dev and lemme tell you: assets is your best friend
i made a 2000 lines of code program that literally just plays fart sounds when an online api node sends an event to a client and that took about 6 months to make and somehow had me stressing about it. programming on its own is already hard, i couldn't imagine trying something as insanely complex as a fully featured video game
why not use ai
@@arunachalpradesh399 ai is not ready for tasks like this yet trust me lol. plus i like to actually make things on my own and release them publically as my own, not pretend like i made it when a robot stole code from the internet for me
I wouldn’t say making a game is impossible, it’s definitely challenging, but extremely possible. I made a game in a little over five months with zero experience and it was pretty successful. You just have to really want it and be persistent. I’m currently working on the sequel and the coding is a lot easier than the first time around so is the problem solving.
just the motivation I needed! Thanks man, also my god that velvet room acerola edition goes hard I love it!
There are tons of comments about the game is dev topic. So I would like to show my appreciation about the piano finale: well played for only 7 months of skill grinding :)
that piano play at the end was fucking awesome!
I've been working on my game for about a year now. It's a game I've concepted and made a few prototypes for a few years now, but I was too scared to actually start programming it on my own until last year and had been busy with college. Just today I got through my game's first full battle without any issues. I still have to add various things, but I'm very proud of my own progress I've made. I'm making it all on my own, and whenever I make small breakthroughs like today, I feel very happy : )
“Anyone can make a game” yea and anyone can paint a masterpiece, anyone can write a classic, anyone can play a hit single, with years of practice and experience and refinement and *effort*
Everybody can *_try_* to make a game.
Also, brilliant breakdown how much effort is necessary.
So good job in putting in your own to make this video 👍
as a solo indie game developer, to really make a successful game, a lot of time, effort, and learning goes into it.
I personally saw this mountain ~ 8 years back, and said "Fuck it, we ball" and started my journey rolling this boulder up it.
I have had to learn all of this:
3D Stuff:
3D Modelling
Animation
Rigging
weight painting
texturing
UV unwrapping
normal maps
cinematography
rule of thirds
lighting
camera angles
2D things:
texturing
color palette design
Digital art
drawing tablet skills
color theory
brushes
Game Engine Stuff:
programming
model importing
material swapping
game system design and implementation
scalability
shaders
asset optimization
Sound stuff:
sound effect creation
music theory
music writing
music composition
beepbox / tracker software
setup good mic settings
speech synthesis
Story stuff:
writing skills
character design
character dynamics
plot
Game design stuff:
good boss monsters
designing to prevent item hoarding
good UI/UX design
misc:
NPC AI (movement)
pathfinding
databases
behavior tree
state machines
player controllers
dialog systems
I am sure I am forgetting some stuff, but the last years have all been a grind, just learning beginner level stuff for all of these skills.
I am STILL learning as well. but, I can say confidently that with my current skills, I could make a shiddy ~1 hour 3D story based game with zelda like combat, that would be on the level of an early GameCube/ Late N64 game. (maybe a vertical slice of a potentially full game)
Props to you dude, sounds impressive
That's cool , something like a demo disc worth of content. I'd love to see it
Creating your own game is very hard!
I'm a solo indie developer working on a story-oriented horror game called '7th Floor.' I've been developing this project for 6 months, and I'm close to finishing the demo. It would have taken much longer if I didn't have 10 years of experience in this field.
As a solo developer, you need to handle everything-story, models, animations, sound, particles, post-processing, UI, level design, programming, and more. Finishing a game that combines all these skills is challenging and time-consuming. And if you don't have a publisher, you can add marketing to your skill set too!
I would recommend working in a team, but even with a small group, there's no guarantee of success.
By the way, your music was cool! :)
i think "a game creator can come from anywhere" is better than "anyone can make games"
it encompasses that same idea but without putting people down
It's true though, anyone *can* make a game. If they put in the patience and discipline to learn the many aspects of game development.
I think its the difference between can and could.
Almost anyone could make games, but being able to go from potential to creation is a big deal.
i think it's also about scale. everyone can make small simple games. the higher you set the bar the fewer people can make it. my goal is to keep raising the bar and having fun at the same time. if i want to make a big game i will need a team.
@@plebisMaximus You missed the point. Just because a sentence is *technically* correct doesn't mean it can't have different underlying implications. "Anyone can make a game" can also imply that people with any skill level and any level of commitment can make a commercially successful game, which isn't true.
Isn't that the plot of "Ratatouille"?
It really isnt hard at all. It just takes time. A lot closer to digging a huge hole in your backyard. Anyone can do it, but it will take forever - especially if you dont know how to dig and dont know how to use the tools to make it go faster.
btw Zeekerss actually released "The Upturned" in 2022 before Lethal Company as well. Also I will say ConcernedApe admitted that on multiple days he would totally slack off (he's still more productive than me lol) so this idea of 10 hours per day for years is a little overzealous imo. Excellent video though thank you :)
Finally somebody who actually says it how it is. If game development was really THAT EASY then we’d have a new indie hit like Omori or Undertale every other week.
I would like to make a game someday, I’ve been writing notes about game ideas for years now. I’d say that I’d be most proficient in Writing, Visual Arts and some of the game design but I am ass at programming, sound design and music…
Will I ever make it?
Who knows…
But when and if I do start, I’m going to make something small. Then progressively work up to something bigger.
@lewsi9s If you wanna get started with programming try python , they even have game engines in python like pygame/pygame zero (it's not popular) , you could make a flash game or 2d style game with it though but most game dev is done in c++ or c#
As someone who has been making a multiplayer medium-big game on its own for the last year.. I suspect it might take another 2 years until a release, and then another 3+ years of just adding stuff.
The hardest part is to be seen, my game dev vlogs have like 70 views.
It's hard to stand out in the sea of indie games :)))
But at least its fun and fulfilling.
It takes a while to learn, for me it took around 5 years, but at the end its pretty fun and worth it.
*Projection:* If I am the one to wrote that comment then I would've add _"yes I'm coping for all the past and future sunk cost"_ in my head.
@@ultimaxkom8728 It wouldn't be my first failed long term project.. :)))
I've been making games for 5 years.
Game dev is like playing the lottery, you never know if your next project is a success or not.
For me, It's still fun either way.
just wanna say that outro of you playing was phenomenal! great video as always
15:20 - i love that Sonny Boy background
This actually motivates me to continue with my smoll project knowing it will take a long time
We see those gains acerola
Why is no one talking about how awesome you play the piano! Nice job, keep learning!
Gonna ignore this anyway because it doesn’t matter what gets in the way of your dreams. Even if it is difficult.
My idea of a sensible scope for a solo developer would be a bullet-hell shooter in the style of Touhou. And even then you better assume that it's going to take a year if you want it to have any decent quality.
The actual Touhou series then built on its foundations and probably didn't have to change much about its software anymore, so ZUN could focus on music, art, and enemy/level design. But getting the first title off the ground is still a greater task than one may think.
As an indie game developer on Roblox, I've always tried making games entirely by myself. Eventually I realized that any help was appreciated and thanks to this I have a small team that helps me with the different aspects of gamedev (mostly art). If there is one thing that I have come to realize after these years, it's that players are absolutely reckless and will shoot you down any opportunities they've got. They don't care how long it took or the effort put into the project to make it happen, they don't care about how financially struggling you were at the time and they definitely don't care that you went 300% and went past your own expectations, in only half a year. They will see the flaws, and dehumanize you because the project is not perfect how they imagined it. This circles back to what you said in the beginning of the video: games are granted to them and they see that as something easy to make. I'm proud of what I made, but just having to deal with everybody's AAA level of expectations and the absolutely hateful comments sometimes is pushing me to reconvert professionally.
Being a gamedev sucks massively, there is no recognition & no respect at all.
Most of roblox players are spoiled kids of course they would trash anyone with any chance they have
I'm a solo Game Dev that is actually making games for 5-6 years. And I released ZERO games during this time period. I don't have any single finished project. And because of this, I was really depressed. But seeing this video gave me chills. Now when I look back, I see that I have improved my skills in many areas. I know how to program, make music, write stories, build universes, draw, model etc. This is what makes the process good. If I had released the game I am currently developing 4 years ago, I would have had a completely garbage game with the world's most disgusting graphics and gameplay mechanics with an extremely cliché Mario story. Personal development is the number one thing for game dev.
0:06 Skill issue.
You a game dev?
@@AnImmortalBeanI’m not but now there is so much ai generation for content and code, as well as creativity to come up with solutions to problems. Reddit can help fix issues, unless we are talking bigger scale games with “higher detail”.
You can also use the thousands of games and look at it as a reference.
And then youtube is very helpful too.
And I’m currently a mechanical engineer, and I currently work more efficiently than you probably do.
If everyones experiencing the same problems, there is probably a partial solution or a change of approach.
Try process diagramming how you want your code to proceed, and everything will somehow fit into place, unless windows powershell tells you no by throwing you strange errors that you can’t entirely fix on your own.
@@AnImmortalBean
No, but hes right.