Good day, I'm an indie game dev. I'm literally making more money as a Janitor, than as an Indie Game Developer. If the game is successful, then you can make some money, but keep you job.

I loved hearing you talk about your motivation. I have a similar experience with motivation in my work, even though it's not game dev specifically, so it was encouraging to hear

Here are some hard-to-swallow pills you didn't ask for -- slow down, it's not the destination, but the journey. Often a lot of these YT gamedevs make it look easy to crank something out, and that "a year" is realistic. Common advice is "scope small, halve that, and halve it again," but the truth is, if you're goal is to FINISH a game, then yes, by all means, ship a Pacman clone and call it a day. If you want to make something meaningful, artistic, and is a bespoke product only you can make, then you need to work on it. And I don't mean chipping away at the same piece over and over. There is seldom an example of someone being considered a master of their craft based on their first piece. You need to learn to be comfortable with failure, but you also need to try. No one sets out to lift weights saying "I want to be in a shape where I can regularly lift 15lbs every day without sweating." Motivation comes from challenge, and you need to give yourself that achievable challenge to make this feel meaningful. Yes, you won't make your "dream game" anytime soon, but the attitude of "well if you can't ship something this year, when will you ship anything, let alone your magnum opus?" -- cut yourself some slack and relax, you literally spent the last year learning coding, graphics, game design, etc., etc., in a single year. At some point, you'll release your first, then your second, then things will move faster and you'll get more support and recognition, things will iteratively get better over time. Don't do what some other YTers do and just stake everything on one project getting out the door before fiscal year. People can tell if something is not made out of passion. The development cycles of those "indie one-hit-wonders" may have been a year or two, but you're not counting all of the years they've spent playing with the engine, learning new skills, building their brand, and developing their work ethic. Things take time, and it's really toxic how the internet nowadays just makes it easier to feel bad about your progress because everyone's business is just out there in the open to be judged. When solo-developing, your game is like a committed relationship. If you can't see yourself with that person after 6 months, then you'll never see yourself with that person for a lifetime. Sure, you can be "done" and ship the game in 6 months, but you'll still need to market and support it, it will become one of your children. Be realistic with yourself, work through the challenges, not because you have to, but because you care. If you can't convince yourself the game is interesting, what makes you think you can convince others? Do some self reflecting, find a reason why you're not motivated, and then give yourself the reason to work on it every day. You'll find that secret sauce that'll get you there, but that will take time.

Thomas Brush has really good advice when it comes to marketing and setting expectations for game development. For your next project i think it would be beneficial to find an intersection between what you're interested in and what games are popular. That way you can make something you're interested in as well as something that's more easily marketable. You're doing awesome!

Keep plugging along, Jared! It's normal to go through ups and downs when it comes to motivation with projects like this. You def have the right mindset. You got this!

restart with me and my wife. get viral or gtfo. gameplay over everything. ecosystem are also on our focus (edit: currently doing a fishing game, we have time, im a programmer and we have a budget). if you dont want to, then dont invest time or effort in your yt videos - dont allow your time to get stolen. i havent seen any yt dev that made it because of his dev vlog.

follow da market ma man. japanese fountain girls dating sim is what's popping LEGOOOOOO

my advice is to do dev logs for those interested in your game and show your progress to the target audience. even if it doesnt look amazing to you others will enjoy it

13:43 I don't know about that... I can't 3D model. 😂

Fish game dev, greetings from Uruguay 🇺🇾✌️

how did you spread your video? any paid advertisement?

Cool game!!!

Update your discord link and select the option "never expire", otherwise, the link defaults to expiring after 7 days.

Nice! love the idea of a different camera angle when you click on an individual fish.

8:32: From the basic outline you've given of the intro, I wouldn't be surprised to face an unexpected mutation, or a strange interaction between species. A poisonous fish or a super carnivore. Something that you might need to somehow offset.

Man. A lot of progress in 3 months

i think it would be cool if the camera was fixed in space but had a small range angles it can pitch and yaw through

The discord sounds so sweet!

AWESOME WORK JARED!

Given the narrative of the tutorial it would be kind of cute for it to start in a more sterile fish farm environment and then move to the full pond at the end of the tutorial segment when the player has built up several fish to release.

Nice! looking good. I'm interested to see where it goes. One small thing I recommend is, you have the fish moving in a great flowing languid manner, but the camera is very rigid in its movement, Instead of setting camera targets directly, I recommend having a target position for the camera that is constantly moved to with Vector3.SmoothDamp or something and you assign a value to the target position and it will smoothly move to its destination, but with smooth damp it will move faster when far away to cover ground, but move less when already close to the target. Would make the camera feel like it too is "swimming" and feel more cohesive.

You'vs said people doesn't need to be patreons to join the discord but the invite link is under the patreon post. Can you link it to your yt socials or into description of videos?

Nice video as always wyrmyr! keep up the good work!

Nice video. Also seeing some great addendums to the process in the comments. I got this saved into my Game Dev 2024 list. Also, saw your first vid of Game Dev or Janitor? Im right there with ya, man. Here's to both of us succeeding!

Really like your style and calmness. Excited to see your game come to life. Which tutorials / books would you say are the ones that got you where you are now?

I could test it if it works on steam deck...great advice too!

Fellow new-ish Unity dev here. Interested in testing if you still have that need.

Hey I recommend reading Tynan Sylvester's "Designing Games". Its a must read. It will help with learning game design. Also marketing isnt advertising. It starts withh the conception of the game. Make sure your game actually has a market, and an audience. And work on making a prototype first. If you can make your prototype fun, then all you have to do is scale it up to the full game. But you have that anchor of good game design. It would be better to spend a whol year making a prototype that is perfect, than a full game that is flawed. Also please scale down your first game. You can go so far with so little. If this is your first game, you WILL fail if its too large scope (especially since you only have a year, and you dont have a technical background.) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, make a small but innovative game. Look at "Baba is you" that game is so simple, and super innovative. And widely successful. Please dont start woth a large scale simulation game. Games largely fail because of 2 things: Noone wants to play it. The game design was bad. By making a small game you can improve your game design skill with games that are easier to design. You should honestly spend your time making 1 small innovative prototype a month. Then pitch to publishers. If you get a deal from a prototype, youd be able to work fulltime and not return to janitor work. And doing repeated games will hone ur skills

Have several prototypes in parallel. One for gameplay, one for visuals like animation or post processing, one for the menu element and inventory mechanics for example. Its much easier to test and iterate on those if the project does not depend on all the other elements of the game. Other elements could be mocked if needed. Once all main "modules" are sufficiently usable, you can assemble them into a combined project, implementing them in a clean way. That then is the basis of the game.

This was really helpful. How could this be done for a first person role playing game like fallout? It's not exactly a first person shooter, since fighting is only one portion of the game play. I'm thinking since it would involve crafting, building, fighting and quests, i should make a prototype for each mechanic, but also one that involves all of them to make sure they're balanced?

I disagree.. i think that if you want to learn how to code games, making prototypes could be a good way to do that.. but games are more than the code.. if you want to be a solo dev, you'll news code, art, sound, level design, story, character design,ect.. the only way to build those muscles are to work them.. i think beginners should do as many game jams as possible to practice every aspect of game dev..

good reminder about implementing, failing fast/receiving feedback, and iterating. back to development!!

imo: simulation games - gamified slices of life with traditional game mechanics simulations - deep and representative software emulating non-game mechanics

oh wow! do you find the broad but basic skills required for janitorial work match well with your work style? i've been thinking about this approach to life and pay-the-bills-work myself.

Hi, good open and honest ideas, thanks. But not too sure about this; as you say most genres have a set of core mechanics and it may be fairly easy to program them and test them without them being much fun or the sign of a good game to come. But isn't the key the differentiator, what really makes your game fun and what is the perceived progress process that will keep it fun? Share too much too early and a good tester will see a way forward to make a better version more quickly and this could undermine your game. Be careful out there, this is a 'dog eat dog' world. Now I must get back to my new unshared prototype: 'Hungry fish!'. Good luck.

Thank you for the clear and concise guide to prototyping. If you're still looking for testers feel free to reach out.

Thanks for the helpful video, I look forward to seeing your work and wish you good luck on your journey!

You said you were a beginner in game dev, but you are clearly articulating wisdom that not many beginners compartmentalize early on.

thank you, helps a lot

Great stuff. The game art is looking great so far.

I agree that prototype is good to start but the best is having a deadline, the game will have to be finished no matter what

most important: protoypes are vertical, not horizontal. a slice of every layer, not a finished layer

What about a strategy game, wouldn’t it have plenty of game mechanics so how do I isolate the core of it for a prototype, It will either take too long to make the prototype then I will have to scrap it so high wasted effort or I will burnout due to the amount of game mechanics I need to build and then if by some miracle if I finish the prototype and it is validated, I have to refine and fix my code which will be almost the same amount of effort as in making the prototype. Likely, I will give up either way so what should I do?

It depends on the type of game. If it's a narrative game, then a basic prototype is not quite as feasible (you can still do it, but you have to provide a little more content than an action/arcade/etc game). I am going to do something similar, starting with a text adventure progressing in stages until a fully graphical, animated point-and-click adventure game.

way to gooo Brother !!!

You don't need to prototype something that you have seen work in a zillion games. Characters can jump onto platforms in video games -- no prototype necessary. If you make a platformer, a significant effort will go into perfecting the jump mechanisms, and a prototype really won't help -- you may as well start on the first iterations of the final product. Camera-tracking always needs refinement as a project progresses. Again, don't even bother with a prototype -- it's just one of those things that needs fussing with until it's right, and you won't know if it's right until you see it at the tail end of the project.

That looks nice, reminds me of My Aquarium, I am also a solo developer and know how hard gamedev can be.That deserves a sub and a like. Will you check out my prototype?

Hey! I would love to test this game! It looks awesome! Also, I've really enjoyed following your growth and story. Reminds me a bit of myself.

Good stuff! It's really logical to create prototype in order to separate good concepts from bad ones, unfortunately we're emotional creatures and a lot of times we ignore this in order to create our "dream game" 🤣. This a good reminder to stay grounded and trust the players more than your own fantasies.

I would be interested in testing, but I don't use Discord. Any program that "requires" the ability to comb your computer's programs to collect data is not welcome on my PC.