Haha! Sorry about the flicker, no sure what caused it

@@ArkThePieKing it’s the genre Civ is in and stands for explore expand exploit exterminate. Broadly though they are just turn based strategy which focus more on empire building and map control than on detailed combat.

@@IndieGameClinic Oooh okay, cool I'd never heard that term before, thank you!

My brain just cannot do that genre of puzzle game, for whatever reason!

@@IndieGameClinic damn, well thats ok, my brain just couldnt figure out how to the owl one, i just got in a twist because block koalas has been my favorite so far

@ haha it’s all good. I recently did a video on an in development Sokoban and I really liked that one because there’s a lot of potential variability in levels. Still hurt my brain though! ☢️📻🥷 kzbin.info/www/bejne/eHXWq4ahYpeGodE

@@IndieGameClinic woah that looks pretty groovy!!

@@ChristopherAOBoyle thanks!

I’m sure there is a better name for it, but it’s a design pattern I’ve seen in a few places. I think we assume players like having more choice, but there’s a point at which having more choices amounts to less meaningful choices because it all just becomes a rush to click through all of the options

@@hydrax7131 I guess? I play pretty much every kind of game but I do tend to be a button basher when it comes to anything which isn’t slow and thinky 🤣

When I played this game I never got through the tech tree, even though my main strategy was using brintor to speed up the tech tree.

Ahah this is a great insight 🙏🏻

Always both!

Now I must just rethink the leveling system planned for my game. 😅

@@BrannoDev I liked hanging out in the little church, live on location

The moment we all fear, but secretly pray for

Thank you! Means a lot!!

@@ThomasGiles yes! Look at the “Indies Under the Knife” playlist on my home page x

@@khongnoi1012 hey, thanks for the encouragement. Good question. If I were in your position now the two main things I would start doing were 1. trying to go to events and 2. trying to convert that abstract knowledge into a format that people can read. To give you an example, I got my first industry job at 28. It was from someone I’d met at a local tech meet-up. We added eachother on Facebook and then at some point he saw I’d been posting from my blog some articles I’d written about how to make small games and finish them. That alone didn’t get me the role as assistant producer but it did prompt him to tell me the role existed and prompt me to apply for it. I don’t think written blogs are very good for much anymore unless you specifically aspire to be a writer, but I think they can help with having something to show people how you think and how you explain things. A KZbin channel might have the same effect, but on here you really have to juggle being a friendly entertainer as well, and a written format doesn’t require that. Going to any sort of events in person even if they are very general arts or tech events can really help. “Networking” is kind of a gross term/concept, but the only way to get more opportunities is to be in the right place at the right time, and that is very rarely about being sat in front of a computer.

@@IndieGameClinic Thanks for the advice, it's really helpful. I dread going to networking events since I'm very anxious about actively approaching strangers, but yeah, that would be a very effective approach now that I considered it again. At this point, I'm willing to do that much to speed things along. On the other hand, I'm quite excited to do the writing part. I've had an urge to do so for quite a while now, but I've always put it off, thinking that I'd be much more qualified to do so after I had finished a proper game project. Maybe my first blog post will be my version of "how to make small games and finish them" too. Something to help me do exactly that. Do you still have that blog post of yours, by any chance?

@ I don’t unfortunately; I got sick of Wordpress at some point and shit it all down. Might have a draft somewhere though. If I remember I’ll turn it into a video at some point.

Oh haha! Yes it is! Amazing :D

@ whew, thats great and funny. Good sign you show up randomly in my yt feed. I’ll take this as a sign if faith, seeing you offer mentorships and consulting. I’ll go and contact you proper via email. Cheers.

@@lindersi all good - feel free to go direct to email if preferable. I’ve recently learnt that Superprof makes people pay to even contact you in the first place; which feels a bit gross

@@lindersi all good - feel free to go direct to email if preferable. I’ve recently learnt that Superprof makes people pay to even contact you in the first place; which feels a bit gross.

It's never the answer people want, because it means there is going to be some critical thinking and "work it out yourself", but I've worked across 4 studios and they were all massively different. Sometimes they had methods I agreed with, and other times they didn't.

That's fine if you're doing a hobby project or making an art-game. But a lot of online game-dev spaces are awash with people complaining that they can't "market" their game when they're really just talking about post-launch advertising. I already covered this quite extensively in the video, but if you reduce "marketing" to "advertising" then you've failed at marketing months or years before launch. An example would be; when George Tan designed Plants vs Zombies, he started from the perspective of wanting to make a Tower Defense game for younger or more casual players who may not have any existing knowledge of the genre. This then informed every design decision. The core theme may seem very random, but it explains all of the mechanics at a glance (zombies are a threat which slowly moves, plants are something which stays still, the VS implies the plants can fight, sunshine is the currency for plants and because it's sunshine it's generally a steady stream instead of coins you get as a reward related to specific things). The audience determined the level of simplicity of the game, and therefore how a bunch of things should work in terms of the theme and the mechanics and the relationship between those things. Having a set expectation of who the audience is helps prevent time wastage during development because you can easily narrow down what to include and what to leave (or at least put in the backburner as post-launch nice-to-have content). Inversely, I see a lot of games which are targeting a Steam audience but do simply not have enough crunch or depth to compete with similar games in the same genre as them. "Business planning should be in service to the game's vision, ensuring it gets to the people who value it." is a find take, but it starts from the assumption that there *are* people who will value the game. Often games developed in the way you describe - i.e. purely as passion projects - fail to find their audience not because of a failure of post-launch advertising [many developers want to think this is the reason, but it's not] but because the design process missed out some genre cornerstones, or just ignored the level of depth or polish the potential audience might want. Or the game is simply not unique enough from a slightly better competitor game, so all it is serving is "it's X but slightly worse in multiple ways". Listing competitor games is not about trying to "copy" them. It's about acknowledging that that is what your game will be compared to - the existing audience it might be played by - and how that might impact player expectations. For example, if you make a twin-stick shooter which uses an entirely different control schema from the genre-standard, you're going to put yourself in a weaker position because a larger % of your player-base will bounce off of it. This channel is dedicated to helping indies design better games, based on my experience in industry and on years of teaching and seeing what people tend to struggle with most. You absolutely do not have to use the methods I advocate for, but I think I did a pretty thorough explanation of explaining the "whys" of the methodology in the video itself. Everyone is free to continue working in the "passion project" way, but I would also argue that if that's your approach, then you do not need documentation at all. Gut-feel is fine for creativity, but it's not design.

Those are very valid points but make me realise I didn't articulate my thought clearly. I was writing on a phone while out n about. I did not mean "one should not think about" marketing, platforms, intended audiences, genres, and platforms at all when designing a game. Indeed that would be foolish for commercial indie steam / app store games. Rather ( how can I put this ). I like to have two documents, one for the game's design planning, and another for the game's marketing design planning. I do them both simultaneously but flit back n forth organically. The reason for this division is to create clear spaces for creative vs critical thinking. I think Mark Cerny's DICE talk about his Method for game dev pre-production and production phases articulates this separation of concerns nicely. I've just found in my game dev degree lot of students became confused about the purpose of a GDD. Is it a doc to persuade investors the idea will earn money, or is it a doc to explore a creative game idea. Most examples I've found lie on a spectrum between the two. I guess with experience the ability to switch hats so to speak becomes easier and can be done in a single document; but to the inexperienced it can lead to pitfalls where one is overfocused to the neglect of the other. Hence why I find having them seperate is helpful.

@ yeah that makes a lot of sense. Normal if I were working on a larger project I would have separate interlinked web docs for each topic. This video was really about “what does the MVP version of a GDD look like”, focussed on things that new devs are weaker at.

@@bc4198 Stardew Valley only works because it over-delivers on the homage. A feature-complete Pokémon homage by a solo developer is not attainable. And even Stardew is not a good model for most indies to be able to do in terms of realism of scope.

​@@IndieGameClinic Oh, for sure, 100%. Stardew is perhaps more of a successor than an homage, aiming to be at least as grand as its inspiration. And Palia could have been derided as derivative, if they hadn't made the audacious swing at 10x-ing Zelda and The Sims. To your point in this clip, where they've eventually doomed themselves in making a Zelda MMO, is thinking people wanted a Zelda game with microtransactions. Nerfing the social components will just quicken the eventual problem, of how to play an online game if the host company is gone. That aspect affects all online games, but I think it's an added risk with homage games, because it's less certain if they are sustainable.

They’re good Quetzals!!

While you get better stats with better equipment. The main mechanic for builds are gems (represents your move set) that you attach to your equipments. So there's a bit of depth 🙂

@@TheUnsupported I hope it gets a bunch more players. I think we just need a quicker on-ramp to more of the combat features.

@@BrannoDev yeah totally. There are screenshots of a combat scene where it looks like you have more things to do or manage. This is just way too slow to get to the fun.

Thank you for catching this Zelda II reference 😂 I want to have fun with the text, but I need to be careful that it doesn’t look out of place, as most people won’t see the reference.

@@diredier I hope you waved at the screen

@@kuku7732 repeatedly drugging myself and sleeping in chibi Jeff Goldblum’s pixel-bed to get my daily prize with increased regularity

@@IndieGameClinic I’m on that sleep grind 😴

@@kuku7732 dreamsmaxxxing

Haha, I’m not 100% sure what that means!

@@julesarmani7650 maybe I’ll make a full length version on day haha 🤣

Is your indie game a narcissist

that sounds really cool!

It’s a great little game, the kicking feels excellent.