What I learned after 10 Years of Game Development!

I've been making video games for around 10 years now 10 years and at the time of making this video I've worked with many different game engines created several hundred different unity projects participated in ten game jams and made over 400 videos on the subject so I'm not exactly new in the game pun intended and I think it's fair to say that I should have learned a few things by now at least I should so in this video we'll take a look at my game development journey and see if there's anything we can learn from it

or you can just laugh at my mistakes it's up to you but first this video is sponsored by hosting er during my years in game development I've often had to set up different web pages for many different purposes I've even tried programming one from scratch and hosting it on my own but boy oh boy is that a lot of work this is why hosting are such a great solution for all your web hosting needs they're extremely fast very affordable and just so easy to set everything up with and most important of all they take care

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you'll really like it so when I first started out I was using blender yes blender has a game engine and back then it was actually pretty popular in the community the main reason being that it had a simple visual scripting solution I made my first games without touching a single line of code just using this here's my very first one it's split screen physics based shooter I think it's fun to go back and see just how little has actually changed I'm still in love with rigid body physics and I love the games I make now

are based around local multiplayer so after using blender for a while I noticed a new interesting engine pop up it had been around for a while but was only starting to gain more for following I'm of course talking about unity so teamed up with some friends and we decided that together we would make a game using unity it was called awake an atmosphere based horror platformer similar to that of limbo which was new at the time so we got started creating game design documents art assets and I was learning unity following the few tutorials that

were available back then however despite our best efforts we didn't get past the first half of the first level and of course instead of learning from our mistakes we drew up an even more complex idea a game where the player gets to create his own levels and shared them with others the title of the project was your game and this time we got further our 3d artist created a cool character I started to get into programming in c-sharp and making icons in Photoshop we created UI for the game with a bunch of cool assets and

overall we felt much more confident of course it failed just as hard as the first one but that wasn't important because we were getting better in fact I was feeling confident enough to try and program my own game so I created kill pill be fast paced FPS that challenges to play to stay alive as long as possible shortly after that I followed up with the sequel kill pill tropic Island yes I misspelled tropical however this game had nicer graphics even though there overexposed here for some reason a more condensed map and power-ups after having spent

a lot of time on projects that never got finished it was incredibly satisfying to see these two games complete and it taught me my first important lesson don't try to make everything perfect in the beginning you're a beginner it won't be instead I recommend trying out different things and mixing things up for me this helped me figure out what parts of the process I like and what I don't and this was around the time when I started making videos uploaded my first video December 25th 2012 hello welcome to the first tutorial done by Brian Jones

it was the first of many on making a survival game in unity and holy wow did I improve a lot from making them and he should think that I'd learned my lesson by now and chosen a project that I could realistically finish however even after 37 videos the game was nowhere near complete and I decided to move on this time more determined than ever to finish a project I created to make a game begin a course where we would create a ball rolling game not the most exciting thing in the world but I finished it

with only 27 videos alongside the videos I worked on a variety of projects I created a free inventory system and published it on the unity asset store later I made another editor extension for drawing pixel art inside the unity editor it's still in the asset store today but it hasn't been updated in quite a while but for every project I finish and published in this way there were at least ten projects that I scrapped after just a few days or weeks some were just quick tests where would try out a certain feature I experimented with

stub motion stick-figure ragdolls swarm simulation voxel terrain generation RTS style unit movement and even space simulation just to name a few and each time I got just a little bit better at a certain task and a lot better at troubleshooting other projects were more serious for example I created a 2d puzzle platformer called squid soul I was really proud of this project and actually managed to create quite a few levels unfortunately I lost a huge amount of progress to corrupted project files which caused me to drop it lesson learned make backups I also created and

finished a top-down shooter called wave incoming together with a friend of mine he made the art and I implemented everything in unity the game was simple but we managed to implement multiple characters a settings menu and a shop where you could upgrade your character some of you might know that I'm a huge fan of Gary smart and that it's one of the main reasons why I decided to try out game development that and Warcraft 3 World Editor of course and I've never understood why Gary smart was kind of the only game if you could call

it that of its kind so I wanted to try recreating Carrie smart but with unity and I made three attempts at it first time I just had a few physics cubes that could be controlled by shooting different projectiles the second time I'd learned about UI and modeling so you could spawn in different objects manipulate them around and even put thrusters on them that could be assigned to a keyboard key the third time I'd learned a lot more about particle effects post-processing lighting and UI I got just about as far as the first time but this

time at least everything looked much better and at this point I felt like trying something else have you ever done something really pointless in your life I have I tried making a game engine from scratch using C++ and this is how far god with this much code such safe to say that most of the projects were not only fairly ambitious they were also often clones of already existing games and most of the time I had to create projects that were built as examples to use in the videos which I couldn't just finish in a weekend

this was the time that I discovered something that changed everything I participated in Ludum dare a 36 Jemm where you get 48 hours to create a game from scratch the only goal to actually finish it for this Jam I created Dickon and I had an insane amount of fun not only was it incredibly satisfying to complete the game in time with graphics audio and programming it was also amazing to see other people play the game afterwards and get feedback and inspiration from other developers since then I've participated in a bunch of jams and created anything

from stick figure games to racing games to crafting games games that require teamwork in games that require aim and talking about game jams earlier I mentioned that we have an exciting announcement we are hosting a community game jam it's a huge game Jam event that will take place over a week at the end of August and the cool thing is that it's not only organized by us it's something that we're doing together with a bunch of other cool guys so far psycho black thorn Pratt Danny and Jibril's are all helping put together this event and

we'll all be participating with the purpose of showing how game development can bring people together across our different sub communities so if you are a content creator I really encourage you to make a video saying that you will be participating in the jam and encouraging others to do the same we will all be showing our process of working on our entries afterwards and I'm personally really looking forward to seeing how we're each going to be approaching the theme so regardless of who you are if your content credit or not if your ever participated in a

jam or not or if you've even just picked up the hoppy I formally invite you to join us in the community game jam in fact black thorn prod has put together a short trailer for the event that I just have to show you so let's roll the footage a game jam paints until your brush breaks dream up ideas so great so you'll make people face cold like a maniac into the sky turns sound music just focus on having a ton of fun this Jam is organized by some of the top and game dev channels on

YouTube with the goal of bringing the entire game dev community together the challenge is to make a whole game in just one week and it's coming up on the last week of August 2009 see so if you're interested make sure to join the jam or just learn more by using the link in the description also it's of course allowed and in fact I encourage you to join the jam as a team and special thanks to the practice discord staff for helping put everything together and with that said what have I learned after 10 years of

game development well thing it's safe to say that I've worked on a lot of different projects and only managed to finish a few of them and while that might seem inefficient and frustrating I don't regret it one bit going through all these past projects have made me realize just how much I've learned from them and how proud I am of even the ones that never got past the first level I think it's pretty common advice in the game dev community to not start out with something too ambitious and in some regards I agree with this

you can be incredibly hard to keep scrapping projects because of getting stuck or losing interest but at the same time I think it's pretty much unavoidable for beginners to take on too much simply because it's so hard to grasp what's easy to do and what's not and personally whether ended up scrapping a project or not I've always gotten better with everyone I think the most important thing is that you don't lose interest not in a single project but in game development in general because at the end of the day and that's you're really serious about

game development and have turned it into a job it's all about having fun and challenging yourself especially when just starting out and whatever makes you go that could be fun to try I say go for it no matter if it's something you can realistically finish or not and if you find yourself having a hard time finishing things participate in a jam once in a while it's honestly my favorite part about being a developer and it just can't recommend it enough so sign up for the community Jam today no but seriously doesn't matter which just tried

and just one other thing don't be afraid to ask questions or use Google for answers copying other people's code and modifying it is an amazing way to learn and it's something I've done so incredibly much in fact I think that half of being a good programmer is knowing how to Google and that's pretty much it for this video also I just want to let you know that we will be taking a bit of vacation time over the summer and so we're skipping the next two videos don't worry we'll of course be back on schedule and

motivated as ever before long also don't forget to check out hosting out for fast web hosting solutions simply click the link in the description to get started on that thanks watching and I will see you in the next video thanks of the awesome patreon supporters who donated in June and especially thanks to infinity PPR Dennis Sullivan Chris Tyson Knopf ski Shane Cleveland Faisal Merrifield near the set Ronan Justin Palmer Daniel - sanic Constantine Oscar answer's no kirisaki Carter Pierce Erasmus Tim affordable cure Swedish key David Lipka and others in the fierce you guys Rock