Please do not listen to coding tutorial channels. They are in a different industry. They help with coding know-how, but they usually have no clue about the gaming industry, AAA standards, marketing, or creating actual IPs that matter in sales. It is why they have a channel. They suck at IP and game creation. Therefore, you forgot to mention perhaps the most important part: Your game is ugly, and not fun to play. It is certainly an interesting take on Factorio, but it is by no means unique, and this is why it failed so badly. This is what matters most. Plenty of games were badly coded, managed, handled before release, but if the game idea is amazing, if it sticks with the players, if it looks amazing (within its scope and budget) -- this is how you shine. And here's another hint: 98 % of all indies go either bankrupt or return to their desk jobs for good, because of the lack of commercial success. So, forget most of the nonsense online. It is usually coming from people with little to no success. Never release shitty games, or else you end up like those "I make 30 games per year, and they are all crap" guy who after 10 years admits that he sucks as a game designer and therefore needs to return to his desk job.
Also a game developer here from an Indie studio. Our first game had one major flaw. It was fun to play, but it looked like from the 80's. We actually embraced the style, but it was not appealing to anyone. We playtested the s out of it with friends and whoever came by the office and made many revisions. However, we realised that marketing is a full time job and you can't start doing it 2 weeks before release. Try to avoid all the issues above. Now, we occasionally use that old game to test out marketing campaigns, before trying them on our next game.
I am a solo dev and make games in my free time but I have never released anything. This video was incredibly helpful and I learned a lot. Thank you for being candid and honest!
I have just started my dev journey too. My aim is to get my first chappy game out in a year so I can say I have released somthing to then move onto my main project
I love that you guys can be candid with one another and point out each other's shortcomings without offending one another. It seems like you two have a good relationship and I think it bodes well for the longevity of your company.
I love how honest you are. For me, the biggest takeaway was that you’re not dogfeeding enough. You really should be playing your game constantly. If you don’t like what you made, how can you expect others to😅
I have done solo software / games for about 15-20 years. The thing thats always comes back to bite me is the planing. It's so easy as a dev to just start to code. But managing you board and backlog makes life so much easier. Splitting up tasks in a kanban style, And in game dev, be sure to split your "cool ideas" and actual backlog, set a time frame for proof of concept for "cool ideas" and try to value them (what does it bring / how much time will it cost). A key concept in proof of concept is fail fast, try to figure out what the big points of failures is and test that first.
As a solo dev myself, this video was super helpful! Especially scope and commitment are two aspects that I‘ve overlooked a bit. And very nice sketch at 5:07 😂
One thing I read on Reddit regarding marketing, is that making devlogs is basically a waste of time. Players want to see the game, the feature, what can they do. They don't care about how you make the game, or how much passion or time you have spent on it. Only other developers do, so thank you for the video anyway :)
Yeah, devlogs are cool and all, but they don't really convert well, because it's not your future players watching it, but other devs, who usually just wishlist it to support the Steam algorithmn, with no intention of ever buying. -M
This was awesome. Big thanks for sharing this. I kept smiling all the way since I recognised most of the mistakes from my own journey. Solo dev making my first game, closing in on release. "Just bugs left" 😀 Again, thanks for sharing! Inspiring in so many ways.
I’m planning on making a game. I’ve had the concept in mind for about a year now, it’s a small visual novel and I think I will split the development in episodes/chapters. I’m trying to set realistic goals for whenever I start doing it so it won’t be overwhelming. I’ve been watching your videos since yesterday and it’s really helpful. I don’t have funding and I guess the best marketing I çan do is post about my progress on a UA-cam channel
If you can do the art yourself, and use an engine such as Ren'Py, making it itself shouldn't be too hard, it just takes some time. In regards to marketing, VNs are a different breed I feel, it's a lot of marketing through itch.io/Twitter as far as I've been looking into it. Good luck! -M
I recently found your channel, It has given me some awesome insight as I've begun working on my own game. I hope you guys keep doing what you do. Also I have heard about these railroads in multiple vids now. You should make a video explaining the story. I'm extremely curious what specifically made them so hard to implement.
Congratulations on releasing your first game! Make sure to celebrate! I think the scope issues you guys had wasn't too bad because the game was still released in a reasonable time frame and also working in a team is a smart move. I started a game almost three years ago and thought it would take 9 months so you guys did very well! Well done! I think the mistake I've made is trying to take on too much by myself such as: Coding, art, animation, SFX etc etc etc. Although I did hire a background artist and work with a musician so at least I wasn't completely alone.
Even if the game would be a complete failure, we still will have gone through the entire development process, start to finish, something that not a lot of indie devs can say. Good luck on your own ventures, at least you've hired the talents we sorely lacked. -M
Grats on releasing - I've been in IT for many decades. A lot of this list is less game dev specific than you probably realize. All new projects/teams have organizational and communication challenges. The biggest problem all projects have is scope creep - everyone should plan on doing a deep review of the game at least once a month to identify scope creep. Stuff like why did you two add this feature - it's not on the list - oh because we were talking about it at lunch and decided it would be cool. Of course that feature involves adding several 100 new items to the database etc. Thank you for discussing your pain points as well as the good parts.
Congrats on finishing a game. I think the reason visuals are so important is the consumer gets a product they already know they'll enjoy if they end up liking the gameplay or not.
Congratulations for releasing your first game. One of the biggest mistakes I did for my first game was to do too much by myself. I worked so much time on code and art that I could have easily bought. Compared to the hours or even weeks I put into it I just could have bought it for like 20€ or even 100€. But since I'm a solo developer I didn't want to pay money for a game where I don't even know if I ever would make money from (Spoiler: I didn't :-( ) Currently I'm still trying to figure out how to make a game which is in my head since 3 years now. But it's so overwhelmingly big that I don't know if it's even possible to make a game like that. And I also had the experience. When you want to know how your game will take you to make. Think how long it would probably take and then triple it. I tought my game would be finished in half a year and it took me 1,5 years. But I learned so much during the development and I recommend to everyone when you want to make a game do it! The most important part (at the beginning) is to be consistent. Don't work every few months. Work every day on it. Even if you only do some refactoring and rename a variable it's better than nothing an the progress will add up later. And you don't have to get into old code again. Thanks to you two for this honest video. I see it's really hard to make a game in a team when not everyone is really commited to it. But you made it. You can be really proud of yourself.
Something that caught my attention is how you put blame on others. You also recognize when was your fault, but that is the reason why you work as a team, to learn from your mistakes, pull in the same direction, and if there's someone to take the blame is the leader. But it's important that the leader knows how to comunicate. Finger pointing is not healthy and can lead to performance issues. What you want is to build trust, partnership, a good environment that has the goal for everyone to grow, be confident and taken into account. We all make mistakes, let's learn from them and move on
Railways! I have 5+ railroad simulator type games but none of the ones I have integrate the world/commerce building that your game appears to have, now there are probably ones that do this, but just saying, unless your game is set in the Middle Ages or something, railways are pretty much a must. Thanks for the updates, and full disclosure, even when it might be embarrassing. It's very helpful and very much a god-send to those of us still on the fence or in the trenches!
Lol, guys ) It's so fun to watch someone else talking about all beginner issues you had experienced yourself with your own first game ) Glad you've made it ) Sometimes iyou just want to quit and find yourself a decent job, or two, or three if you count your marriage )
I really enjoy this content, you guys offer insights into game dev in a very transparent way. I would not have known about the steam key issue without your recent pirate video-and I learned s lot from this one too! Keep it up guys
I'm developing a "bullet heaven" game now. the development of the previous game (about 18 months, 20 hours a week) failed mainly due to change of scope and too large a scope, initially I wanted to make a very simple strategy game, then the strategy game became more and more complex. I have learned that before starting development you need to have a clear idea of what you want to do and resist the temptation to change
Excellent and very mature post mortem! You have a great failure culture. Feedback about the actual game: A very respectable first title! If I had to complain about something, I think the worst thing is perhaps the broken lighting; it looks like it's without its generated lighting (more like "null", like removed but never regenerated), and without both ambient color gradient and without an environment reflection probe. (it needs one of these two). It would take a tech artist with actual engine experience less than an hour to resolve this. Took me years with Unity to understand why the scenes looked like that, it's not obvious at all even though it's a very easy fix. To elaborate on this path, the color grading is a bit flat for a game 18 months in development by 4+ people. Had you done the concept art early, you could have used that as your color grading template, possibly even straight as a LUT (look up how to make LUTs in a graphics program for Unity - for example: ua-cam.com/video/TQkI5XZ7pfE/v-deo.html - under 1.5 minutes with Amplify, but just straight Unity LUTs work basically the same). :)
Hey guys, first, congratulations on releasing the game. This is the first time I heard about you and I have to say that I identify with a lot of the things that you mention in the video and your experience in general. I started my game company at the end of March. We are a team of 9. The idea was to do a small game in two months. Here we are, 4 months into development with a bigger scope and a game that is not ready yet. I hope that we finish before month six, in theory, we should but I want to be careful haha. I been thinking a lot lately about all the errors we did and the things to improve in the future, and I definitely agree with the things that you say. Is always good to don't expect success from your first game and take it more as a learning experience for the future. So yeah, hope to see you succeed in the future. Good luck 😄
Hey I stumbled upon your guys channel and game just the other day. I am also someone who has only put one game out. When coming up with the idea I though of 'what would I want to play' and came to the conclusion of a multiplayer horror game. I worked for 2 months on it and released it to steam. The game has about 25 reviews and are mostly positive. I feel that multiplayer games are more fun to play then top down resource management games (obviously my opinion) but it should be taken into consideration while very early in development. Hope this helps and happy trails making games :)
Hi, great and very helpful video, thanks that you share with your experience :D i have a question about two of mistakes described by you. One of it tells that i should make a prototype but in the other hand i should polish mechanics earlier than end of implementation. Do you know how balance this two? Until now i thought that prototype means all working mechanics which i want to have in my game, but not balanced, polished, without graphics and generally looking bad. But it sounds like it's not fit with your advice to polish game earlier, means when xd?
(hey, did you ever get to the railways?) This is fantastic. Genuine honesty and transparency, absolutely great and humble. Youve clearly learned a lot, and it's going to really equip you so well for the next one.
Been doing a lot of game dev tips and tricks research last month into this one and I gotta drop you guys a follow. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with us.
I work as a Software engineer out side of game dev and pretty much everything you have put here is standard anti patterns that happen in most software companies.
I was really surprised to see you release so soon after playing your demo for a bit. The demo tutorial was understandable for me as I am an avid fan of management games and even had the same journey as you trying to develop a few. However, if I were to give the tutorial to many around me, they would be lost very quickly. What gave you the trigger to release? Was it because you were sick on working on Forge Industry, or did you think it is ready and the best it can be? Don't get me wrong, I admire your courage to press the release button as I never personally did it on steam yet. I would be really interested in a follow up video in a few week reviewing your reach, sales and feedback from players. Anyway, congratulation, time to celebrate your release and the Belgian Independence Day!
It was a whole mix of "why release now?" and we will definitely make a postmortem video on our launch in a few weeks. But you've got it pretty spot on. As exposed in the video, Thomas, who's 25% of the team and the main dev, doesn't even like this game that much. It was supposed to be a "quick learning experience" before we went on to go and make an open world rpg (or another dumb idea). Also, it's the reality of not having any publishers/funding. We ended up going to a few, but nobody wants to support a project that is nearly complete. So the only way we would make anything was releasing. And since we didn't have the drive to support the game for another 3+ years, early access was out of the question as well. Also, purely feature and mechanical, we kind of handicapped by making ourselves fantasy vs. scifi/modern, as having nuclear reactors and other wacky end-game buildings aren't lore wise really (and we wanted to stay away from just calling everything "magic"). We think the experience we were able to deliver right now, is pretty solid, and whilst we will still support Forge Industry, after 18 months, it's also just time to move on from our first game. I will most likely be revising the tutorial soon. That's the problem with playing 1000+ hours of your own game, I can speedrun the tutorial in 10 minutes at this point, not realizing anymore what may be unclear. -M
A really insightful video. Self-reflection is incredibly important so I think it's great that you guys can see and acknowledge the mistakes you made along the way and then also share them with everyone else. Congratulations on your release! Whether or not it's a financial success or not, it's still a great achievement and obviously you guys have learned a lot. Looking forward to seeing more videos on your game dev journey in the future and new details on the next upcoming project!
8:16 - As a fellow indie dev with a UA-cam, I'm shocked that you've got your video production times down to 4 hours! My last devlog took 3 weeks to finish. Not the game updates, just the video. Great tips, by the way! I'm curious, you mentioned scrum, do you guys do any unit tests, or do you plan to for your next game?
We used to use Unit Tests, but *some people* never bothered to update tests, so they kind of fell into disarray, as we didn't have a good pipeline structure that would prevent merging if tests failed, so in the end we disabled them. I think the devs still ran some unit tests locally to validate item operation, but the result is only as thorough as how you write the test. -M
18:49 I mean the easist one that most game devs over looks is reach out to Press and offer free keys for them to hopefully review... Like you never need to sponsor a video when their are hunders of press channels who will do it for free... Though getting on a press list would help a small team with a budget.
Learning 3d on the fly is difficult.. Ive been doing 3d game model for 3 years now.. and Im now grasping the concept of Parallax texturing... Theres a bunch of stuffs u would have to do for game optimization if u are making detailed 3d models for your game
Great video! Humble to share them like this. Where there any main reasons for not doing Early Access earlier in the development stage, or changing the release that was done to an Early Access release instead?
Also been throught some mistakes [ 1.lake of art/design skills(no drawing, focus on 2d games 2. Go without having a real idea, what u doing 3. borning gameplay(no substance, none-ense to play[ peoples enjoy building up & gathering stuff ] 4.too big scaled (now i first focus on 2D side games) 5.published game too early ]
15:55 From having a bit of experience with localization on other systems, like apps or websites, to be honest, if the localization system is good, the number of languages is irrelevant. I would focus on having a system that supports any special character really regardless of language (UTF-8 should cover the great majority of it really), than take into account that not all languages use ltr, some do rtl (right to left), as such add support for that and take that into account in the UI. After this, adding a new language should be as simple as picking the file with all the text entries, giving it to a translator and adding more on top.
One of the main problem in your game is simply the price... When i checked the steam page, i was shocked by the price. Nothing i. The steam page justify this price. One advice i saw online was to make the game looks expensive... Make thr player think his purchase was justified. Your game looks cheap, thr menus, the graphics.. marketing is not only videos or ads... Graphics are also part of marketing. Marketing start the moment you have the game idea. Put yourself in the player's shoes , what will make you buy the game .. you have to answer this.
On the point about removing assets... I mean in the case of Rewired, I implemented it before Unity had a proper control system in place... so yeah, I'm not sure something like that can be avoided. What made you ditch Rewired if it was already implemented? Do you think Unity's built in system is better?
If you implemented it before it was in place it's basically impossible to avoid indeed. We had Rewired integrated but didn't like the rebinding UI it gave us. We decided it would probably be quicker to implement the new input system with rebinding (it has great modular examples) over customising the Rewired UI. It's definitely not a bad asset to use though! -T
We did, at least at first, only Thomas lost his feeling for the game during development, I still personally like it, although the fun of the mechanics has been spoiled a bit after 800 hours of playtime and testing -M
First and most important: you are adorable. This was a fascinating video because i didn't expect the journey to have been this messy/wild. It's great that you share this so open for other to learn from. Here's my mistakes and how i 'effed up developement: #1 I was a kid who started a singleplayer-mod for Unreal1 and as the "leader" i happened to have to do all the in between stuff that no one else could and neither could i and i failed at a lot including project management. For years i felt kinda bad for it, and now 20 years later i mostly wonder why almost half a dozen people, including grown ups 20 years older than me, even joined my little team. I learned a lot, so thanks ex-team-members, my personal developement wasted so much of your time. #2 Me and a friend tried making an RPG, two programmers with no skill in art. We concentrated on stuff we could do and didn't solve the problems about the content we did could not do and as a result, it did not work out but we learned a whole lot. It was so valuable and i found a friend for life. Even though we argued so much, if the CIA had tapped our wire, they would have adviced us to marry so we could finally get a divorce. I loved that time. #3 I got a real job in real non-gamedev programming and experienced a whole lot of different projects. Some went really well, others didn't. I participated in projects that went horribly out of scope and i salvaged other peoples broken mess, which is eye-opening. Sadly, i'm not allowed to tell details about my work. By now after more than ten years in the job, i am far better at estimating where problems can arise and which issues need to be tackled in order to not bite us later. Your multiplayer-attempt, that's the kind of idea where i would use the word "bullshit" in a meeting with my bosses. Between all the ..."educational" failures, i also did some successful gamedev, but that's not todays topic. Till next time~🦭🐟
Just my two points, but I wish you more luck with the next game: 9:12 - Lack of Talent - Tbh the lack of a good 2D/3D Artist or "Talent" hurts this project the most in my opinion. You should have rather use assets from the unity store (e.g. Poly Catalogue) for your first game if you are not that talented in 2D/3D Art. Also the UI/UX Design is not that great tbh. You can make the best game systems, but as long as you have no good presentation no one will play the game. You do not need UE5 graphics, but at least a design concept or art direction (look at Valheim for example how they handle sunlight or the how much better foundation looked after having a new UI/UX). Presentation is key and there are a ton of tools that could be used already existing. Even if you call the game "Poly Industry" it would may have a better foundation than the pertty mediocre 2D/3D art style from forge industry. 15:07 - Localization - Stay with english and your local language. But stay open for additional community driven localization e.g. via mods or via community open source projects. "Voxel Tycoon" uses "weblate" which helps them a lot with localization in 18 languages by the community.
I think you say that you probably will switch to Unreal Engine. Is that really going to happen? EDIT Very curious about that becouse I'm suffering from analysis paralysis, and I would like to ear your thoughts about game engine chose process, specifically now
We will be using Unity again for our next game. The short version of my opinion on this is "Both are fine, and you cannot make a bad choice." If you want more details on engines in general we have a tier list video where Marnix and I give our thoughts about several engines. -T
Oof when the "Art guy" dictates scope... Edit to clarify. the blessing of an art person is creativity but its also a curse. Too many ideas if its not locked in at the offset then too many creative ideas can be bad.
It is a bit of a love hate relationship. Ultimately this just isn't the type of genre that I personally like the most. I like the game we delivered, but would not play this for hours and hours. I hope that makes a bit of sense! -T
So an extra mistake, based on your friendship, is crapping on each other (you did this…) in public. Professional organisations are united. Keep that stuff behind the scenes and provide a united front.
Whilst I think this is true in business, I think this is not something that fully applies in our case. We're UA-camrs as well, people don't watch us just for the raw information, but also the way we present it. If we were all sterile and formal, it would 1) Not be genuine 2) Not as relatable Both are very important for being a UA-camr, which would lead to limited growth here - M
@@bitemegames Professional doesn’t have to mean sterile and formal. It’s about how you behave, not how you present. You’re supposed to be a team. But hey, do you.
Probably not for Forge Industry, our localization system there is not capable of adding languages at this point. Also, it's about 13k words. For our next game, we may try to crowdsource some localizations, I think the best thing to do if you're interested is join our Discord, we'll ask for help there when we're looking at localization. -M
Congrats on releasing the game!
All of this that you learned will be a huge help in your second game, best of luck with the new project!
Thank you for making our game a reality, without your vids we'd probably still be stuck on something dumb. -M
Please do not listen to coding tutorial channels. They are in a different industry. They help with coding know-how, but they usually have no clue about the gaming industry, AAA standards, marketing, or creating actual IPs that matter in sales. It is why they have a channel. They suck at IP and game creation. Therefore, you forgot to mention perhaps the most important part: Your game is ugly, and not fun to play. It is certainly an interesting take on Factorio, but it is by no means unique, and this is why it failed so badly. This is what matters most. Plenty of games were badly coded, managed, handled before release, but if the game idea is amazing, if it sticks with the players, if it looks amazing (within its scope and budget) -- this is how you shine. And here's another hint: 98 % of all indies go either bankrupt or return to their desk jobs for good, because of the lack of commercial success. So, forget most of the nonsense online. It is usually coming from people with little to no success. Never release shitty games, or else you end up like those "I make 30 games per year, and they are all crap" guy who after 10 years admits that he sucks as a game designer and therefore needs to return to his desk job.
Also a game developer here from an Indie studio. Our first game had one major flaw. It was fun to play, but it looked like from the 80's. We actually embraced the style, but it was not appealing to anyone.
We playtested the s out of it with friends and whoever came by the office and made many revisions. However, we realised that marketing is a full time job and you can't start doing it 2 weeks before release.
Try to avoid all the issues above. Now, we occasionally use that old game to test out marketing campaigns, before trying them on our next game.
They didnt mention the biggest mistake. Spending so much time something that would almost certainly not make money.
I am a solo dev and make games in my free time but I have never released anything. This video was incredibly helpful and I learned a lot. Thank you for being candid and honest!
I have just started my dev journey too. My aim is to get my first chappy game out in a year so I can say I have released somthing to then move onto my main project
I've made like 8 games in the last 12 years. It's a hobby for me. I only have one on steam, it's not even released yet lol
@Rhysman30 what's the game? If they're finished try releasing some of them!
I love that you guys can be candid with one another and point out each other's shortcomings without offending one another. It seems like you two have a good relationship and I think it bodes well for the longevity of your company.
I love how honest you are. For me, the biggest takeaway was that you’re not dogfeeding enough. You really should be playing your game constantly. If you don’t like what you made, how can you expect others to😅
I cannot emphasis enough how dramatic a shift this has made to my app, since I have started dog fooding my own app.
I think you should add trains! It sounds like a really cool idea!
Still not doing it Marnix...
-T
I have done solo software / games for about 15-20 years. The thing thats always comes back to bite me is the planing.
It's so easy as a dev to just start to code. But managing you board and backlog makes life so much easier. Splitting up tasks in a kanban style, And in game dev, be sure to split your "cool ideas" and actual backlog, set a time frame for proof of concept for "cool ideas" and try to value them (what does it bring / how much time will it cost). A key concept in proof of concept is fail fast, try to figure out what the big points of failures is and test that first.
As a solo dev myself, this video was super helpful! Especially scope and commitment are two aspects that I‘ve overlooked a bit.
And very nice sketch at 5:07 😂
Workers go brrrr is a complete vibe in a commit message
One thing I read on Reddit regarding marketing, is that making devlogs is basically a waste of time. Players want to see the game, the feature, what can they do. They don't care about how you make the game, or how much passion or time you have spent on it. Only other developers do, so thank you for the video anyway :)
Yeah, devlogs are cool and all, but they don't really convert well, because it's not your future players watching it, but other devs, who usually just wishlist it to support the Steam algorithmn, with no intention of ever buying. -M
Your honesty is refreshing, and your generosity in sharing your mistakes is much appreciated!
This was awesome. Big thanks for sharing this. I kept smiling all the way since I recognised most of the mistakes from my own journey. Solo dev making my first game, closing in on release. "Just bugs left" 😀 Again, thanks for sharing! Inspiring in so many ways.
I’m planning on making a game. I’ve had the concept in mind for about a year now, it’s a small visual novel and I think I will split the development in episodes/chapters. I’m trying to set realistic goals for whenever I start doing it so it won’t be overwhelming. I’ve been watching your videos since yesterday and it’s really helpful. I don’t have funding and I guess the best marketing I çan do is post about my progress on a UA-cam channel
If you can do the art yourself, and use an engine such as Ren'Py, making it itself shouldn't be too hard, it just takes some time. In regards to marketing, VNs are a different breed I feel, it's a lot of marketing through itch.io/Twitter as far as I've been looking into it.
Good luck! -M
Just starting our own studio and your videos have been a great help so far! Thanks for making them!
For someone that wants to start soon in the industry, this is very insightful ! Thank you.
I recently found your channel, It has given me some awesome insight as I've begun working on my own game. I hope you guys keep doing what you do. Also I have heard about these railroads in multiple vids now. You should make a video explaining the story. I'm extremely curious what specifically made them so hard to implement.
Congratulations on your release! I'm really enjoying your vids lately.
P.S.: Railroads are cool!
Thanks! But please don't encourage Marnix for railroads 🙃
-T
22:03
1 1/2 - 2 years....
To optimistic, triple it XD
Congratulations on releasing your first game! Make sure to celebrate! I think the scope issues you guys had wasn't too bad because the game was still released in a reasonable time frame and also working in a team is a smart move. I started a game almost three years ago and thought it would take 9 months so you guys did very well! Well done! I think the mistake I've made is trying to take on too much by myself such as: Coding, art, animation, SFX etc etc etc. Although I did hire a background artist and work with a musician so at least I wasn't completely alone.
Even if the game would be a complete failure, we still will have gone through the entire development process, start to finish, something that not a lot of indie devs can say. Good luck on your own ventures, at least you've hired the talents we sorely lacked. -M
@@bitemegames Hopefully it all goes well! Looking forward to the post mortem and seeing how things go with the next game etc.
Grats on releasing - I've been in IT for many decades. A lot of this list is less game dev specific than you probably realize. All new projects/teams have organizational and communication challenges. The biggest problem all projects have is scope creep - everyone should plan on doing a deep review of the game at least once a month to identify scope creep. Stuff like why did you two add this feature - it's not on the list - oh because we were talking about it at lunch and decided it would be cool. Of course that feature involves adding several 100 new items to the database etc. Thank you for discussing your pain points as well as the good parts.
Congrats on finishing a game. I think the reason visuals are so important is the consumer gets a product they already know they'll enjoy if they end up liking the gameplay or not.
Thank you for releasing this video - fantastic information and checklist for things to do/not do! All we indie devs appreciate it
This was super helpful! Hindsight is 20 20, just have to plan ahead a bit more next time
Love all the honesty here gentlemen (and the good-natured humor), it's very helpful for the rest of us - thank you!
Very insightful and helpful experiences, thank you! I'm taking some of this to heart for realz.
The game does look like it would naturally have railways though...
Congratulations for releasing your first game.
One of the biggest mistakes I did for my first game was to do too much by myself. I worked so much time on code and art that I could have easily bought. Compared to the hours or even weeks I put into it I just could have bought it for like 20€ or even 100€.
But since I'm a solo developer I didn't want to pay money for a game where I don't even know if I ever would make money from (Spoiler: I didn't :-( )
Currently I'm still trying to figure out how to make a game which is in my head since 3 years now. But it's so overwhelmingly big that I don't know if it's even possible to make a game like that.
And I also had the experience. When you want to know how your game will take you to make. Think how long it would probably take and then triple it. I tought my game would be finished in half a year and it took me 1,5 years.
But I learned so much during the development and I recommend to everyone when you want to make a game do it! The most important part (at the beginning) is to be consistent. Don't work every few months. Work every day on it. Even if you only do some refactoring and rename a variable it's better than nothing an the progress will add up later. And you don't have to get into old code again.
Thanks to you two for this honest video. I see it's really hard to make a game in a team when not everyone is really commited to it. But you made it. You can be really proud of yourself.
Thanks for sharing yours as well!
-T
Something that caught my attention is how you put blame on others. You also recognize when was your fault, but that is the reason why you work as a team, to learn from your mistakes, pull in the same direction, and if there's someone to take the blame is the leader. But it's important that the leader knows how to comunicate. Finger pointing is not healthy and can lead to performance issues. What you want is to build trust, partnership, a good environment that has the goal for everyone to grow, be confident and taken into account. We all make mistakes, let's learn from them and move on
But they make no money, panic should be setting in. I'd side with the critics, graphics are limiting the game.
Railways!
I have 5+ railroad simulator type games but none of the ones I have integrate the world/commerce building that your game appears to have, now there are probably ones that do this, but just saying, unless your game is set in the Middle Ages or something, railways are pretty much a must.
Thanks for the updates, and full disclosure, even when it might be embarrassing. It's very helpful and very much a god-send to those of us still on the fence or in the trenches!
RAILWAYS! XD
First video I've found of you guys. I'm a solo dev, and all of this is very good advice. Subbed!
Lol, guys ) It's so fun to watch someone else talking about all beginner issues you had experienced yourself with your own first game ) Glad you've made it ) Sometimes iyou just want to quit and find yourself a decent job, or two, or three if you count your marriage )
Great that you are so transparant! Thanks for sharing these mistakes so we can learn from you guys.
I really enjoy this content, you guys offer insights into game dev in a very transparent way. I would not have known about the steam key issue without your recent pirate video-and I learned s lot from this one too! Keep it up guys
I'm developing a "bullet heaven" game now.
the development of the previous game (about 18 months, 20 hours a week) failed mainly due to change of scope and too large a scope, initially I wanted to make a very simple strategy game, then the strategy game became more and more complex. I have learned that before starting development you need to have a clear idea of what you want to do and resist the temptation to change
Excellent and very mature post mortem! You have a great failure culture.
Feedback about the actual game: A very respectable first title! If I had to complain about something, I think the worst thing is perhaps the broken lighting; it looks like it's without its generated lighting (more like "null", like removed but never regenerated), and without both ambient color gradient and without an environment reflection probe. (it needs one of these two). It would take a tech artist with actual engine experience less than an hour to resolve this. Took me years with Unity to understand why the scenes looked like that, it's not obvious at all even though it's a very easy fix. To elaborate on this path, the color grading is a bit flat for a game 18 months in development by 4+ people. Had you done the concept art early, you could have used that as your color grading template, possibly even straight as a LUT (look up how to make LUTs in a graphics program for Unity - for example: ua-cam.com/video/TQkI5XZ7pfE/v-deo.html - under 1.5 minutes with Amplify, but just straight Unity LUTs work basically the same). :)
This comment is gold. Thank you
Found your channel recently and have been loving the content! Keep up the good work!! 🎉
Hey guys, first, congratulations on releasing the game. This is the first time I heard about you and I have to say that I identify with a lot of the things that you mention in the video and your experience in general. I started my game company at the end of March. We are a team of 9. The idea was to do a small game in two months. Here we are, 4 months into development with a bigger scope and a game that is not ready yet. I hope that we finish before month six, in theory, we should but I want to be careful haha.
I been thinking a lot lately about all the errors we did and the things to improve in the future, and I definitely agree with the things that you say. Is always good to don't expect success from your first game and take it more as a learning experience for the future.
So yeah, hope to see you succeed in the future.
Good luck 😄
Good luck to you too! Hope you can learn from our mistakes!
-T
Hey I stumbled upon your guys channel and game just the other day. I am also someone who has only put one game out. When coming up with the idea I though of 'what would I want to play' and came to the conclusion of a multiplayer horror game. I worked for 2 months on it and released it to steam. The game has about 25 reviews and are mostly positive. I feel that multiplayer games are more fun to play then top down resource management games (obviously my opinion) but it should be taken into consideration while very early in development. Hope this helps and happy trails making games :)
Hi, great and very helpful video, thanks that you share with your experience :D i have a question about two of mistakes described by you. One of it tells that i should make a prototype but in the other hand i should polish mechanics earlier than end of implementation. Do you know how balance this two? Until now i thought that prototype means all working mechanics which i want to have in my game, but not balanced, polished, without graphics and generally looking bad. But it sounds like it's not fit with your advice to polish game earlier, means when xd?
(hey, did you ever get to the railways?)
This is fantastic. Genuine honesty and transparency, absolutely great and humble. Youve clearly learned a lot, and it's going to really equip you so well for the next one.
Great video guys, thank you so much.
Been doing a lot of game dev tips and tricks research last month into this one and I gotta drop you guys a follow. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with us.
Danke!
Very honest account, you guys will eventually succeed keep it up!!
I work as a Software engineer out side of game dev and pretty much everything you have put here is standard anti patterns that happen in most software companies.
I was really surprised to see you release so soon after playing your demo for a bit.
The demo tutorial was understandable for me as I am an avid fan of management games and even had the same journey as you trying to develop a few.
However, if I were to give the tutorial to many around me, they would be lost very quickly.
What gave you the trigger to release? Was it because you were sick on working on Forge Industry, or did you think it is ready and the best it can be? Don't get me wrong, I admire your courage to press the release button as I never personally did it on steam yet.
I would be really interested in a follow up video in a few week reviewing your reach, sales and feedback from players.
Anyway, congratulation, time to celebrate your release and the Belgian Independence Day!
It was a whole mix of "why release now?" and we will definitely make a postmortem video on our launch in a few weeks.
But you've got it pretty spot on. As exposed in the video, Thomas, who's 25% of the team and the main dev, doesn't even like this game that much. It was supposed to be a "quick learning experience" before we went on to go and make an open world rpg (or another dumb idea). Also, it's the reality of not having any publishers/funding. We ended up going to a few, but nobody wants to support a project that is nearly complete. So the only way we would make anything was releasing. And since we didn't have the drive to support the game for another 3+ years, early access was out of the question as well.
Also, purely feature and mechanical, we kind of handicapped by making ourselves fantasy vs. scifi/modern, as having nuclear reactors and other wacky end-game buildings aren't lore wise really (and we wanted to stay away from just calling everything "magic"). We think the experience we were able to deliver right now, is pretty solid, and whilst we will still support Forge Industry, after 18 months, it's also just time to move on from our first game.
I will most likely be revising the tutorial soon. That's the problem with playing 1000+ hours of your own game, I can speedrun the tutorial in 10 minutes at this point, not realizing anymore what may be unclear.
-M
A really insightful video. Self-reflection is incredibly important so I think it's great that you guys can see and acknowledge the mistakes you made along the way and then also share them with everyone else. Congratulations on your release! Whether or not it's a financial success or not, it's still a great achievement and obviously you guys have learned a lot. Looking forward to seeing more videos on your game dev journey in the future and new details on the next upcoming project!
8:16 - As a fellow indie dev with a UA-cam, I'm shocked that you've got your video production times down to 4 hours! My last devlog took 3 weeks to finish. Not the game updates, just the video.
Great tips, by the way! I'm curious, you mentioned scrum, do you guys do any unit tests, or do you plan to for your next game?
We used to use Unit Tests, but *some people* never bothered to update tests, so they kind of fell into disarray, as we didn't have a good pipeline structure that would prevent merging if tests failed, so in the end we disabled them.
I think the devs still ran some unit tests locally to validate item operation, but the result is only as thorough as how you write the test. -M
I sympathize with the difficulty of adding railways, but it would be a very loved feature.
18:49 I mean the easist one that most game devs over looks is reach out to Press and offer free keys for them to hopefully review... Like you never need to sponsor a video when their are hunders of press channels who will do it for free... Though getting on a press list would help a small team with a budget.
two times a week....
looks like I've found my morning coffee videos :D
See you then!
-T
Thanks for the videos guys
Very good video, thanks.
Learning 3d on the fly is difficult.. Ive been doing 3d game model for 3 years now.. and Im now grasping the concept of Parallax texturing... Theres a bunch of stuffs u would have to do for game optimization if u are making detailed 3d models for your game
thanks!
You guys need some game art friends and people that can build ui but congrats guy your done with making this one
I need some friends... -M
First rule (and old one too) of PMing is:
estimate= estimate * 2 + 1
Keep it up! 💪🏼
Really entertaining and informative video, liked and subscribed!
Great video! Humble to share them like this. Where there any main reasons for not doing Early Access earlier in the development stage, or changing the release that was done to an Early Access release instead?
Also been throught some mistakes [ 1.lake of art/design skills(no drawing, focus on 2d games 2. Go without having a real idea, what u doing 3. borning gameplay(no substance, none-ense to play[ peoples enjoy building up & gathering stuff ] 4.too big scaled (now i first focus on 2D side games) 5.published game too early ]
best of luck with your game,
15:55 From having a bit of experience with localization on other systems, like apps or websites, to be honest, if the localization system is good, the number of languages is irrelevant.
I would focus on having a system that supports any special character really regardless of language (UTF-8 should cover the great majority of it really), than take into account that not all languages use ltr, some do rtl (right to left), as such add support for that and take that into account in the UI.
After this, adding a new language should be as simple as picking the file with all the text entries, giving it to a translator and adding more on top.
ill support
One of the main problem in your game is simply the price... When i checked the steam page, i was shocked by the price. Nothing i. The steam page justify this price. One advice i saw online was to make the game looks expensive... Make thr player think his purchase was justified. Your game looks cheap, thr menus, the graphics.. marketing is not only videos or ads... Graphics are also part of marketing. Marketing start the moment you have the game idea. Put yourself in the player's shoes , what will make you buy the game .. you have to answer this.
7:11 thats basicle me xD all. especially when i fix something before a build all my commits are "minor fix" but no one knows what was fixed xD
Sensing lots of passive aggression between the two
On the point about removing assets... I mean in the case of Rewired, I implemented it before Unity had a proper control system in place... so yeah, I'm not sure something like that can be avoided.
What made you ditch Rewired if it was already implemented? Do you think Unity's built in system is better?
If you implemented it before it was in place it's basically impossible to avoid indeed.
We had Rewired integrated but didn't like the rebinding UI it gave us. We decided it would probably be quicker to implement the new input system with rebinding (it has great modular examples) over customising the Rewired UI. It's definitely not a bad asset to use though!
-T
new thumb design? this one is 🔥
I have no clue what I do when making these thumbnails, but it seems the past ones have all been doing better. -M
Yes to railways!!
I have one question, did you guys developed a game that you wanted to play?
We did, at least at first, only Thomas lost his feeling for the game during development, I still personally like it, although the fun of the mechanics has been spoiled a bit after 800 hours of playtime and testing -M
First and most important: you are adorable. This was a fascinating video because i didn't expect the journey to have been this messy/wild. It's great that you share this so open for other to learn from.
Here's my mistakes and how i 'effed up developement:
#1 I was a kid who started a singleplayer-mod for Unreal1 and as the "leader" i happened to have to do all the in between stuff that no one else could and neither could i and i failed at a lot including project management. For years i felt kinda bad for it, and now 20 years later i mostly wonder why almost half a dozen people, including grown ups 20 years older than me, even joined my little team. I learned a lot, so thanks ex-team-members, my personal developement wasted so much of your time.
#2 Me and a friend tried making an RPG, two programmers with no skill in art. We concentrated on stuff we could do and didn't solve the problems about the content we did could not do and as a result, it did not work out but we learned a whole lot. It was so valuable and i found a friend for life. Even though we argued so much, if the CIA had tapped our wire, they would have adviced us to marry so we could finally get a divorce. I loved that time.
#3 I got a real job in real non-gamedev programming and experienced a whole lot of different projects. Some went really well, others didn't. I participated in projects that went horribly out of scope and i salvaged other peoples broken mess, which is eye-opening. Sadly, i'm not allowed to tell details about my work. By now after more than ten years in the job, i am far better at estimating where problems can arise and which issues need to be tackled in order to not bite us later. Your multiplayer-attempt, that's the kind of idea where i would use the word "bullshit" in a meeting with my bosses.
Between all the ..."educational" failures, i also did some successful gamedev, but that's not todays topic.
Till next time~🦭🐟
Always a pleasure reading your comments
I like trains. I would like more trains in more games. I'm working on helping with that.
Definitely add trains.
Only buy this game when I can have a multi-player party during a train ride where I can in-train chat with my friends!
I feel like I should just make a standalone train game at that point 🤔 -M
Just my two points, but I wish you more luck with the next game:
9:12 - Lack of Talent - Tbh the lack of a good 2D/3D Artist or "Talent" hurts this project the most in my opinion. You should have rather use assets from the unity store (e.g. Poly Catalogue) for your first game if you are not that talented in 2D/3D Art. Also the UI/UX Design is not that great tbh. You can make the best game systems, but as long as you have no good presentation no one will play the game. You do not need UE5 graphics, but at least a design concept or art direction (look at Valheim for example how they handle sunlight or the how much better foundation looked after having a new UI/UX). Presentation is key and there are a ton of tools that could be used already existing. Even if you call the game "Poly Industry" it would may have a better foundation than the pertty mediocre 2D/3D art style from forge industry.
15:07 - Localization - Stay with english and your local language. But stay open for additional community driven localization e.g. via mods or via community open source projects. "Voxel Tycoon" uses "weblate" which helps them a lot with localization in 18 languages by the community.
I LOVE railroads...
RAILWAYS !!! CHO !!! CHO!!!
gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam
... gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam
gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam gamejam
Always start with a first fun loop that is immediately interesting.
Whahaha railroads FTW !!!!
félicitations / congrats .. and new sub ;)
Merci Beaucoup 😉 -M
I like trains. So Railways yes!
Just letting you know that I'd like railways
Your first issue is something I face with several startup engagements, it’s not unique to game dev 😊
I think you say that you probably will switch to Unreal Engine. Is that really going to happen?
EDIT
Very curious about that becouse I'm suffering from analysis paralysis, and I would like to ear your thoughts about game engine chose process, specifically now
We will be using Unity again for our next game. The short version of my opinion on this is "Both are fine, and you cannot make a bad choice."
If you want more details on engines in general we have a tier list video where Marnix and I give our thoughts about several engines.
-T
I'm a composer and music producer who is starting to understand a little about game programming.
Trains! lol
✌🤍
where are the railways :o everyone loves railways
Railways are the best!
Please don't encourage Marnix his behavior 🙃
-T
Any game is better with railways!
workers go brrrrrrr
Oof when the "Art guy" dictates scope...
Edit to clarify. the blessing of an art person is creativity but its also a curse. Too many ideas if its not locked in at the offset then too many creative ideas can be bad.
make railways!
Railroads plz?
Do it for me, as my game doesn't have metal, and I can't.
Please don't encourage his behavior 🙃
-T
Railways++
I notice a subtle tension between you guys. Like you're good friends, but also a little mad about how the development of the game went.
Add railways I love trains
Thomas do you realy not like the game? Did you lose interest over time?
It is a bit of a love hate relationship. Ultimately this just isn't the type of genre that I personally like the most. I like the game we delivered, but would not play this for hours and hours. I hope that makes a bit of sense!
-T
What I'm really curious about is why you chose such a sexually charged name for your studio
This could be titled "We made every beginner dev mistake there is."
Thoroughly amused. Not looking forward to making mistakes. Kek
So an extra mistake, based on your friendship, is crapping on each other (you did this…) in public. Professional organisations are united. Keep that stuff behind the scenes and provide a united front.
Whilst I think this is true in business, I think this is not something that fully applies in our case. We're UA-camrs as well, people don't watch us just for the raw information, but also the way we present it.
If we were all sterile and formal, it would
1) Not be genuine
2) Not as relatable
Both are very important for being a UA-camr, which would lead to limited growth here
- M
@@bitemegames Professional doesn’t have to mean sterile and formal. It’s about how you behave, not how you present. You’re supposed to be a team. But hey, do you.
@bitemegames ya dont listen to this guy.
Your raw honest chat is what makes these videos interesting.
you guys need spanish localization? for free? xD
Probably not for Forge Industry, our localization system there is not capable of adding languages at this point. Also, it's about 13k words.
For our next game, we may try to crowdsource some localizations, I think the best thing to do if you're interested is join our Discord, we'll ask for help there when we're looking at localization. -M
@@bitemegames sure, im doing 3D modeling for 2 other indie studios so i would be more than glad to help :D