the BRUTAL Truth of Indie Dev 😱🤔
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- Опубліковано 18 вер 2024
- Welcome to the Indie Game Clinic, where members of the gamedev community get their games reviewed mid-development by a pro designer and academic.
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📋 Background pixelart was provided by CraftPix.net via opengameart.org, and also Rick Rubin's face and other game assets. All background music is from my personal library.
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Please use indiegameclinic@gmail.com for all game submissions. Be sure to include some information about yourself or your team, and an explanation of where you are in the game development process. This is a game design education channel, not consumer reviews, so I will only be looking at games which are still in development, and from developers who are actively seeking genuine feedback.
Your music analogy really resonated with me. I don't practice making music because I think i'll get famous, or even so that i can get better at it. I do it because I love it. And when you love doing something you do it so much you get good at it by accident.
with a flood of "I did a game in two hours and now im a milionaire" kind of videos in youtube that just increase expectations and anxiety. this video reminds that the true objective is internal not external, thanks.
@@doug9000 glad you found it helpful Doug. I still think GDC talks are a way better UA-cam resource for developers than the more “UA-cam native” dev content. There are just more eyeballs in this kind of “you can achieve anything” shallow inspo-porn I see floating about.
Indie dev is a great hobby, but a brutal career. Great video.
@@BrannoDev I would even go as far as to say that as a hobby it’s not really “indie dev”, because “indie” describes a relationship between marketing and publishing and development, but that’s splitting hairs and probably not that helpful a distinction to make for most people.
@@IndieGameClinic semantics matter, but I have to accept that indie has morphed into 'not AAA' rather than just small and without a publisher.
@@BrannoDev right. Saying you’re “independent” when you haven’t really finished a game is a bit like being an “indie musician” who has never been offered (and turned down) a recording contract.
@@IndieGameClinic if you grown up as a company, and have steady income lets say hades devs, they already AA-AAA games, if it was the 2000 it would have been count as AAA game.... with budget of AAA game.
@@danielr7599 “AAA” refers to whichever bracket of games is currently most expensive to produce.
Imagine a painter who makes a painting but it doesn't sell and they go on UA-cam and say "My painting failed". Meaningless statement.
If they were trying to sell it they could say they failed
Usually paintings don't take 4 years to make
I heard someone saying: If you are making a game because you want to make money, don't. If you want to make games because you love it and money can be a consequence, maybe?!
It is similar to the trend of pushing people to "be an entrepreneur". A lot of people (i'd say most) are not fit to be one and to those who try they have to know that any small business you'll be in the red for at least 18 months. And even after that you're still have a chance to fail. And this is something with the intent of generating money.
Now, transpose that to a creative project, where you don't even know if there is an audience for your game and, if there is, you'd have to compete with over 3,000 "real" games and 10,000 other creative projects.
@@rd-um4sp exactly. And so many people want to do it solo, and think they can do every part of game dev well. People are often good at a couple of things and then have Dunning-Krueger syndrome about everything else. If more people collaborated we’d have less bad unfinished games, and more okaying finished ones!
Really great video!
The past 3-4 month I have been thinking about what I really wanna do in live and making games is the most resonating thing I want to actually do.
Your videos are really grounding about the reality of making something and that we usually will fail first before we might achieve something great.
My friend and I recently started working on our own game and when we do some prototyping I'll definitely send it to you.
@@cross0395 great to hear!
This is such a good and amazing video honestly
Bro went to his barber and said "I want the Anton Chigur"
Greenscreen is unkind to curly hair.
This has been deeply validating ty doctor
The 90/10 ratio and interquartile mean for game revenue makes the field undoubtedly brutal and unreliable as an income source. Arguably this is true for some other fields as well. It is good to know going into it so you can keep a back-up plan warm. It is a shame really, since it puts a hard upper bound on what is possible for many people.
@@frankpalladino2512 I’ve been watching a lot of “why my game failed” videos on here, and while I agree the field is hard to succeed in, I don’t think people do themselves any favours. The “what I learned” bit is always “I didn’t show my game to people early enough”. People think play testing is something which happens after you’ve finished your idea in full, with 10 levels and 10 weapons of whatever. Indies need to make vertical slice and greybox demos and check their idea actually resonates before putting more time into it!
I will do a full video on this sometime soon, but long story short, if you’re not involving players in the creation process, then you’re not doing “game design”, you’re just a hobby technologist. Which is fine, but don’t expect to convert that kind of project into a product and just luck out on whether people like it after 2-5 years of you tinkering in isolation.
Game development should be an hobby, not a profession.
it's both. but if you want it to be a profession then you have to approach it as one and not just tinker on something for years and hope people will like it!
It's too labor intensive to be seen as anything less than a profession.
@@vincev4630 You could say the same about music or filmmaking. Something is only a profession if you make a livelihood off of it. That’s literally what “professional” means.
@@vincev4630 It is very labor intensive if it is uniquely seen as developing a product that has to be sold in order to earn enough money to allow the developer to live on it.
What I see is that the AAA industry it's collapsing under its weight, but also the indie scene is struggling and it looks like an awful life for developers too. I don't know if it possible to reach an equilibrate middle ground.
Probably the solution needs a paradigm-shift for what are our expectiations for the videogames themself.
Awesome channel. Good that you decided to do this!
I love your videos, also I couldn't agree more about this! Thanks for your work, Dr. Joe! :D
Awesome content mate. Cheers
No YOU are awesome content
That about sums it up. Nothing to do but get back to the grind I guess.
@@captainawesome2226 for sure. But don’t value the grind for itself; work smarter not harder!
Hey! First of all, great content! It's nice to see a scientific perspective on game design here on UA-cam! However, this video wasn’t quite what I expected. I'm not at the beginning of my career but am working in another creative field. I was hoping to learn more about the broader reality of game production. How realistic is the dream of founding an indie studio in the long term? Sure, there’s the possibility of a big hit, but is there nothing in between? Is this a winner-takes-all industry, or is there a good number of middle-class indie studios with healthy finances? From the outside, the financials look kind of puzzling. A lot of medium-sized studios seem to work for years with a dozen people on a project. How do they manage to survive during that time? 😅 Do they just burn through cash from investors or publishers like regular startups do? Or does it work through long-tail sales, where one game pays for the development of the next? Maybe this was beyond the scope of your video, but these are the questions that came to mind. Among all the crazy stories on UA-cam, a realistic overview of how typical game studios operate financially would be great!
@@denizbinay42 I’ve only ever been an employee or a contractor, so this is really outside the scope of my knowledge. I’d love to be able to do that video, but I’d also like to foster a kind of UA-cam where people say “that’s outside of the scope of my knowledge” too. Truth is, if I had that information, I probably wouldn’t be here.
@@IndieGameClinic shouldn't there be data on this topic in the form of reports/research/surveys?
Worth noting that the watch:like ratio on this video is half the channel average. People really don’t like rational answers to silly questions, or game dev content which isn’t blowing smoke up their jacksie.
fellas im loosing it making a game fr
I gave up and now I just tell people to not make games. Living the dream now.
did the music thing, saw the online perception of over saturation so i moved to game dev/computer science and am seeing the same thing... anyone have a similar experience? Finding your hobbies and prospects for a career become a trend then die and feel like you were just caught on the wave and question whether you ever wanted to really commit to the idea or were influenced to try it for some companies then fall into a pit of self doubt of whether youre even a real person with interests or just a cash fow being milked by corporations? Just me? Doubt it
yes I feel the same. Stopped doing music because there wasn't a way to get people to know it or hear it, happens the same with video games
Please can you share a link to the soothing ambient background music
@@UcheOgbiti what time in the video? Some of them are open game art.org but a lot aren’t as they’re just my random tracks from years ago.
At the beginning you said you intention its to review game's.
My question is are you still review game's
if Yes is there any way to share my game in the order to review when you have time.
@@watercat1248 yes, I do around one a week. The instructions are on in my video descriptions
@@IndieGameClinic okay.