TLDR: What's the most important advice for new game developers?
- 1. Start big
- 2. Keep adding features
- 3. Use only the best game engine
- 4. Delay everything & attend some courses first
Sarcasm alert: Do the exact opposite to everything said above. Game development requires you to at least have a game finished so you can sell it.
These are the growing pains I went through when I started making my own games. Every single one of them. And I'd argue the best thing to know before becoming a game developer is that you need to live through them yourself rather than read about them and try to sidestep the mess.
I'm not here to tell you to avoid common mistakes. I'm telling you to go full steam ahead, do it hard, do it fast, and rip the band-aid off. Failure is a sign of progress and these 4 points are important milestones in becoming an experienced developer. I learned all four the hard way while building P For Pistol.
Things to Know Before Becoming a Game Developer: Start Smaller Than You Think
You will overestimate everything. I guarantee it. My first proper attempt at a project was a disaster of scope. I had mechanics planned that I had no idea how to build, an art style that required skills I didn't have, and a timeline that assumed I'd be working in a bubble with no life events to interrupt me.
It's vital you keep your project small. If you can't finish the game alone or with minimal help within 60 days, it's too much work. Write down all the tasks required on a piece of paper, cut it in half, then cut it in half again. It's called a diet.
Acquiring skills is the critical point here when starting out. In order to make money from selling video games on platforms like Steam or the Google Play Store, you need to have a finished video game ready to sell. You can't sell a concept. You can't ship a mood board.
Early on I had no experience gauging how much work any given idea actually required. Only building things fixed that. So hurry up, start your project, finish it within 60 days then do it two or three more times. Your goal is to complete the project.
Which leads to the next point.
2: Feature creep is not your friend.
Before you start, open up notepad.exe or MSPaint; write some notes and/or doodles of what the game should look like and do. You're after the Minimum Viable Product.
Focus on the bare minimum needed for this idea. If it's a match-3 game, you'll probably just need a Main Menu, a Match 3 Level and a Result Screen. That's it. Three screens.
Once the minimum is finished, it will tell you what actually matters and what you were just romanticising about. The answer is usually "most of the cool ideas were unnecessary."
It's very easy to take the bait by going down the rabbit hole where you start adding features because a friend said this would be cool, or you read a post about this mechanic, or you played a game and thought "mine needs that too." I've done this. Every developer I know has done this.
Every time that thought comes to your mind, just go back to notepad.exe and focus on the task at hand.
Your goal is to complete the project in your game development cycle.
3: Don't overthink it, Just do it.
I can hear you rejecting my words already. "But Mr-Know-It-All, what's the best game engine? Which programming language is better? How do I find a team? Is it better to work with an artist?"
You, Mr New Developer, are in no position to be asking these questions. You haven't even uploaded a Hello World app or made a Flappy Bird clone to Itch.io. Tasks which take literally 30 minutes to complete with a YouTube second-by-second guide.
It's incredibly easy when starting out to get bogged down in idealism and procrastination. This is probably the biggest thing I'd want someone to know before becoming a game developer. The question paralysis is real and it will eat your motivation alive.
Reddit, Quora, Discord. Every single one of them is in no short supply of passionate new developers who get burned out within weeks, never having shipped a single thing. They've debated Unity vs Godot six times without building anything in either.
You can steal a man's idea, but you cannot steal his conviction.
Should you use Unity, Godot, GameMaker, or plain JavaScript? Pick one, start a project, and finish it. Every minute you spend on Quora or Reddit discussing what you should do is a minute you could have spent actually finishing your own game. I've wasted more of those minutes than I'd like to admit.
Your quest is clear: complete the project. Then repeat it.
4: You don't need a fancy degree to make games
A game is effectively lines of code manipulating images on the screen to get a person to perform a repeated loop.
A university degree, a Udemy course, or a three-month boot camp is not a magical tool to produce that. I've met people with computer science degrees from actual universities who cannot ship a game and people with no formal education who have games on Steam right now. The credential means very little when compared to the thing you actually built.
There is no such thing as "learning the basics before making a game." Making the game IS learning the basics.
Thanks to YouTube, there are thousands of hours of content walking new developers through how to build all sorts of products, including games. GDC talks, Brackeys tutorials, Godot community guides, all of it is free. If you have a potato computer, access to YouTube and can read this article, you are more than capable of making your own game.
Once you've made your first application, you can go out into the world armed with something most people who argue about making video games don't have: genuine experience making a game.
Yes, making a match-3 and uploading it to the Google Play Store counts as game development experience. Don't sell yourself short. I've done exactly that and it taught me more than any structured course I've taken.
Ramblings.
If it's taking you one year of 80-hour weeks to make your first game, that's a very bad sign.
The games industry has shifted to match how people actually consume media now. It's all short-form, impulsive, and social. The days where a solo developer could sit in a cave in 2009 with zero feedback or testing, commission a couple of art assets, upload to the freshly launched App Store, and break even fairly quickly are over.
Think about the average PC user who has Steam installed, including yourself. How many games are on your Wishlist right now that you've been meaning to play for years? How many do you have sitting in your Steam library with under an hour of playtime?
That is the market your game is competing in. Thousands of games with beautiful trailers that no one plays. Your first game doesn't need to beat them. It needs to exist, get finished, and teach you something.
I've written more about the marketing side of this in my post on whether indie developers should bother with SEO. Short version: make the game first, worry about visibility second.
The same ruthless-scope mindset I use for games applies to the other things I make. When I started writing manga, I had to kill the same instinct to over-plan and under-execute. I wrote about that process in the how to write your first manga guide if you're curious how the thinking transfers.
Finishing two or three small games is vital for getting the skills needed to actually break into your customer's head. There's no shortcut around it.
Conclusion
Start small, ship it, and do it again. That's genuinely the whole advice.
If you want to see what this looks like in practice from someone still grinding through it, check out P For Pistol.
- Pistol Taeja
