For real. If you’re like me, then this is a hobby. If it’s your first video game, I would NOT COUNT on being able to make bank off your first game. I’m no expert, but I still feel like it’s good life advice to try making a few games before quitting your job or relying on games for income. Which leads me to my next point…

For me, I defined success as, “Make a chill, fun, multiplayer game that you can enjoy with non-gamer friends and pick up and play seamlessly. And release it on Steam within a year or two.”

This was a S.M.A.R.T goal (more info located here). It was important for me to make sure that I could measure my goal based on feedback from my friends, who said that my game was “fun” and “easy to pick up and play”. That way I pretty much couldn’t fail, as long as I play-tested with my friends frequently and iterated on the parts of my game that sucked. So regardless of how release went, I was successful! Yay me!

Even if it’s just opening the game and testing for bugs for 10 minutes.

If you do something every day, then eventually you’ll finish!

There’s a lot to be said about diligence and making something (like game development) into a habit. I could go on-and-on about habits, but if you want a complete breakdown of habits and how to form good ones, consider reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Nobody is good at everything, and that’s ok!

I was pretty decent at recording music, doodling cartoons, and had some knowledge about programming logic, so I leaned into that and made a cartoony music-focused action game.

What do you think you’re good at? What interests you? Can you base a game around that or your experiences?

Please for the love of yourself don’t make an MMO or anything huge.

Some developers may disagree with me on this one. However, there’s something to be said about “following through” and being a “finisher” before jumping to another project.

Who are you making it for? Why are you making it? What message are you trying to send?

This is important to guide you through development and remind you what you’re doing. Also to prevent expanding the scope of the game into an MMORPG or something crazy. Some people write “game design documents”, which sound important for a big team. But since it was just me working on Bass Monkey, just a short purpose document titled, “Why am I doing this?” was sufficient.

It’s impossible to scope the time it takes for these kinds of things. Some people say to double the time you think that it takes. In my experience, you’ll probably get some expansion of your project’s scope (for example, thinking “ooh wouldn’t it be cool if I could also play as a panda bear”?) So tripling the timeframe kept my expectations in check.

I just used the notes app on my phone. I tried Trello, which many people find useful. But the notes app was easier to maintain.

At the end of the day, making sure that I have some lists where I can cross things off was extremely good for my morale. This helped me track progress week-to-week and month-to-month.

I started by using Aseprite, since I thought pixel art was neat. With any tool, there’s a large learning curve (and I’m still improving every day), and plenty of tutorials to help you out. Here are a few amazing youtubers who teach about pixel art online:

Pedro Madeiros has amazing pixel art tutorials on his blog.

References are love. References are life. Even professional artists use references, so you should too!

Keep “mood boards” to save pictures whenever you find something cool. This will provide inspiration later.

There’s no shame in using “assets” that other people created.

A good website to search for assets is itch.io

Make sure you credit the creator if you use their stuff in your game.

OK, you don’t have to take a full-fledged art class (although that would help at some point), but learning a bit about some art fundamentals will go a long way.

If you only watch one video on color theory, I’d recommend this one by Blender Guru.

If you only watch one video on composition, I’d recommend this other one by Blender Guru.

Well that’s awesome! You probably know more than I do. In that case, here’s a few resources that helped me learn more:

Take lessons! It’s never a bad idea.

I use Reaper as my digital audio workstation. It’s a free and powerful tool to import/record/arrange music all in one place.

Splice has amazing sample libraries. Although there are other libraries, this is my “one stop shop”. Be aware that it costs money, though.

Don’t worry! There are plenty of sounds and music online that you can use if you don’t want to dive into the world of music production.

I have to say, I don’t have a whole lot to recommend, as I made all the music/sounds for Bass Monkey. But here’s some sound resources to get you started:

If you need an interface to upload these sounds and want to dabble in pushing around the sound waves, adding effects, or stacking sounds together, I’d recommend downloading Reaper as a digital audio workstation. It’s free and has resources like this one to get you started.

I used Gamemaker Studio 2 and utilized the “drag and drop” programming language. This way, I could get by without learning all the nuances of the language. And I wouldn’t have a bug every time I forgot to place a semicolon somewhere.

Again, I don’t think there’s any shame in using these “drag and drop” languages instead of learning to “code”.

I got started programming in Gamemaker by following tutorials by Heartbeast on youtube. He’s amazing and has tutorials for different types of games:

Seriously. If anything, I learned that almost all programming problems can be solved by some smart googling. Someone else has had your problem about 99.99% of the time.

In my opinion, the most frustrating part of development is programming. If I had a dime for every time I got stuck for hours, went to sleep, and then woke up with an idea that solved my problem in 5 minutes, I’d be dropping dimes like nobody’s business.

This is kind of a paraphrased quote from the indie game podcast “Game Dev Field Guide” by Zackavelli. It’s very insightful. The point of game design is to elicit a response from the player, whether it be fun, frustration, happiness, laughter, etc.

If you can focus your game design choices on a “feeling”, this will help tremendously along the way.

Remember that even though making a video game is such an enormous creative project, at it’s core it is intended for other people to play as well.

You’ll have to swallow your ego on this step. Putting your work out into the world is scary. I know. But you’ll enjoy watching other people play your creation! And it’ll improve your game at the end of the day.

Once you can have a playable version of your game (even if it’s just a jumping marsmallow or something), ALWAYS have a playable build of your game for somebody to test.

Game Maker’s Toolkit

Design Doc

Tim Ruswick of Game Dev Underground

Chris Zukowski of Howtomarketagame.com

Gameifyouare.com

In case you have a tweet or something that goes viral, having a funnel to catch some of that attention and channel it into your projects is important.

Pick one (or two) social media platforms and stick with them. It’s better to focus your efforts than spread yourself too thin.

I think that the more games you release, the more of a following you build, and the better you get at making games. Which in turn makes more people follow you.

There’s very very few games that are insanely popular, generate a lot of revenue, and are a developers “first game." Even the "overnight success" stories had a ton of blood, sweat, and tears behind their development. Like Alexander Bruce’s game, Antichamber, which was “An Overnight Success, Seven Years in the Making”

I really like Chris Zukowski’s stairstep approach to indie game marketing. He argues that when first starting out, you can’t have a marketing strategy like Blizzard or other huge game companies. You need to do things that “can't scale” and take it one step (or one game) at a time. Like write blog posts. Or respond to email responses to your blog posts (which I will totally do if you email me).