Hello,
My game’s biggest update will go live tomorrow!
I’m also redoing a lot of the branding, promo art, copy etc… which means I’ll probably have cool data to share next week or the week after. Stay tuned for that!
In the meanwhile, here are this week’s ideas.
3 Gamedev Ideas
I.
When starting out, you’ll likely copy the games you admire way too much – even without realizing it.
You’ll basically be creating a worse version of another game.
It’s only once you gain confidence in your own skills that you’ll be able to create something unique.
II.
You’re probably not going to be the next Minecraft or Dead Cells or Hollow Knight.
But if your goal is live off your games, you don’t need to.
Thousands of indie devs are earning a (good) living with games you’ve never heard of.
III.
It’s dangerous to be entirely dependent on specific tools if you want to build a sustainable business.
I’m using the Gamemaker Studio 2 engine. Due to server issues on their side, a lot of users could not log into their account for the past 3 days.
Which means they could not access their project and could not work at all during that time.
It’s the same thing if you’re basing your whole business on one platform: YouTube, Steam, Twitter… any of those companies could decide from one day to the next to delete your stuff.
Another example: I have a secondary YouTube channel where I put up some videos a long time ago – montages of motivational speeches kind of videos.
They got pretty popular and kept gathering views over the last 3 years.
Until one day, they just got copyright striked out of nowhere (by the dudes who gave the speeches in the first place) and had to be taken down.
Fortunately, I don’t really care about it now.
But if I had decided to go all in on this channel and tried to make it my main source of income – that would have killed my whole livelihood instantly.
Ideally, you should structure your business so that any one platform / person / company should not be able to destroy it if they just decide to.
Until next week,
Thomas Gervraud,
Developer of Space Gladiators: Escaping Tartarus