So my first question really is:
what advice would you give to people
planning their first commercial indie game?
You've been very generous with your
advice
up to this point with all the blogs and
speeches and everything
but if there is,
if there were sort of like main ones
because a lot of our people are trying
to make that jump
trying to make the jump from being a
hobbyist or a group of friends to doing
their first commercial thing
and putting some money on the line so
what will be your your top tips? 
- Yeah so
My top tips and this is very, I want
to make sure that
anybody listening, because I'm going to
be honest
what I'm speaking to, is a person who is
very specifically
they want to make money, and they want to
do this as a living, and they want to
grow into it. Now there's a couple
divisions within people who make games
that, I don't want to like, you know dash your
dreams, so if you're an artist and you're
getting government grants or anything or
you're trying to make a real movement
stuff
I'm not talking to you, because you can
do your own thing like,
this advice does not apply to you. I'm
also not applying this advice to
somebody who
is legitimately doing this as a hobby
like they just want to
you know they just like engine
programming or they just like
building elaborate 3d worlds or
something,
and you don't care about the money
that's fine and that's totally,
both of those cases are totally
perfectly legitimate and, 
but my advice here is
specifically for people who are trying
to make this a legit business,
or really trying to make money. 
And I think the most,
if you've never released a game before
and you've, maybe been working on it,
I would say you have to keep it short,
and release the game, and go in
knowing that your first game is not
going to sell. Just go in with that don't
try and make your masterpiece
uber representation of your soul because
you just don't have the skills yet
and you don't even know what your skills
that you don't
know are like there's so many things
that it's required to make a game that
you just don't
even know what they are, and releasing a
game is a skill upon itself like just
cutting, because you're gonna have to
learn how to cut features and how to get
things
out and and make do and little hacks and
just
get your game across the finish line and
that is the hardest thing.
This is super duper hard even if you're
a good coder or if you're
an artist the hardest thing is
getting it done.
And so you really have to learn that
skill and so that's why I make those
short games that are just like one
screen
or that sort of thing, I would say go
in with the assumption that
your first game is not going to sell and
that your main objective is actually to
release
a game because it's kind of like riding
a bike, you don't
go from not learning, not knowing how to
ride a bike, to saying oh I'm going to
ride in the Tour de France.
Like you just don't do that you
start, and it's like 'I just need to get
to the end of the driveway'.
'Okay I just need to be able to ride this
bike to the end of the street'.
'I just need to be able to ride to the
grocery store'. Like you learn
how to take these little things and
that's what you got to do with game
development if you've never released a
game before.
Just try and get to the end of the
driveway you're not going to be breaking
any speed records,
you're just trying not to fall down and
you're just trying to get to the edge of
the like street.
That's it. And so you have that same
mentality with games and there's
lots of ways of doing that but the main
thing is just keep your game super duper
small,
and on my website I blog a lot on a
website called howtomarketagame.com
that's my personal website,
and if you just Google it, there's
something I call the Stair Step Approach
and then also I have one, I think it's
called
'this game is simple' or 'how to make a
simple game' because a lot of people
don't understand what a simple game is.
They...
It's not until you start making
games that you know that they're simple
or what a simple game is? And so I hear a
lot of advice from
famous indies and stuff and they say
like 'oh just make a simple game' well
it's like, well what is a 'simple game'?
And so I wrote a blog post about what
simple games are and,
the basic gist of it is: look at games
that were released
to arcades from 1975 I think
that's when they really started coming
out '75 to like '82.
Those type of arcade games like
Asteroids or
you know even Donkey Kong those
games are
'simple' and so I know they're not going
to set the world on fire
but you're just trying to learn how to
release games. Those kind of games and
those type of
genre are the best ones to kind of
release you're not going to sell a lot
of them because the games have been made
a lot,
but they're just good ways to get
your ability to release games. Which is
such a an important thing and then
you're going to learn so much from that.
So that's my key bit of advice.
Hi guys, Stuart De Ville here from Game Dev London. Thanks for watching that clip of
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