How Making Indie Games Changed My Life

(soft ambient music) - [David] When I started making games, I really didn't think it would honest to goodness change my life. I didn't even consider myself a game developer. I was just a film school graduate living in the middle of nowhere in Utah.

I didn't even know how to program, and honestly still don't. But here I am, a full-time indie dev. Before I get into that though, let's start at the beginning.

- [Man] If you land it, I'll try it. - [David] When I was a teenager, if I wasn't skateboarding or playing drums in a band, I was making mods for Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight. I created places like a hotel space station, a haunted campsite, and an abandoned city.

I also loved finding other people's levels online, seeing what they could make with a pre-made library of assets, and exploring them from top to bottom. I even played the multiplayer levels by myself just to see these worlds people had created. Naturally, I wished it was possible to make a full-fledged game by myself, and possibly even sell it, But in my mind, only big studios and genius programmers could do that.

I would have to settle with making free mods for existing games. In high school, I decided to go into film since it was still creative, but it seemed a bit safer and more realistic. Right after college, I got a film editing job that seemed really promising, But, the creative work dried up, and turned into an architectural blueprint planning job.

The last thing I wanted was to get stuck drawing up ventilation ducts and electrical wiring schematics for 20 years, but that seemed to be the only way to pay the bills. It wasn't until a coworker said, "Have you heard of Unity? " "You could use that to help you with your architecture work.

" "No way! " I thought, "A free game engine. .

. " I watched my coworker drop some trees and walls around the building we were working on. I couldn't believe how easy and fun it looked.

I asked, "Well, do you need to know code to use it? " And naturally the answer was, "Well, duh. " As a visual and art-oriented kind of person, learning a coding language sounded impossible.

The only class I had ever failed in high school was Spanish. Yep, Spanish 101. My brain had the hardest time memorizing words and grammatical concepts, and I never learned to code in my modding days due to the same issues.

A little bit later, my coworker mentioned something that changed my life. "There might be a visual scripting plug-in for Unity, you could check that out. " "Okay," I thought.

After some quick Googling, I found out about PlayMaker, a visual scripting tool based around finite state machines. To put it simply, I could finally see the abstract interactions I was creating. It was like a lightbulb turned on in my head, and then exploded.

I could actually make a simple game from beginning to end. I also found lots of people online who seemed to make it their life's mission to dissuade any would-be game developer from actually using these tools. At first, I believed them and thought making a game with PlayMaker would never work.

But at that moment, I made a decision to at least try, because I figured the true travesty would be not telling my story just because some code snobs on the internet said so. I bought the plug-in and messed around in tons of small projects I never saved. I just wanted to practice and see what was possible.

I practiced with the Unity UI systems, the Animation window, the lightmapping; everything. I probably Googled a million different questions. I was able to figure it out slowly but steadily.

As a filmmaker, I love telling stories; and since I love games, the combination of storytelling and gaming was this new frontier I couldn't wait to explore. When I played the game "Dear Esther" for the first time, something clicked in my head. There were millions of experimental stories waiting to be told in this medium.

I absolutely loved exploring a 3D environment and trying to piece together the beautiful but abstract story that took place on this abandoned island. I then played "Gone Home", which told a more personal and emotional story in a lonely and somewhat creepy house. Exploring those environments reminded me of when I would play other people's multiplayer levels for Jedi Knight all alone.

But now there was an interesting story being told. That's when I decided that I wanted to make, and actually finish, a game. (intense music) There'd be no more unsaved test projects in Unity, even if it was a super short game that was released for free, I wanted people to play a finished project.

I took inspiration from two things in my life, a poem by T. S Elliot, and the memories I had of people I grew up with in rural Virginia. That game became "Home is Where One Starts".

A first person exploration game about a little girl from a broken home overcoming her past. I still had to work full-time to support my family, so I worked on it every free evening and weekend I got. After 18 months, $300, and a million Google searches, I had a short 30 minute game you could play from beginning to end.

Now you're probably thinking this is the part of the story where I tell you I made a million dollars, and I quit my job, and I became a famous indie dev. This is not that part of the story, because when I released my first game, it only did. .

. OK. I had neglected marketing, an essential part of indie game developing nowadays, and it didn't help that my game was a short experiment with little mass appeal.

But it didn't matter. I was so happy because I had finished it and it was mine. I got some nice bonus money from the game which I put into a new dream computer, and I saved the rest.

I kept working my dead-end full-time job, but now I had a cool project I could show off to people. It was that game that help me get my dream job at The Void, a VR startup in Utah which was taking the world by storm. With that game on my resume, I explained I had added Oculus Rift support and sold 5,000 units on Steam, which immediately raised the eyebrows of the chief engineer I was being interviewed by.

Before I knew it, I had escaped my old job and was working as a technical artist on the stories that shaped my life: namely Star Wars. I started off making free mods for old Star Wars games, and now I was actually working as a partner with Lucasfilm! It still absolutely blows my mind when I think about it.

And it's all thanks to messing around with Unity, finding PlayMaker, and teaching myself the discipline to finish a project and release it on Steam. This isn't the end of the story, however. During my time at The Void, I decided I wanted to fix the mistakes I made with my first game and do an indie game launch right.

The idea behind my second game popped into my head while I was doing dishes, and that became my new passion project after work. After another 18 months, I finished "The First Tree", a beautiful third person exploration game about two parallel stories; a fox looking for her missing cubs, and a son reconnecting with his estranged father. Long story short, it changed my life in ways I couldn't even imagine.

In September of 2017, my game launched on Steam, and after a year made me a $150,000. With that money, I was able to put a down payment on a house, and put the rest of the money into console ports. In 2018, I launched on Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch.

In 2019, I had the opportunity to quit my job at The Void and become a full-time indie developer. I started "Game Dev Unlocked" because of the emails I get every day from people asking me how I did it. I wanna show you everything I learned after years of experimenting, Google searching, failing, and finally succeeding.