After looking at platforms where you can find your potential gaming community for your upcoming game, we move on to some tips of how to develop a game successfully.
There are many mistakes new developers can make at the beginning of their developing careers that might even ruin their dreams of creating games in the future. Likewise, I have taken the time to summarize some tips which I personally think can make a difference in developing a successful game. All the tips are more in-depth explained in the video down below:
https://youtu.be/79MzvTiaGrg
Tip 1 – Your first game should not be your best possible game
First game or first few should not be games that you have worked your entire life on, just make some cheap games to start collecting some resources and audience. So don’t spend too much effort on it at first just start with a basic 2D idea. After launching some random games and gathering some budget and fans now its time to focus on your dream game. It’s important to create many beta versions of your dream game in order to seek some investment funds from big developers so that the final version of the game turns out even better. Funding is key.
Tip 2 – Don’t focus your life entirely on the game
No matter how good the concept of the game can be it’s never 100% that the game will be successful so having a stable job while working on your first game it’s a good start. What’s important during this stage is to always count the extra after hours you are working on your game, counting them only as hours is one way. The other way is to count them in imaginary hourly rate let’s say you’ve always worked three hours after your main job on your first gaming project (1 hour = 10$) so you have spent 30$ on daily basis to work on your game. It is a good measurement for the success of your potential game because you can check the total amount of “budget” you have spent working on that game and you know on average how much to charge, where to publish it, and what to expect from it.
Tip 3 – Don’t develop everything on your own
You can be very talented in coding and have high creativity but making the game from scratch especially if it’s the first one it’s a total mistake. Why? Because of the limited resources, not only money-wise but also time-wise. There are tons of places online where you can buy for example a bundle of weapons, ambience, skins, whatever is necessary and then just use them in your game (Unity Asset Store). Focus on two game developing engines: Unity and Unreal Engine both are great and offer amazing free features. But it is necessary to choose one and not mix them, the decision can be made based the genre of the game you want to make. If you are looking into creating an indie game then Unity is definitely the answer, other types of games are better done with Unreal Engine. But of course, at the end is always up to you.
Tip 4 – Fan community is key
Building a fan community is necessary for progressing as a developer, reaching out to your fans on daily basis with news on the game or something related to it or maybe completely unrelated to the game itself makes the difference at the end. You must be looking at giving promotional codes, or free access codes when the game comes out to gain loyal customers. Building a fanbase it’s all about consistency, quality content, and hashtags, which in turn helps you out to have a successful game launch.
Tip 5 – Learn how to sell your game
Marketing is everything in the gaming industry, is not possible to think of marketing only as the ability to sell your game. It is the capability of making gamers desire your game before buying it but also after trying it out for some time. It’s necessary to keep your fans always engaged and listen to their ideas for further development of the game.
References:
https://www.freelancer.com/articles/programming/game-development-tips
https://www.jmcacademy.edu.au/news-and-events/news/8-tips-on-creating-your-first-game/
https://kotaku.com/a-beginners-guide-to-making-your-first-video-game-5979539
