Personal Journal for New Developer

[boghdady]

Hello all,

I'm new to this forums and to the game development as a whole; so thought about introducing myself as well as try and maintain a journal of my progress

I'm a 30 year old Mechanical Engineer from Egypt. Since high-school, I've on & off into web-development, but never into game development. Unfortunately I'm not doing it as a hobby, but rather as an attempt to drive a very much needed second income in a country struggling with an economic crisis. 

My current progress:

• October 23rd, 2017: Enrolled in Udemy's "Tile Classics in JS for HTML5 Canvas" course for $11
• November 3rd, 2017: Finished all 14 hours of the course, with all included exercises. The course covered alot on the logic behind 2d tile-based games. But lacked any details on AI, sprites, audio, ... Outcome of course (+ some personal learnings):  http://boghdady.com/JSProgramming/MonsterGame/main.html
• November 4th, 2017: Enrolled in Udemy's "The Complete Mobile Game Development Course with Phaser" course for $10

Next Steps:

I plan on purchasing TV's "Making Money with HTML5" later when I have enough confidence and ability to build decent games. I expect to spend at least a couple of month studying the ins & outs of phaser before that though.

Spending so far:

• Udemy Courses: $21

Feel free to leave any tips, recommendations, advice, ... As it is really very well needed

[mattstyles]

Get writing some games! It's pretty much accepted to be universally true that humans learn more by doing than by observing, so get creating some games, come back and ask questions as and when you need, sounds like you probably have the basics covered regarding actually getting started.

Once you have a game or even a game prototype start getting your friends to have a play and provide feedback, then start posting it to places like this forum, none of this earns you any cash at this stage but the goal is to find out whether you have a product that could get you some cash in the future. At this stage you just need to hone your craft to a stage where you think people would be willing to pay for it, until then there really isn't a whole heap of point in working out how to maximise profits (although reading in your spare time, away from the actual coding, is a good thing to do to change things up for your brain).

The best marketeer is probably able to eek out some cash from a terrible product, but a terrible marketeer will be able to make cash off of a great product, once you have the great product (which is probably where your passion is) then work out how to become a decent, then good, marketeer and watch the cash come rolling in, loads of it, more than you'll know what to do with (I'm joking of course, but there's no reason you can't dream!).

If you get good at it then hopefully you'll get to the point where you think: 'I'm making a little bit of cash out of this, to make a decent amount of cash I really need to invest more time in to it', at that stage things get a little tougher, but its a good position to be in.

Good luck.

[boghdady]

Matt, thank you for taking the time to go through my post and actually provide some solid advise there, much apprecated!

I've already started tweaking the games I've created during the Udemy course. Taught myself how to do sprites, and already have it functioning now. My 2 biggest concerns are 1) finding enough time to program & be good at it with all the work & family responsibilities I have, and 2) the work actually paying off (I'm not a good marketeer )

Unfortunately I lack any vision right now on what type of game I would want to create, and thus I'm just learning topics at random. I might just go to Apple's or Google's stores and check the top charts to get some inspirations.

I'm parking the creation of the game graphics and audio for now, although I'm sure these will become real burdens once I start to get serious. Will probably have to throw-in some investments in those before I even have any income from the development of games.

Never thought there were too many aspects into game development, but I'm willing to stick to it till the end  

[mattstyles]

3 hours ago, boghdady said:

Never thought there were too many aspects into game development

Yep, when you want to work for yourself (even pay yourself as a hobby) these are all of the sorts of soft skills that you need, these are all super good questions before you embark on this kind of adventure.

3 hours ago, boghdady said:

Unfortunately I lack any vision right now on what type of game I would want to create, and thus I'm just learning topics at random

I think there are generally two types of approaches to this:

1) Make what you like, if you like it then chances are you're not unique in the world and others will like it too

2) Do your market research, identify a niche (or 'hot' area) and build for that

I'd say option 1 is firmly in the hobbyist camp whilst option 2 is not. If this is truly a hobby then do you want to get cornered churning out games that you don't enjoy building? And can you really produce your best work if you're not enthralled by your own game?

Option 2 becomes very important when you want to keep yourself fed, but as a side piece of work that will hopefully earn a bit of extra spending money I'd say go for option 1.

3 hours ago, boghdady said:

I might just go to Apple's or Google's stores and check the top charts to get some inspirations.

Never a bad idea, its just market research. However, without a bit of strategy behind this you'll always be behind the game. It depends really on whether you go mostly option 1 or mostly option 2 (from above). If you want to hit a niche then you'll need to do this to identify a niche where you can make some cash. 

Be aware that many indies find it pretty difficult to earn any real cash from Apple store (I think Google play store is the same), whilst they have high demand they also have high supply and you'll be competing with some very big guns. If you do want to target these very big markets then hitting a niche is likely key (unless you want to roll the dice and just try and get lucky). Getting any recognition at all in these markets is incredibly hard.

Conversely, when Windows first launched their store I've heard a number of stories of indie devs making a decent chunk of cash, whilst the demand is low, you have a much much bigger shot at recognition. Emerging markets are often like this, on the one hand riskier, one the other a great opportunity.

Your choice of market should also be determined by the type of game you make, the two go hand-in-hand. Puzzle games on mobile stores are mega saturated, other types not so much. You have the additional problem that monetising products on the web still isn't an easy task, many rely on advertising and it can be a rocky road.

3 hours ago, boghdady said:

I'm parking the creation of the game graphics and audio for now, although I'm sure these will become real burdens once I start to get serious.

Absolutely, most of us here are programmers so the audio/visual side can be real tough. I think for the pros here amongst us, particularly the lone wolves, they're all excellent at audio/visual stuff as well.

Check out the subforums here, you may find other hobbyists with the skills you need who would be willing to work on a fun (non-profit) project or accept revenue share. Be wary of investing until you're at least reasonably sure you can recoup it (or afford to lose it).

3 hours ago, boghdady said:

finding enough time to program & be good at it with all the work & family responsibilities I have

Solid problem this one!

3 hours ago, boghdady said:

Never thought there were too many aspects into game development, but I'm willing to stick to it till the end

Good luck to you. What I will say is that making money from gaming is tough, almost doubly so on the web. At least on the web you have a delivery mechanism all ready for you, on the other hand, hitting a url is free so monetisation can be tough.

There are many people here who are pros though and from the sound of it some do very well, they certainly sound like they put the hours in though.

[boghdady]

Matt, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to actually go through my post and provide all that advise! I truly highly appreciate it!

I've decided to focus solely on the programming side of game development. With that said, I'll not even delve into monetization methods nor platforms; as this should only come at a very later stage I believe.

Yesterday I was on holiday, and luckily my family was out as well; so I had 8 full hours of programming. I built 2 classes to allow sprites & multiple layer tiles. Outcome of such could be found here (not my gfx, just googled and grabbed any pictures I could find): http://www.boghdady.com/JSProgramming/MonsterGame/main.html
Going through Phaser's website, I discovered all those classes and even more are part of its framework. So I headed over to Udemy and used a coupon code to enroll in "The Complete Mobile Game Development Course with Phaser" for only $10. Its a 10 hours course, so hopefully will give me some solid ground-work on some of the different programming aspects I'm missing right now.

I've updated my journal, in hopes that someday it could be useful to other newbies paving their way into the industry

[mattstyles]

2 hours ago, boghdady said:

I've updated my journal, in hopes that someday it could be useful to other newbies paving their way into the industry

Sounds awesome, very commendable thing to do!

2 hours ago, boghdady said:

Going through Phaser's website, I discovered all those classes and even more are part of its framework.

Yep, that tends to be the way with frameworks, but its absolutely essential (in my opinion) that developers really learn how to do this stuff by implementing it themselves, then the dev has an idea why the frameworks make the decisions they do. Once you've learnt all that stuff then you'd want to use frameworks to do all the heavy lifting for you, with the added benefit that the framework should be well tested for both reliability and perf, not to mention that a decent framework will always be looking for better ways to do things and by continually updating that framework you get these benefits largely for free whilst your time is freed up to work on your actual game i.e. features that give real tangible benefits to your users (in addition to bonuses in performance you get from the framework of choice continually becoming better).