tristan-shatley-blog

[tristan-shatley-blog]

My experience making a game for YouTubers (and failing)

Back in 2015, before the matrix fully glitched, I decided, as a completely inexperienced game developer youngin, to make a game for a YouTube Channel in cooperation with said YouTube channel. I’m not going to name the channel, but I will say it was for a podcast that is fairly large (over 100k subs) and the main YouTuber in said podcast is over a million subs.

I initially contacted them with an email, talking about my idea. After a month, when I had lost hope that they were interested and then they got back to me. They liked the idea of having a video game based on their podcast and the “characters” (guest) that are part of the show. Soon I was making a call negotiating a deal and talking about how the game should be. It was great fun. Exciting. I hadn’t felt so happy in years. And then immediately the excitement turned to fear and anxiety. It’s one thing to have the prospect of working with a YouTube channel, and then it’s another thing to actually have the knowledge that you need to create a full, complete game when you have never done that before. This sorted faded eventually, when me and the artist (my older brother) got used to just working on the game. This was something we did now.

So onto the actual making of the game. It was made in Unity, the most awesomest of engines (for me at least :). Our inexperience didn’t really show at first. I had made very nice platformer systems (it was an action platformer btw) and my brother had made some cool looking art, that was probably striking compared to what the podcast probably expected (pixel art). (goddamn I use parenthesis to much). I didn’t even know this until way later, but at some point they quietly announced the game at the end of a show and mentioned the stage they saw in development. But months into development, things turned south. We didn’t do this full time. So development was becoming slow, we weren’t working on it everyday. In the periods that we were it felt even slower, because the task was more monumental than we bargained for. Every game developer knows projects take longer than expected to complete. Probably even most inexperienced game developers know this. But inexperienced game developers still try anyway.

We didn’t have a GDD beforehand. We had written some things out, but not in detail. The main problem was the gameplay wasn’t fun. We had developed all the basic mechanics for over a year but the mechanics did nothing fun, nothing original, and just felt boring. You shot some projectiles forward and dodged difficult obstacles. Near the end I tried and tried to make it fun, but when you’ve already built up the game it’s hard to. Being a programmer making small games you have the ability to tweak really fast and make changes. But being a programmer != designer and if you’re going to make a large game you NEEEEEED to put just as much work into gameplay design and planning as the programming and art.

Me and my brother struggled to work together as well at the times when it got most difficult. We never spent anytime in the same room, which I think was more necessary.

Moral of the story, we built a lot of the game, the game wasn’t good, at this point the time wasn’t worth potential profit either, so we eventually just kind of stopped. The YouTuber texted me how the game was going at one point and I just sort of said it’s going but you know life. Haven’t talked about it since, but It’s been so long I assume they assume it’s not worked out. Will this experience be a learning experience or a colossal waste of time do to mismanagement and inexperience that I could have spent developing my skills? Only time will tell. I took an opportunity and went for it though. That is something i’ll always be proud of. And this was when I was 16 and 17.

Sorry for any grammar mistakes, i’m tired af.

#gamedev #programming #developers & startups