Something New - Asking "What Can I Learn?"

I’ve continued to make progress on my game, but admittedly my YouTube channel is taking up a significant chunk of my time. The channel continues to be a fun and rewarding, but the growth has slowed. I’m not sure why…

Did I do something wrong? Did I change something? Did YT’s algorithm just decide to spread the love to other channels? Or maybe I’ve captured the Bolt niche and it just isn’t that big?

It’s probably a little of all of that.

So I decided to try something new. Something that I’ve had in the back of my head for a good long chunk of time. That being trying my hand at game analysis. Not game reviews. Not creating “Let’s Play” videos. Much more of asking the question, “What can I learn from a particular game?”

For my first attempt, I choose the game Equilinox. A game I found the thanks to YouTube suggesting one of the devlogs. It’s a “small” and “simple” game - and I mean that in a good way. So enough typing, here’s my video…

Did you make it past the video? I’d love to hear feedback and thoughts!

A Growing Channel and a New Tutorial Series

Work on my current game project continues, but I’ve also been busy creating a new set of videos and tutorials for the game development class that I teach. This year I made the decision to drop Playmaker, the visual scripting tool I’ve used for the last three years, in favor of Bolt. I’m three months into the class and I’m very glad I made the switch.

If your curious why, I put most of my reasoning into a video that looks at the pros and cons of each platform.

I’ve had great fun learning the new platform and creating videos to support my students. Since Bolt is fairly new its a bit short on tutorials, especially compared to Playmaker.

This shortage of tutorials made it pretty easy to push my way into the scene and start to create my own little niche in the larger YouTube community.

Let’s be clear! My channel is tiny. My channel started as a place to host a game trailer and evolved into an attempt to support my class.

When looking at the analytics it’s pretty clear there’s an inflection point in the traffic stats when I released the first few Bolt videos.

I leave out the actual very small numbers…

And again! My channel is tiny. The view count is laughable. I gain fewer subscribers per month than many sites gain in a day or an hour…

But still.

It’s fun to watch. It’s fun to create. And it’s fun to think about how far this trend might go. The question that keeps nagging me is whether the graph is linear? Or could it be curving upwards? Can the channel sustain the recent 25-30% month on month growth? Can the subscriber growth continue at 40% per month? Can I continue to create weekly content that’s engaging?

I’ve seen spikes in the channel stats before, but this time feels a bit different. And this time I’ve started asking a different question.

Two years worth of data. The trend becomes a little more clear.

Could my channel help support my game development?

I don’t mean that next month I quit my job, but if that graph is curving maybe in 2-3 months the channel can cover my Unity subscription? If it continues to curve in 6 months could it pay my monthly internet bill as well? And then…?

And if the graph isn’t curving? If it’s straight as an arrow? Or if starts to curve towards horizontal? What then?

Then I’ve had fun and given back to a community that taught me how to make games.

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So… If you’ve made it this far then why not go one link further? Come check out the channel? Maybe hit that subscribe button? And check out some of the videos and the coolness that is Bolt visual scripting…

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Screenshots from the next handful of tutorial videos.

Procedural Spaceship Generator

I find myself short these days. Short on patience. Short on time. Short on words. Just short… So here’s a short post and a quick video.

All the same I’ve been finding an hour here and 30 minutes there to slowly make more progress on my game. Yes this is the new game. The next game. If you missed it, you can read all about why I had to shelve my last game. This game is strongly influenced and inspired by the class BBS game Trade Wars 2002. I’ve been coding up a procedurally generated universe, fleshing out an inventory system and scripting the backbone of an economy.

With those pieces working, I sat back and looked at what I had. It’s not bad. It’s rough. But doable. The problem is still that to get something “shippable” or at least in the hands of testers and there’s a lot of content to create. So I had an idea…

What if I could produce a mini-game? What if I could take chunk of the big game, polish it, refine it and publish that? This would cut the immediate project size down significantly, result in quicker feedback from players and give me a second published game. So that’s what I’m doing.

The “game loop” will consist of building a ship, battling an AI ship, earn/collecting a reward and then starting the process over again. It’s simple but seems like it has potential.

I had the basics of a combat system already working so the next big piece was to develop a procedural generation script that could produce the AI ships. And that’s what I’ve been working on the last few weeks. I put together a short video showing the work.

Hope you enjoy and I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can play with the ship generator here - it’s an html build nothing to download just run it in your browser.