What I learned from making my "1st" game.

I think the development of this game started way back in 2013... I'm not really sure. Maybe I should explain my deving situation a bit more before going into the game's dev journey. I'm not a game developer by trade; I'm a hobbyist, well, for the moment at least. I'm more of a "gamer who can make some decent art, compose a bit of music and is pretty ok at arranging logical statements/game design"... I have made a game from scratch using BASIC in my early teens, but I haven't use that language in years. I plan on trying my hand at it soon. I also work a 12 day work schedule, so exploring game development options has been at a snail's pace at best. With all that in mind, I want to talk a bit about the games I've made over the years. SNAKE was the BASIC game I made way back in the 80's... made that in computer class. The next game was made with RPG MAKER VX, but it never saw the light of day due to my rudimentary script writing skills... I put a game breaker in the code, never tested for bugs, continued building on that logic and once I finally ran the project, epic fail. I couldn't remember where the game breaker was in the logic, and in frustration I deleted the project. In hindsight I could have kept the project and looked for help on the forums, but this was during my infancy experience with the web. I didn't understand how to network, and that costed me opportunities to meet like minded individuals. This brings us to AXG... I had a project in the works prior to AXG's development, but it only consisted of (at the time) 3 years  worth of art assets. It would be 7 years later before I started work on that game, but that's a topic for another time.

AXG (ancient xeno guard) was sort of a game jam idea... I wanted to make a very quick and easy game in the matter of weeks. I decided to make a Pong/Breakout/Arkanoid clone... "it's a simple game to make" I initially thought. It wasn't lol! I think I rushed through all the tutorials and manual information I could get my hands on... I wasn't "absorbing" what I was reading/watching. I was rushing through the info to reach the bullet points that I needed to know to get my game working... not understanding "how it works". This is the number one rookie mistake for novice game devs. Your first game should look like crap... in other words, don't focus on making the "prettiest" game ever... focus on game design and practicing gameplay mechanic implementation. Trust me, this will save you an enormous headache once you've decided on the art style and story direction of your game. Ok, I think that handles my "one per list" PSA... back to the deving of AXG.

For the art style, I decided on vector assets that were relatively easy to create. I used ready-made music and sound for it as well. I won't go into the story since I already put that on the game's page, but needless to say, it's Arkanoid, folks. I used this project as a "stepping stone" towards learning the in's and out's of the game engine I was using to make it. 

What I learned from the development of AXG? Patience... bar none. You're not going to knock it out the park on your first try in game development.  (unless your last name is that of an animal... lul) It's going to take years (and yes, even more years) to learn the ropes and make something that will touch as many lives as your own. Passion projects usually yield those results, but it's not an exact science. My advice for aspiring, novice indie devs? Make something you want to make. You don't have to follow trends at the end of the day... set your own path. If you're getting into game deving to make money, forget what I just said lul! If you're more of the latter, study the industry as a whole, network as much as humanly possible and gauge which game genre is more profitable for your situation. It's really tough starting out as an indie dev, but if you're passionate enough and work hard on your craft you can achieve success. "Success" is always open to interpretation. ;)