📜 See all articles: Sitemap
What is this site?
This site teaches end-to-end early-stage game production with a focus on developing a vertical slice suitable for publisher interest and investment.
A vertical slice is a segment of your game demonstrating the potential of both your game and your team. It's used to attract interest from investors and publishers.
The vertical slice focus is an essential element of this site’s structure and the path it takes. While it’s important to know what you want your full game to look like, we’re just going to develop a sample of that game. This limited scope has implications for what you develop and when you develop it.
In a sense, this is a guide for building a miniature game—or a demo of your game. You have an ideation stage, a building stage, and a shipping stage. But in your case, rather than shipping your game to the masses, you’re shipping a small part of your game to the people who will help you make it big.
I want to be clear that this is just one approach. You can create a game on your own, market it yourself, and launch it on Steam. Plenty of people do! But that’s a story for a different guide.
Why have I made this site?
I spent the better part of a year hunting for the answers I’m providing here. While the internet is full of useful game development advice, it’s widely dispersed, and it requires many hours and a lot of dedication to get a complete picture of the game development process.
I think it’d be useful for all this information to be housed in one place. I couldn't find a central repository for it, so I built one myself. I hope you find it useful too!
Who is this for?
This site is for three sets of people.
Total beginners.
Small indie studio heads looking to improve their production processes.
People who have made games before but are, for the first time, seeking funding from a publisher.
How is it organized?
I've organized this site into three distinct stages: planning, production, and pitch. Let me break them down:
Planning is the messy process of discovering your game. As a composer, I’ve always felt like I was discovering the music that was already there, not creating it. Your mileage may vary, and you may feel like you’re manifesting your game from thin air. Whatever the case, it takes trial/error and a ton of mistakes to build the gameplay loop that will propel your game to greatness.
On this site, I classify this period as everything from the seed of an idea to a plan for your vertical slice. A vertical slice is a segment of your game that clearly demonstrates your gameplay loop and your art's potential to interested parties—particularly investors and publishers.
It's difficult to estimate how long planning will take. I’m going to provide advice on maintaining momentum, documenting your mistakes, and planning for the future.
Production is your heads-down game development period. If you have teammates you expect to stick around for the whole project (read: not short-term contractors), they’ll be working with you before too much of the production process starts. This is where you begin to fill in your canvas. It’s more structured, more directional, and a lot easier to time box (though still real tough). At the end of this period, your game will be looking like a game.
In general game development, production divides into key periods often known as Alpha and Beta. Your Alpha build has arrived when your game is feature complete. It’s playable, but it’s got plenty of bugs, and the art, music, and sound effects are nowhere near complete. Your Beta build has arrived when your game is content complete and looks polished.
Pitch happens when you’re ready to ship your game. In your case, “shipping” your game means preparing to pitch to a publisher. The tough part about checking the "done" box is that you will always have things you want to keep working on. After all, your game’s not really a game yet. You have to put that aside, decide when it’s satisfactory, and put a bow on it. While you’ll be fixing some bugs and shoehorning in a couple new art assets, this section of the site focuses on preparing publisher submission materials like budget, pitch deck, and video.
Content I Won’t Be Covering
There’s lots of industry content covering other subjects, so I’m not going to replicate that here. A few examples:
Blogs, guides, and podcasts on the soft skills that producers practice in everyday team management.
“How to market your game” type content—particularly useful for people launching their own game and not seeking a publisher.
An unbelievable aggregation of job opportunities across the industry, existing across various websites and Google Sheets.
Many external resources can be found here. I’d love to find in-depth articles on the localization and porting processes, but I’ve yet to do so. If you know of any, please send them over.
My philosophy
I have pretty strong feelings on the way internet help is written and delivered.
Internet help has a frustrating tendency to be vague. It’s my biggest issue with various blogs, posts, even books. There’s too much “it depends,” and there’s too much industry jargon for people at the start of their game development journey.
Sometimes it’s pure bullshit, courtesy of “gurus” who blather on via LinkedIn. But plenty of other times, and across all industries, it’s from veterans who have such a deep understanding of their subject matter that every answer has its contingencies, and so “it depends” is where they start—and too often the place where they end.
I don’t think “it depends” is the wrong answer, but I do think it’s only part one of the answer. And since, like everyone else in the industry, I started out as a beginner, I’m quite familiar with the frustrating search to find the foundation so that I can make at least a half-informed decision.
All that leads me to this list of things I’ll strive never to do on this site:
Leave a hanging “it depends” without telling you what factors it depends on and how you should evaluate them.
Tell you “it’s a matter of personal preference” without telling you my own.
Provide vague solutions to real problems. If I can solve them, I’ll tell you how. If I can’t, I’ll tell you, and give you the best advice I’ve got.
If you're ready to get started, head on over to Intro to Planning. And thanks for being here. I hope I can help you turn your dream into a game.
📜 See all articles: Sitemap
Comments