in this video me and my buddy Jason the creator of cultic discuss his secrets to making an indie game completely alone and if you stick around through the entire video you're going to walk away with top tier advice from one of the most brilliant full-time game developers I've ever met Who Sold over 50,000 copies of his first game by the way the sale for my new course YouTube gamedev starts today you're going to learn how to build a YouTube channel dedicated to showing off your game and building a massive audience that could generate six figures in income it's 40% off and last for just 14 days 200 seats left and you're going to join Over 400 students worldwide the links below I'll see you there so this this hobby project turned into your full-time gig is this the first game that got you that full-time gig oh yeah it's the first game that ever got out of like tiny little single scene hobby project status cuz uh I was a pretty pretty serial project Hopper before culk just like as soon as something new like a new idea would would hit my brain I would just stop what I was working on and go work on that and that's the thing and I know my audience so many people who listen to this struggle with that and it's one of the it's it's definitely a problem that solo developers have because there's like no accountability you you release cultic you're still releasing chapters for cultic and that's providing you a full-time income along with I'm sure 3D Realms funds you correct um I it just funded off of um the sales of my game so it's just uh if I succeed uh then I succeed and if I and and if I stop selling games uh then I don't get to have electricity anymore so um I'm I'm officially officially took the plunge into being self-sustaining which right now is working out great but I would lie if I said there wasn't a great anxiety that I'll like never release another good game and the thought of going back to like like an 8 to5 like regular gig uh is is really scary because I'm a spoiled man now I totally know how you feel I think the worst thing for me was like when I started going full-time was still I guess I guess it it was still kind of during like Co like times you know when stuff was still kind of shut down and and I remember like and I guess I still kind of get this but like just like going to like if I go to the grocery store at like at like 11:00 a.m. on a Tuesday because you know my schedule makes no sense it's just like I see people working way harder than me and I feel so bad cuz I'm just like you know my I'm just going to go home and set up my computer and work on my games it's like it's like it's like a very weird um I guess I don't know what the ter it's it's a bad guilty feeling and it is I I guess I I've been there before you know like that was you know I did that was what I did in college was that kind of you know like retail work and so like I know I know that it can be kind of Soul draining and so to be doing something that's like the opposite of that that's very like fulfilling is just like it feels weird cuz I'm you know I'm only two years into getting to do this fulltime now so it's it still feels very weird well let take me back to those retail years what what was the process like just getting from that that those couple days working the job you hated all the way to the point where you got that email that said you were going to get funded I went to college for graphic design um and that was kind of what I did professionally before this so I I guess like you know too so so retail was uh that was like college like high school college trying to pay my way through college so I worked at Sears if you remember Sears everybody I I worked I worked at Sears selling Electronics which was actually a pretty fun job after that I worked at the at a Walgreens photo lab which would have been a cool job if people weren't sending me like like I guess is going on YouTube so I'm not going to say that but um people people sending me things I didn't want to print uh but so after that I actually went into graphic design and I did that gosh from like 2013 through 2017 and in 2017 I was actually working an awesome job I worked for a hospitality company um and I did like graphic design and photography for the restaurant division but then the the living situation I was in at the time fell apart and so I decided to move back home to Kansas I've always been interested in more of like I've been interested in game development since I was like 10 10 years old and so I you know ideally that's what I always wanted to do but you know when you start to look at realistic jobs in the real world it's like okay well maybe that's going to turn into like an IT job or something instead so when I moved home I switched gears and I got a job actually in my hometown doing software support like it was a less prestigious job than getting to do all this like photography for these cool like restaurants and stuff but it was something that it I like I was so much more passionate about it and so it was a lot more fulfilling then so I did that for a few years and then in 2020 I started working on cultic it was January of 2020 I'm trying to remember my my or was it 2021 oh Lord I'm so old I can't remember all you got to say is was it during Co or not you it it it was during it was during Co so it would have been January 2021 yeah so I started working on it January 2021 when you say started working on it do you mean you started learning game development no no I've been doing Game Dev since I was uh 10 or 11 years old and of course how old are you Jason I'm 31 okay you and I have like the we have like the same life but what's cool about this is and I want my audience to hear this is that you and I are two of like the most normal guys out there we're like classic normal American dude yet here you and I both are working with 3D Realms and we're releasing some of the most vile violent video games today especially today cuz these kind of games don't really get made anymore especially your game so anyway you you started working on cultic right but you were still working a full-time job so 2021 I started working on cultic and the idea for culk has been around for a long time I've wanted to make that game since probably when I first started playing like build engine Shooters which would have been in like middle school but I never you know I knew it had to be a 3D game and I didn't have any 3D game development skills and so I never tried to make it in my game maker days and then I tried to start making it in unity several times but my 3D skills were just terrible like you know I was still learning and so every time I would try it I wouldn't be happy with the results I was getting because cuz in you know I've been building up this idea of mine as like a dream game in my head and so I don't I wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than like like Perfection and then so early 2021 I was actually working on a completely different game um called cryptic and I modeled this just this Mar's leg uh lever action rifle for it but I wanted it to be like a low poly PS1 aesthetic kind of thing but just for funsies I decided to I had this model that I had made for this completely different game and I wanted to try turning it into a Sprite like just for fun I'd never done that kind of like 3D model to Sprite workflow and so and so I did that and I and I found this cool palette that I liked and modified it a bit and applied the palette to those Sprites that I made and I put it on Twitter and it was like the biggest tweet I'd ever had in my life and granted I had like maybe 100 followers then and so this was like normally if I tweeted something it would get like maybe 12 likes on it on a good day and this was something that got like hundreds and so I was like oh man I'm on to something here and so I took another model from an old from a game I wanted to work on um which which was the old uh axe cultist model the really low poly one and I turned him into a Sprite too and then I put the two things together in unity with a really crunchy pallet and made that they one of those earliest cultic videos of just like shooting these guys with the lever action and that like that blew up and then Fred from 3D rums reaches out to me and I thought it was a scam when I saw the message because I mean I mean it's like it's like that's like getting you know like the email that's like I'm the king of this country and I want to give you a bunch of money you know it's like it's just you know you start to get a little bit of ention and then suddenly some somebody from a game Studio was like we want to buy we know we want to sign your game and I didn't know who he was um because you know my knowledge of 3D Realms was pretty much limited to to Duke Nukem 3D that was it and then I saw I don't remember how but I saw I think I probably just decided to look him up and I was like well let's see if this guy's real and then I look him up and it's like oh no he's he's a real person and he's actually from 3D Realms and so then I really hastily replied to him CU I think I just left him in my inbox for a couple days because I thought it was fake and yeah and so it's like here I am with this you know this rink dink little game that's like one test area and just like some Sprites and then I've got you know this company that made these games that I used to play and I still love that's like wanting to sign my game and that I that was that was crazy and then uh my impostor syndrome was still is but at the time was like so deep that I was like no like I I don't even have a game yet I just have some Sprites and so I told him like let me make a proof of concept demo for you to kind of show you cuz I didn't have any gameplay yet and so cuz I want to show you what I'm thinking C is going to be um or at the time it was still cryptic actually um but I was like I want to show you like what I want this game to be and so I spent all of March you know I worked full-time 8: to 5: and then I would say from like 5: to 1: in the morning I would work on my this first level demo and so by the end of March I had so what time what time did you start I'm sorry to interrupt what time did you start working and what time did you end because people listening might want to replicate your schedule it sounds it sounds insane but if people really want it they're going to go for it so what was your schedule again so I I my day job was 88 to 5 um and then I then I would like take a break and eat dinner and then I would usually work on my game from like 5:00 p.m. until 11: to 1 in the morning whenever I was like I have to go to bed D yes I'm so happy for you and excited for you that you did that cuz that takes so much and I'm also a little bit I'm a little bit proud because I did the same thing and and you see so many people on YouTube and on Twitter in the comments saying like well I can't do what you guys do because I have X Y and Z going on and I'm like every most people are doing exactly what everyone else is doing working our butts off the only difference is is that once 5:00 p.m. hits that's not Netflix time it's time to make games yeah for you for you and me now I I can I could never do it again yeah and right now like even tonight doing this podcast with you is exhausting like yeah like usually usually it's 5:00 I'm done hang out with my kids go go Netflix and chill but when I was when I first got married the best part of working a day job is that you learn what you don't want and more importantly even even what you hate so that it pushes you and propels you to go and do what you did which is I'm going to work till 1:00 a.m. just to get out of this stupid day job yeah now granted I think you said you liked your day job so that was my yeah part part of it yeah I did like my day job um cuz I doing like software support stuff meant that I basically sat on Discord with all my co-workers who were good friends of mine and we just like you know you know it was it was fun like I looked forward to going to work so that definitely helps you know if it was a thing where I was working you know like again like if it was like like my retail job like at Walgreens like I could never I don't think I could have ever gone home and then made myself work until 1: in the morning after that job cuz that job was physically exhausting can we talk about the technical side so we we talked about the scheduling side and like that journey to get your game from start to finish right right so that we talked about the schedule and the emotional side can we talk about the the technical side of what it takes for someone like you to make a game completely alone sure so get give me a breakdown of the technical side of how this game was made and give me give me some context as it pertains to doing it solo because I can I swear to you the audience listening they most of them are going to want to make this their game solo so they want to figure out okay how do I make a game technically and how can I do it all by myself yeah so I mean the biggest thing is just um is really having a big appetite for learning which sounds really horny to say but it's just like you you have to have that drive to learn if you want to do everything yourself because like I didn't go to college for game design I I didn't go to college for music theory I can't even read sheet music um so like learning how to do music was just like I'm just going to download the tools and and and go crazy and that's kind of the way it was for everything was like you know starting with game maker and just downloading Sprites off the internet eventually was like well I'm not satisfied with using somebody else's Sprites uh or especially ones that are copyrighted and so I like well I want to make my own spres cuz I want to make my own game um and so then you learn that and it's like well I don't want to use stock music and I don't want to use music from games that exist so I'm I need to learn how to make my own so Unity Unity was your tool of choice that's what you ended up landing on even though you started with game maker do you write the co and also really quick the the sound design tool what did you what do you use for music for uh I use uh FR Loops FL Studio for Studio okay and and the alternative is logic pro for Mac that's what I use Okay so we've got Fruity Loops for those who want to make music uh for developers who want to make 2D games you can start in game maker but you can uh make 3D games in unity do you code the game yes yep okay so do you use visual scripting at all or is it just C from scratch all C I don't have anything against visual scripting but it always it always feels limiting to me um personally cuz I'm like I know exactly what I want to do so I just want I just want to type it out and do it I don't want to mess with like I don't want to mess with spaghetti but and big but um had VIs ual scripting B at the point that it's at right now when I started with unity I probably would have started with it like if I were getting into Game Dev today and blue and like blueprint was an option that's that might have been where I started well what was the what was your art tool of choice for some context here cultic is a combination of 2D Sprites and 3D correct right so the art the art process is kind of like a a bucket of butts cuz it's um it's like um it's so everything in the game is is 3D modeled uh originally so like the even though the firstperson uh weapons like in like Doom or or Duke 3D or whatever are are Sprites they are fully modeled um and I model them in blender and then I set up a camera rig which exports that or renders them down to a 2D image and then and then I take the 2D image into Photoshop and I clean it up um I you know brush out like weird 3D artifacts or like clipping um and then adjust like the highlights and the shadows and brush on a bit of extra shading um and then it gets sent to aprite which is my spriting tool and that's where I would apply the color palette um sequence the animations and then do the final touch-ups and since CK's color palette is so limited so much of like like if I if I appli the color palette and it looked like crap then I would just I would go back to photoshop and and do more texture work and so the textures are very heavily tailored so that when it gets um cuz the color palette is so limited that in order to make everything pop your highlights your shadows have to be really distinct and a lot of times you're using uh Hue instead of um brightness to create contrast because the color palette's so limited and so a lot of that so like if you go and look at the original renders they're like they are they're painted all over like there's all this all this markup all over them so yeah it it was it was quite a process and you're doing all this artwork from scratch you're not using assets right what about your 3D models are you ever tempted to go grab you know some kind of mesh from Turbo squid or something low poly mesh and then repaint it it's been really tempting with um with cars um because for chapter 2 uh since it takes place partially in the city I need to have a lot of City props and it's like because of because it's getting voxelized and because the texture color count is so low whether I perfectly model a car or whether I go get a perfectly modeled car it's going to look the same in the end um but cars are one of my biggest my one of my weakest points as an artist like I just can't draw them and so was like no I'm going to I'm going to model them um that's just that's the way to do it you are a timid game developer you don't quit you don't quit your job you wait until you get a ton of wish lists before you quit your job and you do everything from scratch because you you want to make sure that you're doing it legally but also it clearly paid off because the game has a such a cohesive style all right guys thanks for watching and just remember you can join my new new course YouTube Game Dev starting today you're going to learn how to build a YouTube channel dedicated to showing off your game and building a massive audience that can generate six figures in income and no it's not a gimmick it's taught by somebody me someone who's actually in the trenches doing all of this oh and you're also going to get my course fan base framework which is all about building a massive email list that could generate revenue for you and your game and also hey I'll throw in stream my game totally free this is a course dedicated to teaching you how to reach out to top tier YouTubers and get them to play your games this course is 40% off and guys this is going to last for just 14 days the link is below I'll see you [Music] there