I'm a 17 year old game developer who just released his first commercial product on Steam, developed entirely on Linux using the Godot Engine! AMA

I don’t really have a question, just wanted to say that it is awesome you are so focused and driven at that age! Hope you are successful.

Mmh, I guess I will ask- when do you find the time to dedicate to this with school and any suggestions on getting kids into coding?

Edit: spelling ugh

Thank you!! :)

Basically any time I have when I'm not in school I put towards either playing a game or working on a game. I should really be putting more effort towards my schoolwork which has fallen by the way-side especially in the months leading up to the release of Mass O' Kyzt, but now that it's done I think I can spend a little more time and energy on schoolwork.

As for getting kids into coding, I think that the kids have to have a significant appreciation for computer first. I think that once they realize just how powerful, fast and versatile a computer is and once they realize that coding is literally the means by which they can manipulate humanity's greatest accomplishment, they'll want to learn about coding. I think the best learning experience is when a kid would take a template of a program, maybe they'd copy it out or something, and then they can add bits to it to make the program slightly different but ever so slightly personalized.

I don't really have much experience with that stuff so maybe I'm just talking nonsense but I hope that gave you something to think about?

Just wanted to say keep focusing on being a computer whiz and building things that actually interest people. You’ll be far more successful, and happier, than following a standard academic focus.

Thank you!! :) That's the idea. For a while I was kind of disenfranchised with getting into gamedev and thought that I'd just spend my life working a 9-5 as a software developer in some random company, but at some point I just... decided not to? Now I've got my heart set on getting a career in gamedev, or becoming homeless trying.

As an ex game developer at EA, Criterion and a few others, I just want to say that what you've done getting a game together to releasable quality is amazing but beware that working in games for someone else is a completely different experience.

I had a website business on the side through school and Uni (this is back in 98) I was hand coding DHTML and javascript to make Web pages come to life with with dynamic animations and little games. I loved games not websites though and wanted to work on triple A games. So I joined a games company without thinking I was giving anything up and I was suddenly faced with the realities of working for someone.

It's just implementing other people's ideas for the most part. I was given the choice to either design or code (not many get the choice), I chose code and its like in that moment my ideas were worth less than some first year intern just because they had a job title. If you're really passionate about making good games, having to implement other people's bad ideas can be quite soul wrenching. I earned less working every day of the week and weekends, than I did when I worked 2 nights a week doing websites. I had Christmas booked 6 month in advance to go see my parents, the game hadn't shipped yet. I offered to work remotely. I made sure my handover was up to scratch, etc. but I was kicked out of the team when I came back. I had one boss take credit for all my work and leave me with no reward after working my ass off.

If you've got a chance to make your own games company, do it. Don't go working for someone else if you can help it at all. Hire an experienced game developer as soon as you can. So you can learn from them. Always hire people that know more than you about something important.

I own an AI company now after many years to course correct and I couldn't be happier but really be careful what you choose. I did learn so much from working with great people, so make sure you get some of them around you either way. Good luck!

Don't go working for someone else if you can help it at all.

That's pretty much been the plan. I really value my independence and creative freedom as it is, and I really can't see myself ever working at a AAA company. Maybe at a small-scale indie company, but that's a big maybe and I think I would have to be afforded a large amount of input to not get restless.

Thank you for the advice, I've been trying to get into contact with some very talented developers in my area. There's this organization called Games Wales which organizes meetups and other events once a month for Welsh game developers to attend, but most of the places they go are 18+ and well, that's a problem for a few more months.^^

I'll definitely keep everything you said in mind. :)

The more I read this thread, the more I can identify to you.

I'm 15 years old, started high-school this year. Game development is my dream. Games carried me through all the crap I went through as a weak, weird introverted kid. Without them, I don't think I would have carried on very long. Art is the way we learn the things we can't learn in a school or that we can't all figure out just by experiencing them. That's what I want to try doing for the world.

But in the last couple years, I almost lost my hope of ever reaching that goal, because I couldn't get myself to do much to work towards it. Seeing that you think the same way as I do and that you've made it at such an age gives me some hope again. Plus, thanks to this post, I just found out about Godot ! Since GameMaker stopped being free, that's gonna be of use.

Thank you and good luck.

Wow, thank you so much! It feels really good to know that I somehow inspired someone by making a weird lil game and then doing a reddit post about it.

Best of luck to you on your gamedev endeavors! :)

Dude you're only 17!!? Just reading your posts and seeing your work makes it easy for me to believe you will be a very successful person. You're definitely on the right track. Good for you man. You seem very smart and driven. 17 year olds are supposed to be smart ass lil shits standing there with their hand out. You seem to be FAR ahead of the curve. Keep doing what you're doing, success will find you. Good job bud.

Haha, thank you!!! :) That means a lot.

Yup that's a fine suggestion, one I can relate to. Years ago, I made a Java music player similar to Winamp. I tried cramming in as many features of the original as I could, and it turned into a very satisfying learning experience. One silly customization I did was adding a message box that said 'Fuck you, I don't do that!' when dragging and dropping a non-music file into the program... Not the most mature thing to do, in retrospect. :D

Haha, that's great! :)

That makes sense I think with getting them to make something more personalized to start. My daughter is 2yrs so I have time, however, I have cousins that are 11yrs and I am very close with them.

Good luck!! 2 years might be a tad young, but yeah- 11 years sounds like a good time to get at least some kind of programmatic foundation in their thought process. Good luck!!

...once they realize that coding is literally the means by which they can manipulate humanity's greatest accomplishment, they'll want to learn about coding.

This, just so much this! This is so eloquently put, and I agree 100%. I'm a programmer (also game dev) and that's basically word-for-word what happened to me :D

Congratulations on your achievement, you have much to be proud of.

Thank you!! :)

Go back to your teachers and show them your work. You may find one that will award credit for your efforts here. Show school administrators, too. If your school has some sort of a ‘public relations’ department, show them as well.

Get yourself some credit at school for this.

Thank you! I've told some of my teachers, but since I'm in the UK and things are all standardized based on testing/coursework, the teachers can't influence my grade. :( They have been supportive of my efforts, though!

How long did it take you to reach the level of coding that was needed to create this? How long did finding all the bugs take? (my java code for courses still has infinite bugs and I can’t imagine ever posting to steam so props for putting yourself out there :) )

Edit: wow my set of upvotes >100 thanks for all the advice on using an engine - i might look into it once I reach the end of the job search - glad you’re doing so much with your life already at 17 - it really is much harder to learn something well that you’re passionate about once you’re trying to accumulate job worthy skills so congrats on being ahead

I've been programming since I was like 8 years old so the programming side of things just came from a lot of experience. I have spent the last two years or so getting really into game development so that's when I've really been concentrating on improving my skills- it's slow, but I think it's paid off.

Haha, I'd recommend using a full-on engine rather than just Java and whatever framework(LWJGL, etc) if you're trying to make a game as an indie. There's really no shame in it- it saves a lot of time and pain that could be spent on the higher-level elements of your game. Performance isn't really that relevant unless you're doing something really unconventional that other engines just don't facilitate properly, but concepts like that are few and far between.

As for finding all the bugs...

I just pushed an update to fix like 3 of them after getting a few messages about them.>.> It's the price to pay for no real QA testing, I suppose.

I agree with this. If you want to make a game, use an engine. The only reason you should make your own engine is if your game is really simple, or you just want to learn how to make an engine. Most engines let you supplement the engine with your own binary code, so even if you need something really unconventional, you can usually add it to the engine.

Agreed! The Godot Engine allows for C++ modules to be added at compilation, which is what I had to do in order to integrate the Steam API.

Godot 3.0 has this thing called GDNative which allows for C++ module integration without having to re-compile the engine which I am looking forward to a lot, considering Godot uses MinGW conventions and Steam uses MSVC- not exactly the nicest thing to compile on a MinGW compiler which throws a tantrum at the sight of certain MSVC types.

I don't know too much about Godot, but my cousin is making a game with it, and he told me about the new features in 3.0, it seems pretty exciting.

He also uses Godot at work at Google to make basic UIs, because it's easier than making it in python

Oh wow, that's super cool, though I suppose it makes sense. I think one of Godot's greatest strengths is its ability for rapid prototyping, so I suppose that's a pretty smart use-case for it.

How did you learn how to do graphic design for the game? How long have you spent making the game?

I've spent about 9 months making this game, all in all.

As for the graphics, I've spent the past 2 years or so creating placeholder graphics that I never thought would stick. Eventually, these placeholder graphics became high enough quality to where I just... kept them. I really never meant to learn pixel art on purpose, but it happened and I guess I'm going to keep developing my pixel art skills!

what did you use to make the graphics?

I used Aseprite and a whole lot of trial-and-error.

thank you! do you have in mind if you are going to learn blender, maya or any other similar tool? you can get autodesk programs for free once you start attending college.

If I learn a 3D modelling program, it's probably going to be Blender due to the fact it's open source and I've had a little practice with it. I can't do much, but I know vaguely what the UI looks like^^

What made you choose Linux over windows or Mac?

Well, mostly it's because I really like to know how the computer works at a fairly low level and I like having a lot of control over how it runs- even if that control means I break it every few months.

With regard to developing on Linux rather than Windows/Mac, I found that certain things like compilation and running the editor were a lot smoother and faster than they were on Windows. Also, by the time I really got into game development(1-2 years ago?) I was already way more familiar with how Linux worked than I was with Windows, so the fact that I was just used to it became a large factor.

I don't consider myself a zealot for the Linux cause, I think everybody can pretty much choose what they want- but I think in order to use Linux you have to be a bit of a computerphile.

I imagine you probably already have but in case not, you should check out the YouTube channel Computerphile. It's awesome, along with Brady's other channels like Periodic Videos, Numberphile, Objectivity, and Sixty Symbols

Oh yeah, I'm a big fan of Computerphile as well as Numberphile. I'm a bit of a maths nerd too, so if you're into those I'd recommend Matt Parker/Standupmaths. He's made some appearances on Numberphile!

I'll just add 3Blue1Brown as an interesting math channel as well.

Ooo, I haven't heard of them. I'll definitely keep them in mind.

As a Linux user, thank you :)

Also as a Linux user, you're welcome. :P

I'd love to learn how to program, especially graphical programming like OpenGL and DirectX or equivalents, and after talking to some family friends who do it for a living, apparently I have the right coding philosophy for getting the job done well, but I just have no idea where to start. I have extremely basic Java and C++ skills, and can do small script prototypes in Python. Where would you recommend I start developing my skills and what are some good projects to start with that teach you a lot?

I think it depends on what you're really going for. I think I'd probably recommend strengthening your Java/C++ skills a little bit for OpenGL/DirectX usage since that can get really complex and upsetting really quickly in my experience. The one that everyone recommends is Tic-Tac-Toe in text in a terminal, but if you're looking for a more graphical task then try making Pong in OpenGL or something like that. From there you can modify it slightly, make powerups, random events, choose a different scoring mechanism(score based on how much you move your paddle?), etc. The program is yours!

Hope I could help!

Congratulations. I wish you much success. Which Linux distro is your favorite? Thanks.

Thank you!! :) I've been happy with Debian for the past several years. It's super solid, easily editable and has a huge community. I've tried Mint which is also solid and Ubuntu which I always run into driver errors on. I once tried Arch. That's really all I'll say about it. I like large packages of compatible software that some would consider "bloat".

How did you start programming at 8 years old? Were you nudged in that direction by a friend or family member?

My dad was super into computers and helped get me into computer games from a very young age, so I was always fascinated by all sorts of computer games. I tried several times to create (massively over-ambitious) text adventures in Windows Batch script from YouTube tutorials which I could literally just copy out exactly and just change the flavour text.

From there, I learned maybe one or two commands in ActionScript which basically just made buttons work. I didn't really understand how to do anything else, I understood key-frames and the basics of how sprites worked, but yeah- that's how I made and uploaded the award-winning "Catch-A-Button" to Kongregate.

Are you primarily doing this AMA to drum up advertising for your game?

Well, yes. Secondarily, it's because I'm super proud of having made it, so it's kind of a 4/10 on the "evil businessman" scale?

Nothing wrong with it, congrats. I just figured it had to be said since in the past year, AMAs on Reddit went from interesting to commercial.

Not to take away from your accomplishment, but I do kind of miss the old AMAs that used to make it to the front page :(

Yeah, I agree. I don't know, I unsubscribed from this subreddit for a while because it did kind of move from "hey here's a cool unique thing about me" to "hey buy my book/game/movie/whatever". I know I'm being part of the problem, but it's been going this way for years and I'm a bit conflicted about not taking advantage of that. :(

I know I'm being part of the problem

Nah, I wouldn't say that. While you do fall into the category of "hey guys, check out this thing I want your money for!" you don't fall into the category of "hey guys, buy my shit while I ignore all questions that don't have a trivial bullshit answer I can give". Also, your situation is uncommon enough (releasing a steam game at 17) that as long as you do answer the tougher/more useful questions then you will have done the community a service by doing the AMA, which really is the goal, in the end.

Haha, thanks, I've spent the past 5 hours answering questions so I like to think that maybe I've atoned for my sins.

Will you get rich from this? What’s your next project?

Will you get rich from this?

Honestly I have no idea where to put my expectations. My first instinct is to assume my game will do terribly, but the median number of sales in a game's first month on Steam is ~100 so I'm thinking that maybe I'll make my Steam Direct fee back which would be nice.

What's your next project?

I'm not entirely sure. Maybe something to do with whales. Or mushrooms. Maybe both? Probably just one. I expect that it'll be quite different from Mass O' Kyzt, though!

Maybe an RTS with three factions consisting of the whales, Japanese whalers, and Sea Shepard.

Yes.

Put a narwhal in there.

A game can't live without a narwhal.

...Thanks for the suggestion. :)

You have to pay a fee to publish on steam? I figured they just took a percentage of sales.

They do both. You have to pay a $100/£70 fee per title to put your game on Steam, and then they take some percentage of sales on top of that. At this point, they can afford to since they're the biggest digital games retailer in the world! ^^

Haha I love this answer to what your next project will be

AlexHoratio: #1 AMA-er

Why did you choose godot instead of unreal or other physics engines? What language did you use?

I tried Unreal and Unity, but Unreal confused me and Unity was a bit buggy and difficult to use on Linux. Godot was super intuitive and worked perfectly and fluidly, so I just stuck with that one. Good thing, too, because I also tried Game Maker, LWJGL, PyGame, Pyglet, C++ and OpenGL and Batch Script when I was super young.

Its amazing how you are so composed and focused on your work for your age. I was so busy trying to get rid of my virginity at that age. Ugh.

Anyway now that i have a kid of my own, how would a completely clueless adult like me introduce a kid to the world of computers and coding that could lead his appreciation in considering this field as work? Just thinking ahead. He is only in preschool actually.

Thank you! :)

Hmm, I'd suggest to get him into the practice of thinking programmatically/logically first of all(though that's hard if he's in pre-school!) Alternatively, get him some computer games. I think that there's really no sure-fire way. I got into programming because every time I saw something cool, I just wanted to make that thing. I got a lot of games when I was a child and so I just kept trying to make different types of video games- little text adventures(which I never completed), etc.

I really don't have much experience with kids so I don't know if anything I said was helpful, but I hope you got something out of that!^^

Why should I play this?

That is to say, there are so many excellent indie games on steam, what do you think makes yours stand out, and what differentiates it from all the others.

I'm not going to try to sell you this game as the best indie game because it's really not, but I think that mine stands mostly due to the interesting premise of upgrading your enemies and the (well, in my eyes) cute lil alien designs.

I'm really happy with how the combat feels. It's as tight as I want it to be, the game feels fast-paced enough to be exciting and there are enough extrinsic incentives(unlockables, achievements, etc) to keep the game interesting and satisfying to play.

I hope I helped you understand something about the game, at least!

What was the hardest obstacle you had to get through in this whole journey?

The fact that I didn't really plan it properly for the first 6 months, honestly. I came up with the idea that you would "upgrade your enemies", meandered and played around with it for a while and it just wasn't going anywhere. I must have gone through several iterations of it before landing on the final version and that's a lot of time that I wasted because I wouldn't just sit down and think about it what I really wanted out of my game for an hour or so.

Coming from a 35 year old who started a web agency at 17 years old, which has evolved into a product company with 50 employees today: It's not always the case that you will find the best solution (or even idea) on the first day (or first hour). That's kind of like publishing a book at first draft.

When working on product ideas, it is very useful to build quick prototypes in the beginning, testing it on friends and improving the idea with a few iterations to set the features properly. Then start on the full implementation. By the way, even if you do what I just outlined, you will find golden nuggets along the way. It is impossible to cover all corners of a product when planning.

It's impressive that you've published a game on Steam at 17 - keep going, and remember to have fun with other parts of life while doing it!

Thank you! :) I appreciate the advice, and I will!

What’s your favorite kind of cheese 🧀?

Probably cheddar, honestly. I'm boring.

What do you like most about the workflow of the Godot engine and what do you hate most about it?

I really like how prominent and easy-to-use the Node system is. I know that other engines have similar hierarchy things, but in Godot it feels really integral to the engine. Everything is based on Nodes and it gives everything a really nice, modular feel.

The worst is probably the audio system. I know that it's entirely different and a lot nicer in Godot 3.0 now, but as of 2.1.4 it crashes constantly and it's really awkward to use.

Is it open-source? Because if it is, then you have my full admiration. You can open-source the engine and still sell the content, you know. Great job either way, be proud.

I may or may not be planning on open-sourcing the project later on in its life cycle for the fairly shameless reason that I can re-publicize it then. That doesn't count as slightly evil if I'm being pretty open about it, right?

What is the best method to teach yourself programing? I tried when I was a kid Game Maker and GBA rom hacking but I never wrapped my head around it.

I think the best method is to:

1. Make sure that you are programming something you're interested in

2. Don't try to cram too much knowledge into your head at once. For instance, don't try to comprehend list comprehensions in Python if you've only just learned what a list even is.

3. Don't feel bad about stealing code from random StackOverflow posts. As long as you have a basic understanding of what it does, you're pretty much good to go. I mean, don't out-right plagiarize but algorithms are free.

I also tried Game Maker 1.something and it never really clicked with me. I tried to make a fan-game of a book by some friend who wrote short stories several years ago, but it never really went anywhere. I would recommend the Godot Engine, since it's got a built-in scripting language which is similar to Python. Python is a fairly simple language to learn and definitely one I'd start with if you don't know what you're doing.

Hope I helped!

EDIT: Regarding #2: I meant that you don't necessarily need to be able to recreate it on command, as long as you see it and understand that it does a thing even if you can concede that you'd never have thought of it on your own. It came off a bit wrong, as MajorMoustache pointed out below.

How much does being able to understand complex mathematics (algorithms, for example) factor into being a computer programmer and video game developer? Hope that's not a silly question!

Not a silly question at all!

I think that you don't really need to understand much complex mathematics in order to program to a sufficient level. Things get a bit more complex in 3D (quaternions... yuck) but honestly as long as you've had enough practice thinking in a logical/programmatic way, you should be fine.

I think that some knowledge of vectors and matrices come in handy, things like dot products, cross products, and what it means to normalize a vector. Also, some physics helps if you're dealing with a physics engine, so differentiation, integration, getting comfy with parabolas all helps out a lot. I think you can get quite far without most of that, though.

What do you think you'd like to do after high school as far as pursuing computer science/game developing? Are you going to go the college route? Im currently in college for CS (2nd year) however its really tough mentally spending so much money, and more importantly time, on gen eds that don't relate to my degree. Even the pre-calc class im in right now I've been told isn't overwhelmingly useful in CS. I'll likely continue with my degree but curious to see what you think about that.

Congrats on the game! Thats a huge achievement for being only 17, you should definitely be super proud of yourself.

I'm not actually planning on going to university(the UK equivalent to college), since I don't think the monetary and time expenses of going to uni are going to out-weigh how much I can do by building my portfolio by actually working on games. It might not work, but I think it's worth trying. Worst case scenario, I can always go back to uni.. right?

Yeah, I currently take Computing as an A-level and it's really only tangentially related to anything that I could conceivably want to do in the future. A surprisingly small amount of it is actually programming and computer-related work- there's a lot of systems analysis and weird paperwork stuff that I don't like.

Thank you! :)

Hey man, just letting you know that you're off to a great start and you should keep going with your dreams.

Have there ever been any design issues or ideas that just didn't make the cut? Do you think you will implement anything new into the future?

Thank you!!! :)

Yeah, definitely. I wanted there to be multiple boss types, I wanted there to be a big final boss and a lot more unique upgrades which would be randomly offered to the player(choose between: enemies explode on death, vision reduced to a certain radius, your gun now overheats) but that really wasn't feasible for a single person to create. Because of that, I just had to cut it out and keep going.

I don't know how I'll treat the game in the future. Right now I'm still in the "cooling off" phase- I need a little bit of time to be able to take a step back and see how the game really is, rather than just seeing little sprites with bits of code attached running around the screen. I think that it's not unlikely I'll add a few more skins to the roster in the future, but I can't promise that.

May I ask how did you manage to have a 2D game require minimum of 2.4Ghz processor with recommended being 3.0Ghz? I hope you just didn't setup requirements correctly, because otherwise I can already tell that it was done in worst way possible as I don't see what would require so much power, from preview...

That's like what 3D games with tons of stuff in them require.

I'm going to be honest I just guessed based on 3 computers, two of which are pretty strong and the third is a laptop. I hope that nobody takes those too seriously^^

How did you decide what game to make? Any inspirations?

Well, I randomly came up with the idea for a game where the player gets to control how the enemies' power level scales. I though about it for a while and went through some half-formed ideas that I can barely even remember now, and eventually came up with the hook which was "Mass O' Kyzt is a game wherein you upgrade your enemies". I think that I kept this single sentence constant more than anything else in the game's dev-cycle, even though I went through multiple interpretations of it along the way.

As for inspirations, yeah, it was inspired a lot by Risk of Rain early on- one of my favourite games of all time!

I bought the game. Will play it tomorrow. Any tips?

Thanks for the 15% discount by the way!

Woo, thank you!! :) Biggest tip would probably be to upgrade toughness last>.> things get very hard very fast when the Kyztlings take a lot of hits to kill.

How many copies per day are you selling since release?

I can't tell you that, Steam might get annoyed at me. :)

What engine/framework/language did you create the game in? Well the answer to that was in the title...

Did you make the art yourself? I enjoy coding small game projects now and then but always work with free placeholder assets, I don't feel like I could dedicate the time to also learning how to make art, as I have a lot of things going on and also value leisure activities outside of sitting behind a computer, and it doesn't really interest me that much either.

Yup! I made the art myself.

It's actually quite a funny story about how I came to make the graphics for this game. I made so many placeholder graphics for previous games that my skills just improved without really noticing. Art is a lot more analytical than you'd think- being able to make the shading consistent and correct is really like most of it. Apart from that, I'd recommend to just keep the sprites lo-res and relatively small so that the human mind fills in the details by itself^^

If you can't deal with art, get a 3rd party on to help you with the art. I've never done this before, so I can't give much advice on that!!

Yea, as asked before...what is your Linux distro of choice?

Debian Sid, baby!

What's you're best piece of advice relating to game-dev and/or programming techniques?

As for gamedev in general, probably "fail fast". I know it's not strictly a game development saying, but I think when interpreted to mean that you need to prototype->evaluate as many times as possible in a project's life cycle it's super helpful. I went through like 4 different iterations of the main gameplay hook(upgrade your enemies) before settling on the current one, and if I didn't just bite the bullet and effectively delete tens of hours of work on the earlier iterations my game would have been a lot worse off for it.

You want music for your next game?

I'm taking a break for a few months since I need to focus on schoolwork, but we'll see by the time my next project rolls around. :)

Game looks interesting and fun! My question is, why did you choose the Godot Engine instead of something like Unity?

I tried Unreal and Unity, but Unreal confused me and Unity was a bit buggy and difficult to use on Linux back then. Godot was super intuitive and worked perfectly and fluidly, so I just stuck with that one. It's mostly just luck that I happened to like using Godot so much, but I am very happy with it, and its current iteration(v3.0) has fixed 95% of the problems that I've had with it.

How did selling your game work given that you're under 18 (and therefore,as I understand it, contracts with you aren't legally binding). Did you need to have your parent/guardian make seller agreements for you?

Well, I'm in the UK so as long as I'm over 16 I can register as a Sole Proprietor, which is what I did. Also, Steam has no explicit rules against being under 18 while using their partner program(and I looked everywhere).

Unfortunately, I can't put my game on Itch or GameJolt yet since they require PayPal accounts which require me to be over 18... I can wait a few months.

Is Ryland good at computer science?

Better than me.

Do you have a Linux port? And if not, why not? Godot is cross platform.

Yup! It would be weird if it didn't, since I developed the game and am typing this reply to you on Linux too. :P

I'm going to college soon for game design, I was just curious where you'll be going if for game design?

I'm not honestly planning on going to college(if that's the US equivalent to university?), since I think that as an independent developer the time and monetary cost of going to uni is not offset by the likelihood that it'll help me get a job or make a sustainable living. At some point, people are more willing to look at your portfolio as a relevant indicator of your skill than your degree and I like to think that I've started building it up early.

Good luck in college! :)

Did you make a plan while you were working on your game?(i mean, working on a GDD, or using a app like Trello to monitor your progress) Or you improvised on the march.

P.S.: Sorry if bad english.

Hey! Yes, I did use something similar to Trello (but more game-development focused) called "HackNPlan". It was super helpful and I'd recommend it to anybody who wants to develop games!

I just wanted to say that I am also seventeen and probably not as computer-literate as I would want to be. I have always wanted to make my own games but I cannot code for toffee, so I stick my skills into writing and 3D modeling, as well as building things.

Any tips for staying motivated? Although my hobbies are not the same as yours, motivation is probably a major component of both haha. I just wanted to say that the game looks awesome really.

Yeah, motivation is really difficult. I think that to some degree, you have to balance thinking about where you want to be with not stalling because you're so far away.

Also, I think setting small goals helps a lot. I used HackNPlan to help set very small (30-60m) tasks that i can work through incrementally. If you can't do that, honestly try getting a team. I don't have much experience with this, but I know that if someone else expects you to do some work then it's a lot easier to motivate yourself.

If you don't want to get a team, at least get some friends to show off your stuff to!