Make and release lots of small games before making a big one

The only piece of eternally relevant gamedev advice.

People ask me for beginner advice all the time. "How do you start making games?", "How do you get into the game industry?", "What are good tools for beginners?", "Any good tutorials you can recommend".

Look I started making games in the early 00s when I was 11. Here's the tutorials I used, a book called Flash 4 Magic. It came with a neat little CD-ROM of all the examples in the book, and since there’s source files I could tinker around with them and figure out how they worked even though many parts of the book were over my head. Not a very useful answer in the year 2023. I have very few specific suggestions for people, since it's been 20 years since I was a beginner and the times have changed. The communities have moved. The tools are different.

But the one piece of advice I do have that is eternally relevant, if you wanna make games... you have to MAKE GAMES. Plural. Lots of games. As many as you can. If you wanna do a thing, you gotta practice the skills, and you practice the skills by doing the thing, and the more you do the thing the better your skills become, and the better your skills become the easier it is to do the thing. The advice works for just about everything.

Anyway the usual tangible, actionable advice I give for this is that you get started by making (AND RELEASING) a ton of small projects, NOT by jumping into your big ambitious dream project right away and grinding at it for years, thinking you can skip straight to marathon running without learning how to walk first. Every time I post this on twitter it goes big viral, its the type of thing people absolutely love to have "takes" about after all, but twitter lacks nuance, and many people misinterpret exactly what I mean by this, so this post serves to clarify. I have made the small version of this post enough times that I feel like its time to make a big version of it. It's like poetry. It rhymes.

First of all, this is not advice just for people trying to make a career out of games, or just for hobbyists. It's advice for everyone with ambitions of making games, big or small, free or commercial, personal hobby projects or magnum opus dream projects. I suspect some confusion here is because there's a separate, tangentially related piece of *business* advice that goes, roughly, "there’s so much luck involved in success that the more attempts you make the higher your odds are of finding that success", or, "its better to make 10 small games than 1 large game since the small ones each have a chance of success" or some other variation of that law-of-large numbers rule. I'm not talking about that. I mean, it *is* a side bonus you get from making a ton of small projects, but my advice here is more about learning and self discovery, and the easiest path you can take towards actually making that ambitious dream project a reality.

Because, I WANT you to make that big ambitious project. This is not meant to discorage you from dreaming big, quite the opposite. It's here because, jumping straight into a big game as your "first" game is exactly how you end up losing motivation and never finishing that game, or ending up with something that ate years of your life that you can't even stand looking at anymore. If you follow this advice, you are infinitely more likely to actually end up making your big game, and it will be better for it, and there's even a chance you might get there quicker too.

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PART 1: THE WHY

Why do this? Why make a ton of small games instead of just starting right off on a big thing? Why is this the near-universal advice from experienced game developers? What if I'm built different? There's a ton of different reasons why this is a good idea, and I'm gonna lay out a lot of them. Even if you disagree with one or two of them, you should understand that the totality of all of this is why this advice is good. There are any number of situations and mitigating factors that could make you an exception to any singular one of these reasons, but probably not all of them. Maybe you have prior experience in a related fields like art or programming. Maybe you have an existing audience from something else. Maybe your dad owns an emerald mine.

REASON 1: LEARNING THE BASICS

Here's the thing. Your first game is going to suck. No matter how much you try or how much passion and ambition you have. The first picture you ever drew as a child was nonsense scribbles on a piece of paper. Your first game is the equivalent of that. Your second game? Probably also going to suck. Scribbles again. Your third game? Look, its still not likely to be good, but maybe there's something there. The scribbles are starting to look like things. You keep working at it, they become more and more like actual games. Scribbles to drawings.

If you make your dream project your first project... its gonna suck. A terrible fate for a *dream project*. You gotta get your feet wet first. Learn to walk before learning to run. Keep the dream there, but make sure you can do it justice.

As the saying goes, "Your first 10 games are going to suck. Get through them as fast as possible".

This seems obvious when applied to other art forms, but for whatever reason it seems like people have a hard time internalizing it when applied to games. You don’t start by painting the mona lisa, you scribble nonsense with crayons as a baby first. You don't teach a kid to read by handing them a copy of War and Peace and telling them to "have at it". You don't teach a kid to cook by handing them a can of beans and going "good luck, figure it out". You don't learn how to sculpt by buying a 1 ton block of marble and just going ham on it. You start by carving soap with a butter knife. You learn how to play musical instruments by playing hot cross buns over and over. You learn math by learning how to count first. You write short stories before you write novels, make 2 minute videos before making movies.

REASON 2: LEARNING HOW TO FINISH AND RELEASE GAMES

Releasing games is a skill that requires practice. That's part of why I always make sure to say make AND RELEASE a bunch of games. Do you know how to avoid feature creep and actually finish your game? Do you know how to take your game from finished to released? Do you know how to get people to play it? How to market it? What a hook is? Do you even know how to upload it to whatever site you're uploading it to, or their process for review and approval and launch? Do you know anything about business or marketing or how to identify scam publishers from legit ones or whatever? Do you know how to negotiate sponsorships, buy out deals, publishing deals, how to read contracts, etc? Do you know how you're going to react to getting a bunch of negative feedback? A bunch of bug reports? A bunch of *positive* feedback? Troll reviews filled with slurs and personal insults?

If you're hinging your future on a big project... none of this is stuff you wanna get blindsided by at release. I have personally seen many devs I know get completely overwhelmed to the point of depression and burnout post-launch just because they never had the experience of what a game launch is like. It gets easier the more you do it. Make mistakes on less important projects so you won't make them on important ones.

REASON 3: ARTISTIC SELF DISCOVERY

What is your artistic voice? What do you find interesting and fun to work on and what are you actually good at? Games are art after all, so what do you want to say with your games? What game out there is desperately missing, that you are specifically well suited to create?

It's a hard question. One people spend their entire lives in search of an answer for. It's unlikely that your first idea, one coming from a place of zero experience, is going to be the answer to this. After all... if you've never made a game before, how do you know which parts of game design you're good at? Which parts you enjoy doing, and which parts you loathe.

I'm gonna reference Derek Yu's classic venn diagram about what kinds of ideas have potential here.

You should be striving to make games in that middle part of that venn diagram. That’s where your strongest voice will be. If you've never made a game before, 2 of those 3 circles are blind spots, so its gonna be nigh impossible to actually hit that sweet spot. Making a bunch of small games gives you an opportunity to experiment and discover things about yourself. Maybe you discover that hey, you just really really hate doing dialog boxes. Just, kills your motivation working on it. Can't write for shit or they always feel bland. That's a very useful thing to learn about yourself before starting your 5 year dream project "DIALOG BOX QUEST".

Or maybe, you made a really fucking cool homing missile in one of those projects. Just like, innately satisfying. Wasn't the main point of the thing, you just added it in and it was cool. And people you showed the game to also comment on how cool the homing missiles are. So like hey, this is something you're good at. Maybe that big idea of yours has room for homing missiles in it somewhere. Over the course of making a bunch of smaller games, you'll find tons of stuff like this about yourself. Those circles won't be blind spots anymore, and you'll actually have an understanding of who you are as an artist.

REASON 4: DISCOVER WHERE EFFORT IS MOST EFFECTIVE

Its a really incredibly common mistake for newer game developers to waste time and effort on things that like, kind of don't really matter. There's a hard cap on the amount of hours in a week. You don't have unlimited effort to spend, so you should want to spend that effort where it will have the most impact. This is a very hard skill to learn. It takes practice and experience to get right, and even experienced devs get it wrong often.

I'm not here to tell you specifics on what matters or not. Every dev has different skills. Everyone has different priorities. But like, if you choose to do a small, 2 week project, you're gonna learn real quick which things matter and which things don't. If you spend 1 week making fancy animated menus and 1 week modeling a main character, well that’s all your time spent. Hopefully you have learned something about time management and prioritizing. A nice thing to learn in 2 weeks instead of 2 years.

These issues don't go away by simply increasing your time budget. Time is always limited. The priorities are gonna shift for a 1 month project vs a 2 week project. They'll shift again for a 6 month project. They'll shift for a 1 year, 3 year, and 5 year project as well. But there's always limited time, and you're always gonna need know how to prioritize the impactful stuff. And the more you do it the better you get. The stuff you originally thought would take months now takes weeks because you know where the effort needs to go. These lessons apply tenfold to bigger projects, but you can only learn them by doing.

Your favorite games are all examples of being smart with how their time was spent. They knew the things that mattered and the things that didn't, and what to spend their effort on. After all, there’s a fixed amount of hours in 3 years, a game like Hollow Knight is not simply the result of "just putting a ton of effort and passion into it". I mean they definitely did put effort and passion into it, but they were smart about it. Hollow Knight didn't have any sloped platforms, and didn't have any moving platforms in it. Did you notice that while playing? Probably not. Sloped platforms and moving platforms are surprisingly difficult to get right, they take a lot of time and cause a lot of issues, so they decided, those don't matter for this game. And they were correct. The time they saved not having to do slopes or moving platforms could be better, more effectively spent making the world larger, the art better, and making cool bosses. The things that mattered for that game.

I have a million other examples of the smart ways great games "cut corners". It should be a blog post of its own tho. Pay attention to it next time you're playing a great game. You may learn something.

REASON 5: DONT KILL YOURSELF

There's 1000 posts on reddit and twitter and GDC postmortems and everywhere from devs who poured everything into their game, went into debt, quit their jobs, dropped out of school, only to release and earn $0 (or very close to $0). There's often tons of posts and comments coming up with reasons why the game earned $0, lack of marketing, bad art, no multiplayer, whatever.

But the thing is... there doesn't need to be a specific reason why a game earned $0. MOST GAMES EARN $0. If its your first game its especially going to earn $0. Those comments people give... the feedback isn't wrong, but even if you did do marketing, fixed the art, added multiplayer, or whatever else they were suggesting... the likely outcome is you still earn $0. And comments would have a whole new set of justifications as for why. But again, games don't need a reason to make $0. They need a reason to *not* make $0.

Anyway, this isn't a business advice post, so I'm not gonna tell you all the ways you can make a game not make $0, though I *will* say one great path towards that is to uh... make a lot of little games, and maybe one of those might get some kind of viral attention or win some awards or attract the attention of a publisher or something. Expanding on that game is a good way to not make $0.

But no, the main point of this section is not how to make money. It's about being smart about the risks you take. There's nothing wrong with releasing games that fail (by whatever definition of fail you want to use) as long as you can feel proud of it or at least learn something from it. But if you dropped out of school or quit your job or took out a huge loan and spent years working on something, well those flops hit a lot harder.

I wanna make sure I'm not misconstrued here, I'm not saying "never take risks". Risks are absolutely necessary! What I'm saying is, "practice in a low stakes environment". Your two week project is not gonna ruin you if it "fails". The stakes are low. There’s room to make mistakes, which means you can learn from those mistakes, which means your next thing will have a higher chance of success. At some point you may decide that chance is high enough that you do wanna take that jump and make a big ambitious project. Great! That's the goal! But if you skip that first step... the chance is gonna be pretty close to 0.

In fact, a low stakes environment is a really damn good place for taking risks and doing weird stuff. So many great indie games spawned from Newgrounds. So many unique games spawned from game jams. There's a reason for this! A low stakes environment is freeing. If your game doesn't *need* to make money, and there’s no expectation that it will, then you can do whatever the fuck you want with it. Who cares what other people expect? Give them something weird. Unshackle yourself.

REASON 6: DUMB BUSINESS AND MARKETING STUFF

I'm trying to not make this post about the business and money side of making games. But hey, if we really wanna cover all the reasons why making a bunch of small projects before jumping into a big one is a good idea, well there are money and business reasons as well. And if your end goal is a *career* and not simply a hobby, then you will inevitably have to make money on it.

The games industry is weird. There's a ton of dumb luck involved in success. The more games you make, the more chances you have that any individual one takes off in ways you weren't expecting, and hey that's something that could be the trigger you need to turn it into a bigger project.

It's not just about the attention tho, it's also possible that you might just stumble onto a game concept that turns out to have far more potential than you originally thought. My first big commercial game project, Closure, was the result of one of these. The flash game it was based off of took 2 months, but god damn it was really cool and got a million plays on Newgrounds, and it was hard not to look at that game and just think of all the potential ways to make it bigger and cooler.

Making tons of small games also helps you build up an audience and fanbase that can support you and help hype up your bigger projects. Marketing's hard after all, "do marketing" is correct advice but not really actionable for a lot of games as you cant just start that process as an afterthought at the end of development, it just doesn’t work that way. It needs to be part of the project from pretty early on, and the game needs to be marketable. You gotta practice that too, and smaller projects are once again a great way to practice that so you don't mistakes on your larger ones. Having an existing fanbase makes the whole thing easier too, so anything you can do to build up that fanbase is great.

Making tons of small games also helps you network with other developers and make friends and find other people to work with on projects. Few people are gonna wanna join up to work on your dumb big dream project if you don't have anything to offer them, but "hey lets team up for a game jam" is a lot easier sell. And if you work well together then those relationships can chain into bigger and better things.

REASON 7: IT'S FUN

Making games is fun, and making lots of games is lots of fun. That's it. That's this section.

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PART 2: THE HOW

So, how exactly do you make a small game? What counts as a small game? Let's go over that part now. What I am saying here is mostly recommendations, not rules. You don't have to follow them to the letter, or at all if you don't want. After all, the only real advice is "make and release a bunch of small games before making your big one". So if you already have an idea on how to do that, then great! You can ignore this entire section. But since some people want tangible advice as a guideline, then here you go.

"How much time should I spend on a small game?"

2 weeks. Maybe less, depends on how much free time you got. But 2 weeks is plenty. After a few 2 week games you can move up to 1 month games if you so choose, or you can keep doing 2 week games, or maybe even a 1-weekend game jam game. But 2 weeks is a sweet spot for beginners.

"WTF? 2 weeks? How?"

You think smaller. Whatever your idea for what you want to make is, think smaller. What CAN you do in 2 weeks? Keep shrinking the idea until it seems like 2 weeks is more than enough, then do that.

STAGE 1: THE TUTORIAL

You can go from zero experience to a working Pong clone in a few hours. So maybe pong is too small. Or maybe not, that'd be a valuable couple hours if you are starting from nothing. Your goal here is to get your feet wet and learn the tools, not to create greatness. Snake is another good one, a bit more complicated than pong, but quite a bit more fun, and you can go 0-to-Snake in a day or two probably, and snake has a lot more room for adding twists and gimmicks to it to make it unique than pong. Speaking of which, if you pick something you can get up and working in a day or two and then spend the rest of that 2 weeks adding twists and gimmicks to make it your own, that’s a great thing to do too.

A simple platformer might be harder to do in 2 weeks from 0 experience. It's possible, but much easier if you at least learn the tools first. But with even one or two extremely tiny games under your belt first, a short platformer in 2 weeks is very doable.

Whatever you choose to do here, the goal of this stage is to learn the tools and the basics. It's probably not fulfilling to just simply clone pong and snake and mario, but its over quick. Try to come up with unique twists to add onto them and it's a little more fulfilling. But learn what you need to learn and move on. If you had any prior relevant experience you can safely skip this stage.

STAGE 2: THE GRIND

You know how to use the tools, now you can actually make your own games. This is the fun part. This is where you come up with your own ideas and attempt to make them. This is the stage where you should start learning how to finish and release your games. Put them up on newgrounds or itch.io for free. You want people to play them and give you feedback. Something playable in the browser is going to be a lot easier to get people to play than something they need to download and install. Consider tools that let you do web builds.

Now here's the kicker. Once your game is released and uploaded, close the book on it and move on. Take the feedback to heart, but put it towards the next game, not the one you just released. Your goal here is to make a lot of games, not iterate on one forever. If you want to practice fixing bugs and doing updates, budget that into your 2 weeks. Make a 1 week project and spend 1 week updating it. Then move on.

Unshackle yourself from expectations. Stop watching youtube video essays about game design, the vast majority of those are useless for actually making games (most of the people who made them are not game developers, and don't have any actual experience for you to learn from). They're entertainment only. Try to learn by doing. Experiment.

Try to work in a variety of genres and styles. Pick things you don't like about other games and try to improve them. Mash genres together. "Why is making an RPG a game dev meme?" Make an RPG and find out. "Is 3D really that much harder than 2D?" Make a 3D game and find out. "Is a combat system where you do X and Y a good idea?" Make it, and find out. "What if I made a visual novel where you do inception on plants". Make it, and find out.

Try to get people to actually play the games you release. Post them on relevant reddits and twitter and social media. Make some juicy gifs to attract people to your page. Literally just ask for feedback, people will give it to you. More than you want. Some games will grab people's attention, some won't. Get them in front of people and figure out which is which. Other game devs are an easy audience to reach for getting that initial feedback, but strive to break out of that bubble and get feedback from people who aren't game developers, who aren’t your friends and family. The general internet. Gamers.

Be prepared to abandon plenty of prototypes if they don't work out. 2 weeks is a guideline, if after 2 weeks you don't have a fun game, shelve it and move on. Don't get stuck. Make LOTS OF THINGS.

STAGE 3: THE BIG PROJECT

At some point, you're gonna wanna make your big project. How will you know you're ready? When is it a good idea to finally take that risk? The only real answer is, "you'll know". But good advice here is stay open. Maybe one of your small games gets more attention than you thought it would. Maybe one prototype shows far more promise than anything else you've made. Maybe you place in the top at a game jam. Maybe you just feel like that fuzzy indeterminate path towards your big idea is now clear and achievable. Any of these can be reasons to finally take the plunge. "You'll know".

When you start this project, you'll have an understanding of what your goals are with it. You'll know your strengths and how to play to them. You'll know your weaknesses, and know who to ask for help. You'll know how long it should take. You'll know what the important stuff to focus on is. You'll know what its hook is, and how to get people to care about it. Fans of your smaller projects will be there to kickstart your hype and cheer you on. Friends you've made are there to help. You know how to get and respond to feedback. It's energizing. It's so much better starting from here than from zero, and your game will be so much better for it as well.

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PART 3: THE BUT

This is the section where I address some of the common reactions to people who see "make a lot of small games" and just, really wanna disagree with that for whatever reason.

"But what about <insert successful indie game here>!? They didn't do it this way! Why should I?"

Chances are, they actually did. You just didn't see the trail of smaller games or other relevant projects they made before they had their breakout hit. Look up their history, or even just ask them about it on twitter. The information is there. Obviously there are still *some* exceptions, but much fewer than you'd think, and even most of those had some other mitigating factors in their story.

"But what if I don't want to make small games first? What if I'm happier just grinding forever on my big project?"

You do you. Just be aware of what you're doing.

"But what if I don't want a bunch of shitty games released under my name?"

Nobody's gonna remember or care about the stuff you put on your itch.io account. They'll only remember the hits. The illusion of an "overnight success" despite a dev having 50 games under their belt before their big hit is a testament to this. Literally don't worry about it.

"But what if I'm already years into my big project but didn't do this, are you telling me I'm just supposed to abandon it to make smaller games I don't care about?"

I mean, no not really. But why not try? 2 weeks ain't a big time investment right, if you try it and hate it you didn't lose much. Chances are you won't hate it tho. If you're asking me this I assume it's because you're having some doubts about your project. Maybe its not as fun as you hoped, or maybe development is feeling like you're stuck in a quagmire. If that is the case, then yeah I do think it would be immensely valuable to take a break and make a few small things. It could be just what you need to refresh that motivation and become inspired again.

"But what if, fuck you!"

A surprisingly common response. I'm not sure what about this advice makes some people so vitriolic, perhaps they know its true