PickVidsBest Indie game development Videos
The 38 Indie game development videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 1 introductory, 14 intermediate, 22 for a general viewer, and 1 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a talk. What they share is that one speaker finishes a claim, and the examples exist to hold that claim up. Channels you will keep seeing include GDC Festival of Gaming, Nizzotch, CodeParade.
Juice it or lose it - a talk by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho
Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho take a bland Breakout clone and add layer after layer of 'juice' such as easing, particles, screen shake and sound until it feels alive.
Jan Willem Nijman - Vlambeer - "The art of screenshake" at INDIGO Classes 2013
Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman shows how to make an action game feel great by stacking small effects like screenshake, recoil and particles onto a basic shooter.
Jonathan Blow - How to program independent games - CSUA Speech
Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games.
The Engoodening of No Man's Sky
Internet Historian tells the story of No Man's Sky, from its over-hyped and badly received launch to years of updates by Hello Games that redeemed the game.
Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way
Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software gives a GDC 2018 retrospective on surviving as an indie game maker since 1994, from shareware days through Steam.
Jonathan Blow: Game design: the medium is the message
Jonathan Blow's CreativeMornings talk arguing that business models shape game design, drawing an analogy between 1970s TV and HBO and between free-to-play and premium games.
How we fit an NES game into 40 Kilobytes
Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes.
EPC2018 | Wave Function Collapse in Bad North | Oskar Stalberg
Oskar Stalberg explains how Wave Function Collapse assembles island dioramas from handcrafted tilesets in Bad North.
Learn Low Poly Modeling in Blender 2.9 / 2.8
Imphenzia's 83-minute tutorial covers the low poly modeling techniques he learned over five years of Blender use, with timestamps from navigation and extrusion onward.
Dwarf Fortress Creator Explains its Complexity & Origins | Noclip Interview
A /noclip interview with Tarn Adams of Bay 12 Games about Dwarf Fortress: where the ASCII simulation came from, how it works, and the plans for its Steam release.
Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
People Make Games investigates how Roblox relies on young, often child, developers to build its content while paying them very little.
The Making of: ROM City Rampage (Retro City Rampage)
Making-of video about ROM City Rampage, the NES version of Retro City Rampage, covering how the game's core was crunched to run on real 8-bit hardware and how NES games are made.
PRACTICE 2018: Joseph White
Joseph White, creator of PICO-8, retraces the design of the fantasy console and how tools can shape and guide creative work.
1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality
In this 2019 GDC talk, Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott explain how they flooded the app stores with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games to find the lowest bar for success.
Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play
A 2016 conference talk by a mobile game CEO on the tricks of free-to-play monetization, including player profiles and how to target high-spending whales.
Hyperbolica: A Non-Euclidean Adventure [Old Trailer]
The old announcement trailer for Hyperbolica, CodeParade's Unity game set in hyperbolic and spherical space.
How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit
Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games explains at GDC 2016 how an indie developer survived eleven years without a hit by building a long tail of games and redefining success.
Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation
David Rosen of Wolfire Games explains how simple procedural techniques can produce fluid, interactive character animation from very few keyframes.
Diablo: Original Game Development
David Brevik's GDC 2016 post-mortem of the original Diablo, covering how it evolved from a turn-based claymation DOS game into the genre-defining action RPG.
Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage
At GDC 2019, Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage ask why game developers rarely sign their work.
Spherical Geometry Is Stranger Than Hyperbolic - Hyperbolica Devlog #2
CodeParade's short devlog on how spherical geometry looks in 2D and 3D and why it feels so unusual, part of the Hyperbolica series on a non-Euclidean game.
Zach Oakes - Making Games at Runtime with Clojure
Zach Oakes explains why Clojure suits making games at runtime, so designers can experience their work as they build it.
HandmadeCon 2015 - Pat Wyatt
Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori.
Creating Prelude of the Chambered
A timelapse of Notch (Markus Persson) creating his Ludum Dare 21 entry, Prelude of the Chambered, from scratch in 48 hours.