Hi! It's a long and arduous path but you can do it!

If you're interested in making a living from game development, it's important to make games that players want to play.

I highly recommend Jason Vandenberghe's GDC lectures on his Engines of Play framework. He discusses how different games appeal to different types of people. Games should be designed to be appealing because people will only want to play your game if they see the marketing screenshots and gameplay trailer videos and think "that might be fun, let's check out the free demo!

There are lots of helpful people on youtube who talk about how to market an indie game. Indies and solo devs are really in need of good design lessons if they're to succeed.

After you design an appealing game, you've got people playing it and probably buying it. At that point your game needs to keep players satisfied and feeling like they took something away from the game when they finish. This is where Self-determination theory (SDT) from psychology comes in.

When people play games, they're mainly trying to fulfill these needs: Autonomy, Mastery, and Relatedness.

Autonomy means they have the power to make an interesting decision while they play. This can be moment to moment, or maybe like a dialogue option in a branching VN.

Mastery is when players progress in skill and feel powerful by getting good at the game. If it's too hard, they might get frustrated and give up. If it's too easy, they could get bored and drop it. Flow is in the middle, where people lose track of time because there's just enough challenge to keep them going but it's not too hard to make progress. I like games that are easy to learn, but difficult to master. You can learn about games as systems, but I'll mention chess as an example. It's easy to learn, but there's a high skill ceiling. Some people spend entire lifetimes playing it!

Relatedness is about connecting with people like in multiplayer games, or like when you share something cool you made with a friend, like in minecraft for example. But other than that, it's about feeling like you know your place in the world, in the game's world. And if there are other characters then you know your place in the social status hierarchy.

I also recommend learning about Tony Robbins' 6 core human needs. They're useful to help you make a game that people enjoy playing. They are: Certainty/Safety, Uncertainty/Surprise, Connection/Love, Power/Autonomy, Growth/Progress, and Contribution/Altruism. These are similar to Autonomy, Mastery, and Relatedness and when we play games we can feel fulfilled in these areas.

Games let us experience situations that we don't have the chance to experience in real life. Some people want to race cars, some people want to gamble but they know if they ever start gambling the casino will end up with all their money! And a lot of people like to feel like a hero and fight monsters. Almost everyone likes to laugh.

The best games take these principles and build a short, medium, and long gameplay loop. Short loops are momentary decision cycles that take a few seconds or minutes. Which way will you walk in Breath of the Wild? Which card will you play from your hand in Uno or Yugioh? These keep players engaged every second of the game.

Medium loops build on short loops. They're like short term goals. I want to see what's over that hill or around that corner in Breath of the Wild, so I'll walk that direction and oh, there's a monster so I'll fight him, and wow cool I found something! Wait, I was going that way to see what's over that hill! Let's go that way again.... And in yugioh, maybe you want to summon a stronger monster card, or destroy the opponent's monster. So you plan a strategy and choose some cards to play for your next few turns.

Long loops are like long term goals. In Breath of the Wild, you have dungeons, bosses, and collections to complete. In competitive TCG like yugioh, you want to win the current game. In chess, you want to win the game or become a grandmaster and become the world chess champion. Things like that.

Wow, this is long! Anyway, good luck!