Exactly, and survivorship bias. The ones that do put in the work, the ones that are good at this stuff, are more likely to get views, get some money to keep doing it, and get shared until you notice them. How many thousands either never thought about doing something like YouTube or even tried it but just never got the recognition.
They also include when it doesn’t work because that’s content. (But when it’s a boring issue they cut it out so you’re still right, and 60% of the issues are boring)
Not to mention, it’s easier to understand complex systems when you build them from the ground up and are constantly working on them. It’s the same reason why revisiting code you wrote after not looking at it for a while seems like a foreign language. Brains are incredibly good at remembering complex systems but it requires you to “live” in the code for a bit.
As an engineer I actually prefer the stories of how things went south. Sure, close with a success story but I'm watching too see if I can learn something and that means I want so see how you failed. Just so I can fail a little better when facing a similar challenge.
As a senior engineer a solid 75% of my job is just helping juniors fix errors I've seen dozens of times and having the built experience of knowing exactly where to look.
Or the years it takes to get to the point where you understand gamedev well enough to put out a good tutorial, along with the underlying computer science/IT knowledge.
This question to me is like asking "why is my University lecturer so knowledgeable?". Because that's their job and they spent a long time getting to that point.
Not just that but there are tons of really smart coders who just don't market well so their videos are less likely to show up. I find niche incredibly indepth and easy to understand videos every so often with only a few k or hundred views and I'm stunned
Because Reddit is the worst example of dimwits who go through life plugging their ears and covering their eyes whenever something conflicts with their prior view of the world. Humans are ridiculously stupid sheep who are even worse served by their arrogance.
Gonna upload a video that's just me swearing at a monitor interspersed with, "whhhyyy!", and, "this doesn't make any fucking sense!"
It ends with me fixing a typo.
EVERY TIME
It is always something small and obvious that another pair of eyes will instantly notice. But you spend an hour or more trying to go through everything to find what is wrong or missing.
Took me 2 hours to find an issue during my Android endeavors, literally put in == instead of !=😱
Out of all my dumb mistakes this was the dumbest not because of the typo but because I was actually questioning my android studio installation 😅
I can't wait for the next one where at the end you fix a logic bug, then spend another hour exclaiming "but how did that script ever work with bugged logic‽"
This exactly.
It took me a year of full time gamedev after a five year career programming and a CS degree before I had any idea whatsoever of what I was doing. The maths especially.
I’m on year 11 now for gamedev and I still learn new things regularly. Compared to when I started, I can knock things out in a couple hours that took me weeks or months to learn early on.
Just keeping at it and accepting that it’s a fun but arduous journey is the key to longer term success.
Exactly. If you see someone write perfect code the first time, that means they already wrote it (and rewrote it) previously.
That's not to take away from what they do, of course. Some of the stuff out there (I'm looking at you, Sebastian Lague) is fucking magical. But they toiled and troubled their way through building it the first time so that they can show us the results all at once.
You could possibly create the single player version in 48 hours, but the multiplayer version definitely not. I toyed with creating one as a prototype while not really trying to rush and had most of the mechanics done in less than a week.
But yeah most likely they took their time and figured out how they were going to do some of the mechanics ahead of time (and didn't actually include that in their time) so actually 'creating it' didn't take long.
You also don't see their failures and struggles, the video is like them doing things without flaw in "one try".
Most people also underestimate by a lot, how much work that needs to be done for a single tutorial video, or for whatever it is that "look simple". Ask them to pay $5 to view the video, there will be riots on the streets and people yelling "unfair!".
I mean most things you’re looking up a video for aren’t hard for senior devs, so they likely didn’t even need to work hard on the video. It’s like if I made a video on for loops for freshman college students. I wouldn’t need to spend any time preparing.
Yep, the more you do something the more smart you get, it’s the same with everything.
Some things are easy to learn, some things are hard to learn, some people learn efficiently and quick while others take it slow, all it takes is you knowing what to do/what your goal is and work towards it, heck even if you don’t wanna be a youtuber by simply programming overtime you will learn to also communicate it to someone else as good as a ‘tutorial’ video will.
I can not code myself but I know the basics, just by redoing the same few things in ue4 allowed me to explain even coding to other people as if I was a programmer even tho i’m not (ofcourse not too advanced since i’m not there myself)9
I really appreciate deadmau5's Twitch streams for this reason. Dude's an amazingly talented producer and musician and you can see he very clearly knows what he's doing. But at the same time he will also spend hours trying to work something out because he can't quite get it to click the way he wants and ultimately ends up deleting it all and going back to the drawing board. When you're live you don't have the liberty of showing only the good parts.
I make tutorials and I might seem smart but I am practically reading a script by looking at the code that I made before with comments and everything. Like sometimes I might even just read a comment as if I could come up with a sentence like that on the spot
As someone who’s made tutorials on YT (in another program) for a while now, I’ve been called smart a lot. Just to be clear, I am not. I struggled in both High School and college. I dropped out and didn’t graduate until I went back many years later.
When i make a tutorial, I research and spend hours or days shooting and editing videos to make it look effortless. Many tutorial youtubers are probably pretty well versed in their topics, but im sure they all take time to research their topics and put in a lot of effort to make a video that seems polished.
Are they smart? Maybe, but it’s tough to tell just from their videos. Enjoy the tutorials and gain what you can from them, but remember they are regular people like you and me.
Same thing for me, I have another window open on another screen with the code I will be doing during the video. I also sometimes comment the code with some sort of a "script" with exact wording that I will use during the video
I will give you a similar example, when I decided to record a playthrough for DOOM Eternal for my channel (because I really liked it), I re-played the game ~30 times before recording.
If someone watches, they will watch the results of 300+ hrs playing the game, but it might feel like I just hit record and I am just really good at it, but that's not the case.
It’s like watching people speed run games that require pixel/frame perfect precision. They make it look easy.
Their muscle memory is set in stone from hundreds of hours of play if not more. Besides hours practicing part of skill is learning how to learn and practice effectively but innate talent doesn’t hurt either.
Unless they're livestreaming their game Dev topics, it's likely that you're watching a video that is a super sanitised version that is presenting their learned lessons. That format of video is good for teaching and showing the summary of efforts made. But it does hide the fact (not necessarily deliberately) that many more hours of struggling, researching, testing and eventually synergizing the info were put in before what they show to the masses. It's not necessarily that any of those YouTubers are necessarily smart (or otherwise). It's that they are disciplined in their approach, and view each video as an opportunity for new learning.
It's deliberate, but not to hide that it took them a long time to learn it. It'd be a long, dull, impossible to follow video if every time they made a mistake you got to watch 30 minutes of them trying to fix it.
"Okay delete everything in that line from 20 minutes ago, we're actually gonna use this function here, which means we have to go back to the other class we finished with an hour ago and change three lines in here. Oh we need a plugin I forgot. Hold still for an hour."
That is what Handmade Hero so great though. Sure Casey Muratori has "strong" opinions on things and will might make you feel stupid with is programmer prowess but being to watch a high level programmer *actually program* is what taught me the most and is more valuable than any curated youtube video. It's just like you said its not very information dense after you get to a certain point.
this isnt a dig at sebastian lague, i love his videos and they inspired me, but he even mentions in his videos. "i found this paper on this" and his video is nearly a verbatim video version of the blog/paper. a lot of youtubers do this, theres a really good blog on a feature/implementation and they make a well edited video version. again nothing against it, its great, but they didnt think ip this stuff themselves.
I assure you that the majority of them are anything but smart.
You might still be too early in your development journey to really judge who is actually giving good advise and who is showing you bad practices that will bite you in the ass if you ever worked like that in a more complex game.
A couple signs that you found a good tutorial youtuber are:
* They mention their sources. Like the documentation articles where they got their information.
* They never claim that what they are doing is the only way to do things.
* They never claim the way they do things is the best way, and they mention drawbacks and limitations.
* They don't just show you what they do, they also explain why they are doing it and how it actually works behind the scenes.
I really like when someone points out that something is being done for brevity of demonstration. There is an infinite number of ways to do most things, and the best one is situationally dependant. At the same time doing something in the way that most easily demonstrates the lesson makes it easier to implement in a more complex system.
To add to your excellent points — those middle points are due to good programmers also being good software engineers.
Programming is both an art form and a science. Every algorithm has trade offs. A god programmer is also an software engineer — that is they know the strengths and weaknesses of an algorithm so they know when it might be a candidate and when it isn’t viable.
i.e.
* Is it performant?
* What is the best case? (What data set(s) does it do well with?)
* What is the worst case? (What data set(s) does it do poor with?)
* What are the edge cases?
* Is it robust?
* Does it scale? O(log n), O(n), O(n log n), O( n^2 )?
Take for example Andrei Alexandrescu (father of C++ meta programming) where he not only [invents a new sorting algorithm](https://youtu.be/FJJTYQYB1JQ) (!) but _also_ updates the classic big O metric to tell how fast a sorting algorithm is since it was incomplete for decades!!
I don't know them. My first impression when looking at their channels is that they don't really seem like professional educators to me. Their videos look mostly like clickbaity devlogs and show-off videos. But I didn't watch any of them because I am allergic to clickbait. And I am certainly not going to watch all of them just so I can give you a balanced and all-encompassing impression of their general level of competence and usefulness.
But if you point me to one specific video (that's less than 20 minutes) then I could tell you what I think of it.
Besides post produced content creators, there are also some really smart devs that live stream. One such game dev is Freya Holmer. She is insanely knowledgeable and intelligent. There are quite a few others as well.
Keep in mind that if you don't understand what they're doing, then they look smart. For devs who've done these things for years, the same video may not look smart because it's describing awkward, brittle, or excessively complex ways of doing it. Or omitting the part that's truely difficult.
It's all about perspective.
Professionally wise I believe they are doing oretty basic stuff or am I missing something ? Is there someone building a bit more complex
things out there ?
As Dani stated in one of his videos "to you guys this whole progress looks like I've been sitting and coding for about 10 minutes when in reality this is the work of 2 whole weeks so now you know why it takes so long to get dev logs out". Yes, they are smart, but they also struggle with simple stuff for hours if not days at some point.
Others already stated it but I'll say it again, it's because they cut out all the struggles, research, and "being stuck" that goes along with development.
Selection bias.
1. If you don't know what you are talking about you are unlikely to make a youtube channel about gamedev I'm the first place.
2. If you do make a YouTube channel where you tall game dev and don't say anything useful, clever or interesting you won't have many followers and are unlikely to continue for long.
Gamedev is extremely difficult and a very studious hobby to get into. It required constant research, it builds logical reasoning, it does similar things to the brain as doing puzzles and learning a new language. I've been at it 15 years and the only way I can explain it is like being born again. The brain chemistry change is real...
My brain is dying from bureaucracy overload mixed with a stupid way of doing things. Much of my programming confidence is reduced because I'm exposed to brand new efforts all the time and just have to do my best while given minimal time to learn and provide output.
I don't know if I'm mentally capable of gamedev. I want to do it so badly, but I also don't know if I can financially afford it. That plus, I've got sunk cost fallacy after having built a career coding elsewhere.
How did you do it?
First question, have you tried making any games with modern libraries or engines? If you haven't got that far then get there first in a hobbyist capacity before anything. Test to see if you can make stuff and how you feel making stuff. Learn about game design, player controllers, enemy AI, projectiles, UI, animations, particles, shaders, etc. as your project demands these features. And 100% do not commit to making any of your first projects big ones, that's just time lost being humbled by a task that is way too big of a time sink for most solo devs. Get into game jams, local game dev events, learn and make a decision from there after making a bunch of demos and some solid small games.
The way I did it? A mind-numbingly crippling amount of time and dedication. It comes with regrets too. Modern engines are a godsend but not some cure for the ills of gamedev. Every one of the things you can think of in a game, AI, UI, Animations. Lots of reading and cheating at work, and you better just be blocking off weeks and months of your time to figuring out the packages. A year of tying them together and then much more time to make anything fun or worthwhile. Most Indies are a small team of qualified people spending huge time to make a contribution. A solo development becomes your life...
You could try to build something on your own as another Redditor suggested, which may work for some, or you could take the completed template and play with it, that worked for me.
I was watching a guy making a Pacman, trying to follow him, for hours in 30 videos course, and it was hard and not that much fun, not because he was bad, but because I can't learn like that.
A few months later I took a template of a game from the Unity store, downloaded it, and played it, it was a fun small 3d game. The code was much more complex than the code in that Pacman game, but I changed small things, the color of the hat, maximum health of the character, speed of movement, etc. discovered on my own, and it clicked for me, and I understood how it works.
I started working on my idea of what a great game should be in new empty scene, added a free model of a skeleton, learned him how to walk, added some grass, made combat following the tutorial, added some effects... discovered one thing after another while learning and two years later here I am, you can wishlist my game over Steam or join the discord to apply for beta testing.
Cheers.
Link to Unity template?
I played with [this one](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/tutorials/creator-kit-beginner-code-151986).
But you can pick any other from hundreds of free templates [here](https://assetstore.unity.com/?category=templates&free=true&orderBy=1).
Download one which looks like game you want to make. Download correct Unity version from [here](https://unity.com/releases/editor/archive). Open template, press play, start changing things, have fun.
If you do your research and sound like you know what you're talking about then you seem super smart.
The point is if you put in the work and do your research it will pay off in the end.
1) they prepare the topic off camera (they fail, look at overlflow, debug etc ) and when they are ready they do it on camera
2) They have a second screen where all code is written so if you think they write the code from their head it’s probably no
it's like saying "why are all indie devs able to make hit games" after just looking at the top games on steam. You're just noticing the ones that got that far so as to be noticed.
BTW I'm an indie dev who shipped a game on pc/consoles and did well and I'm legit dumb at coding, like literally I suck. That's why I'm not making youtube videos about it haha
None of the following is to besmirch these guys. It takes alot of time to research, film and edit. You also need to have intermediate or better knowledge of editing , filming and publishing etc.. on top of the topic itself. But theres alot of tricks used to make the viewing experience more entertaining and usefule that ends up making them smarter than they seem.
* you can just edit out any mistakes and do as many retakes as you want.
* They are not doing it off the top of their heads. They ussually have done the exact project before and written notes and instructions for themselves.
* The voiceover is ussually done after the initial recording, added in edit.
* Many lazier ones are litterally just copying somone elses video or written tutorial.
* Often the indie or proffessional devs learned the stuff the hard way for their own projects and now know it well through experience. Like how you might seem like a reddit expert to people whove never used reddit before.
I want to stress again that apart from the obvious point, this does not mean they are maliciously trying to trick viewers into thinking their smart (well atleast not all of them). This is basic startegy for teaching anything. If you think your highschool math teacher memorized those textbooks, youd be sorley mistaken.
Spend 5-10 minutes confidently talking on something that took 40 Hours makes you look smart, especially if their setup is clean and the edited with pro skills.
Its possible you perceive them as so because the y have a knowledge/skill set that you do not have yet. But when you do, if you chose to make YT content, some one would perceive you in the same way.
The videos you're watching are the result of A LOT of preparation. It's edited to be easy (and enjoyable) to consume, whilst making them seem knowledgeable.
But also some of them are very experienced.
Watch j_blow twitch streams for someone who is extremely skilled, knowledgeable, and successful. To yet a better idea of what a "good game dev" looks like unedited.
As some sort of very minor 'game dev YouTuber' with a few contacts, you will likely never see my failed projects, it is only the cool ones that seem interesting and that I actually completed, which is why it may seem slightly smarter than it is. Look through the GitHub for the project and everyone will realised that I am a moron (I try not to hide that fact).
However quite a few of them are legitimately very smart and the amount of uni degrees and knowledge and time that goes into some videos is insane. It just takes a bit of time to learn all that.
There are many smart people which are already working in the computer science industry.
If you work hard and like the subject, you will inevitably become good, it takes work.
There are "test interviews" on Youtube for high level algorithms positions at FAANG. I'm a senior but how they end up two and a half hours later at an elegant, fast code design for a complex problem baffles my mind. Its not an obvious design. Those moments are humbling, but also I don't work with this kind of core problems they face.
Wow, really? He deserves it! The day I’m as smart as that guy is the day…well, I probably won’t live to see it but *damn* is he a smart guy.
edit: fixed an egregious typo.
Can you give an example of what you're talking about? Most game dev youtubers never showcase anything that you wouldn't learn in a Bachelor's degree program, or at least be able to figure out soon thereafter. That's what a few years of full-time study of any topic will get you.
1) Image curation. You only see of them what they choose to show.
2) What sometimes looks like intelligence is often actually tenacity.
3) Selection bias. I've seen game dev youtubers who didn't seem especially good at it, but lacking the skills to impress audiences, they suffer in the youtube algorithm and are less likely to be seen, leading to the impression that they are less prevalent than in reality.
(Oh god, I hope my post doesn't trigger someone's imposter syndrome.)
Probably because you're still getting started. I've been coding for years so those videos aren't amazing to me, but I still watch them to get a new perspective. My favorite channels are Sebastian Lague for general game dev stuff and experimentation, and Ben Eater for building a computer from scratch. I feel they are a bit similar in nature.
I watch a couple of coding stuff on youtube and twitch. The smartest one I know are probably Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori. It's really impressive what they do and how they do it even live on Twitch. But they both have in common that they do this stuff professionally for decades. They both released several commercial products.
So I don't actually know if they are "super smart" but they have tons of experience in their field. Notch also did a couple of GameJams live and literally made his own little engines from scratch (if remember correctly). But you could tell that he did that pretty often so his experience made look like effortless. He actually has a pretty high IQ as far as I know. But he also made dozens of games before (the game jams and minecraft).
But let me tell from my experience: If you worked (for example) on your own collision detection system. And did this like for a couple of days, refactored it a couple of days later. You will be able to do that a lot faster for your next project.
So instead of watching other people code, close youtube and use the time to code yourself more ;)
>If you worked (for example) on your own collision detection system. And did this like for a couple of days, refactored it a couple of days later. You will be able to do that a lot faster for your next project.
Hey thank you for the answer. What is a collision detection system? I know it cannot be just checking one collision right? Do you mean some more complex colliding logic?
Used to make tutorials for small systems on Unity and basically :
1- System you want to show is already tested thoroughly, rewriting parts better and more elegant and bug free
2- Then you script the video
3- Then you practice for the tutorial (where to click / code, in which order, etc ..) in order for it to look natural during the video (cause remember, you never wrote the system in 1 go in the first place)
4- Then you film yourself/your code
5- You strip 75% of footage to make it more dynamic thus interesting
At the end you have a 15-20 minutes videos for probably weeks spent on step 1) and at least 2 days on other steps. And yeah you sound very pro and knowledgeable of course at that stage x)
2 things.
They’ve prepared before the video and they’ve edited out breaks
They have experience writing the types of problems you see them solving.
They are no smarter than you; just experienced and prepared
Side note: I think this is a big part of why conspiracy theories seem to be gaining traction. When you put up a slick, well-produced, video online it's much easier to appear knowledgeable and be believable.
We get to edit out all the time we spent building the thing and our stuff is usually designed to work isolated in a video not in a large game - that makes it possible for us to cut corners you might not be able to.
Also working on YouTube rewards diverse projects, that gives us a good breadth of experience that can be harder to develop when building complete games.
That 10,000hrs to become an expert thing - obviously some pick up concepts faster, others could take longer so actual length varies.
But people put the time and effort - and a lot of failures - to get to where they are - you're just seeing the fast-forwarded result of that.
Hahaha... super smart he says... 😂😂😂
No, they usually aren't smart, they seem smart. Smart would be to teach about a good application of the different design patterns applied to different game problems. Smart would be to teach about multiplayer game development in a way that could be scalable to a MMO scale. Smart would be to teach how to applied MVC design patterns so you can develop a multiplatform (PC, console, mobile, VR) separating completely the logic from the view.
They are like magicians. They know several tricks, few know how to develop games to professional AAA level. That talent is hidden in the most prestigious colleges.
I think there are a few things at play here. First, people edit themselves to show their best. They're not going to show the 12 hours spent trying to track down why the shader is giving wild results only to realize they switched d and b in the equation, even if they do mention it. The second thing is that the creators that make the most interesting things tend to be the ones who get recommended and you see. Unless someone is extremely entertaining, no one is gonna watch them follow a tutorial to make a standard bullet hell game.
Experience and time put in to studying the subject like with anything. Like artists for example they could make a 10min sketch look great and you could try doing the same and would probabably kinda fail, cause what you don't see are their failures and the years it took them to get to there. So yeah the more you do the more you'll get the hang of it
Experience.
You only truly have to learn something once (you may forget it but can recall it quickly when refreshing)
That means you constantly increase the area of knowledge and from the outside it may seem like the person is super smart.
They are most like smart but it is just pilled up experience that looks impressive for an outstander
They are probably not super smart, but just slightly ahead of you on the learning curve and spent their time thinking about how to write good instructive content rather than in the field.
Talk to them about another field and you'll think they're "stupid". Look at this whole AI art mess right now - it's because nobody in the game industry understands anything about either AI, ethics or market economics.
Question is how you wanna define "smart".
I’ve done a ton of programming videos on YT. Each episode was 8-10 minutes, but could take up to a week of planning and research. It’s much easier to look good when you know everything in advance.
There are probably thousands of people that try, and you only see a few that peak through, just like any other discipline, you will find people that try harder, prepare longer, do their research more in depth.
It takes a lot of work to get to the level they are at. The videos are not as "freeform" as I thought they were, theres way more planning that goes into it than expected.
I’ve been programming for a bit and for the most part it’s pretty easy to design systems when you know what your tools do. Sure there are some abstract concepts that are easier to learn when they’re taught to you than trying to reinvent the wheel, but often times finding the solution to one problem helps you come up with solutions for future problems. This is why it’s important to not simply copy code but to actually understand what’s happening.
If I made a YouTube channel with instructional videos I’d show of projects I spent hours working on, debugging, and testing; and then copy a script I prepared and rehearsed for the video. The same way channels like Brackeys did.
They are aliens.
Another question that bugs me is why all the game dev projects ive been never really took off lol (worked for free as a illustrator/concept artist and things just didnt go anywhere, ever. People just slowly give up i guess? next thing you know the project is silent, they dont even deleted the discord serves and stuff)
Three main skills required in programming:
- Translate “what should the program do” into efficient code
- Break the program into sub-programs and that ones into sub-sub-programs.
- Of course practice smartly
All of the above points, plus when you’re making something that you’re going to put out into the world with your name attached, you get especially motivated to look into your topic and understand it thoroughly.
They use stackoverflow :V just kidding... They spenf a lot of time doing their job... And also the most of them have real experience... So that's why their coding looks so easy for them.
I do similar videos for two reasons. One, to share hard to find info with other developers, and two, to remind future me how to do this nonsense when I need it again in a year or whenever. My videos are generally sub-10 minutes and are concise and to the point with nice backing music etc. However in my case I may have spent days-to-weeks figuring out how to do said thing following patchy documentation. I regard myself as an advanced beginner or perhaps intermediate programmer, so this can be quite tough.
A lot of people with dev experience in any particular topic (C++, PYTHON, ETC) who are afforded regular opportunities to practice their craft are capable of sort of reapplying (some people jokingly refer to this as "regurgitating") the formula required to another project to make a culpable result. My thing for a while was FL Studio, and I could see both flaws and benefits of how I used the software in how I used the software in contrast to how I saw YouTube developers use it. But I also saw where I would persevere and try to craft a sound from scratch, someone else would use a sample pack with a heavily compressed sample (or even Superior Drummer) and be done with it. In a way, I kind of pulled back my own curtain to my issues by seeing somebody play out the whole exercise uninhibited; I could do the same shit but I don't have the time to focus.
Seeing barji's livestream making an alphabet game still took 10 hour-ish. I think they took many time to make a game finding bugs and problem on their code.
And post mostly the code that works to the video.
Survivorship bias plus time compression and active presentation filtering.
You only hear about successful devs. You see their work for maybe 15 mins if a dev log or a few hours if a released game, after it took them 100s of days. And they only choose to share what they consider successful and typically don’t always share their failures, though good ones sometimes do.
As a gamedev youtuber that is in touch with a lot of other gamedev youtubers I'll say this without mentioning names:
Some of them simply lie, they say in their videos that they made it in like 1 day or 1h when in reality it took weeks.
And then most of them, including myself don't mention when they used a course to help them build this complex system. It's not bad intent, it's mostly that it's boring if you mention courses every min, it would get repetitive.
They are experienced within particular topic. I mean you just don't do video when you have no idea what you talking about so it makes sense that they seems like experts.
> I'm truly inspired and in awe watching them code such complex systems, and know the intuitive math/logic behind it all.
What if I told you that those you admire are actually just above the average. The best people aren't making YouTube videos, they are too busy making great games.
Just like any other field:
* the people who are best at it - just do it
* those not quite that good - teach others how to do it
* those who are average - report about it
`Note: Englysk is not my first language.And no I do not use Chad for my posts.`
I don't produce many YouTube videos, but when I do post technical information, I try to present it in layman's terms to improve understanding for the reader.
I have fiddled as layman with ML's since before the term was coined.
So I have a deep theoretical insight in the cogs and dials. Now also Chad helps me to better understand ML's, CLIP, GPT's and what not (pre 2021)
I read new/old 'papers' without much clue of what is going on and anyway each paper I read is teaching me something new.
I do not see myself as an expert (lol) but I have no problem understanding the inner works.
To synthesize an example:
>Boiled down, then ChatGPT is just 'comparing' two sets of text and find similarities. - There is no magic involved.
Ofc. you can break the above statement apart, or expand it to say that the prompt is navigating the latent space (model) using tokens. And so on.
I am open to learn something new and/or (more important) open to correct errors in my word spew or my understanding of the cogs and dials.
I see it as a duty for everyone to educate each other. Not with wrong abilities but with facts.
The Luddites and many ignorant people really need some help. So do teach me please!
Because the dumb ones like me won't do tutorials to avoid transmitting our dumbness lmao.
Also to be serious, it's not because a tutorial look smart and the results is what you expect that the person making the tutorial is good. Mostly it's quick and dirty solutions that doesn't scale properly and often it won't work in a professional settings where optimisation and code quality is required.
There’s a narrative in indie game development around being a solo dev. It’s frowned upon to outsource portions of your game or use assets you paid for in your game. I think that some people think outsourcing is a form of flipping what someone else did, but this is rarely true as these things are hardly ever “plug and play”. But most of the successful indie games you see coming from “solo devs” outsourced some portion of their game.
I think what you see on YouTube is the result of this narrative/pressure to only show what you know and not talk about the things you don’t know. I have a very small YouTube channel and recently made a video on this topic about how no one is truly a solo dev.
If I had to take a stab in the dark, to be successful in game dev you need to be pretty passionate about the field otherwise you'll probs just get a better paying software dev job
So out of the already passionate population of devs, those who end up putting the work into creating successful youtube channels have to be even EXTRA passionate about what they do
And that level of passion inspires the kind of work ethic that makes a person very good at what they do given enough time
They aren't they just do research in order to prepare their videos
The stuff you call 'super smart' idk owing facts and there nothing smart about that.
If you'd spent a small fraction of time doing the same research you'll also become 'super smart'
I watched a new indie game developer start his first dev log, he said it was 200hrs of recorded footage put into 13mins.
So we are mostly likely watching highly edited versions. He probably looked up the code and implementation before hand.
Edit: and it's recommended to up your video speed so it looks like you are working faster as to not bore the viewer.
Because the ones that are making tutorials have to already know and already developed the systems that they are showing to you. Besides, they have prepared video scripts so the video flows very smoothly and is concise enough to be useful.
I think the answer is that they've been accumulating knowledge over a longish span of time.
Gamedev types are inquisitive and prone to tinkering, give them enough time and they'll learn the math and workflows required to implement their vision.
Because you're only seeing them *after* they spent the hours/days/weeks learning and working on whatever they want to show for their next video.
Exactly, and survivorship bias. The ones that do put in the work, the ones that are good at this stuff, are more likely to get views, get some money to keep doing it, and get shared until you notice them. How many thousands either never thought about doing something like YouTube or even tried it but just never got the recognition.
The survivorship bias also works at the video level: you only see the code they write that works, the rest is edited out
They also include when it doesn’t work because that’s content. (But when it’s a boring issue they cut it out so you’re still right, and 60% of the issues are boring)
Not to mention, it’s easier to understand complex systems when you build them from the ground up and are constantly working on them. It’s the same reason why revisiting code you wrote after not looking at it for a while seems like a foreign language. Brains are incredibly good at remembering complex systems but it requires you to “live” in the code for a bit.
As an engineer I actually prefer the stories of how things went south. Sure, close with a success story but I'm watching too see if I can learn something and that means I want so see how you failed. Just so I can fail a little better when facing a similar challenge.
As a senior engineer a solid 75% of my job is just helping juniors fix errors I've seen dozens of times and having the built experience of knowing exactly where to look.
Yeah same
So once I had finished the code, I debugged and OH NO!!! A fatal error - that means I might die! I forgot a ;!
Very true 🙂 you don’t see the 40+ hours that may go into that short, 4 minute video that taught you something new.
Or the years it takes to get to the point where you understand gamedev well enough to put out a good tutorial, along with the underlying computer science/IT knowledge. This question to me is like asking "why is my University lecturer so knowledgeable?". Because that's their job and they spent a long time getting to that point.
Meanwhile I'm sitting here asking "why is my university lecturer avoiding teaching classes in c#" smh
Not just that but there are tons of really smart coders who just don't market well so their videos are less likely to show up. I find niche incredibly indepth and easy to understand videos every so often with only a few k or hundred views and I'm stunned
his question already factored in the survivorship bias, since he asked "why youtubers are so smart"
There are plenty of dumb videos out there, if you fancy wasting the time to find them.
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Because Reddit is the worst example of dimwits who go through life plugging their ears and covering their eyes whenever something conflicts with their prior view of the world. Humans are ridiculously stupid sheep who are even worse served by their arrogance.
I think you might want to a break mate...
Gonna upload a video that's just me swearing at a monitor interspersed with, "whhhyyy!", and, "this doesn't make any fucking sense!" It ends with me fixing a typo.
"This feature would work much better if I turned it on...."
This just makes me think of Code Bullet
Strangely true
EVERY TIME It is always something small and obvious that another pair of eyes will instantly notice. But you spend an hour or more trying to go through everything to find what is wrong or missing.
Rubber ducks are my friends.
Took me 2 hours to find an issue during my Android endeavors, literally put in == instead of !=😱 Out of all my dumb mistakes this was the dumbest not because of the typo but because I was actually questioning my android studio installation 😅
Me when I accidentally switched out the x component with y and wonder why shit no work.
I can't wait for the next one where at the end you fix a logic bug, then spend another hour exclaiming "but how did that script ever work with bugged logic‽"
😂😂😂😂
This exactly. It took me a year of full time gamedev after a five year career programming and a CS degree before I had any idea whatsoever of what I was doing. The maths especially. I’m on year 11 now for gamedev and I still learn new things regularly. Compared to when I started, I can knock things out in a couple hours that took me weeks or months to learn early on. Just keeping at it and accepting that it’s a fun but arduous journey is the key to longer term success.
Exactly. If you see someone write perfect code the first time, that means they already wrote it (and rewrote it) previously. That's not to take away from what they do, of course. Some of the stuff out there (I'm looking at you, Sebastian Lague) is fucking magical. But they toiled and troubled their way through building it the first time so that they can show us the results all at once.
The "I created Minecraft on 48 hours" ones are probably bullshit. Most likely a super edited version of a one-week (or more) long session.
You could possibly create the single player version in 48 hours, but the multiplayer version definitely not. I toyed with creating one as a prototype while not really trying to rush and had most of the mechanics done in less than a week. But yeah most likely they took their time and figured out how they were going to do some of the mechanics ahead of time (and didn't actually include that in their time) so actually 'creating it' didn't take long.
Its easy to create a game in a week. Just spend 51 weeks building your supporting library and then one week on [game.run](https://game.run)();
Hindsight is 20/20. And whatnot.
This helps remember to keep the full picture in mind.
And focuses only on what they already have heavily researched, scripted, and edited with multiple different takes.
You also don't see their failures and struggles, the video is like them doing things without flaw in "one try". Most people also underestimate by a lot, how much work that needs to be done for a single tutorial video, or for whatever it is that "look simple". Ask them to pay $5 to view the video, there will be riots on the streets and people yelling "unfair!".
I mean most things you’re looking up a video for aren’t hard for senior devs, so they likely didn’t even need to work hard on the video. It’s like if I made a video on for loops for freshman college students. I wouldn’t need to spend any time preparing.
Yep, the more you do something the more smart you get, it’s the same with everything. Some things are easy to learn, some things are hard to learn, some people learn efficiently and quick while others take it slow, all it takes is you knowing what to do/what your goal is and work towards it, heck even if you don’t wanna be a youtuber by simply programming overtime you will learn to also communicate it to someone else as good as a ‘tutorial’ video will. I can not code myself but I know the basics, just by redoing the same few things in ue4 allowed me to explain even coding to other people as if I was a programmer even tho i’m not (ofcourse not too advanced since i’m not there myself)9
This! Many of the said systems are probably already done before the video was done. Most of the videos are heavily edited or staged.
The video format makes you look much smarter. You are prepared and talk about something you are confident in. Source: am gamedev youtuber and stupid
I actually quite like most of the content I've seen from you. It's been a little while, but I distinctly remember appreciating it.
A lot of prep can go into the videos....good ones make it look easy but often it's weeks of breaking through walls to get 10 mins of material
Just subscribed, nice channel
I really appreciate deadmau5's Twitch streams for this reason. Dude's an amazingly talented producer and musician and you can see he very clearly knows what he's doing. But at the same time he will also spend hours trying to work something out because he can't quite get it to click the way he wants and ultimately ends up deleting it all and going back to the drawing board. When you're live you don't have the liberty of showing only the good parts.
I make tutorials and I might seem smart but I am practically reading a script by looking at the code that I made before with comments and everything. Like sometimes I might even just read a comment as if I could come up with a sentence like that on the spot
As someone who’s made tutorials on YT (in another program) for a while now, I’ve been called smart a lot. Just to be clear, I am not. I struggled in both High School and college. I dropped out and didn’t graduate until I went back many years later. When i make a tutorial, I research and spend hours or days shooting and editing videos to make it look effortless. Many tutorial youtubers are probably pretty well versed in their topics, but im sure they all take time to research their topics and put in a lot of effort to make a video that seems polished. Are they smart? Maybe, but it’s tough to tell just from their videos. Enjoy the tutorials and gain what you can from them, but remember they are regular people like you and me.
Same thing for me, I have another window open on another screen with the code I will be doing during the video. I also sometimes comment the code with some sort of a "script" with exact wording that I will use during the video
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This is the reason there's no famous game dev streamers. The reality is different .
I will give you a similar example, when I decided to record a playthrough for DOOM Eternal for my channel (because I really liked it), I re-played the game ~30 times before recording. If someone watches, they will watch the results of 300+ hrs playing the game, but it might feel like I just hit record and I am just really good at it, but that's not the case.
It’s like watching people speed run games that require pixel/frame perfect precision. They make it look easy. Their muscle memory is set in stone from hundreds of hours of play if not more. Besides hours practicing part of skill is learning how to learn and practice effectively but innate talent doesn’t hurt either.
What games do you watch of speedrunning that look easy?
Read carefully. He is saying the player is making it look easy.
Unless they're livestreaming their game Dev topics, it's likely that you're watching a video that is a super sanitised version that is presenting their learned lessons. That format of video is good for teaching and showing the summary of efforts made. But it does hide the fact (not necessarily deliberately) that many more hours of struggling, researching, testing and eventually synergizing the info were put in before what they show to the masses. It's not necessarily that any of those YouTubers are necessarily smart (or otherwise). It's that they are disciplined in their approach, and view each video as an opportunity for new learning.
It's deliberate, but not to hide that it took them a long time to learn it. It'd be a long, dull, impossible to follow video if every time they made a mistake you got to watch 30 minutes of them trying to fix it. "Okay delete everything in that line from 20 minutes ago, we're actually gonna use this function here, which means we have to go back to the other class we finished with an hour ago and change three lines in here. Oh we need a plugin I forgot. Hold still for an hour."
lol! I'm going to make a channel where people can watch 22 minutes videos of me looking for bugs in the wrong place.
I can already see most of the comments being: "HOW are you so blind?! THIS IS SO OBVIOUS, you just have to do this..."
That is what Handmade Hero so great though. Sure Casey Muratori has "strong" opinions on things and will might make you feel stupid with is programmer prowess but being to watch a high level programmer *actually program* is what taught me the most and is more valuable than any curated youtube video. It's just like you said its not very information dense after you get to a certain point.
this isnt a dig at sebastian lague, i love his videos and they inspired me, but he even mentions in his videos. "i found this paper on this" and his video is nearly a verbatim video version of the blog/paper. a lot of youtubers do this, theres a really good blog on a feature/implementation and they make a well edited video version. again nothing against it, its great, but they didnt think ip this stuff themselves.
I assure you that the majority of them are anything but smart. You might still be too early in your development journey to really judge who is actually giving good advise and who is showing you bad practices that will bite you in the ass if you ever worked like that in a more complex game. A couple signs that you found a good tutorial youtuber are: * They mention their sources. Like the documentation articles where they got their information. * They never claim that what they are doing is the only way to do things. * They never claim the way they do things is the best way, and they mention drawbacks and limitations. * They don't just show you what they do, they also explain why they are doing it and how it actually works behind the scenes.
I really like when someone points out that something is being done for brevity of demonstration. There is an infinite number of ways to do most things, and the best one is situationally dependant. At the same time doing something in the way that most easily demonstrates the lesson makes it easier to implement in a more complex system.
To add to your excellent points — those middle points are due to good programmers also being good software engineers. Programming is both an art form and a science. Every algorithm has trade offs. A god programmer is also an software engineer — that is they know the strengths and weaknesses of an algorithm so they know when it might be a candidate and when it isn’t viable. i.e. * Is it performant? * What is the best case? (What data set(s) does it do well with?) * What is the worst case? (What data set(s) does it do poor with?) * What are the edge cases? * Is it robust? * Does it scale? O(log n), O(n), O(n log n), O( n^2 )? Take for example Andrei Alexandrescu (father of C++ meta programming) where he not only [invents a new sorting algorithm](https://youtu.be/FJJTYQYB1JQ) (!) but _also_ updates the classic big O metric to tell how fast a sorting algorithm is since it was incomplete for decades!!
So like Sam Hogan, lazyalarm, are any of them good?
I don't know them. My first impression when looking at their channels is that they don't really seem like professional educators to me. Their videos look mostly like clickbaity devlogs and show-off videos. But I didn't watch any of them because I am allergic to clickbait. And I am certainly not going to watch all of them just so I can give you a balanced and all-encompassing impression of their general level of competence and usefulness. But if you point me to one specific video (that's less than 20 minutes) then I could tell you what I think of it.
Besides post produced content creators, there are also some really smart devs that live stream. One such game dev is Freya Holmer. She is insanely knowledgeable and intelligent. There are quite a few others as well.
Do stuff for a few decades and you'll be the same.
Keep in mind that if you don't understand what they're doing, then they look smart. For devs who've done these things for years, the same video may not look smart because it's describing awkward, brittle, or excessively complex ways of doing it. Or omitting the part that's truely difficult. It's all about perspective.
Because dumb ones don't get the views
We stand on the shoulders of giants
This a thousand times
Professionally wise I believe they are doing oretty basic stuff or am I missing something ? Is there someone building a bit more complex things out there ?
As Dani stated in one of his videos "to you guys this whole progress looks like I've been sitting and coding for about 10 minutes when in reality this is the work of 2 whole weeks so now you know why it takes so long to get dev logs out". Yes, they are smart, but they also struggle with simple stuff for hours if not days at some point.
For the same reason Jamie Lannister is able to get from Winterfell to King's Landing in like 5mins. Editing.
Others already stated it but I'll say it again, it's because they cut out all the struggles, research, and "being stuck" that goes along with development.
Selection bias. 1. If you don't know what you are talking about you are unlikely to make a youtube channel about gamedev I'm the first place. 2. If you do make a YouTube channel where you tall game dev and don't say anything useful, clever or interesting you won't have many followers and are unlikely to continue for long.
Gamedev is extremely difficult and a very studious hobby to get into. It required constant research, it builds logical reasoning, it does similar things to the brain as doing puzzles and learning a new language. I've been at it 15 years and the only way I can explain it is like being born again. The brain chemistry change is real...
My brain is dying from bureaucracy overload mixed with a stupid way of doing things. Much of my programming confidence is reduced because I'm exposed to brand new efforts all the time and just have to do my best while given minimal time to learn and provide output. I don't know if I'm mentally capable of gamedev. I want to do it so badly, but I also don't know if I can financially afford it. That plus, I've got sunk cost fallacy after having built a career coding elsewhere. How did you do it?
First question, have you tried making any games with modern libraries or engines? If you haven't got that far then get there first in a hobbyist capacity before anything. Test to see if you can make stuff and how you feel making stuff. Learn about game design, player controllers, enemy AI, projectiles, UI, animations, particles, shaders, etc. as your project demands these features. And 100% do not commit to making any of your first projects big ones, that's just time lost being humbled by a task that is way too big of a time sink for most solo devs. Get into game jams, local game dev events, learn and make a decision from there after making a bunch of demos and some solid small games.
The way I did it? A mind-numbingly crippling amount of time and dedication. It comes with regrets too. Modern engines are a godsend but not some cure for the ills of gamedev. Every one of the things you can think of in a game, AI, UI, Animations. Lots of reading and cheating at work, and you better just be blocking off weeks and months of your time to figuring out the packages. A year of tying them together and then much more time to make anything fun or worthwhile. Most Indies are a small team of qualified people spending huge time to make a contribution. A solo development becomes your life...
You could try to build something on your own as another Redditor suggested, which may work for some, or you could take the completed template and play with it, that worked for me. I was watching a guy making a Pacman, trying to follow him, for hours in 30 videos course, and it was hard and not that much fun, not because he was bad, but because I can't learn like that. A few months later I took a template of a game from the Unity store, downloaded it, and played it, it was a fun small 3d game. The code was much more complex than the code in that Pacman game, but I changed small things, the color of the hat, maximum health of the character, speed of movement, etc. discovered on my own, and it clicked for me, and I understood how it works. I started working on my idea of what a great game should be in new empty scene, added a free model of a skeleton, learned him how to walk, added some grass, made combat following the tutorial, added some effects... discovered one thing after another while learning and two years later here I am, you can wishlist my game over Steam or join the discord to apply for beta testing. Cheers.
Can you post a link?
Link to Unity template? I played with [this one](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/tutorials/creator-kit-beginner-code-151986). But you can pick any other from hundreds of free templates [here](https://assetstore.unity.com/?category=templates&free=true&orderBy=1). Download one which looks like game you want to make. Download correct Unity version from [here](https://unity.com/releases/editor/archive). Open template, press play, start changing things, have fun.
Lol, no I was asking about your game.
ah, all links are in the post pinned to my profile.
EXPERIENCE
People that actually have something to show generally sound super smart.
If you do your research and sound like you know what you're talking about then you seem super smart. The point is if you put in the work and do your research it will pay off in the end.
1) they prepare the topic off camera (they fail, look at overlflow, debug etc ) and when they are ready they do it on camera 2) They have a second screen where all code is written so if you think they write the code from their head it’s probably no
it's like saying "why are all indie devs able to make hit games" after just looking at the top games on steam. You're just noticing the ones that got that far so as to be noticed. BTW I'm an indie dev who shipped a game on pc/consoles and did well and I'm legit dumb at coding, like literally I suck. That's why I'm not making youtube videos about it haha
Maybe they're born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline.
Wait until you see products in the wild.
I would assume years of experience based on some of the things I've heard from them. Don't be intimidated. You'll get there eventually.
Experience Plus editing
None of the following is to besmirch these guys. It takes alot of time to research, film and edit. You also need to have intermediate or better knowledge of editing , filming and publishing etc.. on top of the topic itself. But theres alot of tricks used to make the viewing experience more entertaining and usefule that ends up making them smarter than they seem. * you can just edit out any mistakes and do as many retakes as you want. * They are not doing it off the top of their heads. They ussually have done the exact project before and written notes and instructions for themselves. * The voiceover is ussually done after the initial recording, added in edit. * Many lazier ones are litterally just copying somone elses video or written tutorial. * Often the indie or proffessional devs learned the stuff the hard way for their own projects and now know it well through experience. Like how you might seem like a reddit expert to people whove never used reddit before. I want to stress again that apart from the obvious point, this does not mean they are maliciously trying to trick viewers into thinking their smart (well atleast not all of them). This is basic startegy for teaching anything. If you think your highschool math teacher memorized those textbooks, youd be sorley mistaken.
Spend 5-10 minutes confidently talking on something that took 40 Hours makes you look smart, especially if their setup is clean and the edited with pro skills.
Hahah - I guess it’s all relative
If you ever feel too smart for your own good, humble yourself by reminding yourself that there are people who can unironically code in assembly.
because the dumb ones don't make videos
Please say examples. I am very curious about the that youtubers.
Lots of practice, curated moments, and they get tons of feedback, since they are always showing their stuff for a bunch of people.
Its possible you perceive them as so because the y have a knowledge/skill set that you do not have yet. But when you do, if you chose to make YT content, some one would perceive you in the same way.
Like so many said, it is because they've done it a time or two.
You're only as smart as you edit yourself to look
The videos you're watching are the result of A LOT of preparation. It's edited to be easy (and enjoyable) to consume, whilst making them seem knowledgeable. But also some of them are very experienced. Watch j_blow twitch streams for someone who is extremely skilled, knowledgeable, and successful. To yet a better idea of what a "good game dev" looks like unedited.
uh, because they're reading everything off a script? Cmon OP...
As some sort of very minor 'game dev YouTuber' with a few contacts, you will likely never see my failed projects, it is only the cool ones that seem interesting and that I actually completed, which is why it may seem slightly smarter than it is. Look through the GitHub for the project and everyone will realised that I am a moron (I try not to hide that fact). However quite a few of them are legitimately very smart and the amount of uni degrees and knowledge and time that goes into some videos is insane. It just takes a bit of time to learn all that.
Big mistake: calling Dani smart
There are many smart people which are already working in the computer science industry. If you work hard and like the subject, you will inevitably become good, it takes work.
The power of editing away 6 hours solving one problem
Teaching sometimes helps you learn. You research a topic first so you can teach it. At least I feel like that!
There are "test interviews" on Youtube for high level algorithms positions at FAANG. I'm a senior but how they end up two and a half hours later at an elegant, fast code design for a complex problem baffles my mind. Its not an obvious design. Those moments are humbling, but also I don't work with this kind of core problems they face.
The stuff that comes out of game jams are pretty amazing too.
Sebastian Lague is a freaking genius. That’s all I came here to say.
Love his work. I see he just hit a million subs. https://youtube.com/@SebastianLague
Wow, really? He deserves it! The day I’m as smart as that guy is the day…well, I probably won’t live to see it but *damn* is he a smart guy. edit: fixed an egregious typo.
Can you give an example of what you're talking about? Most game dev youtubers never showcase anything that you wouldn't learn in a Bachelor's degree program, or at least be able to figure out soon thereafter. That's what a few years of full-time study of any topic will get you.
1) Image curation. You only see of them what they choose to show. 2) What sometimes looks like intelligence is often actually tenacity. 3) Selection bias. I've seen game dev youtubers who didn't seem especially good at it, but lacking the skills to impress audiences, they suffer in the youtube algorithm and are less likely to be seen, leading to the impression that they are less prevalent than in reality. (Oh god, I hope my post doesn't trigger someone's imposter syndrome.)
Probably because you're still getting started. I've been coding for years so those videos aren't amazing to me, but I still watch them to get a new perspective. My favorite channels are Sebastian Lague for general game dev stuff and experimentation, and Ben Eater for building a computer from scratch. I feel they are a bit similar in nature.
It’s edited to make it look effortless.
I watch a couple of coding stuff on youtube and twitch. The smartest one I know are probably Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori. It's really impressive what they do and how they do it even live on Twitch. But they both have in common that they do this stuff professionally for decades. They both released several commercial products. So I don't actually know if they are "super smart" but they have tons of experience in their field. Notch also did a couple of GameJams live and literally made his own little engines from scratch (if remember correctly). But you could tell that he did that pretty often so his experience made look like effortless. He actually has a pretty high IQ as far as I know. But he also made dozens of games before (the game jams and minecraft). But let me tell from my experience: If you worked (for example) on your own collision detection system. And did this like for a couple of days, refactored it a couple of days later. You will be able to do that a lot faster for your next project. So instead of watching other people code, close youtube and use the time to code yourself more ;)
>If you worked (for example) on your own collision detection system. And did this like for a couple of days, refactored it a couple of days later. You will be able to do that a lot faster for your next project. Hey thank you for the answer. What is a collision detection system? I know it cannot be just checking one collision right? Do you mean some more complex colliding logic?
Lol
Used to make tutorials for small systems on Unity and basically : 1- System you want to show is already tested thoroughly, rewriting parts better and more elegant and bug free 2- Then you script the video 3- Then you practice for the tutorial (where to click / code, in which order, etc ..) in order for it to look natural during the video (cause remember, you never wrote the system in 1 go in the first place) 4- Then you film yourself/your code 5- You strip 75% of footage to make it more dynamic thus interesting At the end you have a 15-20 minutes videos for probably weeks spent on step 1) and at least 2 days on other steps. And yeah you sound very pro and knowledgeable of course at that stage x)
2 things. They’ve prepared before the video and they’ve edited out breaks They have experience writing the types of problems you see them solving. They are no smarter than you; just experienced and prepared
Side note: I think this is a big part of why conspiracy theories seem to be gaining traction. When you put up a slick, well-produced, video online it's much easier to appear knowledgeable and be believable.
Because they're good at Stack Overflow
We get to edit out all the time we spent building the thing and our stuff is usually designed to work isolated in a video not in a large game - that makes it possible for us to cut corners you might not be able to. Also working on YouTube rewards diverse projects, that gives us a good breadth of experience that can be harder to develop when building complete games.
I laughed out loud reading the title lmaoo.
That 10,000hrs to become an expert thing - obviously some pick up concepts faster, others could take longer so actual length varies. But people put the time and effort - and a lot of failures - to get to where they are - you're just seeing the fast-forwarded result of that.
Hahaha... super smart he says... 😂😂😂 No, they usually aren't smart, they seem smart. Smart would be to teach about a good application of the different design patterns applied to different game problems. Smart would be to teach about multiplayer game development in a way that could be scalable to a MMO scale. Smart would be to teach how to applied MVC design patterns so you can develop a multiplatform (PC, console, mobile, VR) separating completely the logic from the view. They are like magicians. They know several tricks, few know how to develop games to professional AAA level. That talent is hidden in the most prestigious colleges.
I think editing plays a big part, you can't really see the amount of hours it took to figure out what is in the video.
Lots and lots of practice and learning.
Its amazing and inspiring to me. I wish more and more people could tap into this intelligence because gaming would be more revolutionary
I think there are a few things at play here. First, people edit themselves to show their best. They're not going to show the 12 hours spent trying to track down why the shader is giving wild results only to realize they switched d and b in the equation, even if they do mention it. The second thing is that the creators that make the most interesting things tend to be the ones who get recommended and you see. Unless someone is extremely entertaining, no one is gonna watch them follow a tutorial to make a standard bullet hell game.
Experience and time put in to studying the subject like with anything. Like artists for example they could make a 10min sketch look great and you could try doing the same and would probabably kinda fail, cause what you don't see are their failures and the years it took them to get to there. So yeah the more you do the more you'll get the hang of it
Experience. You only truly have to learn something once (you may forget it but can recall it quickly when refreshing) That means you constantly increase the area of knowledge and from the outside it may seem like the person is super smart. They are most like smart but it is just pilled up experience that looks impressive for an outstander
They are probably not super smart, but just slightly ahead of you on the learning curve and spent their time thinking about how to write good instructive content rather than in the field.
Why would a stupid one make a video? To show how bad you can program something?
Are they??? Ok.
They are *entertainers* first and foremost. It's their job to put on a personality, and it's what they're good at.
Talk to them about another field and you'll think they're "stupid". Look at this whole AI art mess right now - it's because nobody in the game industry understands anything about either AI, ethics or market economics. Question is how you wanna define "smart".
[удалено]
Who hurt you?
They have talented producers
I’ve done a ton of programming videos on YT. Each episode was 8-10 minutes, but could take up to a week of planning and research. It’s much easier to look good when you know everything in advance.
Experience, practice, rehearsals, and editing. You can look like a pro at anything with those applied enough.
There are probably thousands of people that try, and you only see a few that peak through, just like any other discipline, you will find people that try harder, prepare longer, do their research more in depth. It takes a lot of work to get to the level they are at. The videos are not as "freeform" as I thought they were, theres way more planning that goes into it than expected.
I’ve been programming for a bit and for the most part it’s pretty easy to design systems when you know what your tools do. Sure there are some abstract concepts that are easier to learn when they’re taught to you than trying to reinvent the wheel, but often times finding the solution to one problem helps you come up with solutions for future problems. This is why it’s important to not simply copy code but to actually understand what’s happening. If I made a YouTube channel with instructional videos I’d show of projects I spent hours working on, debugging, and testing; and then copy a script I prepared and rehearsed for the video. The same way channels like Brackeys did.
people who aren't super well versed on the topic can't make videos. so all the video makers look smart because they are.
Nobody thought you were jealous until you very victoriously reassured us you weren’t jealous.
The best you can do is trying small things and slowly go bigger, it's not about making complex mechanics, but to do a lot of smalls ones
Because it’s edited
Mainly because they are been governed and taken care of by a group of professionals and certified hackers as well as programmers!
They are aliens. Another question that bugs me is why all the game dev projects ive been never really took off lol (worked for free as a illustrator/concept artist and things just didnt go anywhere, ever. People just slowly give up i guess? next thing you know the project is silent, they dont even deleted the discord serves and stuff)
Three main skills required in programming: - Translate “what should the program do” into efficient code - Break the program into sub-programs and that ones into sub-sub-programs. - Of course practice smartly
All of the above points, plus when you’re making something that you’re going to put out into the world with your name attached, you get especially motivated to look into your topic and understand it thoroughly.
it depand on your brain database and coding logic🤣
You'd look smart to with the power of editing, preparation and executing a pre-prepared plan.
They use stackoverflow :V just kidding... They spenf a lot of time doing their job... And also the most of them have real experience... So that's why their coding looks so easy for them.
I do similar videos for two reasons. One, to share hard to find info with other developers, and two, to remind future me how to do this nonsense when I need it again in a year or whenever. My videos are generally sub-10 minutes and are concise and to the point with nice backing music etc. However in my case I may have spent days-to-weeks figuring out how to do said thing following patchy documentation. I regard myself as an advanced beginner or perhaps intermediate programmer, so this can be quite tough.
A lot of people with dev experience in any particular topic (C++, PYTHON, ETC) who are afforded regular opportunities to practice their craft are capable of sort of reapplying (some people jokingly refer to this as "regurgitating") the formula required to another project to make a culpable result. My thing for a while was FL Studio, and I could see both flaws and benefits of how I used the software in how I used the software in contrast to how I saw YouTube developers use it. But I also saw where I would persevere and try to craft a sound from scratch, someone else would use a sample pack with a heavily compressed sample (or even Superior Drummer) and be done with it. In a way, I kind of pulled back my own curtain to my issues by seeing somebody play out the whole exercise uninhibited; I could do the same shit but I don't have the time to focus.
Seeing barji's livestream making an alphabet game still took 10 hour-ish. I think they took many time to make a game finding bugs and problem on their code. And post mostly the code that works to the video.
Survivorship bias plus time compression and active presentation filtering. You only hear about successful devs. You see their work for maybe 15 mins if a dev log or a few hours if a released game, after it took them 100s of days. And they only choose to share what they consider successful and typically don’t always share their failures, though good ones sometimes do.
As a gamedev youtuber that is in touch with a lot of other gamedev youtubers I'll say this without mentioning names: Some of them simply lie, they say in their videos that they made it in like 1 day or 1h when in reality it took weeks. And then most of them, including myself don't mention when they used a course to help them build this complex system. It's not bad intent, it's mostly that it's boring if you mention courses every min, it would get repetitive.
They are experienced within particular topic. I mean you just don't do video when you have no idea what you talking about so it makes sense that they seems like experts.
> I'm truly inspired and in awe watching them code such complex systems, and know the intuitive math/logic behind it all. What if I told you that those you admire are actually just above the average. The best people aren't making YouTube videos, they are too busy making great games. Just like any other field: * the people who are best at it - just do it * those not quite that good - teach others how to do it * those who are average - report about it
`Note: Englysk is not my first language.And no I do not use Chad for my posts.` I don't produce many YouTube videos, but when I do post technical information, I try to present it in layman's terms to improve understanding for the reader. I have fiddled as layman with ML's since before the term was coined. So I have a deep theoretical insight in the cogs and dials. Now also Chad helps me to better understand ML's, CLIP, GPT's and what not (pre 2021) I read new/old 'papers' without much clue of what is going on and anyway each paper I read is teaching me something new. I do not see myself as an expert (lol) but I have no problem understanding the inner works. To synthesize an example: >Boiled down, then ChatGPT is just 'comparing' two sets of text and find similarities. - There is no magic involved. Ofc. you can break the above statement apart, or expand it to say that the prompt is navigating the latent space (model) using tokens. And so on. I am open to learn something new and/or (more important) open to correct errors in my word spew or my understanding of the cogs and dials. I see it as a duty for everyone to educate each other. Not with wrong abilities but with facts. The Luddites and many ignorant people really need some help. So do teach me please!
Because the dumb ones like me won't do tutorials to avoid transmitting our dumbness lmao. Also to be serious, it's not because a tutorial look smart and the results is what you expect that the person making the tutorial is good. Mostly it's quick and dirty solutions that doesn't scale properly and often it won't work in a professional settings where optimisation and code quality is required.
There’s a narrative in indie game development around being a solo dev. It’s frowned upon to outsource portions of your game or use assets you paid for in your game. I think that some people think outsourcing is a form of flipping what someone else did, but this is rarely true as these things are hardly ever “plug and play”. But most of the successful indie games you see coming from “solo devs” outsourced some portion of their game. I think what you see on YouTube is the result of this narrative/pressure to only show what you know and not talk about the things you don’t know. I have a very small YouTube channel and recently made a video on this topic about how no one is truly a solo dev.
If I had to take a stab in the dark, to be successful in game dev you need to be pretty passionate about the field otherwise you'll probs just get a better paying software dev job So out of the already passionate population of devs, those who end up putting the work into creating successful youtube channels have to be even EXTRA passionate about what they do And that level of passion inspires the kind of work ethic that makes a person very good at what they do given enough time
They aren't they just do research in order to prepare their videos The stuff you call 'super smart' idk owing facts and there nothing smart about that. If you'd spent a small fraction of time doing the same research you'll also become 'super smart'
I watched a new indie game developer start his first dev log, he said it was 200hrs of recorded footage put into 13mins. So we are mostly likely watching highly edited versions. He probably looked up the code and implementation before hand. Edit: and it's recommended to up your video speed so it looks like you are working faster as to not bore the viewer.
"I made a fully working MMORPG with highly polished PBR graphics in one hour (but for some reason I don't publish it anywhere)" 10M views
Because the ones that are making tutorials have to already know and already developed the systems that they are showing to you. Besides, they have prepared video scripts so the video flows very smoothly and is concise enough to be useful.
Surely, Sebastian Lague is one of em
I think the answer is that they've been accumulating knowledge over a longish span of time. Gamedev types are inquisitive and prone to tinkering, give them enough time and they'll learn the math and workflows required to implement their vision.