Hi all,
The purpose of this thread is to gently promote my YouTube channel, where I occasionally produce videos on Defold game development:
https://www.youtube.com/@WhiteBoxDev
I also started posting step-by-step text-based tutorials on GitHub, which can be found in the following repository:
This is great! Thank you for sharing!
Date: September 19, 2020
Title: Cellular Automata | Procedural Generation | Game Development Tutorial
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slTEz6555Ts
Date: January 12, 2021
Title: Diamond Square | Procedural Generation | Game Development Tutorial
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GuAV1PnurU
Bookmarking for future projects 
Date: February 13, 2021
Title: Lazy Flood Fill | Procedural Generation | Game Development Tutorial
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS0MTrjxGbM
The source code link is giving me a 404 - private repo?
Thanks for letting me know. Fixed. Repository name was wrong.
Date: May 1, 2021
Title: Fractal Noise | Procedural Generation | Game Development Tutorial
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6m7tFztEvw
Quick update to this thread, also some thoughts in general about content creation!
It’s been a few years since I’ve uploaded anything, but I plan to start again. I really enjoy making videos, but making high-quality tutorials takes a lot of time and effort. I don’t have the kind of free time that I used to, so lately I’ve been brainstorming ways to get back into it without suffering from the following negatives:
I have been racking my brain over the past couple months about how I could start making videos again and returning to that feeling of enjoyment and satisfaction that I used to have long before I created this particular channel. I think I have a good answer to all of the problems listed above, but I can’t be sure until I give it a shot.
Throughout those couple weeks of building Defold Rendy, I was posting development updates to this thread. About half way through, I realized how fulfilling and enjoyable it was to log my progress and write out how things were working on a technical level. I thought maybe I should start some kind of programming blog, but after some research I concluded that this probably isn’t the best way to find an audience or encourage discussion in the modern Internet landscape. It is the 2nd best choice since it would meet that “make it fun and satisfying” requirement and wouldn’t require all the editing and additional work that making a YouTube video requires.
At least, that’s how I thought about it a week or so ago. But what if I could make videos that don’t necessarily require writing a script, investing a bunch of time into editing, and all the rest? I’ve only ever made videos with big scripts and voiceovers. If I could find a way to blend my normal game development routine with YouTube that doesn’t cause tangential problems or stress, then that would be great.
I’m going to try to make a series of videos developing my next Defold game from scratch, including explanations and brainstorming, similar to how I was logging my progress with Rendy. Maybe this way I can combine many fun things into one. If it doesn’t work out, then so be it.
I’d also like to hear what @Pawel’s thoughts are on this, since he has been making some excellent Defold-related videos lately. Do you also often run into any of the problems I listed? How do you handle them? Anyone else is welcome to comment as well of course. 
For me making videos is super fun and educative, but very time-demanding. I approach it in this way:
Script + 
Working Project
I spend too much time on writing a script with every single word I plan to tell. If it’s a tutorial then I have to couple it with testing and making the project I want to show/teach - iterate it in Defold, write it down, test what I wrote, make adjustments in the project, make adjustments in the script. Some times it’s easy, especially with beginners tutorials, but sometimes (like my last video about cameras) it’s a terrible amount of rewriting the tutorial, because every time I discover something is not ok with my current scrip - I basically need to start from scratch or from some point.
Voice Over
When I have a script ready and project is ok, I start to record the voice over. I need to plan a time slot for it, because I stay home alone very rarely, so I could have a time for it without kids and noises around. Even if, I make a mistake, while reading or “hang” myself, I try to continue, because I will cut it out.
Sound editing
After I record it, I need to edit it anyway, to join few recordings together, to cut out “yyy”, “eee”, loud breathing, misspoken words, errors and so on. I also play with filters and usually increase the sound strength (because my voiceovers are pretty quiet even though my new microphone is at full sensitivity)
Recording of tutorial
When I have a “perfect” voice over, like you hear in my videos, I export it to a sound file. I play it then on headphones, start recording screen in OBS and record my tutorial trying to do everything aligned with what I say.
Slides
Some parts need more visualisation than only me speaking, so I create presentations for it and try to animate everything. This is another tedious and time-demanding process, but I believe it is worth it.
Film editing
When I have all parts - I import everything to the movie editing tool (sometimes Movavi, sometimes Shotcut) and try to create one cohesive video, add some arrows, pointers, markers, texts, effects, etc.
When everything goes easy and smooth, I can create a video in a week. But sometimes it takes more than a month working on it in my free time (and appropriately more hours of continuous work on it). The worst case scenario is when I discover a mistake at for example film editing stage and I have to go back to rewriting the script… 
I can’t deny it’s fun - I love it and I wish I had just more time for this, but I simply don’t. I must go to work 8h, take care of home and family and I also would love to make some games too! 
In the end, I just find every comment below my videos that I helped someone sooo encouraging and for example people in the latest game jam made use of my videos to create their games - it is a priceless feeling 
The most easiest way is to just write a tutorial and test it, but I know that some people just can’t stand a wall of text and just like to hear about it or better - see it.
Unless we make huge money out of this, it’s impossible to avoid it So I just accepted it as it is.
As you can see above, I am stressed out because of it a lot. It also regards visual quality, because I’m in fact, really envy for example about creators that make few smooth animations, but talk about really simple and “populist” topics and earn a lot of positive feedback and popularity anyway. I will try to mitigate it, and I plan to shift more focus on “content quality” instead, but I already had so many failed plans in my life, I don’t think it will work out, so I will get back to stressing out about visual quality, I can tell you for sure, I will, sooner or later
I had a moment of looking at statistics/analytics very carefully, especially at the very beginning. I was happy about the growth, I had a goal to meet YouTube’s rules to enable monetization - and after I reach it - I stopped looking at it. It gives me now some small amount of money and I believe it will only grow, but I stopped treating it as a goal. Instead, I try to think of it as an outcome of my job, not a single video, but whole content of Unfolding. Because, in the end, those are tutorials, not viral videos - there will be there for years helping many new people and they will watch it, eventually comment it or write to me.
You know, fame will come someday, maybe! 
That’s actually a sign of you having straight goals and focusing on reaching them. I wouldn’t say it’s bad. Maybe - if you would like to create some series, like for example I did with the platformer tutorial, I don’t have use, because I made a couple of platformers and a code I use is basically months of development further away from scratch, it might be a problem stopping you from finishing it. But if your goal is instead not doing it for you, then you might succeed with something like this. But you know, this is not the only way. I plan to open a dev log for a game I’m working on at the Gamedev Camp or about Witchcrafter - and it’s purpose wouldn’t be to teach precisely how to make such a game, because it would take me ages to explain everything. Every developer must go through the hell (or heaven) of learning to reach such state and it can’t be explained in a tutorial. On the other hand - those who learned the basics are looking for answers to more complicated questions - how to structure your game, how to optimize, how to do some complicated feature, etc. Something that can’t be explained precisely, in a form of a tutorial, but you can give: ADVISES. And I look for advises in many videos. Perhaps, this direction will be ok for you, because you don’t need to stress out about some of the above factors (to some degree) and start making what you want and tell people about it.
Perhaps, I just did a retrospective for me as well and I will follow my advises
Anyway, Klayton, you’re a great creator with many libraries - I would love to see you presenting them and telling us how you use them and how you design your game. I wish you everything best!
I think the videos made by you guys are among the best video content for learning Defold (the ones by Tactx are also really good). I’m sure you put a lot of time into each video. @Pawel how much time would you say you spend on a 20 minute video?
Another creator which I admire is Daniel Shiffman and his Coding Train/Nature of Code channel on YT: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCodingTrain
The Coding Train videos are more along the lines of exploratory live coding but there’s obviously a lot of work going into each and every video. Probably a lot of retakes and editing. The channel does have 1.6M subscribers so it is likely generating a fair bit of money for each published video.
I’m not sure what the recipe is for efficiently making video content that is educational and fun to watch. I hate to say it, but I bet there is a place for AI assistance in some parts of the process. Perhaps to refine a script or maybe somehow in the editing process?
It really, really depends I could say a few or dozen of hours, but it won’t be true in many cases, because it’s preparing for all this that takes a lot of time, as described above.
I use some AI tools like ChatGPT or QuillBot to check grammar in my scripts, but there is no way those can generate scripts for me, because as much as I would guide them (even showing my previous scripts as examples to use) they all feel dull for me and I would anyway rewrite them basically from scratch
Perhaps Sora, when released, will be able to help with some B-rolls to fill the screen in between so it might be a boost, we’ll see. Perhaps, I should find some other tools to help speed up some of the tedious work.
I’m still in the process of learning things, so with time I might get better and more effective at making those videos. Some Youtube creators make nice videos about how to make videos in general, like:
But sometimes I just try to follow other similar videos or use things I like from those:
Also, notice that our friend @OURABIG is making better and better videos (https://www.youtube.com/@ourabig)
I will also post to this thread whenever I release a Defold-related tutorial on GitHub, which I created a repository for here:
I usually write small tutorials for myself anyway so that I don’t forget how to do something non-trivial.
Date: February 21, 2024
Title: Window Geometry
Link: https://github.com/whiteboxdev/tutorial-defold/tree/main/window_geometry
This is my first text-based GitHub tutorial, as mentioned in my previous post. I like this method of using GitHub because markdown files are quite expressive and I don’t have to publish to an unknown website where people might be hesitant to regularly visit.
Some tutorials include demos in the form of functional Defold projects that can be downloaded, launched, and analyzed.
Nice one! 
And bonus points from me for using a text based tutorial! (as I find video tutorials not working for me personally)
A good one to make right now would be the new physics listener in 1.6.4. Shouldn’t be too hard and could really help a lot of defolders out (old and new).
I probably wouldn’t do a tutorial just on the physics listener because it’s no different than any other callback function. That would be more of a basic “here’s a feature of the Lua language” tutorial, rather than a Defold tutorial.
I think a tutorial on how to handle collisions in different scenarios would be good though.
I’d like both. The one you mentioned I kind of need right now. But it is definitely a longer video to do what you suggested.
The reason I think it’s a good idea is most tutorials out there don’t even mention the new physics listener so no one will even know it exsists. As a new person coming it we should try to make them aware of it and if they are learning on Youtube it would be great to have that come up in search as opposed to some 5 year old video on how to send collision messages.
My 2 cents at least.
You bring up a very good point that hits on the most fundamental difference between video tutorials vs text-based tutorials.
Video tutorials can’t be edited, therefore I believe they should not be created for topics that are likely to change in some way. A good example of this is “how to handle collisions in Defold” because the likelihood of changes or additions to collision strategies, the standard API, or custom libraries is very high. If the tutorial is done in text format, then it can simply be edited. If the tutorial is done in video format, then it becomes outdated, misleading, or at worst incorrect.
Something like procedural generation with cellular automata is a good video topic because it’s a technique that’s been out there for a very long time, and the concepts and fundamentals haven’t changed. It works and won’t ever not work.
I think this consideration of being able to edit vs not being able to edit should drive more tutorial-makers to choose the best medium, rather than just defaulting to YouTube.
