First Line to First Dollar

You've probably already caught yourself thinking...

First Line to First Dollar is a complete course that aims to help people finish and release their projects to share their dreams with the world. Because there's no way you will turn your dream into reality if you never finish your projects. The most certain way to fail your dreams is to abandon them.

It's time to finish and release your projects! Put an end to the shiny object syndrome. It's not normal to not finish your stuff! It's time to learn how to conceptualize, design, plan, manage, develop, and publish your work. Everyone else is making and sharing their art with the world, so why indie game developers are holding back their gift?

The course is divided into five modules, designed step-by-step in chronological order the way we will make to achieve the complete life cycle of a game.

WHO IS THIS COURSE FOR?

This course is for those wanting to take the next step into their indie game development career. The course is for intermediary game developers so we won't go into the basics of Godot Engine, learning how to code from zero, or how you can implement specific features. These kinds of content fit more free tutorials, and we have plenty of them out there, especially on YouTube.

If you already have experience with Godot Engine but don't understand how you can push a project to the end and launch it, this course is for you. If you already released a game project and are wondering if it was luck or if there's a method to manage and launch games, this course is also for you. If you also want to understand how to get into the process and designing and launching a game product, this course is also for you. Finally, if you are interested in understanding a method that you can rely on to design, develop, and launch a game project, this course is for you.

Our mission is to help you turn indie game development into a business. We are not talking about a multi-millionary one-shot project. We are talking about steady, healthy growth with proper sober management. Releasing one game after the other and leveraging on each project's success. This may or may not lead you to a multi-million project. But the idea is to help you plan, manage, and publish your games and have products to showcase and get a chance to make an income source out of them.

ABOUT ME

I'm a Brazilian solo game designer who, just like you, is working to make my dreams come true. I love to talk about how the human mind reacts to incentives and how game developers and designers master the craft of positive psychology. As Jane McGonigal says: game designers are happiness engineers.

I have plenty of experience studying, researching, making, and teaching game development. Started as a university professor taking the Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence chairs in 2015. Then, after quitting my master's degree, I decided that I actually wanted to get my hands dirty and make some games, not just research them.

In 2018 I started working in the GDQuest team, back then it was just me and Nathan, and we worked together until 2022. I love these days and I'm very grateful for the opportunity, really miss the talks with Nathan, he has been very busy ever since.

After that, I authored 3 books, including the Platformer Essentials Cookbook, which started my Godot Essentials series. I also got hired by Packt Publisher to author The Essential Guide to Making Multiplayer Games with Godot 4 and got invited to be part of their advisory board as the Technical Advisor for Godot Engine and Game Development content, which is very fun as I always get updates about what's about the upcoming books and hot topics!

I also got invited to author yet another book about Game Design Patterns in Godot Engine, which is the one I'm currently writing!

After over 22 game projects, some assets, plugins, contributions to the Godot Engine, over 100 YouTube videos, and over 80 consultancy sessions with people from the academy, indie studios, solo developers, amateurs, schools, and more, I felt like I could offer a lot more if I turn my consultancy session into an actual course, and this became the sparking idea for the First Line to First Dollar course!

WHY YOU SHOULD BUY IT

Because you want to be able to organize your projects and have a development direction, an action plan, and a marketing plan, and finally, be able to make your first dollars with it. Finishing and launching your projects is the only way you can move your plans forward. Your "luck" is not in the next miraculous amazing project but in every project that you build and release that will leverage your authority and expertise until you have enough heat to melt the ice walls and break into the industry!

Think about it for a second, how many times have you searched for a tutorial about "how to make [thing] in [tool]". I mean, I have plenty of videos about that, how to make something in Godot Engine. But how many times have you searched something like "how to break down my project into achievable steps?". Well, I know most people don't do it because I have some videos about that on my channel and they perform badly.

But how do you plan to finish your project if you don't treat it like...a project? With a beginning and an end? With actionable steps that you can wake up, look at, sit down, and do, and at the end of the day you know progress was made and know how much until you can press the amazing "Publish" button.

This is what we are trying to help people with. Don't prevent the world from experiencing what you have to offer.

THE METHOD

The idea is pretty simple. Think from the very end. I learned that by dating, I used to be anxious and insecure so I was with all sorts of thoughts in my head about how things could possibly work out, what could go wrong, and how could I avoid these scenarios. This only led me to frustration and self-realizing prophecies.

But when I started to think "Of course this will work out, as it always does, and we will have lots of fun. All I have to do is to act as if we were already having fun, as if it already worked out" I started to get really good at things. Inaction brings fear and doubt, action builds confidence and skill!

The message here is: knowing how it will end...what did you do to get to the place you want to get? How did the events unfold until you get that first notification saying someone bought your product? What happened to get into that credits screen? What happened to get to that final fight against that multiple-stage boss? What happened to getting into the boss pit...the final level...the level selection screen...the first level...so on and so forward until you get into asking yourself: what happened so I got the first line of the design document?

Thus, First Line to First Dollar. It's the unfolding of events to get to where you want your project to get but thought from the end as if your project was already a success. Thinking from the end as if it already worked so you can act as someone that will make it work.

This way, we learn how to understand the vision of our project, how to measure our progress, what we need to do to get there, and estimate how long we may take to get there, plan our budget, set some goals, and get our hands dirty so we can see our vision coming into life!