200 Days of Game Development

in the last death log Paul and I released our indie game Throne fall into Early Access in this video we're going to add a new level and a new game mode to the game we're currently on day 182 of this development Journey after discussing my ideas for the new level with Paul I was ready to start building as always I'm starting with a blockout so placing down the big shapes first and then slowly going in with more and more detail I mentioned before that I see each level we make as some sort of experiment and the experiment I wanted to try this time is having a very large open area and I also wanted to see what happens if we allow the player to build a very large wall around all of it because in Throne fall you can obviously not choose where to build your buildings you can only choose in what order to build them and choose between a couple of different upgrade paths cosmetic improvements are usually Paul's domain but I just wanted to get a rough feel for the vibe of the level so I put down some basic colors the next day I wanted to add some more unique features to the level cuz unique features are what make the level unique you got to be brave enough to add some weird details like this tongue licking into the ocean here makes it more memorable and adds personality I crafted a little test wave so I could see how it all felt in action

and it was very nice to see it all come to life I had another idea for a unique level feature I really wanted to try out and that's these little Islands here whenever we release a new level we also try to introduce one or two new buildings just to keep things fresh and interesting being able to expand your land by purchasing a bridge was an idea I found quite compelling after my little Bridge Project was complete and I had all of the main islands connected to each other it was time to move on to my next project which was crafting a new weapon for the player I came up with a weapon that shoots projectiles in all directions which is quite different from all of the weapons we have in the game so far for the active ability I wanted something that really allows for some expression of skill I went with this little circle that deals some massive Splash damage but with some delay so you got to predict the enemy movement correctly and as I was already in full-on content production mode I also made a new building the hero quarter which would allow you to build four brand new hero units a few days ago I talked with Paul about a brand new game mode that we might want to add to the game while I was prototyping the new level Paul had been busy and prototyped the first version of that new game mode we call it the Eternal trials which is essentially a ROP likee game mode where

you play on existing levels but against random waves of enemies we did not quite know if this idea was going to work or not which is why we prototyped it and to our surprise even in this early stage it felt absolutely fantastic over the time Paul and I got a bit bored of playing the game to be honest this immediately resp sparked our interest it felt like there were suddenly so many new strategies to explore we'll leave that to Paul for now and go back to building some new units here you can see the first hero unit the Golem at work which is a very tanky and very hard-hitting unit that also deals some Splash damage hero unit I made the day was the support Mage that can heal you and your troops while you're in combat I wanted hero units to be as diverse and interesting as possible so I thought how about we make a flying one it came with a lot of challenges the nef mesh situation on the new map alone was already quite tricky to figure out but after a full day of work and bu fixing it was finally shaping up for the final hero unit I simply duplicated the Archer and made some balancing modifications so that was an easy one to make but I think it still feels quite cool I love making enemies which sounds quite funny when you hear it out of context I guess and at this point in time the warhorse meta was

quite strong in the community the warhorse is a perk that allows you to damage units by riding through them I made a spear enemy that if you ride through it it deals massive damage and slows you down so instead of having to Nerf the warhorse too much we just now have this enemy who counters it quite effectively I also wanted to experiment with having a really high Health melee enemy and I also wanted it to be a zege engine so that all of the units that count a zege engines become a little more valuable so I'm not just randomly pulling enemies out of my hair I'm trying to make each of them fulfill a specific purpose quick shot of prototype Barrel Knights In Action here so far we only had a single flying enemy unit in the game it really felt like it was time to expand on our repertoire a bit I made the fury a big clunky flying enemy that is essentially a flying Siege engine anim made flying wizard which is one of the first enemies that can deal Splash damage and can therefore completely obliterate your army and that way this enemy is essentially a hidden buff to your defense Towers which I wanted to be more powerful for a while now with all of that new content added it was now time to play and play and play to hopefully get the new level balanc the waves I found particularly fun where the

ones with Baron knites knocking on your Gates eventually they'd usually break through somewhere and wreak havoc in your base I kind of liked this chaos and the struggle to survive at all costs I of course later found out that a lot of players did not like that at all which I also understand but it's kind of interesting to see that disconnect that you have with your players sometimes [Music] Community people are like yeah this or that perk or this or that you know weapon is bad and some others are like what do you mean it's so strong depending on the skill level of the player it changes everything on the perception yeah I'm aware there are very radical and also very radically different opinions on game balance okay maybe we'll give you a quick update on the current state of the content update yep perfect okay okay added UA

wind down here the new level so now we have a new weapon and I also just prototyped five new parks we just dropped a little development sneak peek and this is a little to-do list I made for the new map UA wind for things we still have to take care of like making visuals and Zounds for all of the new enemies and units and attack animations and that sort of stuff making new content is actually quite fast as you've just seen but getting it ready for release that's what takes up most of the time my prototype version of uer wind looked like this but within just a day Paul turned it into something that looked way better and way more finished just as I like making enemies I also like putting things on the map I really put this place on the map besides the new perks I also made some new mutators which you can use to challenge yourself and to make the game more difficult then there was the typical busy work of tracing the level outline so that the player can no longer go out of bounds Paul initially was not too excited when he found out that he had to make visuals for eight new units but he did quite a good job the baron kns to look quite a bit better than my initial placeholders

I worked on some balancing adjustments for the game and slowly but surely step by step our to-do list was turning green this triggers me so bad these freaking brain dead units are trying to go into the wall here why you you can't go there while I was struggling with bugs Paul added some more juice to the new weapon we initially wanted to release the new game mode and the new map together however it became more and more clear that the new game mode would take quite a bit more time so we decided to focus on the new map first certainly felt nice to have this much progress already in our back pocket though we were ready to release the new map so I decided to make a little mini trailer for [Music] it the next day we wrote the announcement and rolled out the update all in all making this new level took us 17 work days but we do not work on the game every day so all in all was still something like five to 6 weeks and guess

what we had to work on next no it was not Eternal trials I wish man I [Music] wish there were plenty of many of much of Plenty many much many new Buck reports kind of normal thing to happen after any big update to be honest we did some beta testing beforehand but it's never enough the nef mesh which is used by units to move on is usually quite a mess outside of our levels which cost a very variety of different problems so I eventually got tired of it and wrote a little script that just deletes all of them now it looks clean as hell n nom nom nom n we got a lot of different feedback that was kind of all over the place at times so we decided to craft a survey instead of all of that anecdotal evidence I really wanted to have some statistically sound data for once we added a little quality of life feature that allows you to call and select units directly at their building you can just select them like that fast survey results were in and also the bu fixing continued roughly a week later we had a

look at the data people are very happy with how the player movement works and they're also very happy with the music and the sound effects they are not very happy with the meta progression the castle Center upgrades and they're definitely not happy with how controlling units work here is a different one where we ask which kind of content players want in future updates and the three most popular ones seem to be levels in-game upgrades and choices and boss fights boss fights is a little weird one I did not expect that to be in the top three level difficulty this is interesting this is how many people found the difficulty great or almost there that's the green bar blue means too easy red means too difficult somewhat concerning Trend we notice is that people liked every new level we made a little bit less than the one before thanks to the tons of feedback I think I managed to figure out why so definitely lots of Lessons Learned for the future for example smaller levels really seem to work better for various reasons people do not like running vast distances and they want to see all of the action at once there was a bit more bug fixing to do but we were finally getting to a stage where we could get

back to work on the Eternal trials mode this was the point in time where we rolled out the quick select feature for the units and we already had a couple of other quality of life features planned as well for me personally it was now time to start balancing the Eternal trials mode from ground up which presented a variety of very interesting challenges that I could not wait to get started on one of the very first things I had to do was assigning a difficulty value to each enemy later on every wave will have a difficulty budget and we be able to spend that difficulty Budget on various enemies so to determine the difficulty of each enemy type I played a bunch of mono battles against just one single enemy type and once the difficulty of that felt about right I knew that I had it about correct the next day I continued my quest of balancing the difficulty value of every single enemy type by playing a full-on mono battle against it like the entire round from start to finish first wave to last wave Meanwhile we're already discussing and planning the next steps for the game here or yeah there maybe because then the Eternal Tri feature will be pretty much done the next step for me was to R randomize the enemy waves turns out that completely random

waves are actually not that fun though cuz if you zoom out you can see it all becomes one mud so what you need is meta randomization and meta randomization is basically adding additional layers of noise on top and we can repeat this process a few times adding bigger and bigger noise now when we zoom in in a specific area we get lots of greens but there's still some interesting randomization going on here even on the micro level you get a lot more variety this is my random wave generator script and it has a bunch of settings and those settings too are randomized I get the smaller fine grain randomization through this wave generator script and then I get some more interesting larger scale randomization by choosing a bunch of random settings for that script while I was starting to have some pretty fun and unique matches against randomized enemies Paul implemented a new save load feature instead of restarting a failed match from the very beginning you now have the option to restart the current day which is a huge quality of life Improvement and the following days were testing testing

testing one of our levels did not have a flyer nef mesh yet D Stein the plugin we're using casts the nef mesh onto a surface and does so in weird ways unfortunately so creating the nef mesh was quite a bit more tricky and took quite a bit more time than I expected I eventually made it work in some really silly ways but hey if it works it works all in all things are shaping up all right now we can choose which map we want to play on and with which weapon I played a few more rounds and could already see the next problem creeping up so far there was absolutely no limit on how many enemies could be spawned so there were just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds at times which in terms of balancing worked out but in terms of performance not so great today made some pretty cool architectural changes to the game all of the level data is now separated out into scriptable objects and then this is a completely over-the-top economy simulator I'm building for Eternal trials you can see that for every level I generate a build order now or I predict a build order then from that that exact calculated

build order tailored to that level I can predict the defense gold spend the economy gold spent and the defense power the defense power is mostly the defense gold spend in some levels it's a lot easier to get income than in others so the economy simulator now considers all of those factors and adjust the difficulty accordingly this system also allows me to start the player out with any amount of gold I want and the difficulty will still make sense there was one major problem left to be solved though to prevent the enemy overpopulation problem that complet roasted my computer a few times already we invented the elite enemy for prototyping purposes they're simply green now and they're about five times as strong as normal enemies whenever my wave generator wants to spawn way too many enemies at once now we can simply spawn Elite enemies instead that allows us to maintain the same difficulty while also making sure that your computer doesn't completely go up in Flames today the quality of life changes Paul workon are finally out I do had some ideas for Quality of Life Changes like making units teleport during the day and making buildings built faster so you don't have to wait for as long I'm just fixing a

couple of bucks today this one should be fixed to now I'm not super motivated cuz there's another day of bug fixes and system reworks ahead of [Music] me this one has been around forever I feel like I should finally go fix that not sure if I'm maybe getting to hung up on this when I die the big attack marker appears but the small dot shaped one is still there you see there's a DOT on the enemy closest to me but I can't attack you King freak circle is [Music] [Music] back

[Music] they spawn in one big [Music] wave and then one guy comes in the end so the one guy is is the second wave or what I added some more variety and spawn patterns and meta randomization to the Eternal trials mode now for example enemies can spawn in cute little groups like that which they could not do before we released the Eternal trials game mode on day 222 so by the time this video is out you can already play [Music] it

if you enjoyed this video I have good news for you I documented the entire development process from start to finish so if you want to see another one just click here and I'll see you over there