4 Years of Game Development | Making of Will You Snail?

i spent four years on making a rage platform about an ai that predicts your movement now it's finally done and it's coming out in two weeks on march 9th for siem switch playstation and xbox hey guys this is jonas making video games with you and i decided we're just gonna make a viral game today no problem at all at the moment the game is called goodbye ai that already tells you something about the unique selling point of the game i guess the hard part about it is that there's some sort of an ai and it tries to predict where you'll go next and that's where it will put the spikes it's just supposed to be a little side project this will probably not take all that long maybe we'll make three or four videos about this and then it's gonna be done so my editor the shelf man was so kind to edit down all of my devlogs into a 20 minute video let's have a watch i'm kind of scared because my early devlogs were a little cringe but i think it's gonna be a lot of fun so let's let's have a look

let's see how this started in march 2018 to the test and i have an absolutely brilliant idea we're gonna make a rage game that all let's players and streamers can rage at it doesn't need to be fun but interesting haircut back then i think i haven't been to the barber since then it needs to be memorable and watchable and hopefully those two factors will make it hugely successful at the moment the game is called goodbye ai but i actually think i want to rename the game to did you snail i think it's actually quite hard to did you snail that's kind of funny that's uh okay that looks nice and creepy and that's the first version of the ai okay march 2018 oh you're right there was a while where i did today a bunch of live streams um or however we want to call the game can you actually hear me let's talk a bit about how to make a game go viral i have actually no idea how it works but i think it has a lot to do with you can see that i'm very

uncomfortable talking here like will you snail but nobody plays them if nobody screams at them they can't go viral so what i'm thinking about at the moment is how can i make sure my game attracts streamers and youtubers will you snail [Music] oh that's kind of a cool logo why didn't i keep that it looks kind of i want to go viral and this is kind of juicy it predicts your movement and spawn spikes in your way so it's snail versus ai oh my god the music is annoying spike stones found in the air now and as you can see they don't spawn on top of each other now oh yeah and when i don't move i don't get killed that's another one oh what was that [Music] fantastic fix jones i'm so proud of you what [Music]

the game went through so many weird changes what's going on with my hair and i want to take you with me let's do a better death animation so for the death animation i wanted to have something really funny and crazy so i decided to randomize it actually quite a lot and dying is like a casino gambling game now because there are different kinds of death animations and you're always wondering oh will i get the super awesome one or will i just get that's not a feature anymore that got removed why did i remove that because you'll die a lot then another thing i worked on is the ai representation i wanted the ai to be a bit more prominent more visible i didn't want to have it as a part of the wall so i put it in the background i made it super duper colorful it's really fun to see through how many iterations squidward squid is the evil a iron thing in the background once again 2018 you're not an artist

which is completely fine not everybody needs to be and here we see a little bit of the evolution of the art style i guess you will wonder where do i get them how do you make art for your game when you suck as an artist well and now guess why i've been thinking about this question now let's take a step back okay because i designed this but not exactly yeah my design skills got a little better but there's you think i'm wrong or if you have a different idea i still have a long way to go even today the situation is in terms of design stuff and to experiment as efficiently as possible and that is a cool tip though again looked one week ago this is how it looks now so i basically just oh wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait most of it comes down to it i kind of like the flat side no why did i change it i hope this is finally the one and also fits the ai theme quite well because it also looks kind of tacky technology wait wait wait wait how did

it look like this is how the game looked and this looks kind of dope this is how it looks now so i basically just tried oh man most of it comes down to post processing now i'm finally happy with it i've changed it quite a lot i hope this is finally the one and also fits the ai theme quite well because i mean it's it's pretty much still that stuffy likey my english is brilliant not quite sure about that one because i haven't made a development plan yet so there's no production plan big mistake i think i will extend this big mistake a little bit so there are a couple more features i want to bring into the game oh my god i even had the trello board back then look at that so then have a look at how my trello board looks a little longer to develop i'm thinking maybe about three months but honestly it's hard to guess i hope you'll be able to play green

i got one oh my god okay the ai is evolving challenge for myself making three improvements to will you snail every single day the first thing i had to change was the freaking face of the ai because look at the old one as you can see it's very hard for me to get that stupid face right it's a pretty tough challenge because on the one hand i want to make it blend in on the other hand i want to make it stand out so you can instantly see it on screenshots but if it's too intrusive it disrupts the gameplay it makes it hard to focus on the game wow it seems like i was really frustrated with the readability for now i decided to remove the face completely and i changed the color of the snail the trail of the snail is more visible now and there's some additional feedback whenever the snail jumps in fact i think this helps the readability a ton it's way easier to follow the action which is great for watchability which has always been one of my main goals surprise here comes the face of the ai again the only difference being that now it's in the foreground and the color of the snail

has changed so that really allows me to be a lot more aggressive with the design i imagine the ai with a very cheeky and mean character so i had this epiphany that it would be kind of weird of it to hide in the background i made the face move around it looks a lot more alive now it kind of follows you and reacts to your movement yeah i think i'm still using the same script for that 2018 this is still 2018. that's crazy so here we go so today we're gonna get nine and a half the to-do list is slowly growing normally the trello to-do list branching but in terms of creative work it's definitely more than enough the pixelated phase was still very distracting so it's not visible now when it's not talking that was so unfair basically the main task for the day is recording and my desk as well oh my god first of all i had to come up with some voice lanes i want to implement and then at around 10 o'clock i started recording them

so i managed to implement the first two voice lines that's already the squid original voice i'm not sure in 2008 voice that's pretty cool i guess we need to reduce the stop probability of the prediction a little more i got you because this is obviously way too easy as you can see i almost made it first try maybe i should beat it before i tell you how easy it is maybe that would be a good idea and i assume that was also more or less the time where i decided to keep working on will you snail instead of ovus nova which was my main project at the time simply because i saw a lot more potential in will you snail overs nova was a cool concept but it was also confusing and not very appealing to a lot of people so you quit six months before before your graduation or

yeah same high fives yeah i'm not sure if i should be that proud about it because i i've studied there for for three years and it was actually a pretty good school why'd you quit you asked me why i quit why did you quit pretty good question when i watch that clip of me i kind of want to punch myself into the face a little bit i will don't worry jonas it worked out all right i guess i decided to quit game school early to become a full time well it was just a shame because yeah it sounds like a stupid decision studying there was actually kind of fun yes and even just speaking it out loud sounds pretty stupid but let me tell you i'm happy so this is where we are at we have a lot of cool ideas for level this level is scrapped by now this because you guys join me on stream every single day i'm very hyped that you can finally give this a shot yourself you can finally play this

what do you do if your indie game has an identity crisis and with that i mean your game doesn't really know what it is or where it belongs now guess why i'm bringing this whole topic up i've been working on a game called will you snail for quite a while now and you guessed it it has an identity crisis if you don't manage to fix it i'm pretty sure it will fall flat on its face is my game a rage game a skill based platformer a creative platformer for everybody or a story based game about ai now i'm pretty sure the first question that comes up is why not all of these things and i feel like that's the route i went with fundamentally different target audiences so by now i'm sure you can tell that this is a very tricky and nuanced problem which brings us to the question i don't think actually i think the audiences for those four points aren't that different the answer to that is hopefully it will work out all right because some cost fallacies already in action i've already invested so much time into it i don't feel like abandoning the project now secondly i really like the game project i like the craziness of it i like that it allows me

to tell a story about ai this game has been in development for quite a while now so i'm excited to give you an update on how it's going the game will come out 2020 probably spring is a lot of difficulty balancing which takes a surprising amount of time and with difficulty yeah that's true going through every single level and making sure that all of the four difficulty settings available are about right the to-do lists just don't get any smaller and often times it's peanuts but it's still funny that every time you see the how it feels uh it's a little larger that's kind of see where the game is at at the beginning of the week and then we'll compare where the game is at at the end of the week if you're making games then you might know that feeling of falling further and further behind in your way to optimistic timeline which i'm not gonna like can feel quite frustrating and discouraging at times but is it all real do i really make that little progress or is it just an illusion let's find out this week i

want to implement a bunch of cool new voice lines and rework the tutorial here that is tutorial text at the moment i want to get rid of that text because there's a better way to do this a way that fits better to the main selling point of this game the ai so here's the moment of truth how much did i get done this week before we look at the direct before and after comparison let's sum it up with i implemented 130 voice lines from ground up i created three new levels and i've put a lot of cool systems into place that will allow me to add voice lines even faster in the future so all in all not an insane amount of progress but progress nonetheless okay so here we go that's how the second level looked at the beginning of the week for example just a little reminder so i'm going to show you it looks so different now it's completely different human welcome to my simulation this is well this has been completely reworked this is not in the game anymore because this was like super passive we just were standing around in that level basically i've been working on this game

for more than a year now time to finish it off [Music] within the next four weeks i want to finish off my indie game will you snail on which i've been working on for more than a year now i've planned out all of the remaining tasks and it really seems like we can get them done within just four weeks yes big brain i did some planning for once i've pretty much already completed all of the levels and gameplay so the two most important things the game still missing are story and voice acting the game will not be released in four weeks it will be released in 2020 just to clear up some possible misunderstandings next challenge drawing a monkey and will you snail look great monkey this is a monkey also i made it way too small it looks like an old lady or something no i want monkey oh no i made the outlet will you snail is very forgiving in terms of terms of art style anyway cat psa monkey sprite never came into

existence luckily i think you can understand my evolution chain just fine without them here's what it looked like after four hours at this point i was starting to painting a little bit because i only had two hours remaining and there was still quite a bit to do holy crap though why why stop stop stop stop stop that's spoilers we have to censor that that's spoilers spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler no this is the end of the game no no we shouldn't show that that close to the game you'll have to go back and watch the dev logs if you want to see those spoilers [Music] why i should i shouldn't ask me it's jonas humor my strategy of running away and hiding failed there was only one more way to deal with my little voice line problem to face it i was scared but i knew that it was the only solution yeah by the end of the day i had

implemented all of the 100 voice lines but that's pretty much it is your reaction i'm really that bad that's the definition of insanity right there oh you jumped right into that just as i expected search query error for brainless objects only capable of moving in one direction two weeks ago i've challenged myself to finish this game within just four weeks so there are only two weeks remaining now i've already started getting quite nervous for no particular reason at all the launch is still quite a while away so that brings us to this week as well as to a horrible realization i had monday morning okay so from voiceline 350 all the way to 933 that means okay okay that's that's pretty much the majority of voicelines we have now i think now the local sheet is at like um i was actually thousand five hundred something like that because i just had no idea how long it would take me to record 600 voice lines and according to

my development plan i had two days for the entire process which yes includes editing 600 voice lines let's say it takes me 10 seconds to record a voice line that equals 100 minutes i thought the recording session would take me one hour and 40 minutes i'm fine totally fine of course we all know that by the end of the week i was no longer fine i can't hear the voice line i'm still not fine they are talking to me i think it left lasting marks yeah soundtrack yeah oh my god uh also music video expert finishing a game is so hard on the left you can see how the game looked like four months ago and here's how it looks now can you even spot the effing difference i'm making games full time right now this is where i sleep this is where i work on games and videos and here's where i do this and so i got to work with how is it that people can make entire

games in a single weekend but i made seemingly no progress for months that's a great question am i dumb oh oh now that i think about it that actually makes a lot of sense i upgraded the visuals of this level i haven't seen these in such a long time more levels you have the more time that's great keep them up to date and the same applies to everything in your game when you have more than 800 voice lines having them translate can be so much additional work big big thank you to everybody who has helped with the translation so far yes thank you join the will you snail discord we still can get all the help we haven't even we still need all the help we can get improvements yet because there'll always be that one guy who so desperately wants to play your game on a toaster i'll just allow you to disable whatever you want in the settings disable post processing cool disable the particle effects okay you want to disable the disco lights sure disable the player character i don't care disable rendering all together if you say so it's running on 60 fps actually still have to put that into the

game it's that's false advertisement it's not in the game yet [Music] you can actually you can see my devlog's getting a lot better here so yes i'm making progress but there's yet another reason why the development might take yet a bit longer which is the simple fact that i actually really like working on this game i mean i'm absolutely in love with the lore and with the characters of william snail which is something that never really happened to me before i almost don't want it to be over which i realize is a very dangerous thing to say i also started working on a song for the credits which is still in a prototyping phase [Music] the first credit song this the credit song 2 went through so many iterations so all in all the game made a lot of progress in a lot of different areas but unfortunately there's still so much left to do if you're scared that this game might never be finished then i can only tell you so am i

what is that it goes all the way here let's actually follow those trails oh my god at the beginning it looked like something different but was that real that would make sense oh yeah it's real welcome to another will you snail devlog the game about the fastest snail in the universe this is my new plant plenty make mcthirstyface which is arguably part of the new setup as well it's the only plant in the house and i'm taking your beds now how long you think it will survive it's still alive still alive as you might know all of the main content of the game is already finished all of the main levels are already done surprisingly my to-do list is still absolutely packed and makes me want to procrastinate like this [Music]

you cannot do that i'm not i'm not good at these meme thingies oh no i've been working on the game for more than two and a half years now still working on it but i finished it one year ago that's weird planned out all of the remaining tasks and it really seems like we can get them done within just four weeks yeah there was there was funny even back then it's but it's even it's even worse today it's not ready it has to be perfect oh i'll show you how perfect you are [Applause] [Music] 2021 september

that's not very long ago that's that was basically yesterday in jonas time [Music] you also might have noticed that squid has facial animations now these were trickier to make than it looks cause squid literally just consists of four brackets one line and two dots but a few sketches later this is eventually what i settled on neutral mean sad annoyed happy angry i added a few hats i added tons of new steam achievements i added an epilepsy warning to the game and and and translations for will you snail are a big no no no let's not talk about it let's not talk about it no i don't want to hear about it uh i'm gonna be i'll go away for the game i was more than grateful for that zone absolutely insane translation journey started one massive shelf man why did you pick this

it was absolute insanity how many translations you contributed to the project but then it happened disaster struck i brought a lawyer on board to cover all of the remaining legal questions before launch privacy policy whether i can use the name squid in my game if somebody else already used it and you guessed it copyright and that's when i noticed that i just completely messed up just because you voluntarily made these translations for me doesn't mean that i own them the copyright always belongs to the person who made it so it turned out that if i wanted to use any of your translations i would have to sign actually we got through that we got through that uh translation situation just fine but that's also why we could use some additional support with translations yeah dubious licensing agreement that even needs to contain their full name and address i estimated that the total cost of making the game will be at least 20 000 bucks so you want to have the game that is epic i couldn't be more grateful

which makes what i'm about to say even more painful release date off will you snail is not this year [Applause] i'm sorry [Music] we've been at this for four years now and the game is finally about to come out been wanting to make a new devlog for quite a while problem is everything i'm working on is either spoilers or boring stuff you make thirsty face are you thirsty are you thirsty are you sure are you prepared for the most insane will you snail feature you don't believe this there's a privacy policy button once again most game developers don't really bother with this i just i don't know why why that is for me i just want to do it the right way oh my god one more thing little skywalker you have to wish list will use nail on steam but seriously thank you so much for following this development journey

it was so much fun this chapter is coming to an end now i think this was a great celebration please if you want to support my work and make sure i can do this again and keep doing this in the future then please wishlist julius nail on steam support me on launch i really appreciate it a ton join the willy snail discord let's have some fun together lots of fun stuff planned there i appreciate your time i hope you enjoyed this journey as much as i did