5 Days of My Life: Indie Game Development

hey this is Jonas and I'm currently working on an indie game called will you snail I'm 24 years old live at home with my dad got up at 8:00 today and I've made exactly zerar with my games so far I've been making games for more than 10 years now full-time for 5 months and my ultimate goal is simply to keep doing indie game development fulltime which I'm not going to lie it's going to be very tough to pull off but it's just too awesome not to at very Le SK it my best efforts I spent the morning making music for my game and performing in a cringey dance session so I made the music you're listening to right now for levels like this one this is a disco level where you have to hit the correct dance moves while dodging bullets and my goal is definitely to make an indie game Jem pack with creative and crazy stuff like this we have winter levels we have underwater levels we even have a Tower Defense level we have a space Defender level I really want to explore what's possible

with simple jump and run mechanics try to give me a challenge will you that is squid the AI antagonist of the game and he's in control of the levels he can change conveyor belt directions spawn spikes directly in front of you and he's out to freaking destroy you this never gets old I want to answer some of the most frequently asked questions real quick how did you learn to make games the answer is I made a ton of games they started out pretty crappy and then they became better and better over time also I studied games designed for 3 years then I dropped out and now I'm trying to become an indie developer yay which game engine is this game maker Studio 2 but why didn't you use Unity actually game maker is a pretty good engine for making 2D games I complain about it quite a bit but really it's a it's a solid engine for making 2D games and also Unity is a bit nicer for bigger game projects so I guess next time I'll use Unity how do you make money the answer is I don't make any money I don't have another job I'm doing full-time indie game development and I'm also not

particularly ashamed that I have no income yet I just got started I've been doing this for 5 months I still have time but then how do you pay for development actually development is pretty cheap because it's just me I still live at home with my dad so far my parents pay all of my bills because they are awesome and they believe in me they think I can make it I'm in a really lucky position and I don't take it for granted now if I fail it's 100% on me okay I have the perfect circumstances to make this work and if I can't make it work it will be 100% my fault also I spent the morning play testing one of your games to give some feedback because if I have a bit of time to spare that is definitely something I like to do I want to have a positive impact on the Indie Games industry and that is also one of the reasons why this YouTube channel exists I want to share my knowledge with you and help as many of you as I possibly can so after getting some work done in the morning it was time to buy some groceries and have breakfast and then I decided to create another song for my game first song is complete so I'll just duplicate the entire project

the track I created this time is for dark puzzle levels like this one you should be able to hear it playing in the background now before we continue traversing through this awesome week of indie game development there are a couple more questions I want to answer real quick first of all when did you start working on this game and the answer is in March 2018 I created the first prototype so that's about 11 months ago and here's a snippet from the video I uploaded back then hey guys this is Jonas making video games with you and I decided we're just going to make a viral game today it's a very simple jump and run game you play that snail here very easy to understand and you need to dodge those spikes that are coming out of the ground 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 going to be done so turns out I made a couple more videos about it however I only started working on it fulltime 5 months ago and before that I didn't really invest a lot of time into it okay then when will it come out and the answer to that is I have no idea yet I do have a production plan and I want to finish the first version of the game

at the end of March so that's in 6 weeks but there's a pretty good chance that I'll keep working on the game after that a big portion of the game's already complete I have something like 25 levels so far but there's also still a lot left to do honestly I think I'll probably never run out of things to do there's always something that could be improved that could look nicer play better so I guess we'll see at which point I'll be willing to release it next point on the agenda getting some level design fixes done level design definitely one of my favorite parts of making indie games and before I knew it it was already time to prepare for the live stream yeah time time flies so quickly now it's already time to get ready for today's live stream this needs to go back here welcome to another will snail development live stream today we've got some very cool things planned so obviously some colors do not quite work correctly here and all so I

think it would be a lot more interesting if these destructible walls uh would fall into a different direction okay there might be no point in watching the entire live stream here but let's just say they really motivate me to get something done for my game you often times have pretty cool ideas for me and on top of that I really enjoy hanging out and connecting with you solo in the development feels a little lonely at times so I feel like this is a good way to change it up a bit we managed to create three new levels during the live stream first of which is this one and shooter level this one's pretty interesting as well because you have to be careful not to shoot the platforms you need to stand on and then we also got started on this level where you just have to shoot a bunch of really fast drones absolutely desperate Tuesday started out by playing another fewer game Laser Maze which I actually enjoyed a lot and then of course I started working on my own stuff again implementing some more story elements into willu snail the story will partially be told via voice acting from the main antagonist and partially via those text files to be honest it's

probably a pretty nerdy storyline about artificial intelligence that is absolutely something I want to tell a story about because I think AI will become hugely important in the next decades are my storytelling skills any good I don't know probably not I'd still like to give my antagonist squid a bit more dep than just oh he's the bad Ai and he wants to destroy everybody I'd like him to be a bit more nuanced than that maybe even make him a little likable and I think I can pull that off I'll have to start streaming in 1 hour so barely enough time to go for a [Music] run welcome to another will Nell development live stream challenge for today is to finish off the Disco section of my indie game will you snail maybe you're wondering why I have weird stuff on my head during live streams it's more or less just a running gag and on top of

that I feel like it helps me to take some weight off of my shoulders it reminds me that I don't need to take myself too seriously and that not everything needs to be perfect not going to lie though streaming still stresses me out a little bit at times in this stream we managed to polish this drone shooter level out a bit and coded some new Mechanics for this laser dodging level on Wednesday I implemented some story elements into the Disco chapter which is the second chapter of the game and Polished out the look of these laser beams a bit they look a lot nicer now and on top of that Wednesday was also the day where I recorded the Q&A section of this video cuz unfortunately this video doesn't make itself I would really like to pass something on to you and that is the earworm that was stuck in my head for the entire week so far you're welcome here's the will you snail main theme [Applause]

on stream we managed to finish the boss fight of the Disco chapter which means the Disco chapter is finally completely done yes as I've said there are still a lot of things we could improve about it but the first draft is complete a I missed that button prompt but I dodged those bullets so skillfully so yes the boss fight is basically an epic dance battle I think it turned out pretty fun Thursday you guess it first of all spending a bit of time on storytelling refining some of these interactive text files a bit further doing a bit of bug fixing and then during the live stream we finally managed to get started with the underwater chapter what oh man makes me feel really dizzy did you do that on purpose luckily we got that started out and created two pretty cool levels Friday I usually don't have time to do any game development because hello today simply editing

woo here we go so that's what I've what I have so far I'll just edit the rest of this upload it to YouTube and then make a thumbnail and find a title and write a description and choose the correct text and then hope does that it does well making Indie Games is awesome but Success is Not Guaranteed at all there are so many more challenges to overcome and I'm excited as hell I'll absolutely keep you in the loop and share everything I learned with you so if you want to pull this off as well becoming an indie game developer I recommend you check out another video there's already a bunch of very useful stuff on my channel that you don't want to miss out on a will you snail related video like this one was just long overview so hope you enjoyed and see you in the next one