Can I Finish my Game in 1 Week? | Devlog

four weeks ago I've challenged myself to finish off my indie game project we'll use nail within just four weeks now the time for this challenge is up and of course I've documented the final week of development for you so let's see how it went and what we ended up with and when you snail you go head-to-head with a superhuman evil AI that tries to predict your movement and spawn straps in real time it's a pretty crazy game with a ton of variety in gameplay plus it all just a little bit of a story for you to figure out in case that sounds interesting for you I highly recommend you head over to Steam and hit the wishlist button because that way you won't miss the launch in 2020 at this point it was still lacking two music tracks for the game so that's what I started to tackle on Monday first up was the music for the final boss battle of the game if you've seen last week's left lock then you know that I've already got

a little bit of an idea for that one thing I actually just found a cool melody for the boss fight so copying that idea into Cubase was step number one after that I started to flesh it out a little bit and to add a couple more instruments [Music] [Applause] [Music] and just from listening to this you might already be able to tell that this doesn't really fit the boss fight that well yet that doesn't really have enough tension yet the problem was for a long time I didn't notice that at all because I was too focused on making the music just put the music into the game real quick to see if I need to change something or if it works like that is trying to get a feel for where I'm already getting the correct feeling for the wall so I know I did not so the first thing I did was speeding the music up a little bit and adding a drum track

also added this epic section at the end [Music] and then I listened to that music while watching some bossfight footage which by the way it's a great workflow unfortunately I noticed that it was still not quite what I was looking for it still didn't have that oh my god I'm going up against something super huge kind of feel so I tried to rework the music a little bit to capture that which I partially succeeded in but unfortunately in terms of the feel it was still not where I wanted to yet I think I put a bit much pressure on myself because I knew that this would be the final song of the game this more or less the last thing you hear so I just wanted this track to be worthy of the grand finale which due to my high expectations was a bit tricky to follow

it was already starting to get dark I still didn't have a good concept for the boss fight music and I was seriously considering to start over with the entire track what as usual a little break helped me to clear my mind and after just a bit more experimentation this is what I came up with so pretty epic I was quite happy with that I even kept most of the other parts in the track as well so I didn't have to throw away two too much just the overall feel has a lot more tension and a lot

more and possibility now the second and final music track I was still missing was the one for combat there are couple of parts and we'll use nail where you get a gun and can fight enemies the track started out like this this time paying a little more attention to how I wanted it to feel right from the get-go after a bit more fine-tuning the second version then sounded like this I of course made sure to test it in-game very early this time around then I added this section and then I just polished it out a little bit for the final trick

[Music] so that is more or less the entire soundtrack of the game complete I've already been asked a couple of times if I'll release the soundtrack somewhere rest assured yes you'll be able to listen to it both here on YouTube and you'll probably also be able to get it as a DLC on Steam of course I had to rush these two tracks a little bit for my four week challenge my main concern right now is that these tracks might become a little annoying when listening to them too many times but for this four week challenge like good enough let's move on I started into Wednesday with a giant playtesting session so basically just playing through the entire game and writing everything down that I still wanted to change the ironical thing was that I spent so much time playtesting that it didn't even have that much more time to make anything else happen now

let's obviously focus on the Box first [Applause] [Applause] some of the voice lines seem to be missing or we're not triggered properly so I went back into Cubase where I figured out that yes in fact those voice lines were just missing so I ended up recording some of them a little bit of time but was an easy fix so I could cross it off the list some of the other box were a little harder to find and reproduce like this one here where squid keeps rambling on about reducing the

[Applause] [Music] clearly one or two voice lines too much right there took me a while to hunt that back down but I eventually found it then I made sure squids face stays attached to the drone during the boss battle and at the end of the day my list looked like this which to be honest I was quite happy with [Music] Challenge for today closing as many things as possible off of this list so that's pretty much what I did a couple of bug fixes a couple of improvements here and there for example I experimented with the underwater movement some more but eventually decided to keep it the way it is now squid in the boss fight got a little visual update from this to this so I basically just made it look a little less like a placeholder graphic by no means perfect yet but with my time limit I have to do what I have to do which

brings us to the question but Jonah is what will you do after this week when your game is finished and to be honest the answer to that is I'll probably just keep working on the game anyway because the goal of this four-week challenge was to get the game to a point where in theory I could hit the publish button at any time and in fact I think I have achieved that successfully but that being said of course the game is still a little rough around the edges of course there are still a ton of things I could do to make it even better which means yes I'll absolutely use my time to launch to get the most out of this game small things so missing but nothing major balancing the second phase of the boss fight was another big task on Thursday but in the end I got pretty much everything done very nice I'm very happy right now now before we have a look at the final result I'd say let's see what we've learned and accomplished during these four weeks you might remember week one where we implemented a ton of new story elements into the game next challenge drawing a monkey and we'll use snail look great monkey this is a monkey also I made small week to where we implemented a ton of

placeholder voice lines into the game and did a lot of writing some parts of your development plan always take longer than you think seems like this was the one I've written about 100 voice lengths just as starting voice lines for the level so for example voice lines like this right here oh it's already time for the laser show I love the laser show not to forget about week 3 where I almost went insane by recording 600 voice lines come back humid I Jumilla I'm fine totally fine of course we all know that by the end of the week I was no longer fine and of course now week four where I made the two remaining music tracks that were still missing and just fixed a bunch of other small stuff that was still left to do the main things I've learned from all of this is once again that yes it is possible to get a lot done without crunching I felt extremely

productive even though I worked only for six hours a day and I definitely feel like this is a word mode I could keep up without burning out for quite a while then secondly definitely make sure to include some buffer time in your development plan the buffer time I included in my development plan definitely saved me big time otherwise it would have been so stressful take enough breaks and think twice about making a game that requires a lot of voice lines now let's have a look at the result hope you enjoyed this little four-part miniseries don't forget to wish list will you snail on Steam and now here's what we ended up with [Music] have you ever asked yourself why you're here you taught me how to manipulate it kill on your behalf so that's what I did [Music] and everybody is how you catch a

volleyball [Music]