Can I Finish my Indie Game in 4 Weeks? | Devlog

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 the game is finally getting to a point where I think there's a light at the end of the tunnel 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 all of the best practices I talked about in my burnout video recently I'm gonna try to keep them up that means no crunching which actually adds a little bit of an extra challenge to this challenge but I know that in the long run this will only make me more efficient so I decided to settle on six hours of work per day which leaves me with around 100 hours to finish this game can it be done let's find out will you snail us a game about artificial intelligence you go up against a superhuman evil AI called squid and let's just say compared to other AI antagonists who know squid is a

bit more trololololol and just doesn't seem to take ruling the word very seriously the game is mainly a skill-based platformer but with a little bit of a twist the twist being that the AI tries to predict your movement and spawn straps and spikes in real time in order to stop you from completing the level will you snail us a challenging game it is a little bit of a crazy game if that sounds like something you might be interested in please be so kind and head over to Steam and hit that wish list button because that makes sure that you don't miss the launch and it also helps me to gain some additional visibility the link to the steam page is obviously in the description I've pretty much already completed all of the levels and gameplay so the two most important things the games still missing our 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 now let's get right into the first week there's gonna be a four-part series hope you enjoy yeah this entire area basically before upcoming weeks and I've split this into our six hours per day and I think I've planned to somewhat generously for the

first week I'm mostly focused on implementing some new story beats into the game dealing with the lure of will your snails always super challenging for me cause I've never done it before I've never told any stories with my games I mean in theory I have it all written out on my windowsill but I'm just really curious to see how people will react to it I have no idea if it's any good that two story beats I've implemented so far as this ocean of lights right here as well as this universe fractal we made on stream a couple of weeks ago so two of these green cards are already implemented four more to go what scares me most about my storytelling approach is that there's not really any development throughout the story the story is really mostly about figuring out the universe you're in is that enough story for a skill-based platformer let's just hope the answer to that is yes [Music] we have been working for two hours now here's what I've got so far this is the news story level and the voice line has not been recorded yet but it's already triggered properly and we have some cool

little squares here to pop now usually I'd be sitting inside now and work and then at the end of the day I'd be met that I didn't get any some I tried really hard to take some proper breaks this week and I think I can tell that it paid off you just feel so much more refreshed after a walk and that just allows you to be way more productive the toughest thing after the break was figuring out how I wanted the news story levels to look like there are a lot of different optional of cool things that might have worked but in the end I decided to go for this look right here as that kind of fits the underwater theme of that chapter I'm not quite sure how many stories spoilers I should put into these videos where to be fair there's not that much that can be spoiled most things are pretty obvious probably the section was mostly supposed to raise some questions about existence in general about evolution perhaps what some of the wider implications of evolution could be in the context of artificial intelligence I'm just saying things that make me sound smart at this point let's move on to Tuesday I started out by writing the voice lines I needed for the story section then started

blocking out the level even though I wasn't quite one on version sure while I was going for so other versions I just improvised a little bit then I went for a quick run before I started filling the level with some humans the first draft of the level looked like this spoiler the humans will all die so I decided to add some drones capable of making that happen at this point I probably had only about three hours remaining so I had to prioritize what I want to do next before I make this look any better perhaps I should bring this into a functional state in the first place for example all of these drones need to fly out here when I enter the second trigger zone or something like that and then they should only start shooting when I enter the start trigger zone so I focus on making those crucial things work first and then I moved on to adding some fireworks making those people bounce around a little bit the final result of the day looked like this [Applause] [Music]

[Music] so even though this is pretty cliche I feel like it already has quite a bit of emotional impact and it definitely helps to establish squit as the villain 9:00 a.m. my plan says implementing moist lines today but a morning mood for more story steps just and more story staff so I did some quick rescheduling and off we go the idea for this level was to build a horizontal level that basically resembles a time line this is how the time line looked like after two hours of work next challenge drawing a monkey and we'll use snail look great monkey this is a monkey also I made way too small looks like an old lady or something no I want monkey oh no I made the Outlands too thick no that's not how I want this to look let's try again and saket PSI monkeys bride 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 pending a little bit because I only had two hours remaining and there was still quite a bit to do despite that I took my second two-hour break of the day it some slack lining in the garden which actually gave me some great ideas on how to finish the level on time for example by reusing some assets I had already created and they are there just one hour later the level was done showing the evolution and reproduction of superintelligence and every time you leave the level on the right you'll enter it again on the left so you're basically stuck in an endless loop and you have to figure out how to escape speaking of escape on first I finally did something else I'll implement some in-game voice lines instead I'm thinking the way I go about this is I'll just start writing a bunch of voice lines here and then I'll implement them wow what a crazy good plan Jonas and that's exactly what I did the voice lines are basically the only other big part of the game that's still missing and they're actually quite important because they are what makes wit vitalife there were a lot of the humor of the

game comes from there really part of the main selling point that you have that cocky AI that constantly keeps making fun of you I want to do my best to create that illusion of actually going up against something intelligent which is of course not the case but I feel like if squid is able to react pretty believably to everything the players doing that could make for some pretty crazy and memorable moments okay very nice I've been busy I've been writing quite a couple of voice lines yeah about 64 voice lines which took me quite a while cause obviously you won't don't want to be too sloppy with the writing the writing so obviously quite important first of all I'm gonna take a break at a yadda yadda that was very nice let's download the TSV file into game maker no we have access to all of those white lines and I can see my voice lines on the left and then I can see my quote on the right pretty useful setup makes looking back and forth quite easy and then of course in game I already have a system in place that makes implementing these voice lines quite simple if for example these eight voice lines for when you die to a spike implementing those voice lines are basically two lines of code if you were killed by a spike then play one of these death spike voice lines implemented a

life line I just mark it green at the end of the day had a ton of new voice lines in the game for example there's a voice line for being killed when you're idle for when you die after a jump for when you die after falling down from somewhere even one for when you die after button smashing your keyboard unfortunately it's still a little hard to imagine how it will feel like in the finished game without the placeholder voice lines nevertheless this was a pretty epic week I felt productive I didn't feel stressed got a lot done and had some fun the series will continue for another three so it subscribe jewishness a game right now are squid when it come for you you might be wondering what happened to Friday the answer is guess when I edited the suta video and need some time for that as well stay happy until the next episode [Applause] [Music]

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