Crushing GMTK Game Jam 2019 With Blackthornprod!

hey everybody in this video I want to show you how it's like to make a game with Noah Kali's aka black thorn prop and what I've learned from doing so we participated in the GM TK game jam together which is a game jam organized by Mark Brown aka game maker tool kit the game jam lasted 48 hours and the topic was just one Noah and we definitely have some different approaches to making games which made it quite interesting to work with him you'll see in a sec and of course I mean I've been fanboying and watching his videos for quite awhile now if you think like one year ago I was still at 700 subscribers or not not that big of a channel it feels surreal to me that Noah wanted to collaborate with me in the first place the first lesson here is that Noah's just a very nice dude thank you very much Noah and the second lesson is that if you can bring something to the table and if you show that you can bring something to the table people are way more likely to be willing to work with you that is definitely a very strange side effect of having a YouTube channel that it opens a lot of new opportunities a lot of new possibilities that otherwise you would not have had I was still really really bad when blackphone wanted

to join forces for a game jam that was really cool he clearly delivered on this one the game we made is called life is not very mature as it turns out we're both very mature actually used fridaymostly for brainstorming and then also for setting up unity collect Noah convinced me to use unity collab and was a good choice it's version control built right into unity so you can send files back and forth you can work together on one project quite easily so far I've mostly used to get an SVM for that but I've got to say unity collab has the better user experience you basically just press one button in unity and your projects are in sync again so that's already one of the really awesome things I've learned in this project and I think this will definitely come in handy in future projects as well we could have one yeah just one mechanic just one click one button one one ability for example yeah that could be an interesting one a server play a character that has just

one after like a super easy way to interpret the theme but not really funny later the one player there's only one player it's not very good so that's a nice thing when making a game together is that you can just keep bouncing ideas back and forth and we did that for a while we came up with a couple of different ideas and they started getting more and more concrete as well a game that you can only play once and after that you can't play it anymore again that consists of just one second or one decision again where your character grows older over time and lives for just one minute when deciding for a game Jim ID I feel like the three most important things are that it's a concrete idea the scope is small and it is somewhat interesting and that it fits the topic of course so we pretty much used that criteria to boil our game ideas down to just the best - which included the game about the character who goes through an entire life cycle in just one minute as well as a less concrete idea about controlling one plant growing in different directions and for some reason we actually decided to go for that one because the other one seemed a little

bit daunting the scope seemed a little too big controlling a plant felt like an interesting idea and also like an interesting design challenge I was pretty confident that I could make the gameplay of this work somehow but of course it wasn't guaranteed a little bit of a risky call so it's probably good that Noah stopped me here a little bit just one of the points where I could really feel our different approaches I'm coming more from a mechanic's point of view I'm trying to find and explore interesting game mechanics and then Noah's coming more from an art point of view he's thinking more about what inspires and what gives him the best ideas and clearly and also understandably the aging character was more inspiring to him which also 100% shows in the final game by the way it's something I forgot to think about in the moment but when you pick a game idea make sure to pick something that fully utilizes the skill sets of all of your team members the Asian character idea just allowed us to combine our strengths whereas the other idea might not have good morning Jonas good morning a good morning it's not too early I hope and

partly I think I managed to get a cold or something as long as you don't have the flu I've been thinking a lot about our game and frankly I don't know if I feel that inspired by the idea I've been I've been thinking more and more about yoga idea like one life with that of creature that grows older and older company evolved over time and I feel like it can be fit the theme really well in fact so I'm gonna share a quick screenshots you start small he grows very big then when he grows older he says shriveling up and kind of shrinking a bit we started flashing the idea of more and more although we also had to do a little bit of scope management initially we thought okay it be cool if there's a certain span and the lifetime of the creature where it can fight we just discarded that idea entirely in order to keep the scope somewhat manageable and instead we focused on things that are really easy to control and implement in unity for example the size of the character the jump height and then we also added a

flying ability at the end of the creatures live Ridge and my opinion really helps to make the end of the creatures life feel a lot more climactic so as soon as we had figured the basic lifecycle out we got started I with the programming and Blackthorne with the art I've quite a bit of routine encoding platformer control spin also didn't take me very long usually I'm pretty used to working with this programmer art for quite a while at the beginning of a project but let me tell you black thorn is just so incredibly fast at making art I didn't have to look at this for very long after an hour or two he had already completed the entire 60 frame animation of the character transformation so that was ready to be implemented into the game which I immediately got started with after that I had the time to give the player character a little bit of wobble as well and when I was done with that the game suddenly looked like this black thorn made some first graphics I gave the character a little bit of wobble coming along nicely it's still the first day 12 o'clock no not quite hey hey Axl have you taken my collab yes

awesome beautiful very very nice I'm delighted oh yeah that's a relief I want to take a break I think a lunch break break soon to recharge batteries and then we can super cap pressing play let's see how things are oh yeah well I'll score squishy feels yeah he's definitely too fast we have to tweak that but otherwise things all I think things seems to be working pretty well yeah well I can fly so halfway through the first day all of the basics were already working the graphics were already in the game overall that is a very good sign if you can pull that off that probably means you didn't over scope I felt pretty confident at this point that this game would turn out somewhat ok however there are still a couple of things to figure out for example he objective of the game we hadn't decided on that yeah and I think we can like we start thinking about levels and stuff once we have 2 player controls like well defines yeah there's

about to see like what words like the wall height the platform should be it's tough if we don't have the right yeah clear controls okay and any matching all of these player controls here there's something very interesting haven't have never done something like this before where over the course of an animation the gameplay parameters changes as well balancing something like this is actually pretty interesting challenge haven't done something like this ever so we'll see how it turns out it's not the jump height the movement speed and even the gravity of the character everything is animated everything is changed slowly over time which makes for an in pretty interesting feel to be fair that sort of control scheme obviously has a couple of downsides as well it feels a little more inconsistent for players and it definitely takes some getting used to you need to learn how high the character can jump at which time during its life cycle for example but on the plus side it also feels very interesting refreshing and can also be very rewarding if you manage to use the character's abilities correctly no I'll obviously give some awesome feedback on the balancing as well what's quite challenging to make the character field

both fun to control as well as unique throughout its entire lifecycle for the time we had balancing didn't turn out perfect but clearly good enough when you're young you can jump really high you move a little bit slower but your character reacts really quickly then as you're getting older and older you your jump starts getting lower and lower but your movement speed starts going up but you also can't accelerate and decelerate as quickly anymore so every stage of your lifetime comes with different advantages and disadvantages basically and in my opinion it really sells that feeling of going through that transformation really sells that feeling of getting older which is really nice she has a really high jump which is I think pretty cool yeah he only has that far for a short only person yeah it's true a little bit low enough I want to stop were killing like arts and stuff I think we need to try and figure out how do we actually turn this into a playable game but it's already playable but how do we make it into something quite fun now and then be realized that the whole day hahaha they had got insane what have we done no no

well it's not too late to scrap the project so ok let's restart this is something you write next now why no I was obviously kidding there he actually had some doubts creeping him you didn't know if this was gonna end up working out but I managed to convince him to stick it through which I guess is another advantage of working in a team like it's way easier to stay on track and to stay motivated and all the things got quite a bit more fun and clearer when we figured out what the objective of the game was going to be it would not be an open-world exploration based level would work kind of well because that gives you this replayability that rewards you for understanding how your character evolves over time could have a nice learning curve true it could be nice I'm trying to play in the game there be playing and I don't know that the controls do feel they feel nice but there is something a bit like frustrating when you when you're old and you can't like jump very high or when you're really young and you can jump very high it feels like quite limiting

even though I know that's not on purpose it feels a bit annoying for the player I think Noah was right of course so I went back to balancing there's a lot of balancing on day 1 I've been working on this animation for quite awhile now it's already five pm but I feel like it feels very nice now let's check it out cameras even zooming in and out a little bit as well now and also implement a little bit of screen shake when the character lands to sell the weight of the character which of course does not happen assembly when you when you character small the cool thing about that is that I could just keep using my character animation for all of this like even the camera zoom and the amount of screen shake is just animate all animated in this one animation so all of that didn't require any custom code at all which saves us a lot of time and then it's the last act of the day I started implementing the winning condition so now I could start doing some level design in the morning and they also started working on the soundtrack of the game who can hear the first draft that I made Saturday evening

[Music] however somehow that didn't quite sell the feeling I wanted to get across so I started another attempt Sunday morning I know I was creating some more graphics for the level and I ended up with this what you're hearing in the background right now and the cool thing about this music is that it consists of multiple layers that depending on which layers are active sells a little bit of a different feeling and then in unity I used mixer snapshots to simply blend between those layers so now the music has a nice progression as the character ages came I implemented the dynamic music [Music]

hello hello hello oh man making really cool progress this morning I'm not sure if you wait a second I'm gonna give you my new collab lots of good idea that hides there okay before we leave lots and lots of cool ideas oh yeah I'm just keeping having weird things like these stuffed creatures are basically using the girls to lure their prey in and then just kill him about the night good to wake your cow snots night club I've also put in like the maths notes basically just cut like a demo of how the character transforms and a speed speed sped up version but yeah just just explore man try and see all the things you can find oh yeah man it's a really fun like

suddenly I have kind of lonely like little ideas and there's still lots of things I want to do but I better count down a bit cuz I'm not gonna have time to make everything completely work now the rest of the video will probably feel a little bit cut short mainly because it is I have this new rule for myself that says I can only spend one day a week on editing cause I want to make games right I don't want to spend the entire week on editing YouTube videos and in the last couple of weeks that has gotten a little bit out of control we're barely had any time to work on my main project we'll use snail so I'm short my editing time is coming to an end but there's still a couple more things I want to say we of course spent pretty much the entire Sunday on polishing our game adding sound effects I tried to make the camera movement feel a bit smarter but it made a couple of mistakes and it ended up feeling a little bit squishy and wobbly there are a couple of sections in the game where the camera feels quite nice and smart for example in this long corridor here where you're moving to the left and the camera is showing you perfectly where you're going but then in a lot of other sections of the game it is too soon in and it moves around too

much which made a couple of people feel dizzy actually the main mistake I or we made here is that we just didn't pay a lot of attention to this we didn't really notice was a little bit of a blind spot of ours so lesson learned next time I'll pay a little more attention that the camera feels more steady and if in doubt then I'll just sumit out a bit more no other done absolutely amazing job with all of his art in this game in my opinion and it was an absolute pleasure to work with him highly recommend you check out his video about the game gem on his channel I'll link that in the endcard as well as in the description [Music] Shoeless are you there yes you actually won the game yeah you beat the snot world my record is actually six now so I'm getting better I definitely said that I can I can win the game did you get the snow girl at the end of the corridor was she the last one

you got yeah of course err yeah basic strategy another high-level strategy is never to get the girl in the middle play the first girl dislike very close by I leave her in case of like urgent like a massive urgency but I need a girl and then to everybody who came from Blackthorn's channel actually want to get from warm welcome thanks for watching this video all the way till the end highly appreciated check out my other videos I have a lot of cool games of stuff here I think and um I'll see you next one ba ba