First Prototype to Actual Game in 22 Days!

this video starts with a very ugly looking prototype and ends with a much better looking game where Paul and Jonas and we're making a minimalist medieval base defense game during the day you build and upgrade your castle and at night you defend against waves of enemies one of the first big decisions we have to make now is our art style because if you want to stand out with a simple game like this we really gotta nail the art both Paul and me are making games full time so the stakes are huge if you want to know what happened so far then check out the last two videos for now we started our day with a little bit of art research I mocked up a little scene in unity with some assets from the asset store here's how my result of the day looked like and here's what Paul came up with so at this point we're pretty much just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks my black and white houses did not stick a couple of desperate attempts later it became clear that whatever Paul was doing was kind of more promising so I shifted my focus more towards helping Paul and one of the ways I did that was by doing an overpaint of one of his screenshots you can see here the problem is that stuff doesn't really feel grounded so I painted in a couple of little sprinkles gave it a bit of texture this fake ambient occlusion or outline around

buildings on the ground and it does look a lot better now after that I tried it out in engine so we can see how difficult of a change it actually is and it turned out to be okay here's how it looked like meanwhile Paul made some wild experiments that went more into an experimental Direction and then we found a style we were happy with so time to show it to our friend Friedman who's a way better artist than we are hey it's this one and he was like let me see oh yeah that looks like a cool start what do you mean start this is finished this is finished finished thank God we have some honest friends otherwise that's what we would have gone with back to the drawing board it was one philosophy we tried to live by is be cheap so you can be generous so that basically means content should be easy to make so you can make a lot of content so that means not only does our art style have to look great it also needs to be fast fast one thing that came to my mind was to make something that's maybe a little inspired by Mini motorways or mini Metro all right here

are the results of the day this is what I made and let me show you how it looks in game mini castle ways Paul didn't give up so easily and decided to move ahead with the other art style in the meantime a big leap for what happened when we decided to change the camera perspective to an isometric top-down camera I decided to do another quick Over Paint and Photoshop so check this out this is the old perspective top-down camera and this is the new asymmetric one instantly looks like a strategy game readability is much better so when we saw this we knew okay this is good enough to start into production with [Music] but we still try to take things a little bit slow and careful as our concept art so far was just a Photoshop overpained we still wanted to validate our idea in engine so that's why I continue build a little river and Cliff and blender here and then of course we brought it into Unity the program we're using to make our game added some gradients and all of our little art experiments are safe to this massive my robot which will hopefully help us to see if we're improving and moving in the right

direction we had yet another big problem how should we name our game the working title so far has been thrown fall but there are a lot of other options as well Siege down Castle Mania tiny Knights Arrow fall mini Siege simple Siege your mom's cars or our favorite definitely not Kingdom a lot of you have pointed out that what we want to make is very similar to the game Kingdom in a couple of ways that is true kingdom is a big inspiration for us we love the game and in fact we also know the Creator Thomas because our friend freedoman is making a game called Pizza possum with him so yeah you can see this as a friendly homage but we're not making Kingdom our game is gonna play and feel quite different so we tried to figure out what name to go with and actually we couldn't figure it out back then but spoiler spoiler a couple of weeks later we decided to go with throne for oh what a surprise nothing changed well yeah we got used to the name and we really like it so what do you think didn't make the correct cause you know otherwise we can can still change it of course gameplay check

art style check I clearly defined vision for the product check to celebrate the end of our pre-production phase we did some more research and with that I mean just playing video games for an entire day this is certainly one part of my job as a game developer that I don't mind too too much we have a full production plan now we made that in the morning uh like the next two or three months are fully planned out and it's a very tight deadline after 50 days of development it was finally time to start into production some of you have asked me to occasionally slow these devlogs down a little bit so here you go here you can see me develop till late Into the Night [Music] first thing I did was setting up some pathfinding for units so they can walk around obstacles fall in the meanwhile made the player movement so now you can already ride around the landscape the horse is called Hasty the horse and we adopted it from the acid storms

see the horse yeah some leg spikes though okay let's export it again here you can see a group of potentially maybe enemies or something chasing Hasty the horse around day 51 and you can now shoot arrows at enemies day 52 and you now have arranged as well as a melee weapon slicing through enemies already quite satisfying 53 fighting with pathfinding bugs as you can see these enemies can't find their way to me and although these two are stuck in the wall I added some Allied units so now we can start having some actual battles oh damn we lost the fight I think we might need some attack all right victories hours I encountered pathfinding problem after pathfinding problems so I added walls just to create even more pathfinding problems the coolest thing about making games together is of course that I only need to do part of the work so while I've been busy making units Paul made the building system Percy and you can

now ride around and step-by-step upgrade your Castle I already coded an enemy spawning system for the Prototype we made so I copy pasted that into the new project made a couple of quick improvements to it and now we have waves of enemies spawning into our level the cast layout and the Prototype was a little bit boring and lacked some personality and specificity so that's something I wanted to improve on because usually things get more and more interesting the more specific they are you know you don't want a generic Square Castle you want something that's kind of grown and interwoven with the landscape what I'm building here is likely going to be the first level of the game and it's likely going to be called North fails this is what you call a block out by the way so these are not the finished Graphics I'm just blocking things out very quickly so we can get an idea of how things could look like my main concern for Now is really just making sure Northville feels like a cozy place with a lot of Personality that is also suitable for a first level and then the gold coins [Music] oh dude

oh man at this point the game became more and more playable very quickly even though those enemies down there are still getting stuck on a corner oh well one thing you try to figure out on the block out phase is how big everything needs to be so especially walls and Towers had to be a little bit thicker also polar rightfully pointed out that this Forest back line felt a little too unprotected our solution was to basically just build a wall made of mountains on the back line here to make it very clear you could not be attacked from that direction meanwhile enemies were still getting stuck on karnas so we just had a massive list of bugs and missing features to go through we're simply keeping edit and crossing a couple of things off of our to-do list every day picking your unit spawning next to your barracks making them respawn and so on the way our attack system worked so far was pretty much like in Vampire Survivor so there wasn't even an attack button you would just walk around and attack automatically so while we really want to keep things Mega simple that's one of the main goals for this game actually this did feel a little bit too uninteractive so for now we decided to

remove the ranged attack of the player you only have a melee attack now although we added an attack button so you do have to press the attack button now the combat is still stupidly simple but that's by Design we want to have a skill flaw that's so low that almost anybody can play this another thing that's gonna help a lot for the combat system is having more enemy types so I came up with a couple of basic enemy types I want to have and just started building them I call these hunterlings they are very fast and they only chase the player I made some flying enemies that of course with a melee weapon you can't attack yourself here are catapults dealing massive damage to buildings and also some ogres which are basically strong Amelia enemies the next day when I did some balancing I noticed that I kind of need to do a better job making the walls more worthwhile so I created an enemy type that tries to chase right to your Castle Center and destroy it and basically if you don't have any walls they will destroy you after some more balancing and setting up enemy waves I thought it is finally time to play the pathfinding does not work in the world but are you losing my Minds later everything was working by the way if you

like what you see please wishlist throw and fall on Steam it helps a ton that way you get notified when the game is out and we get some algorithm juice so click the link in the description and become one of the first people to wishlist throne for obviously there's quite a bit more work to do but remember this is what we started out with [Music] foreign [Music]