Game Dev: 3 Weeks to Finish! (Devlog)

last week I challenged myself to finish my indie game with snail within four weeks one week has already passed which leaves us with another three will that be enough when I masterplan end up working out welcome to another indie game dev look where I continue the challenge of finishing my indie game will you snail within just four weeks and at the last video some of you have asked me why I work in a standing position the answers that I personally found that I have to struggle a lot less with back pain if I do it like that and also sometimes I can still sit down for testing or something like that which to be honest looks quite strange but not as strange as this which is admittedly a working position I use it well sometimes let's hope that answered your question and didn't raise ten more another question that I saw pop up a couple of times is what I'll do after this challenge when I've completed the game the answer is that I'll probably keep working on this game even after these four weeks cause even if a game is finished even if in theory I would be ready to hit the publish button on Steam they are just always things you can

still do to make your game even better so I absolutely do want to invest some extra time into polishing after this so this will be the final room of the game and I want squid Dai to lie around here as a pile of garbage basically the end of the game of course I wanted to be somewhat memorable and I also want to give the player that satisfaction of finally defeating the AI first thing I had to do is stopping ji from moving around all the time because usually it's a very floaty AI that basically follows you wherever you go and now that sounds like a simple problem that actually took quite a bit of refactoring da is quite a complex and interconnected system by now with all of the voice lines that have to be triggered etc etc after a while I managed to make it stay in place like this right here but was still hovering around a bit which I eventually managed to get rid of and I spread out the ice a bit more made them lie on the ground so hopefully that really communicates that yeah is broken it cannot do anything anymore and then I went on to making some food because last week I did a pretty decent job at taking enough breaks not crunching too much fat

nutrition is still something I need to work on I can't eat pizza all week like there are definitely worse problems to have but as an indie game developer I find it surprisingly challenging to get some proper food inside me cause whenever I noticed that I'm hungry I'm already so hungry that it is more or less too late to cook something first of all problems I know I blocked out the rest of the level and added a proper end to this which is this black wall that you walk into it was a bit hard to see in a dark level like that which is why I added a light blue gradient in the background as well as some screen to make it feel more dramatic so at this point the minimum viable product of this room was more or less complete [Music] after adding that sound effect it was time to do some writing for da I was a little tricky for me to figure out what I wanted the AI to say in order to make

players feel as satisfied as possible while still making sure the AI stays on character I definitely wanted to flip the power relationship around for one so the AI basically backs you to stay doesn't want to be alone and scared but that didn't quite feel quite on character which is why when you decide to leave squid just completely snaps and starts screaming at you that's a bit cliche perhaps but as long as it has the desired effect I'm okay with that I was already running a bit short on time for the day but I still decided to go for a quick walk just to regenerate a bit and after that I got right into making some particle effects because they I didn't quite look super broken and wounded yet I wanted to make it look even more broken and wounded to really bring the point across this right here's how you design particles in game maker it's a bit painful cause you have no representation of how it looks you always have to try it in game after a couple of tries I gotta try it so I started doing some particles for the end of the level where you go into the black wall into the void which of course went through a couple of iterations as well

[Music] with all the story sections complete the main thing that was still missing we're just a ton of voice lines because during gameplay the AI is mostly just a silent observer for now I want that to change I want ki to be able to comment on pretty much everything you do which as it turns out actually requires a lot of writing so that's what I started with 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 so just a voice line the place whenever you enter a level that already made for 100 voice lengths and that's when I realized oh I think I'm gonna need a lot more than just those [Music]

unfortunately my strategy of running away and hiding failed there was only one more way to deal with my little voice line problem to face it I was scared a venule head was the orys illusion yeah by the end of the day I had implemented all of the 100 voice lines but that's pretty much it and then in the evening I had a little chat with Tim Russ wick that video will appear on Tim's channel sometime soon so if you're not subscribed to Tim yet do so now unfortunately when I woke up on Wednesday my problem was still not solved yet we're still so many more voice lines I had to ride so I hacked ok I'll probably look more like this at this point I was getting really worried that I would fall behind in my development plan on that day alone I wrote 350 new voice lines which all still need to be implemented into the game and which all need to be recorded

by me next week feeling the time pressure really made taking enough breaks a lot more challenging all of a sudden and when I started implementing the voice lines into the game I started to wonder have I actually messed this up by the end of the day the AI could already react to a lot of different scenarios for example jumping into a spike on the wall what can I say walls are dangerous or even some more advanced stuff like when you jump directly into a trap law you jumped right into that I think stuff like that definitely makes squid feel a lot more alive and is definitely worth it the only problem I wasn't even halfway done with implementing whereas my development plan said I should have been done here's the development plan today's Thursday I didn't manage to implement all of the context specific voiced lines yesterday Kelly my development plan has included some buffer time for that you already know even if you plan your development super generously something will take longer than expected for me that was this task right here implementing the context specific coastlines I greatly underestimated that one so this buffer time really helps me

to reduce my stress levels a bit pretty grateful that I put that in here so instantly got to work implementing as many voice lines as I possibly could get rid of that variable now this voice line is not triggered because the jump one is triggered all the time so I'm talking about these underwater currents right here they can give you a speed boost underwater and for example if you do something like this where they just loose to directly into some spikes I want some space specific voice lines to be triggered against all odds and against my own expectations I actually managed to implement all of the remaining voice lines even had a little bit of time for playtesting at the end and as usual my Friday was spent on editing this YouTube video it would really mean the bird to me if you could head over to seem real quick and take the 20 seconds it takes to wish list will you snail and I'll see you next week when we find out whether I'm able to record all of the voice lines on time I'm excited I'm hyped the

saga will continue see you then [Applause] [Music] you [Music]