Game Dev: The Week Before Launch (Devlog)

hey this is Jonas and our indie game Islanders literally launches in just a couple of days so I thought I'd show you what I've been up to in the morning I meet up with the team for our little conference call in Trello we collect all of the things we still want to do and discuss and then in the morning we just go through our to discuss area here and my next tasks making a Linux build and performance optimization problems optimization performance optimization problem is I don't even have a Linux pitch PC to test on oopsie and I've never built a game for scene before which apparently is not super duper easy either I'm gonna go through that process now and I'm gonna tell you what I've learned okay turns out you upload your games to Steam via Steam command which is a command line type thing I managed to figure it out in an hour or two because they are pretty decent tutorials on how to do that and I also decided to install Linux on my old laptop I've heard that it's a good idea to defragment your hard drive first so that's what I did for next thing I had a

look at the frame debugger in unity which I also haven't used before and it's basically a tool that shows you why certain things cannot be batched together batch count definitely an important performance factor of machines you might now I also do daily livestream so now it was time for that and in the live streams I usually work on another project called will you snail a crazy little platformer about escaping the grasps of an evil AI you might wonder why do I not stream Islanders development the reason is simply just that there's not really anything interesting to do for that at the moment working on will you snail simply makes for a better stream and it makes us the day up a little bit for me it's not as dull as just worrying about technical

issues this was the result of the stream just a little bit of extra polish for the tower defense levels of the game [Music] okay we're done with our morning call all of the tasks are assigned I'll just keep working out the lyrics Pete and on the performance of the game so I finally managed to install Linux on my machine but nothing is ever as easy as it seems for some reason the download button for Islanders is non-existent so that's the kind of problems and struggling with you and I can't download Islanders for Linux and the way to fix that is obviously to go into the Steamworks web interface and checking which one of the 1 million settings you got wrong and that are somehow I found it but there's no sighs it doesn't download anything it's instantly finished and now when I click Play I get an error message and I just couldn't figure it out same with the performance improvements I couldn't figure out what was breaking our batches

wide dynamic patching was not working for our game what does one do in a case like that right you just leave a post in the unity forum and then you start working on something else which in my case were achievements when you place a building with 25 points or more for example you get an achievement and now that I've made these changes I will use good to upload them so the rest of the team will get those changes as well all right no conflicts and then during the livestream able the new puzzle mechanic for will you snail there are a bunch of very different level types and will you snail and these puzzles are one of them and what's new here are these red corrupted antennas my alarm clock sounds like birds that's what I get up to at 8:40 energized for a new day or maybe sometimes not quite as energized but you know it sounds better this way I wasn't a bit of pain due to some health issues I'll spare you the details nothing major nothing to worry about but getting some coding in was a nice distraction the new plan was to improve the performance by batching things manually which basically means merging all of the meshes together that don't

move and obviously that broke the game entirely didn't expect anything else at one point the game even looked like this looks like wall-e tried to clean up Islanders and after a while I finally managed to get it working or so I thought I did because actually a lot of the normals are still broken if you have any ideas how to transform normals from object space to world space please let me know because transform transform vector does not work that turned into a pretty cool puzzle on accident for William snail we made a pretty surprising amount of progress on stream i just wanted to build a couple of puzzles but we actually managed to finish the entire bubblegum section of the game now all that's left to do is the final boss fight okay sushi from yesterday just uploaded a couple of new bills to seem to the bitter branch now I

want to see if it finally works on Linux please work on Linux and play game alright stalking it's starting it's starting it's starting nice what the hell is with this cursor place it's a big no I can't click anything a little disclaimer Islanders has only been officially announced for Windows I was definitely a bit frustrated with a linux project at the time so I just continued working on something else performance improvements trying to figure out why dynamic batching wasn't working for us I think I managed to find the reasons multiple light sources for example and so I think dynamic batching is just not an option for us but I'm so pretty positive that we'll find a way to get the performance to a decent level to launch we'll see though we'll see I'll try my best for will you snail I got started on working on the final boss section of the game which I think turned out pretty great so far it already feels

quite crazy and glitchy which is exactly how it's supposed to feel [Music] my fridays are usually entirely spent on editing new YouTube videos so this video you're watching right now was edited today on Friday which means I didn't make a lot of other progress but I want to talk with you about how I feel about launching my first game to steam first of all when will it be out the answer to that is fourth of April in case you haven't picked up on that yet that is next week right it into your calendar please and check out link in description is it scary to launch your first game to seem for me the answer is definitely yes but it's not as scary as I thought it would be and I think that is mostly due to the fact that I'm not in this alone I have a team to back me up and on top of that I'm pretty confident in the product we created so I'm pretty sure it will not go horribly wrong worst thing that could happen is maybe the game has some weird

back and it doesn't run properly on most machines or maybe there are performance issues or maybe people just don't get the game and quit too early before it starts getting fun okay there are a couple of things that could go wrong but let's not think about that too much because yeah that freaks me out a little bit then what are our plans for the future of this game actually we don't have any concrete ones we obviously want to keep fixing all of the bugs improve the performance as much as possible maybe bring the game to Linux and Mac if you manage to make that happen we're also thinking about porting the game to the switch or to mobile however none of that is confirmed yet we're just thinking about our options some people have requested a creative mode or mod support can't confirm any of that either those are kind of things that are standing in the room for now adding more content to the game is obviously something we'd like to do as well adding more buildings adding more Islands however first of all we'll see how the game performs on launch and then we'll decide if it's worth it and what

to do next expect rosie's are more awesome game dev content on this YouTube channel in the near future I'll keep you posted and I also hope you'll enjoy islanders have fun building your cities let me know if you have any questions I'll try to answer every single one of them see you next week bye you