How We Made a Game in 72 Hours! - (Devlog)

hey this is Jonas and in this video I want to share with you what I've learned from making a game in three days the game is called pew pew crew and we made it for the Ludum dare 44 game jam the topic of the gem was your life is currency and although live-streamed the entire development of this game on youtube but i realize you probably didn't have the time to watch all of that that's why this video is here to give you a little summary of everything you missed I made this game together with Yen one of my friends from game school also a huge shout out to Chet who gave us a lot of awesome ideas and especially a big thank you to ice cold who made the music for the game in this video you'll see interesting snippets from the livestream get an overview over how we made this game and I'll also talk about what I wish we had done differently and what I learned from the project here we go hi everybody today we're making again for Ludum dare 44 hello I have yen with me the stream started out with us trying to fix a couple of good issues so that's one thing I've learned setup get properly before the game gem starts because they can save you a little bit of time if you don't know get is basically a way to keep game files in sync if you're working on a project together shopping groceries but

Vlad why are you pronouncing every word starting with s with C oh yeah thanks for pointing that out I'll actually try not to do that as if you could not do that come on I have an idea what if we approach this from a more narrative angle let's explore that multiple characters idea a little further so you have a spaceship and you can fire your crewmembers at other spaceships oh and then you like you fired the engineer and what I really liked about the ideation process this time is that I had somebody to bounce ideas back and forth with I feel like that definitely helped a lot and obviously a lot of good ideas came from chat as well a big mistake we definitely made here is that we over scoped quite a bit yes we were still

able to finish the game off but we didn't really have a lot of time for polishing and balancing in the end which really would have helped the game a lot so I kind of wish we would have gone for something a little simpler how about we do a free game that looks like 2d so basically is modern lights it's using models but it's isometric camera from top down or something like that next up we spend some time fleshing out our game idea usually I'd say the best way to go about this is to do a lot of prototypes and iterate along the way for a game jam unfortunately you don't have the time for that so we had pretty much everything already planned out before we got started some some will rats thanks for that great suggestion does your spaceship have HP or do we not have HP at all for your spaceship well that's kind of that's kind of first we should

probably clear up like what you go listen as well so here's what we came up with the golden poop you cruise to destroy all enemy ships and once you've done so you will continue onwards to the next level instead of an HP bar every ship has a list of crew members and you can decide yourself which crew members you want to fire out as ammunition when you run out of crew members you lose when you get hit by an enemy you obviously lose a couple of crew members as well and all the funny thing is that you need to be a little careful which crew members you want to fire out as ammunition because depending on which crewmembers you lose your ship will differently buffs if you lose your technicians then your shield will turn off eventually if you lose your pilot's your ship will become a lot harder to control and if you lose your gun operators you will slowly but surely lose the control over the gun of your ship so you need to be a little careful which crewmembers you want to quote-unquote fire for this game ID I think my warning bells should have rung because obviously this makes the player weaker and weaker over time which usually doesn't feel great usually it

feels better to get stronger over time here it's the exact opposite your ship gets weaker and weaker the more crew members you fire honestly I think for a game jam idea the idea is completely fine and it turned out quite well it's just that taking power away from the player is always a little dangerous and should be done with care and this time I didn't do it with care I just didn't think about it I feel like I should also mention my last Ludum dare game here overcharge where this is essentially the case as well the player gets weaker and weaker over the course of a match but here it really helps to raise the tension as you're just trying to survive until the timer runs out and another main difference is also that you lose power not control but a better atom now I can see for moving across the entire picture one color that's not good you need to add some sort of particles in the background or something that shows us we're moving this looks reasonable we can always see where we're going there stirred of space on the screen I think

this is good if good for now by the way are we we are probably right we're rotating the player spaceship itself stop drives yeah okay we have to rotate the gun independently from it I have it I don't have it you don't have it in the scene a manager object I have it I'm just just stupid to see it okay looks like a dummy no Trek no okay maybe we need to fix it a little bit maybe if we if you press to the right the spaceship should just automatically move rotate towards the right I would feel a little more intuitive yes yep isn't there 5 p.m. yes it's that's right

it's 5 p.m. we've been jamming for 7 hours and we feel like that's enough for one day like we don't want to overdo it so we'll just let it be for today and do another 7 8 hours tomorrow that was day 1 complete and at this point we honestly both thought we wouldn't be able to finish this game off there was still so much missing enemies were missing enemy AI was missing a lot of the player feedback a lot of the polish the sound effects the voice lines the tutorial was missing the level design was missing and basically all we've accomplished so far is a player that can fly around a little bit so what I've learned from that is and it's not like I haven't run that before but I had to learn it again do not over scope if you think you're in scope you're not in scope if you think you're way way under scope then you're in scope you might wonder what are you talking about the end result looks just fine but I have to say you it was a lot more stress than it really had to be plus this game could have really used some additional time for balancing and polishing because that is usually what

differentiates good games from excellent ones ok now we need to make sure that space people do damage on impact I guess a nice I see the shield now that looks cool what is it doing but you're you were right again it's too soon and to really see what's going on I think it would be worth trying out to make them slower and now in theory the enemy ship was out of crew members and we would have won okay but let's make the enemies shoot as well that would be fun oh yeah now they can deal damage to us luckily they're really bad at aiming if you just stand still they rarely hit us I think the projectile person should have a different impact damage is it's a player or an enemy projector what do you

think yeah I feel player projectiles should have a lot more bang yeah I just increased them significantly so there's a bunch of balancing fixes to the whole shooting doesn't make sense thing one negative side effect of not having the gun operators knows obviously that shield gets quite janky as well mm-hmm should we take that as a synergy effect or I'll just start over ah see that's what I meant that makes it a lot better yeah I really like like the gun operators with those can operate a project has really changes the sheer game what are you doing I'm hacking in something like a tutorial something like that okay let's think love like one is done by the way do we still want enemies to only attack you if you're nearby yes

you wanna so do that radar thing because if you want to do that then we should do zone now yeah although my concentration is dropping too very dangerously low levels where I feel like I'm almost getting nothing done anymore so I'll just have this and this with yeah take a break take a break cool that's probably it for the stream today then so that was stay two out of three complete and guess what we still had so much left to do yes we managed to implement all of the remaining ship behaviors and we managed to implement the enemies but we already knew they three would become very tight first thing I did on day three was finally creating a new model for the space ships I did that in blender and it took me a while one thing I regret a little bit about the art style of pew-pew crews that we mix a little too many styles in my opinion the background has a different style the ships in the foreground have a different silent and these planets that are placed as decoration have a different style

altogether surprisingly we still managed to make it come together quite well but that would definitely have been easier if we just had gone for one style and not for a crazy mixture out of three styles but I maybe that's also what makes it look unique and interesting I'm not saying you're not allowed to mix Styles I'm just saying might have been easier to make something that looks good if we had just gone for one style instead of three now the ship is so bulky and the cannon is so slim yeah that is because if I make the cannon more bulky than you can see the ship anymore after that it was finally time to make some levels to finally create some content for the game and I have to say I'm kind of surprised by how much we managed to get out of just one enemy type I mean we have just one kind of enemy but by varying the ammunition types the enemy has available by varying the amount of crewmembers enemies have by varying the enemy's size and movement speed we meant to create a lot of variety for the player and I feel like that is definitely a very important thing for level design that you really feel like levels are very unique and

different from one another and present you with different kinds of challenges so you can kind of explore the game system in different ways and are encouraged to try different strategies so yeah I'm surprised we managed to pull that off with just one enemy and I feel like that has a lot to do with the fact that we managed to make ammunition types slash crewmembers feel very different from one another this way enemies also feel quite different from one another if they use different ammunition types not to forget that you can also vary the amount of enemies and the level layout to make levels feel more unique so that's another thing I've learned if you have the correct game system and if you're smart about it you can stretch your content quite a lot and it still stays interesting lots of explosions yen hello hello hello hey how you doing how's it going everybody's yelling at me that I should do something maybe that's

the better feedback would be because of the post-processing and also the damage numbers I guess also add a bit of nicer feedback man took us quite a while to implement some decent sound effects into the game and after that Live Chat helped us out to come up with some cool voice lines for the crew members you fire out into space good job Chet proud of you okay I'm gonna go eat something now there are actually multiple options we could do the Super's double stream where I stream to you on this material feel like the space nebula could be moved a bit over here if you go over here it's more of this green stuff

by the sky chill zone okay so Yun added in these space nebulas and planets which visually speaking help the game out so much that should give you an idea of what a little bit of extra polishing time at the end can do for you and I really wish we would have had more time for stuff like that why [Music] hey just rather audio lines all recorded no I just had to cut them and export which all let's take some time why is Sun not rotating that is awesome after a 12 hour livestream we managed to upload everything pretty much last second but we got it done link to the game and to all of the live streams are in the description I think the game actually turned out quite well you can subscribe if you wanna see more game development content like this bye bye and see you next [Applause]

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