How We Made ISLANDERS - (Indie Game)

hello this is Jonas from Grizzly games and today we'll have a look at how we made our game Islanders from start to finish it's a pretty interesting process and I want to share with you what I've learned because that's what this channel is about sharing what I've learned in game development so a couple of quick facts um I made this game as a part of my bachelor program at htw Berlin big shout out to my awesome teammates and the professors that helped us out in the process we made the game within four months and our team consists of three people so that's already one thing that I've learned is that you can really make a pretty epic game in a pretty short amount of time I kind of have the direct comparison now between making games alone and making games on a team and I've really got to say making games on a team is so much faster so much more streamlined if you can work on a team if possible work with a good team that actually carries you actually i' I definitely feel like I got carried a little bit by my team if you're the smartest uh person in the room you're in the wrong room right this is one of the

very early prototypes you can see here that you can only place these buildings on certain slots they have price points attached to them it's a very different game in case you do not know how the game works right now I've made plenty of videos about that on how the game looks now how it is played so if you're not up to speed yet then check out one of those gameplay general information videos first because this video is not that this video is the process of making this game and you can see here this is actually real time so I have for to wait for my resources to come in I have to collect them but other than that we can already see that some of the mechanics are quite similar this house here gets plus 0.8 gold for every nearby house and I still remember one of the base ideas of this prototype was have a flood come in or meteors dropping down from the top that basically destroy your city but we quickly figured out that building a city and then having it destroyed is not exactly the most fun game Loop so we kind of didn't do that I think we did

one prototyping week where we tried out a bunch of different game ideas this is a completely different one in this one you have to assign tasks to people here and then you can do that with Pete and depending on what happens on that mission you get these new resources here it's a high score game as well you basically travel try to travel as far as possible manage all of these stats here we tried that it was interesting for a while and then we got rid of it that's definitely one thing I've learned from this project as well that just a lot of prototyping is super useful if you want to find a really good game idea then you have to try multiple game ideas I already made a video about coming up with game ideas actually coming up with game ideas is quite simple coming up with a really really good game idea is obviously not quite as simple oh yeah in this prototype you just click on stuff and then sometimes stuff happens I think there is a way to move but I forgot how oh and here we have a visual prototype from freedom on that already look

surprisingly quite a lot like like Islanders looks now I think you cannot really do anything here it's just a visual prototype but definitely an interesting one okay here we have the same the little bit of a darker atmosphere also instead of Islanders we oopsy doopsy almost made this rafting [Music] game with these wonderful water physics uh the main reason why we didn't go any further with this is because we did not find a way to make the water look good I think it's just an unle Shader at this point yeah we didn't manage to make decent water that was basically the main problem Oh see and here we can already see that at the beginning we definitely wanted Islanders to be a 2d game in this prototype you can drag some buildings in here not really a lot of gameplay here but H just building something beautiful already quite fun and this got to be one of the first times where we tried making Islanders a 3D game and I think once we

saw this we were all pretty convinced that this is the way to go I think Paul was the one who suggested to turn this into a 3D game and I've got to say good call good call definitely looks quite a bit better than 2D but we did not just explore the visuals we also explored the game play quite a bit and what I have here in my hand is basically a lumberjack these green squares here at trees so the more trees are near this Lumberjack the more income I have so at the moment I get five income from this Lumberjack if I place a couple more Lumberjacks my income will go up so this was still a real-time prototype as you might know the final version of Islanders is not real time it's turn-based but this prototype really showed us that this kind of G gaml can work optimizing the placement of all of these buildings is already quite fun this the workshop it wants to be close to other Lumberjacks but not close to other workshops so in the final game this is basically The Sawmill so as you can here it's a very

iterative process we're trying a lot of different things and another main takeaway I took from this project is that the main goal is really to simplify your game as much as possible if you can find a way to make your game simpler without making it less fun then you should absolutely go for it and you should always be looking for those opportunities often times making your game easier and simpler actually makes your game better and I think that happened to us quite a bit during the prototyping process there's really no good reason to make this a real-time game and making a turn based made a lot of things a lot simpler here for example in this build we have quests earn 750 points with workshops and once that Quest is complete you unlock a new building it's a cool system but it's too complicated although we didn't want to make a stressful game and making it time based always adds a little bit of a stress factor adds a little bit of downtime turning Islanders into a turnbas game is I think what really brought the pacing to a Next Level because you can really

play at your own pace you don't have to wait for any stupid income numbers or Money numbers to go up plus it also helps not to make this economy spiral out of control in the late game oh seems like we have another 3D prototype here you can actually open the build menu with space oh I remember that prototype in this one you can stack these buildings on top of each other which is insanely satisfying and fun so you might still wonder why the hell did we build so many prototypes and the answer is we wanted to see if this works at the beginning when you start out making a game creating a bunch of these really quick prototypes doesn't cost a lot of time and it really helps you to get a feel for what you're creating and whether what you want to create actually works you don't want to invest for months into something and then realize that it's not really all that fun so these prototypes were definitely a way for us to figure out if this works both in terms of gameplay as well as in terms of visuals and yeah event we came to the

conclusion that this will probably work and then you can keep working on it keep in mind that all of these prototypes are very quick prototypes we spend one or two days on every single one of them Max and then of of course at some point you've just got to start building the game and then go from there and then still keep iterating on that you cannot start from scratch every single time and build up new prototype every single time you test something but when you start out you can obviously do that and it doesn't hurt to do that apparently yeah nice nice nice nice nice I also wanted to have some stackable buildings in Islanders for a long time I guess eventually we scrapped that idea I'm not exactly sure why because I still think that's a pretty fun concept see this is the first turn-based prototype of Islanders which takes a lot of the stress away here you can see your coins here we can see the buildings we can place uh now if you put that here we get three points because there are five trees and The Lumberjack itself costs two points and then in order to

get more buildings we have to click on next day which costs one coin this gets more and more expensive which eventually forces the game to an end so as you can see this is still quite a bit more confusing than the current version of the game have coins here we have weird prices here we have price values attached to the buildings and eventually we manag to get rid of all of that which is awesome here you can already see like these Lumberjacks get minus points from other Lumberjacks so you don't just place them all next to each other this already feeling quite a bit like Islanders except for the fact that it's more complicated and dumb now we have to pay seven coins to move on to the next day why the hell is that oh yeah right these uh windmills actually get more points the higher up you place them in this prototype which is intuitive but eventually we decided to scrap that as well just to simplify our rules further here's one of the first visual prototypes in 3D and this was pretty early on into the process still definitely with within the first month

here we can see the next iteration with a couple of buildings I remember one of the main challenges uh we struggled with is that Islands have to look good no matter how many buildings are placed on them often times in Builder games placing buildings makes the landcape look uglier dirtier and that was definitely not what we wanted to happen we still wanted the island to look pretty and nice after you built a city that's why in this prototype we have different steps see the island looks pretty okay without any buildings with a couple of buildings looks good and then with a lot of buildings it still has to look good I'm pretty surprised by how similar a lot of these buildings look to how they look now that's pretty crazy the progress bar was at the top here not that Circle in the bottom left corner that looks pretty awesome by the way this is not a playable prototype whatsoever right this is just a mo up there's nothing playable about this you

can just click through different states of the island but really this sort of stuff I think was absolutely phenomenal for vision keeping which is a big deal when making a game together that every member of the team zor has the same the same vision for what you're about to create and I think this definitely helped us quite a bit to keep that in check if you see something like this then I think all team members will have a pretty clear vision of what this game game is supposed to [Music] [Music] be if I remember correctly I think freedoman was playing around with these mockups uh while Paul and me got started with the code structure for the main project all looks a lot like Islanders oh you can even tilt the camera up and down really feels like the game made a big

jump here but if you think about it it really didn't right all of these mechanics were here before we already had some awesome visual prototypes before that though the jump from whatever we had before to this is not really as big as it looks like and look at these cute little models that's what happens when I make them and not uh not an artist then the Zill looks like this like what what the hell is that ZL is this island already randomly generated I definitely don't think so right if we restart yeah it's the exact same island every single time and that's a thing I guess before you can randomly generate a level maybe you should build a couple of Levels by hand so you know what makes for a good level Al as you can see here in this prototype you cannot decide between different buildings you just get random buildings in here you've got to build whatever you get already quite a couple

of buildings crazy fun fact I cannot move the camera we just wanted it to be this rotational camera movement oh yeah but I really like this tessing also look at the Mansions they have quite different shapes and also they don't want to be next to houses let's eat play oh it already has a tutorial nice oh and we can already pick buildings but we still can't move the camera well that's a shame oh yeah we had this grave right here this little t-shaped thingy which is basically the exact opposite of the statue you can see here every building gets a bonus from having the statue within its range but also every building gets minus points for having this grave within its range and that felt like a frustrating mechanic so we got rid of it statue on the other hand felt like a rewarding mechanic so we kept it and these statues still exist in Islanders till this day uh nobody built in this

area and this was basically just wasted space because nobody nobody wanted to build here not a good mechanic got cut from the game oh tutorial got expanded a little bit I wonder if these are already randomly generated oh well crazy yes they are what the hell is with that menu why did we keep that for so long Zant pit is already in the game doesn't have an icon yet oh it looks like a weird buried Square oh we even have some depth of field here we even have the new island button down here already we can already cheat by pressing enter oh yeah hell yeah so what happens when we press that button let's go to the next Island oh which looks quite a bit different but still has the grave on it interesting let's quit this Prototype all right here the starting already look

a lot more familiar and we didn't have these pluses yet so whenever this circle here fills up you you have to pick buildings right away and your gameplay gets interrupted with Fields pretty dumb which is why we decided to add those pluses there later on so you can decide yourself when you want to choose a new building I really uh getting interrupted by by weird pop-ups while placing buildings is pretty pretty annoying see if I just Place buildings here and then I wanted to keep placing stuff but uh just a weird popup appears out of nowhere no no no that is no fun oh my God this Plateau was something we discussed a lot whether we want it in the game or not final decision was obviously yes because it's an epic building that allows you to build something on top of it isn't that fantastic oh but you can't build it on water yet even had these W platforms I'm really surprised sometimes oh and I can see a buck that that rest struggled with quite a bit these uh little things you

see here are trees that are stuck in the ground by now uh the game's already on Steam it's not out yet but I can already play it on Steam which is epic look at that it's already in my library let it play colors are even brighter more saturated we implemented all of these beautiful Snappy settings and here these starting Islands look pretty identical everything's just a little more polished out looks a little nicer we have little birds flying through the screen little waves in the background some clouds and all of that just makes it look even better the last couple of days we implemented small stuff like this whenever you hover over these trees they are disabled that was not the case in earlier versions some particles and a little bit of screen Shake whenever you play something a lot of d tiny little details

a lot of experimenting a lot of prototypes pretty fun workflow and also honestly a pretty fast workflow as I said four months is not a lot one of the things that obviously helped us out quite a lot is that we managed to simplify our game idea a lot in terms of code this is a very simple game um there's not a lot of complex stuff going on here at all like literally the game play is just you play stuff and you get points for certain stuff that is within [Music] range it's a very simple idea that for some reason turned out to be pretty fun and that's why we managed to create this in such a short amount of time by the way this also pretty much the philosophy freedoman and Paul used in their last project superflight which is also a super simple game but simple doesn't mean boring you can make something that is super simple but still looks nice and plays well I don't want to be too much like yeah yeah we did such a good job I

know how it's done yeah yeah yeah as I've said I don't think that at all I think I got definitely carried in this project I managed to do some useful stuff in terms of gameplay for this game but in a lot of other areas I was just lucky to have an awesome team and we don't know if it works out yet okay maybe nobody will be interested in this game maybe nobody will played and that's fine as well what matters for now is that I'm really happy with the game that I'm kind of proud of what we made here whether other people think so as well is still to be seen this has just a lot of Polish we we we just went for something super simple and Polished the crap out of it if you have any more question of how we made this game please let me know in the comments this was not the last video I made about Islanders for example I'll make some more stuff about the island generator that seems to be something a lot of you are interested in so we'll do something on that yeah thanks for watching watching see you on the next one bye

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