I Got Beaten Up by my Producer (Devlog)

hey this is jonas i'm an indie game developer and i'm currently working on a game jonas you cannot do that game goes i'm not i'm not good at these meme thingies oh no welcome to another will you snail devlog the platformer with the probably coolest ai antagonist ever you control a little snail called shelley and go up against an evil ai called squid who predicts your movement and spawn straps in real time that's exactly what i'm counting on for my calculations i've been working on the game for more than two and a half years now still working on it but i finished it one year ago that's weird [Music] i posted these four devlogs exactly one year ago where i tried to finish the game within four weeks i haven't watched these videos in a while so this should be pretty fun i've planned out all of the remaining tasks and it really seems like we can get them done within just 4 weeks

i've pretty much already completed all of the levels and gameplay i don't understand where did this year go what the game will not be released in four weeks it will be released in 2020 [Music] i couldn't believe it i just couldn't believe it i even downloaded an old steamboat from one year ago and i still couldn't believe it it looks so similar to how it looks now so you forgot how your game looked like one year ago i see no i obviously kind of knew that but it's just i put so much work in this year and it's barely visible so just makes me feel confused and disappointed and how does that make you feel i just said how it makes me feel no reason to scream at me like that one more word and you're fired patient has aggressive behavior obviously we did

make progress this year with your help i added a ton of new languages to the game the settings menu is way more detailed now we have speedrun settings assist features more graphic settings i reworked some boss fights added the basketball level i also reminded you to wishlist will you snail on steam already seriously do it now or my slapping agent will have to slap you i created a pretty neat level select screen added sound effects replaced a few graphics made more music added the end game credit created collectibles added a few secret levels did lots of extra story writing and made a ton of other under the hood changes and improvements i'm doing game development full time yet everything's moving so slowly i guess i am angry that everything's taking me so long i see so how does that make you feel i guess it makes me feel scared because i'm afraid it will take me forever to finish the game like this jones i think you need to lower your expectations of it it doesn't matter you know just take it easy yeah you're probably right you need

to wear powder joints you need to work way harder look at you you're lazy you're way behind schedule i want the perfect game and i want it fast go back to work now go what are you waiting for so i did the slots but hold me and got back to work since the last devlog i made four new music tracks for four boss fights that didn't have their own track yet this first one should sound a little familiar by now i assume you recognized it [Music] and this to be honest is probably my favorite one because it sounds so chill and nice

before anybody asks yes i will upload the full soundtrack to youtube steam and hopefully more platforms second thing i did was a bunch of performance improvements i took my old laptop from roughly 12 years ago and tried to make the game run smoothly on the highest graphics settings at the beginning it didn't work at all i started out with the obvious optimizations like sorting all sprites onto texture sheets the reason why that helps is because the graphics card can render all of the images that are on one texture at once so if you're smart about what you put on what texture the graphics card just needs to render a lot less then there was the slightly trickier stuff like splitting the ai predictions into multiple frames portfolio snail has a simple ai algorithm that tries to predict where the player will go to spawn some traps there so instead of running that algorithm 60 times per second i just run it a lot less often now and i can still kind of get away with it then there's the weird stuff that nobody really understands what the heck is a sleep margin and a timing method i don't know but it seems to be absolutely essential for making your game run smoothly

very fun times yeah i had very fun times with it anyway i got it running smoothly on my old laptop so another big thing i've been wanting to do for a long time now is a visual update and with that i mainly mean the colors there were just two little problems first of which is that i'm very bad at picking colors and secondly trying out new color schemes has been a very tedious process so far because with all of the post processing and stuff going on you basically have to start the game in order to see how it looks like you could have dodged my solution was to make the game read all of the colors from a text file that way i could update them while the game is running and even better this same tool can now be used by my play testers you can send these text files back and forth easy peasy and this feature will also stay in for the final game so if you don't mind diving into some text files you can actually customize the colors this is how the game used to look like and this is how it looks now and i did the same for the other chapters of course it's not necessarily a huge difference yet but it just looks a little more polished this was the old underwater

theme this is the new one the old purple theme and the new one you get the idea i then reached out to my friend friedman who did all of the colors for our indie game islanders and asked him hey do you want to help me with my colors and then he very quickly put together this color scheme which i really like because it's a little easier on the eyes than what i've done before that being said i haven't decided on anything yet will be a tough decision [Music] we also tried to redesign the willy snail logo a bit to level up the steam presence of the game wait a sec have you wish listen i thought maybe something like this might work as a capsule this is how it would look in context compared to the old one and besides all of that the majority of my time is unfortunately still spent on weird little improvements and bug fixes lots

of tiny stuff that just really adds up [Music] we live in weird times my friends in times where there's a happiness and a facial h-slider oh i love this so much okay actually that's not bad now make me surprised come on and angry maximum confusion i can't be the only one who's kind of amazed by that right i mean there aren't even any teeth on the original photo look at it it very much feels like it's not gonna be long and ai is gonna be like my name the is of humanity and you know what the comments under the video are gonna say don't you yeah release today yeah i can hear them it's not ready i want to play it though it's not ready very jonas it's all gonna

be all right i'm also wondering if i maybe have to start doing a little bit of expectation management okay because the fact that i'm taking so much time to finish this game doesn't mean that it's gonna be an absolute masterpiece it's just that making games alone takes a lot of time that's really all there is to it the good news is that there are only two major tasks left before i can publish the game finishing the color update and the story update doesn't sound like a lot of work to me you should be done very soon yeah but so far these predictions have always been wrong there are so many little things and they really add up it's always taking longer than i think it will oh you'll put the finished game on my desk by tomorrow no it's not ready it has to be perfect oh i'll show you how perfect you are [Music]

don't forget to wishlist will you snail on steam please that way you'll get a reminder when the game comes out every single wish list really helps me out a lot the links in the description thanks a lot for watching and peace out what if i told you that it is possible to simulate consciousness i can simulate entire universes you