Making of Thronefall: Final Devlog

hello there we are making a medieval base defense game called Throne fall we're a small team of two and we've been working on this game for almost 3 years now I documented the entire process from the humble beginnings to the first play tests to the Early Access launch of the game we've been very busy since the last deathlock we've published tons and tons of free updates on Steam the moment you see this video 1.0 is officially released on Steam and also on the Nintendo switch surprise and that means this project is done it was a long freaking Journey it was not always an easy Journey now I'm just eternally grateful and I can't wait to catch you up on everything that happened for one I accidentally wiped my hard drive I lost a bunch of the footage I recorded I used to keep track for which day of development we're on I have to admit I completely lost track now I'm super sorry but on the bright side I think it's just a sign to switch up the death lock formula a bit again so we'll go back to the roots a little bit I've locked an entire week of development for you we're starting the journey for this specific death loog all the way back in January 2024 at the very beginning of this year about 9 months ago we started

making a new level for throne fall actually players did not respond too well to the last level we made UFA wind and the main criticism was that it didn't really feel cool from a fantasy perspective that was a mistake I did not want to repeat so this time we're building an absolute Fortress that just feels cool and epic to defend as we're a super tiny team we have to go very fast for pretty much anything we do that's why we create all of our levels with 90% asset bashing that means we just have a couple of simple shapes and we just CL flatter them everywhere it works surprisingly well and as you can see it's very very fast this is how my first draft looked like Paul rked it a bit and now it looks very very cool one problem thrall always had is spawn camping where you just place your entire Army in front of the spawn and just Crush everything immediately that's coming out of it I think I finally found a pretty big brain answer to this and that is the new Shrine building I introduced in this level it charges when units in its very close proximity die and then it gives massive advantages once fully charged it's not only a very powerful defense

tool that shoots at enemies it also gives passive income so now you are actively encouraged to fight all over the map to activate all of your shrines we added a second new building the Royal Forge that allows you to purchase upgrades for your character there are also new enemies including a boss fight at the end we published this new map at the beginning of February and except for a couple of Minor Details it was very well received before moving on to more content we also wanted to address some of the deeper gameplay issues in the game the defense Towers which are your bread and butter in every Lev were still quite boring back then you only had four different choices for the final upgrade of the tower we reworked this by giving you upgrade choices for both level two and level three and allowing you to mix and match them however you please so instead of four there are now 16 Tower types you can build into we published this as the big tower RK in the middle of March it was super well received the update came with a bunch of other stuff like rork to Eternal trials additional unit control Hot keys and a bunch of other quality of life improvements just one month later in April we published the next update which introduced a bunch

of mini game modes to the game these were essentially using the same maps that we've already built but with different waves of enemies and different special rules that apply to every level for example there's one called Throne ball where you defend your Castle as a giant snowball I know death loocks have a tendency to make things look much easier than they actually were I can promise you the next level I made for throne fall did not come to me easily at all I started getting desperate so I tried out new workflows I tried out building the level in blend instead of in unity I had this vision for a jungle level with lots and lots of rivers running through it but I very very much struggled to find the correct angle for designing a level like this sometimes if you can't build a big thing then start with building a small thing that's what I did I started out with a very tiny Island and was just like okay let's let's just start with this very tiny space here this finally unblocked my creative barrier and things started flowing from there [Music]

the idea for the layout was to give you a very well protected main base with only one very small entrance but as you want to grow your economy you're forced to slowly expand further and further out into the map this gives you a lot of options for where you want to defend your base the bigger you build it the more places you have to defend at once so despite my initial struggles it turned out to be one of the best layouts in the game there's a pretty big tale of work that we have to go through for every new level for example designing new enemies you also made a new building the first of its kind because this one has six different upgrades to choose from and of course a new weapon more perks more mutators painstakingly tracing the outlines of the level so that the player can't go out of bounds then of course adding the new map to the level select screen at this stage there's also a lot of play testing tweaking numbers making sure the new content is fun we have to update the localization adding the new content to the Eternal trials mode which also requires a bunch of balancing the specific update also came with a mini map you can see my first horrible attempt right here in the corner at this point the switch version of the game was

already well on its way we outsourced that to warp digital they are a great team we're very happy with them for example they all supported Chuchu Charles but unfortunately the switch is just very very limited with the performance it has the war piece already made some great progress on performance we did not want to screw that up that's why the mini map had to be super duper lightweight we really couldn't afford to spend any performance on this whatsoever so fun fact the mini map is the most optimized piece of code we have in the PC version of the game as it was already specifically built with a switch in mind this entire update came out by the end of May at this point the tutorial of the game desperately needed an upgrade because we implemented so many new quality of life features and the old tutorial just didn't teach any of them properly obviously the existing players are not going to replay the tutorial so we made an in-game tip system that teaches a lot of the new features as well we changed how things are unlocked in the game allowed the players to bring five perks into the battle instead of just three made a huge round of balancing changes and Paul made the UI fully resalable which was necessary to meet some steam deck and switch requirements for the final release of the game we want to come out with a bang so we decided that we want to launch

with three brand new levels first of which we have a creepy dark forest level called moric the concepts for these levels have been brewing in my mind for a long time by now so I already pretty much knew roughly what I wanted to make we only have a very small amount of levels in the game so one of the main goals for every new level is always to make it feel as different as possible to make it feel fresh and new again I was technically going against some of the things we've learned in the past about level design and Throne fall for example this is not an Epic Castle this is a Rand place in the middle of a forest however from a fantasy perspective I was pretty confident this would work out on the one side this is very much meant to feel like a hostile place but at the same time the windy narrow paths the tight choke points and all of The High Ground you can use to your advantage make it feel like a surprisingly cozy place so in a weird way you still very much feel at home here we don't want maps to feel generic we want them to be memorable so in this case I tried to build a very memorable graveyard in the bottom corner of the map and it's not just meant to be memorable it also serves to foreshadow some of the enemies

and especially the boss fight you'll encounter here ironically the process of building a new map is very very fast I can pretty much do it in 2 days or so the problem is more that there's just this massive red tail for every new map the polishing the new content the new features the testing the balancing the map is built in 2 days and it still takes about a month to be fully completed at least I finally built a tool that allows me to place the level bounderies much more efficiently I should of course have done that a long time ago this is a work in progress of the new ghost enemy type that can walk walk through walls and I also made a new monster type enemy the biggest enemy in the game so far which of course immediately caused new pathf finding issues for me to fix wonderful we love it there's a new building called the summoning Circle that allows you to choose which enemies you want to summon to earn some extra gold in the next night the idea for the final boss fight was that it just follows the path on the ground which leads all the way to your Castle Center maybe a little bit of a homage to Classic Tower Defense games it also needs a bit of spectacle so I gave it a massive Firestorm my part of the work was done for this level so I handed it off to Paul for audio visual polish

he would then do another pass on the enemy models rework the visuals of the level a bit and add sound effects to all of the new content meanwhile I was already getting started with the next level frot for this one I live streamed the entire creation of the level on YouTube the vs are still available and for the sake of this devlog I will now simulate an unpatient user skipping through the live stream or something like that was hidden behind the a little bit don't even need this Sur if it looks place to start is [Music] shapes usually do so that there are larger CU we don't do yeah Christ what's coming

okay this level in particular went through a couple more iterations and paed quite a lot of work on the colors and the polishing Al the boss fight you can see here is something I buil off stream and just to kind of complete the arc here the final version of the level that is in the game right now looks like this I would also love to give you a bit of a deeper insight into how making a game like this actually feels like from a personal and emotional [Music] perspective well first of all it obviously feels much much slower than watching this back on a YouTube video it includes random chores and commuting to work I've moved in with a girlfriend a while ago but my office is still in my dad's house you can learn a lot about people by having a look at the rooms they inhabit my room really captures my current state of mind a bit cluttered not amazingly well taken care of planty make thirsty face has seen better days I've been wanting to find a better solution for this green screen because this is uh not and I couldn't even find the correct adapter for my tripod so I'll be filming this death lock without that ever since I started this YouTube channel I've just been going pretty

pretty hard both for game Def and YouTube as you might have noticed YouTube has relaxed a little bit and I'm about ready to take a little bit of a break from game death as well I have to be honest but now was not the time because we wanted to give throne for the ending it most definitely deserved now was the time to keep grinding through a variety of to-do lists which usually involves analyzing and playing the same things over and over and over again till you really can't stand looking at them anymore today was Monday and first of all I finished some more work for the final boss fight of the [Music] level it's very very warm [Music]

and then finally I had some time left over to start prototyping the final map of the entire game to end I wanted it to be a really epic Castle to make for a really cool Showdown I made some very good progress so now it was time to close up shop and slowly start heading to the [Music] gym since I moved on with my partner I also live with four guinea pigs now they are adorable here Lina and Le and L peing out of her cave in the back there after picking up my things I continued my journey to the martial arts gym where I started practicing Brazilian jiujitsu I've been Ed for 9 months so I'm still very much a beginner but I very much enjoy it it feels like the player versus Player version of bouldering very technical very strategic and most importantly for me you meet a lot of great people I don't know what it is about martial arts people but for some reason they're always great to be around good energy is infectious and I think it's important to get your daily dose somewhere and I wasn't even quite done getting mine the sun was still shining

and I've spent the entire day in a cave so I jumped on the opportunity to go for a quick swim my partner works in the social field and has to get up way earlier than I so there are some days where we don't see each other all that much but I'm also not vlogging any of that cuz this is not becoming a family Vlog Channel I'm sure I saw her a little bit it's just if you're wondering why I'm eating alone that's why and finally I closed off the day with some pointless media consumption [Music] you can see here toen is becoming an absolute Fortress worthy of a final level just like on storm clam you build on the ruins of an ancient long forgotten Castle there's not much lore in game but I think it's becoming more

and more apparent that you're rebuilding a Fallen Kingdom back to its former glory it's a bit of a shame that we only figured this out in our fifth level storm Clum that having traces of former civilization really makes the levels a lot more interesting but ever since we figured that out we've done it for every single one of our new levels and it's always worked very very well it gives the place some history and personality and it also makes it more believable in a way this is certainly starting to look like something [Music] I spent my evening working on a personal research SL learning project where I try to craft neural networks from scratch without training them so essentially coding in neurons I'm of course not the first person to ever try this but I found it very fascinating you will probably see a video about this on my

Channel at some [Music] point well I think you can now already imagine better how my day-to-day life looks like I have to point out that this is one of the more interesting weeks a lot of the time it's just coding bug fixing for the purpose of this death log I intentionally chose a week that I knew would be a little more interesting than that first couple of enemies approaching your base is always a little bit of a celebratory moment for every new map here I'm working on the flyer NE M so the surface all of the flying units are going to move on Wednesday is call day so first of all we had a quick call with our community manager Zasha to catch up on some Community feedback like it rings a bell somehow are you ask seen that a million times this goes into

other feedback then we have another call with Brandon from W digital to check in on how the switch part is going the rest of my day I spent on fixing some new bucks the community found we can all very much feel that we're in the final Sprint of this project now for me it's not just the final Sprint for throne fall It's the final Sprint of an entire chapter now I'm not leaving YouTube I'm not leaving game development but I'm very much craving a break and a fresh start in a way it also doesn't mean that I'm not grateful I'm incredibly freaking grateful for everything like I can't believe how well life has treated me so far I'm sure it'll throw me a curveball soon enough but until then let's enjoy the ride chill out for a bit maybe start a family or something and find some new challenges to work on I spent the evening play testing an early build of Twister tower for Thomas had a lot of great things going for it and watched the latest AI explained video as I always do when they come out Paul and I have only a 3 to 4 day work quiek for throne fall which gives us some room to work on Z projects for me that mostly means YouTube all right so this is the video I'm currently working on can

reproduce it and I'll give you a ton of ideas and checklists that you can apply directly to your game at the core you only need four things to make a successful this is my setup timeline on one side and then the video on the other side after 5 years of YouTube and with about 200,000 subscribers my channel is making about 300 per month now that sounds great I'll take it over nothing but it's not a lot if you compare it to how much time I put into this I don't want to take more sponsorships I also don't want to make more videos either I think the reasonable solution is to just treat YouTube like a hobby I love doing it but it's certainly time to stop treating it like a job and take it a bit more chill I think doing YouTube full time is freaking stressful and it sucks a lot of the joy out of it so let's just not do that [Music]

here we go [Music] [Applause] again it's so freaking warm I can't really focus that Friday last day of work effect is starting to set in maybe it's very disheartening how slowly you make progress I think I'm now at 8 minutes or something that's pretty much it for one work week and the dev lock continues for the days and weeks that followed there were only only tons of small tasks left but as we all know small tasks have a tendency to really add up localization balancing polishing here I'm working on a new enemy type for the fin level the fire snail which reminds me my last game will you snail just received a massive update the level editor has tons of new features and we

made a little bonus campaign to show some of them off thank you to the wonderful people in the snay team for making this happen woo didn't have to do much for slices of infinity the team carried me through that one but I'm still starting to get the feeling I might be juggling a couple too many projects at once but whatever luxury problems for the final boss fight of Throne fall I wanted to have this Epic Dragon pulled from the asset store but I couldn't figure out how to get the animations working fast enough so instead I made a dragon at home this is the dragon at home and instead of breathing fire it just PUK all over your buildings awesome it's very difficult to describe how finishing such a massive project feels like it's a it's kind of a mix like between very exhausted and very excited I'm already feeling nostalgic while still actively working on the game you never quite know if you'll ever be able to capture lightning in a bottle again I think the first low light was definitely before we actually started working on F fall in its final form the end of our prototyping phase where we just felt very exhausted already yeah we did feel a bit insecure at the time like can we

pull this off again was this a fluke yeah like this this whole card game decision it's just so interesting and hindsight but well that was certainly one of the low lights for me for those of you don't remember Throne fall almost would have ended up being a turn-based card game it was pretty horrible but for some reason we were in tunnel vision and didn't realize after lots of time wasted we started from scratch and Paul eventually came up with this prototype here iMed very strong good vibe for me like just from the getg go felt like something very solid and look where we're now it's been such a long journey it definitely had its ups and its downs we learned so many new things about making video games I have a lot of new found confidence in my abilities and I can't wait to apply them to new projects I had the same thought yesterday and I think I was even like I was telling my partner about it like maybe that's the biggest highlight of them allall like how much we learn about making games again and how much there still is to learn it's so interesting because we I

mean we did a couple of games that did well before and sometimes you get to a point where you feel like yeah I kind of maybe I understood how to make good games and then just a new project happens and you realize how limited your understanding and knowledge about creating games is and how much there is still to learn so I think that's the most fun part of all while you see the final making off clips from this deathlock series in front of your eyeballs I want to take the opportunity to really wholeheartedly just say thank you thank you to everybody who supported the game with your wallet by finding bucks by providing feedback and of course also thank you for supporting the deathlock series here on YouTube Just you watching is already enough it's more than I could possibly ask for thank you very much the game is out now on Steam and the switch give it a spin if you want to no worries there'll be a few more updates we'll be fixing bucks and so on other than that we're very excited to move on to new adventures now maybe the best final vers I can find D see you for the next adventure