Making Your Game 10X Better Is Easier Than You Think...

All right. So, this game is called Crude Survivor, and I played it, and I was a little underwhelmed by it, and the developer knows that I I did this video, but um basically, my theory was it wasn't the loop. It wasn't the game loop or the mechanics that were the problem. It was actually the juice or the game feel. So, I'm going to take this into Adobe Premiere. Actually, I'm going to take footage from my playthrough. I'm going to bring it into Adobe Premiere. And I think you're going to be surprised how useful Adobe Premiere is. You could basically add game feel and game juice to a game really, really quickly. Now, obviously, all of this juice will need to be added later in Unity or Unreal. But the purpose the purpose of using Adobe Premiere [music] is to quickly iterate and try out new sounds very quickly. So, here's before Cool

concept, but I I don't feel the tension. Let's start with sound. What I'm going to do is go to artlist.io and we're just going to go to music. There we go. Yeah, there we go. Here we go. I'm going to put wave one on there because I don't know where wave one was, but I'm just going to say wave one begins. And this helps a lot, by the way. Um, doing all this in Premiere, you don't have to code anything. Um, you can just put it in Premiere just to see how it feels, right? So, a

great way to to to to practice game feel and juice is actually just to do it in in a in a in a video editing software. So, we're going to we're going to have that go a little earlier right here. We can just duplicate this and loop it. And when the last enemy dies, we we do a crescendo out. There we go. So this right here, you'd have a stinger that plays at the end. Watch. And then that's where you would have the wave finished right here.

Wave complete. And watch. You could play like a bonus uh money sound or some some kind of sound effect that's like re a reward. Oh, we could also do a a warning siren when the when the wave starts. [music] You just want to you want to give every indication to the player. Um, you're trying to tell the player what to feel. One of the that's what juice really is. Juice is basically manipulation. Telling the player, "Hey, this is how you should feel right now." Watch. And then you would just fade this out here. Just going to create a lingering echo of the same pitch

so it lasts longer. We'll do right here. Okay, you guys ready for the next step? Let's give some personality to the player. [panting and gasps] [laughter] [gasps] Just creating fear here. And now, hey, now that we've got um the music working in our favor, um now we can get some monster sounds. Okay, so watch this. Monster growl. Hello. What does the full-time gamedev course offer? The link is below and you can sort of scrub through and see what it offers, but it offers a ton of stuff. I mean, it's I would say it's probably the most comprehensive gamedev course and it's taught by an actual gamedev who's making his third commercial

release right now. Um, so yeah, it it teaches how to how to pitch to publishers. Um, it teaches about how to get funded on Kickstarter with just a demo, how to hit the Steam front page, how to get wish lists, how to get press coverage. Those are that's the business side. There's also the development side. Unity, GDAU, or Unreal, take your pick, 2D or 3D. There's also a free 2D art course, free 3D art course, free YouTube course, which teaches how to do YouTube devlogs, and a free uh course on how to reach out to streamers. So, that's all included for free because of the Black Friday sale. So, check it out below and I'll give you a shout out tomorrow in the live stream. How about this? Alien growl. You want it to have that sci-fi. Here we go. So, I always like to play a sound when an enemy first sees a player. Now, you don't do it for every enemy. What you do is if the enemy's following list is zero,

then you play the sound when the first one arrives on the list. So the first encounter, play the sound. So this one definitely want to play this. And you look, you test this. You go, okay, well maybe maybe I wanted to play every every second enemy that sees the player. Well, we could test it in Premiere. So right here, here we go. The enemy sees the player here. It sounds a little too close. So, this this we can mimic a YouTube not a YouTube a reverb zone um that would be used in Unity, but we're just going to make it super wet. Turn it up. And then he's gonna go [cough] right.

So the thing about uh hurt sounds that you want to do hurt sounds what you want is you want an impact and you also so so often times you'll have like a long tail sound like this but you need an impact sound as well. So let me make sure I set up the sound properly so you guys can hear this. Uh file edit preferences. Let's go to our output here for some reason. Actually no no it's right here. recording playback device. You guys can't hear it, can you? Ah, [sighs] I'm not sure why you can't hear it. Let's see. Maybe you can. Can you hear this? I can't hear it either. Well, there you go. [laughter] Oh. So, let's do this here.

Is that it? Yeah. There we go. So, watch this. That's not That doesn't feel like I just got impacted. So, watch this. You want it quick impact. Let's try again. We're peing. So, let's turn the volume down. Okay. Peing. Good. You want both. You want both. Okay. And we're going to grab this here and just pull it there. We're going to create multi- pitch. That's fine by me. This is a little long tail. And then blood splatter. You want that fleshy impact. Anytime you

hit those enemies, I want to hear. There we go. There's one. And then we're gonna do flesh hit. There we go. That's it. And honestly, you should probably do an indicator on the screen, a red flash when you hit when you hit an enemy. It'll feel so much better. I'll show you guys what I mean here. Um, so here we go. This is the punch sound, guys. You can also get away with adding delay to stuff. So, for example, watch this. I can take all this. And, you know, I would recommend if you're going to do this stuff, you don't bake all of this, but I'm going to bake it uh in the case of just for this video, but I would have this be one sound and then this be another sound. But you can add a delay in unity if you wanted to, like a a subtle yield. Watch this. That is actually really for some reason

that works and then we'll do that blood splatter. But you can play with that delay in Unity. Um we're going to do a little bit of a blood splatter right here. Right here. A very quick way to play with sound design. So, we got to hit here. Right there. We're going to put it right here. Yep. We're going to turn it up loud. Add a little bit of a reverb. Of course, this is sort of pretending that we're in Unity. Let's turn that up and see how it sounds.

guys. Already like 20 times better. Let me show you what I mean by an indicator really quick. This stuff is really important. um some kind of you what you want to do is you want to tell the player what's happening and you want to do it in as many ways as you well in the most effective way as possible until they get it. If a player doesn't know if they're like, "Man, I don't really know if I shot the enemy or not." You keep adding sound and feedback and feedback and feedback until they get it. until they know, hey, I'm making an impact. My gun is actually doing something. You really want the player to know that they're doing something. That's the whole point of a game,

letting the player know, hey, I'm doing something here. I'm making an impact. I underestimate the value of just saying, you know what? I'm going to put this in Premiere for just like 5 seconds and test this out before I commit to programming it. Um, so watch this. Here we go. We got a shot here. Look, we'll put it right there. Dissolve Thomas. Okay. Well, you know how to do this in Premiere, but I you can't do it in a game. Well, all this stuff is just stuff I've done in in uh Twisted Tower. That's all this is. This is all just stuff I did in Twisted Tower. Um I kind of want to shift the color here. It's a little vibrant. [groaning and screaming] It's too big. These tiny little things matter. They really do. Uh we'll do one more here. And you can even do a double flash.

Maybe we need some kind of alien horde sounds. Um, all we need [clears throat] Yep. All we need is sort of this looping sound. And what [snorts] you do is you have this sound. You have this sound attached to every enemy. But this is the key part. What you do is you have a function that starts the sound at a random point so that they're never synced. A safeguard against this, a fail safe is to also set the pitch to 0.9 to 1.1 randomly on start. So, not only you getting the sound to start at a random point, but you're also getting the pitch to be subtly different so that every enemy is always going to have a little bit of a different sound. You make it 3D so that it only plays when you get near an enemy. Uh, and then when you have five enemies, you hear all the you hear A.

[screaming] That one right there. And then we'll add the breathing sound. just and you again you could bake this breathing sound into the end of the wave. But it's so all you got to do is that [snorts] right? And don't forget about the value of a uh war win or round complete stinger.

Some kind of war drums. There you go. I've told you. Who knows that one? And we'll just put this breathing here. Oh man, that feels great, Thomas. Thank you. And then crunching metal sound. That's good enough for me. That's another one. Good. And we'll just take these two and create.

When in doubt, make it an impulse up. Okay. You don't need it to be. [groaning] Okay. We're not scratching the metals back. A little hit there. And then this one. And I'll just put a couple of them here. I'm not going to do every single We'll do one there as well. So, here's before. So, it's like there's not really a lot of tension, you know, and there's no personality to the enemies.

And here's sound and music. And I'll do one more. One more and then we'll move on to the next game. Yeah, I would lean into the horror if I was the developer. Heat.

Heat. Yeah. Uh, here's what's crazy. I think most people if they didn't know what we just did there, most people would think, "Oh man, you added so many more enemies and the the enemies are so much smarter now and there's so much more tension now. Did you speed up the enemies? They seem faster." Nope. It's all sound. All of it is sound. [snorts] So, h how do we feel about this, guys? Was that helpful? I I hope so.