Moving Mountains: Speedy Level Creation as a Desperate Indie Dev

[Music] thank you fasten your seatbelts and prepare to come along with me on a journey into the scrappy unprofessional chaotic and sometimes quite desperate adventure of solely solo indie game development where there are no producers no meetings no one to delegate to there is just you your computer and your determination to see it through to the end so um what is this talk going to be about so um it's going to be a um it's not just a level design talk there's going to be a lot of uh explanation about how I built my first game hang line so it's kind of like a postmorton but there is going to be a lot of level design information

um so the reason I'm going to be talking about how I built my game and how it um more about the game design and the the creation and the structure of the game is because I think this is really fundamental into understanding the level design um as a as a solo indie game developer you need to be able to not just uh be a level designer you obviously need to be a programmer you need to be a game designer uh you need to be a producer you need to be an artist you basically need to be everything um so I think it's really important in explaining how I built the the levels for the game to also explain a lot about the game design itself and the game creation um I'm going to be talking a lot about how to build a process for creating levels as quickly as possible because that's something that was really important in making the game um and I'm also going to be talking about how to theme your levels to get them to stand out from each other and to uh to be memorable in the player's mind I'm going to be talking about how to

teach game mechanics in an organic way not just through Force tutorials and I'm also going to be talking about how to layer the systems of your game together so that you can get maximum variety out of very few game mechanics um so before I begin I'm just going to show you a quick video of my game hang line so you can understand a little bit about what it's about [Music] all right we're back excellent sorry about the technical difficulty sir rule number one is to giving a talk at GDC is

don't use Google Slides so I'm going to talk a little bit about myself now so um I spend a large time a large amount of time in my career is a designer or lead designer on various AAA games mostly games where you shoot people or blow things up um but at some point after um being through quite a lot of different layoffs or different Studios and also the only projects being available were kind of um like a lot of sort of sequels prequels continuation of franchises um I started to think maybe I should try something different um and I started to think maybe I could go Indie um and try and build something by myself but um this is quite a scary thing um so the thing is making a game by yourself um it's a very personal journey and the way you navigate through that journey is very dependent on who you are as a person and your own shortcomings so not

just your actual skills but your your personality as well um so I'm someone that worries a lot and I'll think of like a thousand reasons why Sonic isn't going to work um so even the idea of me making a game by myself was a terrifying thought um and obviously I've thought of a lot of reasons why that is not going to work um and I need a lot a lot of pushing to even decide to do that and for me the push to do that to to become a solo Indie developer actually came from reading an article written by a fake robot dinosaur so um the article is called win like stupid um and it's uh it's all about basically um being a bit more stupid and being a bit more kind of not overthinking something and and kind of moving ahead even though something may not seem like the greatest idea um so I can kind of show a little uh diagram from this talk from this article

um and the important thing about this this diagram is that uh the kind of intersection there between uh Geniuses uh so basically swap people unlike um people that are winning in life and are successful uh it's extremely small and and the kind of point of the article is is all about um yeah kind of being a little bit less judgmental of your own ideas um so the the whole article is actually written in capitals because the the sort of voice is meant to be uh like grimlock's voice so I'm going to read you a few quotes from this article and in order to do it justice I'm also going to read them in the way that I expect uh they should be read so smart people hate dumb ideas only think of ways idea can't win be too stupid for fear too stupid to stop too stupid to fail and uh hopefully I haven't destroyed my

voice for the rest of this talk now so I think you get the point anyway so that this article is super useful in helping me um actually start this journey but uh there were significant hurdles to overcome uh upon doing this so basically when I started this path of solely solo indie game development I had no team um and despite how much I kept going on about wise robot dinosaurs no one really wanted to work with me um I had no funding no money for contractors no art skills had not even built a 3D model in my life and I had limited programming ability uh the last time I programmed was at University so um yeah it doesn't seem like a great start right but God I'd remember the words of the article be too stupid for fear too stupid to stop too stupid to fail so I went off and I started building this game so that leads us to part one which is building the concept

itself so um I left my job in San Francisco and I moved to uh to Spain because I was kind of scared of the rent prices there and thought this would be a lot safer and I constructed a plan uh and that plan was to make a game in about three to six months just do something super fast super basic get it done uh failed miserably and then do another one and make it much better um so yeah what could possibly go wrong the answer is uh many things so uh I I started to figure out some uh or put some goals down of what I wanted to try and Achieve with this um so I thought let's keep things very small um and I'll make a mobile game um didn't want to you know get anything that was too crazy with scope I thought let's keep it really simple and small um I also thought I'd make a free-to-play game because I had a little bit of experience at this working at a

small Indie Studio at one point um I also wanted to do something that was very I had a very relatable theme um so I didn't want anything fantasy or sci-fi I wanted something very grounded just to appeal to a wide audience and I wanted very simple and easy to pick up controls this was something that was really important to me um so I started writing ideas down uh and the one that I was most excited about was a climbing game um so I thought to myself that the mobile controls uh the touchscreen would be really um really effective for making a climbing game because I thought you know you could kind of move the characters fingers with your thumbs um and sorry move the characters arms with your thumbs and kind of move around and I was like yeah that will work really well for a climbing game but I thought okay let's do a little bit of research before I get going um and as it turns out there was a lot of climbing games uh not only were there a lot of climbing games on mobile there

was even climbing games that used the exact same control system that I was excited about so it's like oh okay that's not a great start but then I thought what if you could just kind of give the guy a grappling hook by that that's going to make things a lot more interesting um but there's a there's a little bit of a Twist to the idea so um most grappling hook games uh that were out at that time um they worked in a similar way where you would fire the grappling hook out it would hit a solid barrier you would swing and then that barrier would also form like the kind of the shape of the level right so everything's kind of very um kind of rigid 2D physics let's say and the idea I had uh or the twist on it let's say is that I thought it would be really cool is if you could just literally click anywhere on the screen and send the grappling hook out to that point so you don't have to connect it to

a specific bit of collision and that way um you know you would swing out and it would give a lot more um sort of finesse to to the controls um and this seems like a simple idea but basically the entire game is built around this um so I I set off and I thought okay first thing we need to do is prototype it obviously you know the first time you do everything um it's probably going to be a failure so you may as well test it out first this is me testing out this exact GDC talk so um I'm a pretty lazy programmer basically I don't really want to program anything unless I absolutely have to so the very first thing I did was I looked on the unity asset store just in case there was something which I could use for swinging you up a mountain lo and behold I found easy 2D grappling hook um for a mere ten dollars and uh it turned out this was the best ten dollars I've ever spent

so I got this going and um before very uh before only a few days I managed to get a kind of unity Cube swinging about um and this was already starting to look like you know this could work um so start to think okay what what is the actual point of uh the levels like how are things going to work here what's the structure um so I just kept with something very simple you start at the bottom of the mountain you have to navigate your way through and uh there'll be some pickups on the way Stars uh and then you'll have to get to the top and hit the flag and that's the end of the level so this was my plan um now there were some first steps I needed to take here so um obviously I needed some barriers in the environment to slow you down and to form the shape of the level and uh need some hazards to avoid to make it a bit more of a challenge um but the other thing was I needed to

make the grapple a little bit more elastic and springy uh to fit the kind of feel that I was looking for so next prototype um so here you can see these uh Unity Cube scaled um up and down that's the gray boxes there um the the grapple is a little bit more elastic and then as you're swinging around you've got some these red blocks that basically kill you instantly um so uh this this provided a few initial discoveries uh swinging around was really good fun um but it was very hard to be precise with the physics um so the thing about physics is that it gives a lot of kind of free gameplay like it's um it has its unpredictability which creates a lot of emerging gameplay but the problem is that unpredictability can also lead to frustration if you punish the player really severely so basically anything that instantly killed you was not such a good idea um the other thing that was uh this

prototype told me was a level design is basically everything in this game um it's super duper important and it's you know the game is basically going to live or die based on the level design um so the next thing I did was uh whack in a a character into the game uh this was just some some guy I'd made in a blender tutorial um he wasn't massively happy about being in the game but you know he didn't really have a choice um and so um I thought let's make some hazards that um that don't insta kill the player uh so the first of those with this was this kind of uh falling snow panel obviously here it's just a a again a unisecube but this uh kind of pulled you out your way and then it didn't kill you instantly but it put you into danger and you had to quickly react to get out of there um so another um sort of non-instical uh Hazard was this falling block similar kind of a idea upset this was a solid block that could actually Crush you if it landed on top of you either too fast or whether if

it crushed you against a a sort of solid uh ground piece um I also whacked in an avalanche because obviously this is a game about climbing mountains and that seemed pretty appropriate um so there's a bunch of things that I put in there that sort of knock you off the line but they didn't kill you so you still had some moments to react and continue playing um now around this point I started to think about marketing and sort of getting the word of the game out there um and I met uh I met a chap who worked for a Spanish magazine and um it's a game conference and then I I was talking about my game and then he was like oh yeah let me know when it's something to look at um and then at one point I sent him an email and I've got the email right here so this was the first point where I was trying to describe like what is the game uh in one sentence you know so I came up with this super quick tagline of uh you're a dude with a grappling hook and you have to swing your way up to the top of the mountain dodging Falling Rocks

avalanches and angry mountain goats for yeah that's that sounds pretty cool then he emails me back saying that line angry mountain goats really got me smiley face I was like oh uh yeah I don't actually have goats in the game and I have no idea how they're gonna work but I guess I've got to put them in now so um I built a goat using Unity cubes obviously um you know as you can see artistic skills at this point were not great um and I was like what's ago gonna do I mean probably he's gonna kick you right so okay let's let's put a trigger on it um and we'll get him to Fire and impulse as soon as you go near so um I slapped it in there and um once he actually gets to the mountain boom get smacked by the goat um and miraculously everyone that played the game absolutely loved the goads and even all the way to the end of the game

this was the thing that everyone seemed to comment on so if you don't take away anything else from this talk just basically put goats in your game so um next thing I decided to do was test on the target platform so I built a mobile build as quickly as possible um this came with a few discoveries it's very hard to see what's ahead because you've got this uh kind of narrow field of view um so basically it was very easy to kind of smash into stuff if you were moving left to right because you couldn't see too far ahead um so basically yeah moving very fast left or right directly was was not good in the levels so um basically the levels needed more diagonal motion um so to kind of explain this a little bit better um I've got this crude diagram here so imagine you're um you're sending out your grappling hook to the uh the Red Dot there

um what this is going to do is kind of Swing you in an arc right so then we we fire out our next grappling hook and then we're going to kind of swing back around so imagine we're kind of trying to move up the screen here um and we fire another one out and then we're swinging in the other direction so we're essentially you're kind of making curves As you move um and basically I realized this is kind of like a driving game um so in a driving game the cars are or physics based right and um you know you're controlling them but they're also moving a lot by the physics of the world um and you know your race tracks are very uh smooth and curvy because of that right they're not just flat straight lines um so basically this made me realize that um for you know an ideal shaped level um I'm gonna need some sweeping curves um you know I'm going to need more organic shapes right and how the heck am I going to do this if everything's made from Unity cubes so

like this was what the levels were at that point it's it's all you know really straight lines right so um this moves us neatly on to part two which is pre-production basically how to actually build these levels um so at this point I was thinking I need to get into blender and start you know actually building a level properly um but what I decided to do is find a way to take my crappy Unity Cube levels and put them into blender um so I looked on the internet and I found this uh tool that was an obj exporter for Unity uh so this allowed me to take my basic basic Cube levels take them out of unity put them into blender play around with them make them look a bit better and then pull them back into unity and they'd have all the same Collision um so that's what I did and this was kind of what I ended up with there which was it was okay starting to look a

little bit better it looks a little bit more like a mountain now well it's I discovered the building level R is really slow um so just to kind of get an idea of what I mean by slow um so my goal for playing a level was that it should take about three minutes this was like a rough approximation um when you're actually playing it so I was trying to make about like five hours of gameplay for the first release of this game um just so people would have enough to play and they'd watch the madness tonight it would hopefully make some money um so if we times five hours by 60 minutes per hour we get uh some other number and then we divide that by three minutes and we get 100 levels that is what I would need for five hours of gameplay um but really probably more like 50 levels right because the player is going to die occasionally and we don't need them to you know uh well they're not going to just play through every level one after the other

but this was like literally it was taking me five days to build a level because of my crappy 3D art skills and because um it was just a really slow process so obviously five days to build a level you've got like 250 working days to finish this game that's like just the levels so this was not feasible um and I started to think like what other Solutions are there for solving this and then I thought maybe I could generate the art automatically automatic mesh generation so I I started mentioning this to friends and they were like are you mad what the hell that's for serious programmers not Noobs this idea is dumb and I was thinking yeah this this idea is really dumb but then I remembered the words of that wise robot dinosaur smart people hate dumb ideas only think of ways idea can't

win and I thought okay let's try this so um again I went on the internet and searched for something that might help and I found this tool called polymesh so this is a tool that allows you to basically in the unity editor um set up points for creating simple 2D Collision and so I thought the plan was I could use this to kind of build the shape of the level directly in the editor and get a more organic shape um so it also allowed you to kind of like as you apply the points out it would make the collision and it would also kind of um bevel or sort of uh extrude the edges to make a shape um so I started working on this got it integrated got it together and uh this was a massive step forwards um I could then build levels that were a lot more interestingly shaped um so here you can see I've also got kind of a separation between the the back wall which is like this snowy area which you can grab on connect to and then there's also these solid gray rocks

um and uh well sort of like a solid kind of front wall of rock that you couldn't get past um so this was a huge help um but it's you know it's still not looking that amazing yet right um it's quite basic um so the next part of this step was figuring out like can I actually deform those meshes to make them look a bit more interesting um and again I went on the internet and started to looking uh looking to see there was some code I could use and I found this uh this package called coherent noise um generation and this had lots of different noise curves so you could apply to meshes so I started fiddling around with it um and I managed to you know start um manipulating some meshes to make some interesting shapes and to cut a long story short I came up with a process to build more interesting looking rocks and level shapes so

um this is kind of a top level summary of it um basically I use the polymesh tool to uh shape the Rocks um then I used another tool to triangulate them so this is about like basically making the mesh into lots of reasonably evenly shaped triangles because that's really important when you want to try and deform them then I would add depth to that shape and pull it out then I would apply the coherent noise uh mesh of sorry hear a noise algorithm to deform it with a voronoi curve so this kind of makes cells and that's why you get these sort of Little Rock shapes then I would make the vertices all the same for each triangle to make flat shading because I wanted the the low poly look then I would simplify that using a decimator tool again some code that I found on the internet it was all free and all legitimate I promise and uh and then for the last part um I would uh basically check if the

triangle is facing upwards or roughly upwards and then color it white I don't know why I've written snow Shader there that was probably to sound more intelligent because at this point I had no idea what a Shader was um okay so this is basically what this looks like um we've got our 2D simple shape for the for the Collision of the level and it would deform it into this more interesting looking Rock um there is a gif right here which shows it um shows it working so that's me kind of sculpting pulling out the points to to make this more organically shaped Rock Collision and then after a few seconds of my computer wearing its fans and doing all these calculations it would eventually create a more interesting looking Rock so this was a massive Improvement and with a bit of lighting and some post-processing the levels now to me

looked good enough um for production um so this changed everything basically um it allowed me to rapidly experiment and try lots of ideas out uh it created much more organic feeling levels or it allowed me to create more organic feeling levels and it also allowed me to create more variety in the obstacles because I had a lot of Falling Rocks and things like that which I could now custom build the shapes for which was a huge huge Improvement and basically with this tool I could build a level from whoa this is scary what the heck okay I guess we'll just keep going um I could build a level from zero to done in four hours which was a massive improvement from what we had before um so yeah basically if we recalculate how long it would take to build 50 levels it's more like about 25 days so this was massive um so the next thing I want to talk about because it really relates to the level design is

um the the layering of game mechanics so at this point I had um kind of like made the mechanics sort of in isolation right so um yeah if you can kind of you know playing the game and you encounter one mechanic on its own that's that's cool but if we have several mechanics to interplay together and connect together um that's going to be a lot more interesting so um we're going to get slightly programmary for a second here but I I assure you it's quite basic uh so this is the the object hierarchy diagram for the game and um I really feel like the whole electricity is going to go off soon I need to finish this talk before disaster happens um so uh here uh as an example I wanted the goats to do more than just kick the player I wanted them to kick other things too so um I made this behavior um of kicking uh happen on a destructible object which is at the top of the hierarchy there and so everything

under destructible objects also can do whatever as a distributable object does so because the goat could then kick a destructible object it meant that it could also kick Dynamite it could kick Mountain cats it could kick the player and it a goat could even kick other goats and this created a lot more interesting possibilities with combining the mechanics so as you can see here the cat anyway you can see basically lots of cool stuff happens that's quite interesting and unpredictable um so that was a massive help in in allowing me to um layer the mechanics together in the levels all right so I knew how to make the levels and what the process was going to be so the next thing I needed to do was figure out how to make them actually play well um so I was yeah the next part was yeah basically what makes a good level um so uh there's kind of three basic

things I'm going to talk about here um so the one is first one is tutorials so that's explaining these game mechanics to the player and I didn't want to do uh scripted kind of stop the player and make them read a tutorial message at all I wanted to make it much more organic and in the level and I'm going to talk about that in a sec um also I found that variety was like a really important thing in making the levels interesting and that's um there's a lot of different aspects to that which I'll talk about in a moment and also theming was really important so that's making the levels stand out from each other and being each one of them being memorable in the player's mind so let's get into detail on these so um so the tutorials as I said I wanted to not do guided tutorials I wanted the player to learn organically by doing the thing that um kind of you know shows the mechanic kind of a bit more Nintendo design philosophy I guess

um so I I had a dedicated level that would show you how to um or kind of force you to experience the mechanic and then what it would do is reinforce that mechanic in the next few levels and then I would show the bread for that mechanic afterwards so that means layering it with other mechanics to show how it also fits into everything else so let's dive into a simple example uh so here we've got the goats um this is the first level where you encounter a goat and the player starts at the bottom left of the level and they have really no choice but to go through this quite tight Gap here um and on going through that tight Gap they see this cute little go they don't really think much of it they will naturally accidentally swing into the go and the Goat will kick them in the face then they will be quite angry but they will also understand exactly what a goat does then if we look at the rest of the level zoomed out

um just in case the player misses that first go somehow there is basically ego on every single tight Gap in the entire level so by the end of it they're basically swearing because it got kicked by ghost so many times but they understand how they work um then a few levels later we start to add other mechanics in with the goats that we've already kind of introduced before so here we've got those falling panels which I've highlighted in Orange and we've also got some Falling Rocks above so the falling panels if the player connects to those then they might fall into the go and also if they pull down one of those gray rocks at the top that might actually crush the go so we start to teach the player that these are these other mechanics that layer on to um later on to the goats um super quick example here player pulls down The Rock The Rock shakes the dynamite the dynamite explodes and sends the goat flying so uh the next thing that I did

um relating to mechanics was um I made this diagram um which is basically every level of the game uh and then it shows what mechanic features in that level so that's the the colors you can see to the right hand side so um the point of this really is to just kind of Sanity check like am I using those mechanics to their fullest um you know if there's huge gaps in this uh in this sheet that means I'm kind of forgetting about a mechanic for a while right um so it's about um it's kind of like a reminder just to make sure that you've got an even dispersal of these mechanics so you're keeping things fresh and you're not kind of relying on one for too long um also you'll notice this is kind of a curve that is um coming in from the top there and that's basically the curve of kind of mechanic introduction um so the reason that is a curve and not not a line is because you want to introduce mechanics much faster at the

start of the game because that is going to provide maximum interest to the player so that they're more likely to keep playing because they're basically seeing a lot of new stuff at the beginning of the game this is super important for mobile games where people have really short attention spans especially if the game is free um so if it's a free game they've had no commitment right um so uh so next thing to talk about is variety uh and pacing so um this was another really important aspect that I found when making the the levels um so my kind of aim with the levels was to make sure that there was no single part of the level that would repeat um in the same way later in the level so whenever I had some some section of game plan make sure that if it was repeated it would repeat in a different way um so also I was trying to vary the spaces of the level so we'd have larger spaces where you could fully swing and

move quite fast and then also have tighter spaces where it was harder to get through and you had to slow down and the idea I had was to try and Vary between these two um these two Styles all the time another thing that I was trying to um very was uh the difficulty of each level so that this would um bounce up and down as you played through I.E some bits were easier and some bits were harder and this would constantly change as you go through I'll just show a quick example of that this is another level of the game quite early on so this blue line here this is kind of the main route through the level so yeah player starts at the bottom has to climb all the way to the top this is one of the more linear levels I'd say and um I've kind of labeled here the areas which are slow to navigate through where there is you know say like an obstacle or there's just a narrow Gap and then there's also some areas that are faster to navigate through where there's more clear space and more things

to grab onto and as you can see this is varying all the way to the top of the level then I've also labeled up kind of the areas that are harder and easier in the level um so you know the harder bits are the ones where there's maybe a dangerous obstacle the easy ones are where there's more things to Grapple onto and as you can see again I'm trying to vary this throughout the level so you're constantly um kind of getting an easy bit and then a harder bit and then an easy bit um another thing I was doing with variety was um trying to make sure there was a variety of roots um so I wanted to make sure there was one there was more than one way for each obstacle um so um this basically meant like having a main path through the level but then lots of optional side paths um so this is basically again thinking about like mobile where you've got a very wide audience and you don't really want someone to get stuck on the game so

my idea was to kind of make the uh the main map relatively easy but then have um optional challenge by the pickups like the pickups being in harder to reach places um so yeah as I was saying mobile is a very wide audience so you don't want someone to get stuck um so quick example of that uh this is the first level where you encounter Falling Rocks um so it's quite a simple level you kind of go all straight the way all the way up really uh the main path I've labeled in blue um and uh you can see there's these side paths in green to the edge there so the player has optional routes that can go and those optional routes contain those pickups so they're a little harder to get to um you'll also notice that there's a few points here like especially right at the bottom where uh there's there's almost no way through without encountering a Falling Rock right so again this this consists was a tutorial level for the Falling Rocks I was basically forcing

the player to experience them and if they didn't experience the first one they assure as hell would Experience One somewhere else in this level because it's it's loaded with Falling Rocks um so next thing to talk about is theming um so one thing that I I realized was really important in making the levels was to try and find at least one unique and memorable elements in every level um so um this could be something where there's a very unique use of a mechanic or a key it could even be something that is um that the shape of the level is very very different um so the point is like you're basically trying to make something where you're answering the question why does this level exist in the game right is there another level that's almost the same then it probably shouldn't exist right um does it add anything new to the current set of levels that I have um so another way to think about it is

Imagine two people that have played the game talking to each other like can they describe the level to their friend without telling them the name of the level or the number of it you know they'd be like this is the level with the Giant Octopus or whatever um so this was kind of what I was trying to go for and something I found really important uh so let's show a few examples of that um so this level is actually called leap of faith and you'll notice this is a bit in the middle there where the only way to get from uh this lower part of the mountain where you start onto that larger upper part is by grappling uh grappling a stalactite that can fall and it's literally the only thing you can grapple and then after you grapple that you really need to quickly grapple the other ones um so it's kind of like yeah it's basically a leap of faith and it's quite a like a memorable moment in this level um so another thing that makes this uh level quite memorable is uh it also kind

of looks like Dr Zoidberg um so I'm just going to show you quickly now um that level that you saw earlier in the game so this was uh another level where I wanted to make this feel very unique so I kind of yeah basically stole this idea from Indiana Jones right where you've got this giant falling Boulder and this is like the kind of the largest rock the player has seen at that point and there's like no way to avoid it um so this this made the level very memorable um so just uh to kind of explain how I um managed to kind of keep this idea of theming in my mind when I'm designing levels is um what you see here are two uh diagrams uh that I've I've drawn on paper and that they're just A4 sheets right so this is quite each one of those is is a relatively small piece of paper and you can see I've crammed in like about you know six diagrams of an entire level

into each kind of corner and the the reason for that was to force myself to not get too detailed with each level and instead draw out like what is the unique thing about this level like how is it different to the other levels um and by by drawing super small I couldn't get focused on any details I had to literally think okay how to set this level apart both in terms of its shape or through creating you know a unique element in there um so another super important thing um that I'm going to mention just briefly is play testing um so I literally gave this game to everyone to play like my nephews my friends my mum my dad um you can see my mum there actually in the bottom left corner she was a particularly useful play tester because you can see the kind of claw grip she had on the mouse was quite unique and meant that she had almost no control over the player characters so if my mum

could beat a level then you know that that proved that it was uh safe for human consumption um so yeah getting your game in front of people is Mega important not just because it's going to help you see a load of bugs that you wouldn't notice but it's also um it's going to help you just feel better about the game and realizes there's people enjoying it um so super duper important um and also if you've got your game on mobile this is a manga big Advantage because you can just literally whip it out your pocket you've got it on you all at all times so anyone you meet you can just say hey I'm making a game wanna play it um so that's really useful all right so at this point I was six months in I had all the game mechanics I'd figured out how to make good levels I'd close the final environment art I was almost done right so I want to ask you guys if anyone can guess how long it took me

at this point to launch the game just shout out anything you can think of most of you are actually right I thought you were going to guess less but yes it was one whole year so original idea of three to six months yeah that was completely not happening at this point um so yeah like the reason it took so long was I still had UI to build a whole progression system an economy all this ads and monetization stuff marketing like yeah this was a huge Challenge and um also because these tasks are like super boring seriously if you ever have to deal with like ad mediation networks and uh yeah monetization stuff is yeah this is not the Indie dream let's say um so anyway um at this point in the project I was getting really anxious um I had a lot of friends asking me uh throughout the

project like oh you're working on that game yeah um how long is it going to take you to finish then and I was always like yeah about three months Maybe and then it asked me three months later like yeah so I I have you finished oh no it took about like maybe three more months and this would happen every time and became like this running joke um and I was getting really worried to be honest like I I was thinking am I actually going to be able to balance the progression of this game like all this economy stuff it was super difficult um am I going to finish before I like I run out of money and is this even going to be successful I'm wasting my time um these are the kind of thoughts that you have uh when you are literally the only team member and you're you're you know you're building this thing by yourself um I asked a lot of people for advice um like kind of Professionals in the industry and and to be honest most people said just get the game out as soon as you can it's probably going to fail anyway and this was not terribly helpful it's very sound advice but

it is not that helpful um so like basically I was kind of gambling I was putting more chips on the table but that like the longer I spent on the game and the more things I was adding to it to try and make it better it's it's basically like gambling it's putting bigger and bigger bets um in the hope of success and return and to be honest even at this point even grimlock's wise words were not helping because I I was just feeling like this is this is really scary like I'm really you know running out of money um and it's just taking too long and and it was actually um a friend of mine actually the guy that I'd previously emailed and he'd uh told me he really loved goats uh wanted goats in the game um it was him that that kind of yeah gave me some advice um basically he was telling you uh telling me like he'd worked as a writer for a very long time um where he was kind of working at home and working by himself whereas previously you know work with other people and yeah this is I'm kind of

butchering the quote I mean he's Spanish anyway and I think he told me in Spanish but basically he was saying that like when you're working by yourself you know you're not doing meetings um you're not talking to other people you're not got distractions you are solidly working and you are solidly improving your skills so basically you're getting a lot better at what you're doing um and so this was really helpful to me because I thought to myself well even if I completely screw this up at least I'm going to be better at making games and this was kind of what I needed to keep going and to actually get to the end so this leads us to part four uh the launch of the game but not the actual launch this was the soft launch this was one and a half years in I finally got to actually uh soft launch but of course you know the reason I chose to soft launch is because there were still a few more things to do in the game and also like I was terrified of doing a full launch in case it was a complete failure

um so I used to compete to get a few um installs for free um I uh I soft launched the game in India basically because it was super cheap user acquisition uh and this is The Stance here and you can see the number of users on the y-axis and then there's time on the x-axis this was something like I don't know five days after soft launch and you can see there's about 300 users there so okay this is useful when you get some data from that right and then next day suddenly there was a huge bump in users but when I was looking at the stats I was reading still 300 users in the unity telemetry and yet there was three thousand users in the Google Telemetry like what's going on here and I was like okay let's just have a look where are these users coming from right it should be India right nope it was Russia I was like why how the game isn't released in Russia what

oh that's what's happened so yeah basically the game got pirated and then if we return to the graph a few days later so I've scaled the graph down here so that you can see it's 3 000 users at the top of that little red curve there and I think you can guess what's going to happen next boom within a few more days suddenly there were three hundred thousand users and this time it was not Russia it was China so basically after the after two weeks I got 500 000 illegal downloads and then suddenly that is the email from this company called Yodo one and they're like hey we've been playing your game and we really like it um do you want to have a conversation I'm like well that's interesting you're playing my game because it's not actually released in China they're like uh yeah we found it on this uh site and uh yeah anyway we want to talk to you about a possible uh publishing deal

my okay I'm sure I'll have a chat now I actually knew about Yoda one because they'd worked on crossy road which was huge um I think they did in the Android version um they'd also worked on a game called Rodeo Stampede and they were the publisher worldwide uh and they were telling me about this you know when I chatted to them and they were like yeah I think your game can be as big as Rodeo Stampede and you know we only take on a couple of games per year and uh yeah we think your game could be as successful as that game so okay let's uh have a little look how this how this game is doing and like Rodeo Stampede at that point had 120 million downloads and using my very basic maths of divide by a million downloads to get the amount of money the game has made which I'm sure is massively accurate you get 12 million dollars 12 million dollars so yeah um anyway basically I was like okay let's uh let's try and do some kind of deal um and I managed to negotiate

something where I got quite a a large upfront some for a kind of Licensing the game to them I.E allowing them to be my publisher and then for us to work on the game and make some improvements um and this basically took a lot of um pressure off me because it kind of man that even if the game kind of didn't do that well I'd still you know had some security there um so they invited me to China um to work on the game with them they wanted to make some improvements to the progression system this was amazing because I really liked dumplings um and I got to eat as many as I wanted and then um yeah we worked on the game for a while and uh yeah so now I'm going to ask you guys one more time so at this point after getting a publisher bear in mind they put a team of 10 people on the game to work with me right that's 10 times the original team size how long do you guys think it took to finish from this point to the end

wow you guys are super pessimistic okay it took a whole year which is a pretty long time right anyway so two and a half years later finally the game was released um this is a few little gifts here from the final game so um yeah so how did it do uh well it got a feature with Apple and Google so that was really cool uh it did not set the world on fire I did not become a millionaire I am sorry to say um but it got over two million downloads on the Apple Store uh over two million on Google Play uh it recuperated all the opportunity costs more for me um and it uh it still has players so basically it was for our solo Indie developer it was it was a success um so let's sum up now um so I when I was working on the game

um I uh I used a tool called toggle which tracks uh how much time you spend on a task so basically when you start a task you start this timer uh when you work for it for a few hours then you finish the task you stop the timer and you write this is what I worked on it's in this category then at the end of the project you can get a nice little graph like this and it tells you how long you spent on everything um so even though this game took a very long time to make you can see level design is only nine percent of that time uh and if you think about that this is like literally level design level building level testing and all that business like I think nine percent is actually quite small um and so and I think a huge part of this was because I had this process of um you know using this this editor this custom bit Editor to allow me to rapidly build levels um so uh here's some key takeaways um so yeah I highly recommend if you're working as a as an indie Dev to

um make a level design process or a level building process that allows you to wrap it rapidly iterate um because this is going to help you to not only um build levels quickly initially but also change them later if you need to to either fix bugs or make them work better um I highly recommend theming your levels around at least one memorable aspect so that the the levels um you know players can remember them after they've played them and they feel more unique I'd also recommend layering your game systems so that they interplay with each other to create maximum variety out of um you know as few mechanics as possible um I'd also recommend using other people's code wherever possible and adding goats but yeah basically like you want to try to follow your own unique path to success as an indie developer um because yeah it's a very personal journey and like you're going to have your own um yeah your own advantages that you can bring to that but also you're going to

have your own disadvantages and and your personality is like a massive part of making a game by yourself and as I was saying like my personality was like basically worrying about uh things and like you know worrying like is this gonna work and so I needed to over gun that by um yeah basically being a bit more stupid and not judging myself too much um so yeah just quickly um you might wonder like what am I working on next you know like uh yeah makes sense to do a sequel right or possibly another climbing game another mobile game actually no uh I'm working on an action horror roguelike um about a rapidly expanding procedurally growing tentacle monster and um this game is like way more ambitious than hang life I'm still doing it mostly by myself um so yeah like why am I working on such a huge project I'm being Stu I'm being stupid too stupid to fail so um yeah that's the end of my talk um if you want to keep in touch um yeah there's there's actually a lot

more details on uh like how I built the game if you go to this link on game developer um there's like three articles or more explaining much more detail in the process uh if you want to follow me you can do it uh ad form on Twitter um you can also get in touch via my website dynaboss um and please fill in your speaker surveys if you enjoy the talk and that's it thank you [Applause] [Applause] um and due to that technical hiccup with the video I actually have no idea how long I spent on this because the timer stopped um so do we have time for questions yeah awesome so if anyone has any questions uh please step up to the microphone only easy questions though if possible that would be great hi for what you talked about it was great and I have a question you showed a pic of the mountain which showed uh like the

Esports and the hard parts of the level my question is why did you decided to start with the hard part isn't it frustrating for the player to start a level with the hard part instead of an easy one yeah so I think the the question is uh why did I start that particular level with a hard section because this could be uh frustrating to the player um that is a great question and you're basically right you shouldn't really start with the hard part um it was really just for the example of what I was trying to show so yeah the diagram probably not terribly accurate okay thank you no worries hi thank you that was a great talk um my question is about how you laid out your levels especially after your tutorialization so there's probably a good chunk of levels where you already have all your mechanics talk to the player and uh there's a particular challenge of sorting those in in nice satisfying order maybe increasing

difficulty I'm curious if you had anything to speak on as far as how you organize that so I think the question is like how did I organize the levels in terms of like I built a bunch of them like how to assemble them like in the correct order and and flesh out the kind of gaps and stuff is that what you mean roughly more so after your tutorialization curve where I mean it's it's easy to order things after uh well relatively easy to order things after in how you're teaching things yeah after everything's taught you have a bunch of level content that you need to organize and how to do that yeah yeah no it's a good question um so to be honest uh I kind of still kept introducing new things because the way the game was structured it was split into several mountains that had between five and ten levels in each one and every Mountain would introduce something new um this was partly to just try to you know keep the game interesting as you went along um but definitely the more levels you built for the game for sure you're going

to kind of start to you know run out of uh let's say new mechanics to build and to be honest to me it was about trying to then use the actual design of the level to create variety um so like you know making just more interesting shapes that the player hadn't seen before uh instead of it just being one mountain you know have free Peaks or have like a you know Mountain that's bending rapidly on its side and things like that um and uh yeah just basically trying to trying to play with what you have to to stretch out that content as as much as you can um yeah I mean there's there's lots of other aspects to it I guess but yeah it's kind of hard to sum up in in one line but yeah all right thank you no worries hello um so I was just curious so uh that uh first six months uh was that just to uh get the vertical slice done or were you more focused on just completing the game

in general you didn't really focus on like a more traditional development cycle yeah so the question is like what was I basically doing in that first first six months was that for a vertical slice um yeah the answer is that was their first six months basically was a vertical slice yeah it was about figuring out like how am I gonna build this game what is this game going to be um and like what are the main parts of it and making sure that I had all the tools to build it basically um so it's kind of like yeah how how am I making this game basically um but all the kind of like uh yeah longer progression of the game let's say uh and all the stuff like UI economy and all that that was that was later you know whereas uh do we have one more question I think we have yeah uh yeah you had mentioned that you were going to spend three to six months on this project and then potentially on another what was your Runway like like what was the amount of time you were planning on spending yeah basically yeah it's a good question I think my Runway was basically

what I used so yeah um about a year and a half like because I I was planning to try to make a few small games but yeah I ended up being one game and then it ended up taking longer than that but fortunately signing the publishing deal that um you know allowed me to to keep going cool thank you yeah so I think the idea is definitely plan for a maximum Runway if you're anything like me you're going to end up spending way longer than you think all right thanks guys I think that's all the time for questions [Music]