Our Next Big Indie Game | What to Make? (Devlog 0)

we do not know what game to make yet so in this first step look we're gonna come up with a game idea for our next big indie game release next because I published two games before Islanders and will you snail and we because I have a friend with me this time another co-creator of Islanders he worked on Superfly he made the ramp and the block and chart its Paul we decided to team up because we were both a little traumatized by by her solo project we already spent about six weeks brainstorming ideas so now that we're getting started we have a lot of ideas to choose from the goal of this video is to choose just one of these ideas using a process called prototyping when I look at the ideas we have now I feel relatively equally excited about all of them usually what happens when you make a game and what also happened with my last game is you have an idea and then you're yeah exactly with that it's adrenaline rush you get right into development yeah it's so healthy to not be that attached to the to the ideas I think I made some screen recordings every single day which

is awesome because it means you'll get to see our day-by-day progress I used I want to teach myself some geometry notes and blender every now and then you need to take some time to learn a new technology and what better time to do that than the beginning of a new project I also made a prototype for a strategy game about growing plants and most space building games you build something like cities so I thought it might be interesting to flip that on its head and to build something natural for once they do I got to see some first screenshots for the card game Prototype Paul was working on I kept working on my blender skills for a bit and then of course made another little prototype every time you grab a flower it'll be a small mutation from the flower you grabbed before I'm struggling a bit with what the objective of this could be but it's definitely quite fun to play around with this is throw and fall our card based Kingdom management game you have three advisors or Heroes and you have to assign them to different tasks and I inspired by my last prototype made a game about golfing plants plants have a small chance to evolve so you can basically create an entire ecosystem starting with just one plant okay this

is day four and as you can see on an aim assist line now ah there we go now we got the round counter in the top right so we can see how many more shots we got is there anything we're doing different about prototyping this time around I guess there is red oh yeah I think a lot of things actually first thing would be that we worked on the ideas for a comparatively long time in our heads before starting to actually prototyping them like we have now a very structured approach to prototyping we already thought about what are the questions that we want to answer with the Prototype so for example for our King the manager prototype we wanted to figure out if the simple interaction of dragging characters around was fun enough to make a full game and the interaction definitely was there were just some gameplay problems it was lacking some depth and I figured an analog prototype might be very efficient to experiment with this each character has its own deck to face those challenges for example their Marcus has a deck containing a face card with two tapes and a face card with three face

and one failure cards and one of the guys who might be playing against us at least the need to go into town which will cost us one gold monster see what happens I'll just draw a random card from the stack what we have power around and we felt that means we just strike on this region I would say it worked really well I tested it with a couple of different people and most of them found it pretty fun it made for some fun stories had some good storytelling components basically a deck building game where you built three Decks at once alright we got week two day five and I'm playing around with random terrain generation and I don't know it gave me some ideas for some other algorithms I want to try we had some ideas for an open world racing game and also for a mountain climbing game both of which would have required some terrain generation so this was basically a technical prototype seeing if we can pull it off from a technical perspective as I'm the one who made all of the screen recordings you can see that there's a bit of a false bias here where it really looks like I worked a lot harder than Paul which is definitely not the case in the evening we went through some of Paul's old prototypes which were very inspiring as well for example we found this gem here where you parkour around trying to pick up Collectibles especially the camera perspective and

scale of things was feeling quite unique and not like something you see in a game every day to meet felt fairly encouraging that I basically managed to write a full procedural terrain editor and more or less just two days so that gave us a go for our game ideas that needed open World level Generation Now for example you can imagine an open world racing game where you race through a procedurally generated landscape or a chill rock climbing game where you get to explore and climb random mountains all had another prototype ready a mixture of turn based and real-time strategy you get to plan out your move and then you see it being executed it played surprisingly well it was a fairly fun puzzle game would you say you can see any tendencies in the ideas we collected so far I was actually surprised by the variety of things we came up with probably what they all have in common is that they are rather small experiences so many little notes wow looks like a crazy master plan kind of thing our problem was definitely more that we had too many ideas not too little and it seems like having a bit of a back catalog of old prototypes

definitely helps as well this is another one from Paul where you climb a mountain in this juicy top-down perspective of and it inspired the Prototype I made the next day because I basically made the online multiplayer version of this game we climbed the mountain together and you have to collaborate to reach the top the main mechanic is that you can place these Hooks and then teleport yourself and your partner there um Paul in the meanwhile reworked my plan spreader prototype and made it look a lot nicer here you can really see how effective these little prototyping bursts are we went from this to this to this to this in just a couple of days my last game took me four years to make so I really hope that's not gonna be the case this time around it's a very unconventional platformer where an AI predicts your movement I believe the weekend this video comes out it's still on sale on Steam so now's a better time than ever to play and of course play really means buy buy it on Steam it's a fantastic way to support my work and it also allows me to hire people to for example keep working on a level editor

it's also available on switch PlayStation and Xbox you get a cool game I get to keep making videos and games for you it's a win-win so go check it out for our new game it was now time to come to a decision what will be our next big game project we initially started into this with nine killer game ideas we felt very confident in we talked about them a lot so we were able to eliminate three of them right out of the gate for the plant game idea we tried really hard to make it work the overall Vibe and appeal of this were just so good already unfortunately there were some problems with the objective and the overall game loses it's eliminated the past throwing game was the other way around it would have made for a great puzzle game but there weren't really any interesting design challenges left to solve so in the end it didn't really interest us any more palm and it's eliminated but the open World stuff we figured out sure we can generate terrain but can we make it look good can we make it look appealing and as we don't have a dedicated artist in our team this time we had to be honest with ourselves with all of the artwork that has to be done here this doesn't play into our strength so it's eliminated I mostly shine in game system design and balancing all mostly shines in user experience and user interface design the climbing game the gameplay was pretty much solved and figured out

so all that would have been left to do is level design and set dressing we really would have needed our friend Freedom man for this project who for example made all of the art for Islanders but he's busy making a game called Pizza possum so that means climbing game idea is Eliminator and there was also the online multiplayer version of this game we could have gone for a simpler more abstract art style but in the end we checked out because it still comes with some difficult art challenges plus the multiplayer challenges on top of that it's eliminated maybe this is something for a future project the kingdom manager card game is very gameplay and system heavy very UI heavy so it placed into our strengths really well we also thought people like the medieval setting people like card games and we had a really interesting card game that didn't rely purely on violence it makes for some really cool stories where the personality of your characters is kind of represented by their decks so bam checkpot this is the game we wanted to make but spoiler warning things did not turn out the way we expected at all polymer finally ready to start sharing what we've secretly been working on we are now 61 days into this project and we can't wait to catch you up on all the crazy stuff that has happened so far

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