Spending $20,000 On My Indie Game! (XXL Devlog)

hey my name is jonas i'm one of the deafs behind the indie game islanders and over three years ago i started working on my second big indie game project will you snail compared to islanders where we were a team of three and got a lot of support from our university i'm making william snail all alone from this room right here and instead of the four to six months we spent on islanders i'm already three years into this one it's been over nine months since i last uploaded a death log so we have a lot to catch up on in this video including why my expenses are kinda starting to spiral out of control as well as my latest legal checkups that's illegal seat belts on by club let me get you all back up to speed real quick will you snail is a fast-paced platformer that is completely centered

around the evil ai squid who tries to predict your movement in order to spawn various obstacles so will you snail you dodge ai spawned traps you try to outplay the air [Applause] you solve puzzles and you uncover the dark secrets of the simulation the game will be fairly short but it's also pretty condensed with tons of variety i'm a little bit of a crazy person so the game will kind of reflect that as well [Music] okay in the early stages of development willy snail was only meant to be a silly little rage game but i kept pushing the release date back again again and again and the game kept evolving and my vision kept growing in my last devlog i showed you that i was pretty close to finishing the game already i showed you the new music i made performance improvements new graphics my first attempts of redesigning the logo and i showed you my plushie beating me up of course

but obviously i continuously kept working on the game since then so what the hell have i been up to for the last nine months the first big point is story the game only used to have very vague and philosophical story snippets that didn't really tell you a lot about anything have you ever asked yourself why you're here but my play testers always wanted to learn more about squid and the wily snail universe so i listened did some extensive planning and wrote about 1 000 lines of additional dialogue i love the storytelling in outer wilds it's one of my favorite games where you can explore the story at your own pace and figuring out what exactly happened was part of the challenge so inspired by that i split the dialogues into about 50 segments that players will have to piece together and try to make sense of you can now find snippets of dialogue in the game these weird little springs as the play testers call them they don't have any voice acting though because the voice acting for squid alone is already driving me into insanity i can hear the voicelines they are talking to me but as a solution

i got my friend jen and my sister clara to do some generic talking sounds which i think already makes the characters feel very alive [Music] i also added a new room where you can look at all of the dialogue snippets you found so far in chronological order again somewhat inspired by outer wilds probably will my story be as good as the one from outer wilds i doubt it because this is the first time i'm writing a story for a game but hey we'll see i don't really want to spoil too much but let me just say it's obviously a story about artificial intelligence just like the entire game and i think it approaches the topic from an angle i personally haven't seen before because i was kind of wondering what exactly would happen if ai became powerful far far beyond our wildest imaginations there are also some new story levels but i'm walking the fine line of showing

what i've made without spoiling the experience here you also might have noticed that squid has facial animations now these were trickier to make than it looks cause grid literally just consists of four brackets one line and two dots but a few sketches later this is eventually what i settled on neutral mean sad annoyed happy angry evil skeptical pitying worried horrified cheeky and crazy i personally think they turned out quite well but not everybody seems to like them so i think i'm just gonna add a setting that allows you to disable them if you really want i added a new game mode to the game yay the main levels can be a little frustrating at times which yes is by design wow you landed precisely where you weren't supposed to land that requires

some serious skill congrats here i made it even easier for you you'll probably still fail though but i felt like it would be nice to have a small more relaxed game mode as well where you can just kinda jump around and enjoy the good vibes in this mode you just have to collect the smileys to level up what's purpose well i don't know either it is up you the nothing special but for some reason i just find myself playing it for way too long whenever i need to test it i added some speed boosters and a combo system so now it's surprisingly enjoyable even though there's no real point behind it except for a steam achievement maybe just like last time i made some new music you heard some of it already [Music]

[Music] and this one is a track for the fourth chapter of the game unfortunately i'm not quite sure how well it fits so i might have to rework it a little bit [Music] [Music] but let me know what you think should we make it more uplifting should we change it should we keep it let me know in the comments and last but not least i also kept working on the credit song some more you remember early on i made a very cringe credit song that sounded like this there are words where we suffer [Music] there are words where we strive that's enough to cringe a bit later i reworked it to this which i was already way happier

with and i guess the latest development i need to inform you about is that i've followed your advice and hired a professional singer and we now have vocals by jason haynes who i found online [Music] once again still not 100 finished i think a little more work is needed but definitely going in a cool direction as you can tell i put quite a bit of effort into the soundtrack so before the question pops up in the comments again yes i will upload this to all popular streaming services as well as to steam and to youtube since last time i also completely reworked the colors of the game again

this is how the colors used to look like and this is how they look like now the classic color scheme is the best yeah i like the classic one as well but the new one looks better on marketing screenshots the new one looks more like every screenshot looks the same i don't know because they're all some kind of desaturated pink that's some fake news hey don't worry stop worrying so much i added a color scheme selection in the menu so if you like the old colors better you can still pick those as well there are two color schemes now you can choose this is the classic color scheme this is the modern color scheme and both of them are a lot better than what we had before and of course as mentioned in the last devlog you can even create your own color schemes completely from scratch if you don't mind diving into some cryptic text files so i'm already very curious what color schemes you will come up with and the reason why there's no color editor built directly into the game is because we do want to release the game at some point right

honestly i made so many changes since last time but we really need to speed this up a little bit i finished the logo redesign i added safe slots i created a new intro animation when you start the game i updated the store page after chris sukowski told me in this video how i can do better i know it sounds like you're being redundant you got to tell them like three times you're telling somebody i made a new trailer for the game after derek lew told me in this video how i can do that properly the best time to start thinking about your trailer is when you're thinking of game ideas i mean most of you have probably seen the trailer by now i added a few hats i added tons of new steam achievements i added an epilepsy warning to the game and and and translations for will you snail are a big fat yikes at the moment the game has exactly nineteen thousand two hundred twenty one words or one hundred six thousand eight hundred sixteen characters that's roughly one thousand voice lines for squid and six hundred lines of dialogue for the springs and that's not even counting the store page and the achievements which obviously need to be translated as well

luckily for me a lot of you reached out telling me that you want to support me with the translations for the game i was more than grateful for that zone absolutely insane translation journey started one massive google sheets file 200 translators and over 50 different languages it was absolute insanity how many translations you contributed to the project we even managed to get translations for arabic danish persians some languages i haven't even heard of before but then it happened disaster struck as this entire game project was slowly approaching its end i brought a lawyer on board to cover all of the remaining legal questions before launch privacy policy whether i can use the name squid in my game if somebody else already used it and you guessed it copyright and that's when i noticed that i just completely messed up just because you voluntarily made these translations for me doesn't mean that i own them the copyright always belongs to the person who made it so it turned out that if i wanted to use any of your translations i would have to sign a licensing agreement

with whoever made them so in short thousands of translations suddenly became absolutely useless unless i could get 200 random community translators from the internet to sign a dubious licensing agreement that even needs to contain their full name and address and to make matters even worse for underage translators both parents have to sign it as well in my opinion that makes sense of course i'm just saying i didn't make it easy for translators at all but joan is is all of that really necessary i mean yeah technically not but you're putting yourself at risk of being sued and we um we don't like that here sorry so what was the result about 50 out of the 200 translator signed the agreement which to be honest was more than i expected after i completely blindsided everybody with that and then we started a completely new blank translation sheet and started the entire process from scratch now i have an entire freaking folder just filled with

licensing agreements the paperwork and organization of this literally set me back several weeks hundreds of translators lost hours of work and all of that just because i did not worry about the legal implications of all of this earlier on translators i said it before but i'll say it here again this is my mistake i screwed up i'm extremely sorry i hope i learned my lesson and yeah this won't happen again i know what some of you might be thinking can you not just copy some of the translations from the old sheet to the new one and yes that is possible but only if we're 100 sure that all of the translators that contributed to the translation signed the agreement so yes we did try to recover as much of the translation work from zion translators as possible but that also comes with its very own logistical challenges i mean thanks to the edit history we can still check fairly accurately which users contributed to which translations but to do that you'd have to manually click on several thousand cells together with

status from the will use nail discord we found a somewhat acceptable process using a macro recorder now there's a computer program checking every single cell for who contributed to the translation but it's still super slow and a massive pain in the butt so yeah not too sure what to do about that honestly let me know if you have any ideas so the end result of all of this hundreds of work hours were wasted both mine as well as from translators we ended up with a lot less translations than we used to have and we're legally covered and can't be sued for copyright infringement anymore wow yeah that's great i'm totally worth it a small victory the lessons this taught me worry about legal implications of everything you do earlier on don't make games with a lot of text don't translate your game into 50 languages before it's even out yet that's stupid stupid by the way if you still want to help with the translations after everything you've just heard or you just want to stay in the loop with the development join the will you snail discord i really

appreciate your support thank you besides the translations there's one more thing that makes me a little nervous and that's how my expenses for the game are kind of starting to spiral out of control my estimate is that the total cost of making the game will be at least 20 000 bucks the majority of those costs are once again for translations because i hired a localization company to rate and proofread some of the missing translations but there are also legal expenses software licenses marketing costs like paying the shelf man who edits most of my youtube videos at the moment so i have more time to work on the game soundtrack vocals steam fees i still live with my dad where my living expenses are relatively low but 20 thousand bucks is still a lot of money for me yes i lenders did well and created a nice financial buffer but 20k is still about twice the money i've made from this youtube channel since i started it three and a half years ago oh and by the way those were three years where i missed out on a normal salary by not working a normal job so if i just assume a somewhat average salary in germany that's about another 85 000 i

missed out on that means my total time and resources invested for reason equal about 105 thousand bucks that's why it's arriving as an indie developer is so hard oh no i literally need to make 105 000 bucks with will you snail just to make an average salary i don't know how realistic that is you know what i mean and by the way don't get me wrong i'm not saying that i'm entitled to an average salary or something like that i'm making games because i love making games the reason i'm doing these calculations is because in the long run i would love to support a family off of all of this save your empathy for somebody who actually needs it i'm fine i'm just trying to share something interesting with you here let's run the math a little further right let's say the game will cost 15 bucks most people will probably buy it when it's on a discount though so let's say the average price will be more like 13 bucks now

let's deduct five percent refunds 30 from steam's car and 50 taxes that means my profit per game sold could be something like 4.3 bucks 105 000 divided by 4.3 is 24 418 that means i have to sell 24 000 copies to break even on my work go wish list will you snail on steam right now it's a beautiful game and wish listing is 100 free if you wish list you will get notified on launch when the game comes out as well as about every as the 100th member i hereby present to you an extremely poorly drawn shelly begging to be released on steam well that's up to you jonas i will release willy snail in october some october not this one [Music] in 2020 well at least it will release in 2021 right

so you want to have the game that is epic i couldn't be more grateful which makes what i'm about to say even more painful the release date of will you snail is [Music] not this year [Applause] i'm sorry [Music] oh no yeah it was inevitable so i was wise enough to put a maybe in the trailer now it happened your memes predicted it oh man not again the delay is mostly for a different reason this time though and i think you'll be excited when you hear about it will you snail will launch in q1 of 2022 if not i want you all to unsubscribe from this channel i'm just as sick of these delays as you are

this video right here might be one of the last if not the last will you snail devlog why well cause the game's done all that's left to do is a ton of bug fixing some performance improvements marketing and making sure play testers stop giving me new things to do i'll obviously make some other fun game videos till then subscribe if you're new subscribe if you're new please go wishlist will you snail now to let the steam algorithm know that you're interested that way you directly help me to keep making games and youtube videos for you wishlist [Music] i really appreciate all of your support more than you can imagine this is the end game you