We Carefully Deleted Our Indie Game

yes again and in this video we're gonna unmake it and making a game is as interesting as it is dangerous so don't try this at home we are professionals whenever you want to unmake a game you first of all need to have a close look and analyze what you got the game we have here is called gova day and it was submitted to the ludum Dare 52 game gem the topic of the gem was harvest in Gober day you harvest goba fruits and decide who to feed them to the more goba fruit you leave on the field the more Global fruit you get in the next turn because they self-replicate but at the same time you have to keep the village well fed every village has a certain chance to survive to the next turn a chance you can drastically increase by feeding them young children and elderly people are especially dependent on your Harvest fine and the kids get fruit too can't really spend anymore can't afford to I'm sorry they can also generate Offspring who will grow older and older every turn and so do you at the age of 70 the game is over you're scored based on how well you did and that's it it's a little strategy risk management game here's where the dangerous part starts cause how do we unmake this obvious first of all we have to undo the

online presence of the game remove the game from ludum there download the game from each beginners often forget to undo all of the marketing assets even the ones that were not used so remember to be thorough when undoing an entire game [Laughter] is that what you had in mind please oh I can make more if you want to know if you're doing things correctly check out the clock if the timer of the game gem is going backwards that's usually a very good sign next up you want to try to add some small bugs to the game you can use play testers for this if you want to because sometimes they have really great ideas for small bucks you could Implement so for example we added some bugs that draw UI stuff in the wrong order make the hover feedback of certain buttons not work anymore and a couple of other smaller things I took a quick break to spit out some food and turn it back into individual ingredients then I

got back to work next up we have to remove all of the Polish and all of the sound effects yes in Polish I'm worrying about sound effects of course we're doing this properly so we have to take the individual sound effects and unmake them one by one to do that I used a little program called me the sandbox first I split each sound into its individual components because most sounds are actually a combination of multiple sounds then I tried to sort these sounds back to where they came from if I see a sound came from an online database I take it search for the correct position in the database and upload it that way the sound effects are back where they belong and it's all cleaned up some sounds unfortunately need to go back into the microphone these Leaf Sounds here are one example for that luckily I found an object in my room that I thought might be great at absorbing these sounds I know she looks a bit thirsty but don't worry about her she's fine let's try to make her absorb the sounds

it worked very nice using my ink sucking pen I unchecked all of the things from my undo list that we already managed to undo at the end of the day it's always a good moment to check out how the game looks like because Jen is gonna keep working through the night for a bit longer and is likely gonna undo a lot of what we can see here alright I feel really awake so time to go to bed the next morning I watched Yan undo the art for the gravestones on his live stream I left you the link to his YouTube channel in the description yen is great at unpainting art with his Mouse only so it was a pleasure to watch him work and remove the colors one layer at a time right now they're having different um icons for the graves and everyone who died died happy so far because they were fed until the end of their lives finally all that was left was some very poor placeholder art for the graves so very very good progress by Yen here for me it was now time to undo the music of the game the game had a dynamic music system where the mood changes depending on how you're doing in the game there's a neutral a tense [Music] I said

and a happy track and they all seamlessly fade into each other so first of all I had to reverse engineer the code to get rid of that then I imported the finished music into my music program iterative processes are super important in game development so instead of removing all of the midi notes right away I decided to speed up the music and make it a lot worse I showed it to Yen and he confirmed that in fact it was a lot worse now didn't sound so musical to me personally so that worked out really well I gave it another go and this time I managed to get rid of all of the notes so music successfully cleaned up yeah using another iterative process we made the name text look a lot worse and step by step deconstructed the UI to make it look uglier and uglier tea break I removed grapes from the code at this point it was still way too easy to understand how the plant spreading worked so we decided to remove the plant spreading animation you gotta manage your time very carefully when unmaking a game because if you slip up you might accidentally unmake parts of your life

that you didn't mean to unmake so be very careful it's a dangerous craft at this point the timer showed a bit more than a day so that was pretty much perfect just you know take it one step at a time remember to regularly uncommit your changes from good so your teammates receive the latest and lose you did to the project when you're done with an undo list erase it say goodbye to how the game looks right now because Ian is gonna undo a lot of it overnight and let's go to bed the sunshine is gone who would have thought we made sure to undo a lot of the play testing that was done to the game so we could then make more informed decisions about how to best destroy the balancing of the game we could hide that and just replace it with just a visual I carefully removed the Victory and loose state of the game and ended all of the UI that was necessary for that we destroyed the balancing even more to make the game less fun to play and then it happened Yen came in with a huge down date for the game he uncommitted all of the art and suddenly we only got some very questionable placeholder art left fantastic progress

I mean obviously Yen still had to undo all of the art on Photoshop but at least it was out of my sight already I focused further on deconstructing the gameplay for example I made it so you could feed multiple yens to each Jonah I mean you could feed multiple fruits to each villager lots of uncoding and untesting it can be quite tedious to uncoat stuff in unity cause you gotta be very careful to remove code in the correct order if you just remove everything at once the left hours are gonna be floating through the Multiverse you don't know what Universe they're gonna end up in that would be very irresponsible next up I made it so you could not feed Jens sorry villagers at all anymore I removed the drag and drop functionality from the game and went to sleep in the next morning I noticed that the next turn button was still working so I undid that downgraded and removed the play solder art while the project was finally empty now the most difficult part that still lie ahead undoing the idea for the game from our brains of course if you want to get rid of a thought it usually helps to write it down or to draw it talk about it get it

out of your system you know my we try to distract ourselves with other ideas which was rather effective we kept going for a while until finally the idea was completely gone erased from our brains have a look at the clock game jump being removed right in front of your eyes you know you're perfectly on time but wait how did I even end up in a team with Yen time to undo that Yen I do not want to participate in the ludum Dare game gem with you send unclick the Subscribe button if you don't want anything to do with game development and I'll see you in the next one bye