We Made a Game With 24 Devs - (Biggest Team in GMTK 2023)

we assembled a team of 23 game developers in an attempt to win this year's gmtk game gem we have eight programmers three game designers five artists three Tech artists two sound engineers and two idiots who are trying to keep this massive team organized the gmtk game gem is essentially a game making competition where every team gets two days to make the best game they possibly can there is no limit on the number of people per team but that's only because having a bigger team is not necessarily an advantage this might as well result in complete and utter chaos Avengers of game development we must stay organized and that's exactly why this video is put by Myro Mario is an infinite online whiteboard with real-time multiplayer where basically your entire team can come together at posters sketch things out and get organized I'll let you in on a little secret we would have used Miro anyway they got scammed out of money here we have all of the availability times of the team mapped out on my arrow so we can see who's available when and right next to it we have a giant kanban board

where the entire team can keep track of their to-doos and see what everybody is working on this is some inspiration that has already been put together by the art team this corner belongs to our 2D artists and as you can see they were already very busy scribbling all over the place what's awesome about Meyer is that it's just a massive white space and you get to do with it whatever you want the concept is stupidly simple and that's exactly what makes it so useful and the best part is they have a ridiculous free version with almost no limitations so just click the first link in the description and get yourself organized make a game that fits the following theme [Music] so here's the game plan step one we're gonna split into four groups for brainstorming it's too confused in terms of concept I am also wondering if like a lot of people on this game jump will have this idea and that it's gonna be a little bit mainstream is that true each mini team comes up with a game idea and

presents it to the big team we came up with a brilliant master plan we were making a reverse escape room game where we start outside of the escape room and you're trying to lock yourself up real good you're a poltergeist trying to stay undetected and Ghost Hunters they're coming into your haunted house but actually the Mansion is like uncontrollable like the Mansion itself has kind of Life of its own you have to always go there and make them stop make the vase stop from falling down stop the piano from playing on its own if that person sees something really odd for long enough they're going to take out the photo camera frantically and try to take a photo of it step 3 we rank the game ideas on this awesome awesome to easy scale it seems like we're agreeing pretty much on the awesome scale I feel like something we're not really agreeing on is the how easy it's gonna be scanned and the easy scale is definitely up there for me personally I disagree because two of the points Pro points you mentioned are actually con points that

being that the room is small and then that makes it easier somehow step four only the best idea survives I feel like right I mean I've seen games get away with like not decorating rooms to the brim hard dad for twenty dollars will you increase your phone maybe for this package they're already working third person or top down third person because if you have a top well actually no you Uh crap based on what people were saying earlier but the delivery one we spent a while debating it was a while debating Bo okay [Music] I think um remember the ideas just the starting point I feel like the game can develop in a lot of different directions yeah you're right no no no no no no no no

come on yeah [Music] who wants twenty dollars we're gonna do the haunted house don't get caught by the Ghost Hunters but I don't uh I don't know if I fully understand the scope in order to discuss it with my group yeah that is why the game design team has to get on that ASAP and hopefully Define it come on guys let's uh yeah okay step five Yen and the rest of the team will start getting to work and writing the to-do's step 6 iron the rest of the game design team squeeze as much as possible out of the idea oh what if you could teleport to the objects you can interact with I feel like some ghost like movement abilities would be would

be very nice step seven [Music] work you lazy fools okay we should probably get our every some area on the My Robot uh yes Among Us I'm thinking of bad among us this is some gameplay relevant thing me um we're not that far yet we're just getting started okay the pressure is on with such a huge team what if you can kind of tell apart to things that are on your screen or in your vision range like a spooky object I want old man prankster house really young nerdy cameraman but up to you guys no no no you're you're actually the right you get to decide this man I don't like this what is your idea of the wind stage or lose State sound effects are we doing spatial audio I did not sign up for this

so it's like a thing like threatened to do something and then the NPC might go to it and we need to know if they saw it do the thing or not I would say you all stop what you're doing right now and just I'll go read the design document because you're you're spinning in communication circles it's it's a bit painful to listen to and nobody's working on the actual interaction um so something yeah no higher movement but nobody's working on someone please I'm I don't like waiting for I'm waiting for is that the same thing that's what I thought it was referring to do we have some stuff being worked on that is fantastic first tasks are being finished and most importantly we know what we are creating I drafted a little game design document together with them the rest of the game design team so now hopefully we all know what we're working on and we actually got to work aha that

is fantastic that is fantastic ah holy crap that was a crazy evening I'm kind of through I'm not gonna lie oh man that was something that was something for sure oh God today's gonna be a freaking hot day I'm already sweating like crazy and the day has only just begun let's hop right in uh Hey China hey uh we were just figuring outwards but who could keep doing what you're doing you're you're the design team so it seems like a lot of features are starting to come together that sounds great this is the admin page on itch LOL and that's not even all of them that took me like half an hour to just add all of the team members [Music] okay so

um after got my first coffee so I don't get a headache I did not have breakfast yet so I'm probably gonna do that as well oh God yeah probably a good idea [Music] stay tuned was very rough things were feeling very very slow and sluggish even though we were getting a lot of tasks done the game was not really coming together properly because all of the programmers were kind of working on different features and the communicational challenges were even more of a hindrance than on the first day there are some not applied overrides to the player character prefab I see maybe maybe that's the problem are you using the

Mansion scene I did briefly but I don't need right now so okay I'm gonna take it yeah take it running missing texture man could do some programming the question is what needs to be done what even needs to be done uh descend into chaos activated things were broken everything looked super unfinished and we had problems left and right by the way I have noticed um an issue with the enemies again we have the random Point thing but the reason they're getting stuck in that one position is because it's choosing the same point over and over and over again no the Skate 3 Pro is moving so fast that I'm not used to that yes I committed like quite a lot it says okay so on my GitHub it says 20 minutes ago and then if I go on GitHub it's not there I mean I also don't see it on

GitHub so oh that doesn't that's not good because you cannot read anything because but you I'm pretty sure you committed some stuff before that we so on our projects right yes I need to stop watching it so I can be productive but what's the end of the day things are starting to come together a little bit better but it's still looking a little dire we don't really have gameplay figured out yet we had to make some emergency gameplay changes because we felt like the gameplay wasn't really moving in a good direction yet there were some pretty obvious issues with the gameplay like just holding a button to diffuse an object that was kind of lame and balancing issues left and right and it just looks like a complete mess right now so I'm a little bit worried still a lot left to do wish us luck

all right today's the day where we turn this around I could feel it let's go Holly from mashup games just joined us and started posting bug reports so that is that is amazing I mean it was obvious that we're gonna be a couple of bucks so it's great that we have somebody on that I'm not even sure if how far did people get yesterday how far do we get let's check out the unity project can't updating for quite a while that's that's a good sign yo I'm excited um that is not a good thing then it's an excellent sign oh my God look at that we're here now yeah that's gonna be tight okay we have a little bit of a background illustration here you haunting me or am I haunting you I got their shading shaking their booties say cheese [Music]

okay the game is a lot further than last time say cheese oh God this ain't really fun you got caught but there's there's nothing suspicious okay okay see there's some work to do but they made a lot of progress which is which is very nice yeah so starting to get the balancing right because at the moment it's it's playable at least I'm already happy and excited about that but yet it's not necessarily fun yet right no it isn't yeah silly idea haunted objects just turn on and off when you touch them so we get rid of the timer entirely when you touch them ah but I thought about something like this like on yesterday morning but I wasn't sure um if it like throws away like half the game Loop yeah and also the the markers

on the screen at the moment they're kind of confusing as well like everything's just very confusing the Clock Was ticking we wasted a ton of time just to get the gameplay up and running and now that we had the first game Loop we realized it felt terrible there were some tough decisions ahead of us coming from a place of I didn't really know a lot going into it I think kind of the main thing for me is that I just couldn't really see anything it's very dark yeah okay there's a lot of code to look at I feel like I should just rewrite the oh my God oh man at this point everybody's blood pressure really started Rising we were running out of time and we knew it oh yeah that's just a bug I can I'll fix that as well oh now did I crash Unity now uh hello uh putty there's still a very ugly placeholder UI in the game the the hearts that fills up into action you're on it okay all right okay okay I

feel like we need to really think very hard what the most important things Arno and just get people on them do we have somebody on the AI bug fixes hello I was already hype talking to you the question for that is what needs fixing that the AI just keeps uh standing there not doing anything uh yeah the things we don't really have programmers [Music] oh thank you the thing is the webgl problem does not

go away does not go away we know it's a Memory issue something is either causing a memory leak or something is expanding in memory once you load the Haunted Mansion it's always a bit dumb but my brain is just mush what do you do with these objects like I don't get entirely and at this point I was almost ready to throw in the towel we really had to simplify I'm constantly eating I'm gonna drop Panic eating we removed the teleport sorry for whoever wrote that and in between panicking we fixed as many problems as we could another another okay I can upload it for you thank you the bug I just fixed got undone for some reason I don't understand how things get overwritten like this though we have 40 minutes 30 viewers apparently this is what people want to

see yeah it's broken now and get why is it broken on get now then fix it now I oh my gosh okay deadline here I was almost really losing hope for the game but look at that the game came together really nicely it looks awesome it plays way better than I expected and it is possible to understand it what say cheese [Music] well we did it so what lessons did we learn from this entire Madness one making yourself useful as a team leader is unexpectedly difficult it feels like nobody really needs you but simultaneously the entire house is on fire two if we ever do this again I think we need a dedicated prototyping team that can get some gameplay up and running fast like [ __ ]

because we arrived at a playable State way too late and I think the gameplay suffered a lot from that and three allowing a team of any size in game gems is really not a loophole after all big teams make things a lot easier in some ways and a lot more difficult in other ways so I think that ends up evening out quite nicely here are our final ratings at this point big concrets to everybody who scored higher than us you managed to beat out at 23 people try hard team well done oh you did we made it we made we made a game oh my God we made a game if I had to um describe this experience in two words I would say primally terrifying um yeah but overall I feel like we did really well and I'm yeah I would I would do this again I would do this every single time let's actually look at the finished Nero bark everybody was using that quite

a lot as you can see so you can see the 3D team used this quite heavily for inspiration we used it for prototyping game design over here we used to build some flowcharts for the programming even used it for the map design over here there are so many different ways to put mirror to use and yeah we used it quite heavily we used it yeah for almost everything wild absolutely wild thanks to Miro for believing in us and for sponsoring this video if you ever need an online whiteboard tool then check out the link in the description you can get started for entirely free and also huge huge thank you to all of my team members I could not have done this without you and that's why I'm linking to all of your Social accounts from Rock Park through the entire night to Sega who was constantly on the most important bug fixes everybody did such an amazing job it was such a joy especially so thanks also to Yen for helping me with this and with helping I mean doing pretty much all of the important prep work thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one bye