What If You Improved Your Indie Game 3 Steps / Day?

this week I said a little challenge for myself making three improvements - will you snail every single day the first thing I had to change was the freaking face of the AI because look at the old one in case you're wondering and will you snail you're basically playing against an AI there are no obstacles in the level but an AI tries to predict your movement and place obstacles in real-time which makes the game extremely hard and frustrating but that's exactly what makes the game fun ah the second thing I improved on my indie game this day is that there's no hiccup in the level animations when you respawn so this is after the changes let me show you before the changes here you can clearly see that whenever the player dies that level changes there's a little hiccup in the animations and in how the level looks even the deaths particles disappear this is changed now because the level doesn't restart anymore the player just gets reset to the start position and this just looks a lot smoother yes it's a small fix but it's an improvement on the less next up is a

visual improvement for the death animation let's do a little before and after comparison here you can see the effect before other changes and once again in slow motion nice and clean and the new one just more particles more fireworks also these main sparks these main trails are a little longer and yeah that feels more satisfying now which is a little counterintuitive do you really want death to be satisfying in this case I absolutely do because dying is the main thing you do in this game you die so many times so bear them make sure it's satisfying so yeah now you'll get some even cooler fireworks whenever you make a mistake last thing I improved on Monday where the eyes they are a little more defined now less creepy you can see better in which direction they're looking once again not sure if that's really better just wanted to try it out here's before and here's after the change we're on day 2 now and the day before that I really felt like the better test animations really helped the game out so I improved them some more as a little reminder this is how the

animation looked before the change and this is how it looks now so I added a nice flare which makes it even more full she and more impactful you can even see some Lightning right at the impact and all of that happens very quickly in game so you barely even realize it's there but it makes a huge and absolutely massive difference in terms of how powerful it feels I felt like the face of Kay I made the screen a little too noisy so I tried making it darker which I feel makes it easier to focus on the gameplay last thing I didn't you say for my indie game will you snail is I changed that death sound of the snail it obviously fits from your animation a lot better it gives it more impact and the nice electric sparkly vibe works really well in my opinion we're now entering game development day 3 as you can see it's very hard for me to get that stupid face right it's a pretty tough challenge because on the one hand I want to make

it blend in on the other hand I want to make it stand out so you can instantly see it on screenshots but if it's too intrusive it disrupts the gameplay it makes it hard to focus on the game it needs to fit to the style of the level while still looking unique and interesting and providing the level with something interesting and crazy to look at so yeah maybe it's wishful thinking that I'll ever be able to accomplish all of that in one design but there's just another experiment please help me out and tell me in the comments which one of the AI faces you like best appreciate it next up I made a little respawn animation for the snail this is how it looks like it's pretty subtle but once again it just has to increase the overall polish of the game because my workflow at the moment is that I'm producing a vertical slice so I try to make one level and one level as awesome and as good and polished as possible probably not the best workflow for every project but in this case I think this will save me a lot of time because if I decide to change something later on it would be a pain in the ass to go through

all of the levels again and change everything up in every single level so that just has a little bit to do with how game maker is set up the weird layer system I just want to get the layer straight for my room before make more levels and another advantage of this workflow is obviously that you get something that looks pretty decent prettier so you have something to show off and it makes it sort of easier for people to imagine how the finished game will look like day three improvement three was that I create a jump sound it's okay I'm not quite happy with it yet honestly but it's still better than having no jump sound so I guess it's an improvement and I changed the face again after watching the pixelated face for a while I didn't really dig it anymore mainly because I was kind of upset by how messy the level looked by how chaotic it was how hard it was to follow the action this is obviously a lot more clean the AI stays a lot more in the background the disadvantage being that the main selling

point of the game isn't that visible anymore the AI isn't that visible anymore so yeah seems like I can't have both wow he seems like I was really frustrated with the readability for now I decided to remove the face completely and I changed the color of the snail the trail of the snail is more visible now and there's some additional feedback whenever the snail jumps in fact I think this helps the readability a ton it's way easier to follow the action which is great for watcher bility which has always been one of my main goals this game needs to be entertaining and cool to watch and for that you obviously need to see what's going on I've tried changing the color of the snail a couple of times but I never really found a color that fit to the rest of the level I think this blue fits to the level kind of well so I think I'm gonna keep it surprise here comes the face of VII again the only difference being that now it's in the foreground and the color of the snail has changed so that really allows me to be a lot

more aggressive with the design I imagine the AI with a very cheeky and mean character so I had this epiphany that it would be kind of weird of it to hide in the background I mean it's trying to annoy you it's trying to piss you off so of course it's right in your face it might even block your view whatever as long as you can still see what's going on everything's good with me and I think that's a lot easier now because the snails blue now before we move on to the last awesome day of game development I want to answer this question for you is this actually a good way to work on your game the D you make three improvements to your game every single day whether that small improvements or big improvements is entirely up to you now what I can tell you after trying this for one week is that this works really well if you need a way to motivate yourself to get some work done it's a little bit like that oh just sit down for five minutes method that basically relies on the fact that when you start doing it you get motivated to do it and you do even more of it but it's a more resource oriented version of that I feel like this actually gets you somewhere whereas yeah

just working on your game every day for five minutes sometimes that doesn't get you anywhere another thing that I find extremely motivating about this is just tracking your progress so definitely make sure you take screenshots after every improvement or even better make videos after every improvement that's what I did then going back and looking at all the improvements you made to your game it's such a motivating feeling you definitely want to make more improvements after that if you're struggling with consistency in game development I recommend you try this out maybe even just one improvement per day bonus points if you turn it into a video like this one and upload it to YouTube that brings us to day number five I made the face move around it looks a lot more alive now it kind of follows you and reacts your movements while also trying to stay out of your way a bit really like this change and I think it's gonna be really cool as soon as the AI has some facial expressions and starts talking again the only thing I'm still not sure about is the quickly look of the AI the style it's painted and so if

you have any ideas for that let me know next up is another fix for the readability the spike warnings are more visible now before that you often had the issue that you couldn't see them especially when you are standing exactly on top of them this issue is now resolved you really can't miss them anymore the last change is something you will absolutely see if you pay attention but I wanna see if you can spot it yourself for now I want to do a final comparison from where we started to where we're now this is where we started just take all of those impressions in so much is still missing it feels really awkward to look at it now this is where we ended up of course very happy with the result if you want to become a game developer or a better game developer you might want to hit the subscribe button because that's the journey we're on here on this channel I'll see you guys and the one girl that's watching in the next one