Most of what you're talking about here is called "abstraction", despecifying capabilities in order to make them generic and reusable as well as linking related settings and configurations to minimize the effort required to make further changes. It's a core tenet of software development and my primary concern when designing application enhancements for my job. I'd much rather spend the extra time up front designing something that not only solves the current issue, but also related past issues as well as potential future ones. In the end, if done well, it significantly reduces overall complexity while skyrocketing maintainability. It's also a puzzle that I tend to take as personal challenges.
@@461weavile Abstraction is a core tenet of the reality we live in. Everywhere you look there will be some level of abstraction. It’s the superpower of reality
Yes, and I find the same approach applies to designing art assets - consider what few repeating base shapes can the reference be created with in a simpler form. Can a basic material be setup for a repeating asset that generates varied textures with a few tweaks?
There are actually programmers who like to work on those "boring" frameworks rather than gameplay and me as a game-designer I am happy they exist and do all that stuff.
@@KilgoreOnDrugs me too actually. The most fun thing about software development in general for me is building classes and tools that make me build the actual fun features so fast. It's much more fun than stacking a "quick fix" just to than spend crazy amounts of time working around that "quick fix". I'm glad this video was made.
"And yes, I realize that 'future Mark problems' are starting to stack up a bit." Welcome to game development. Or software development in general. Or really, making *anything.*
Those are not future mark problems, those are future mark challenges. The way is the goal and so on ;) enjoy the ride and I'm so curiously looking forward to the video about sound design!
Here is my feedback: -I totally got the eureka moments in every level -It will be easier to automatically grab de magnet -I got softlocked many times so the restart was nice. I dunno if it will be better for players to get less stuck than the reset -Initially I thought I should return to the key hub, that made me feel as if the level endings were anticlimactic -I'll love to move while aiming, it feels more fluent -The key as a concept and progress tracker is nice but I don't know how well it fits in the game. The doors weren't like the key type so it doesn't make sense to open them with it, also it's kinda weird to just throw them thru the pipe... maybe a fuse or something that restores the energy will be better -Maybe it will be nice if the polarity affects the magnet character, for example making the positive smile and the negative sad -The main character could shine more while aiming, maybe a subtle movement in the eyes following the aim Overall I loved it and am really thankful that it was free for everyone so I could try it ♥
I agree that the puzzles felt a little anticlimactic- there was a lack of the sort of "victory moment" most puzzle games give you when you've solved the puzzle and run to the exit door or push the last block into place, not something i really noticed until it wasn't there
I think moving while aiming might lead to some bugs. At least I've seen something similar in speedruns of other games, the player would jump at a wall and shoot a weapon with recoil at the same time, causing him to get out of bounds. Video game physics can get a little tricky when there are multiple things colliding with each other at the same time.
I also thought it was weird we didn't need to return to the start of the level. I think the fact you finish the 1st tutorial level by throwing the magnet at the pipe and then going to hub, but all the rest are finished by just touching the key. I got used to it by the end, but it deffo felt "off" the first couple times. Also, the 2nd to last level made me feel like a big brain smartey pants, deffo dialed in that 'eureka' feeling a lot. It's great.
Just to clarify it for everyone who's starting: when Mark said: "it's worth putting in some extra effort at the beginning' he did not mean before the MVP, before you haven't first inspected your core idea(s) are worth pursuing and which are not. Fail fast. Fail early. Inspect and adapt.
Made it pretty far into developing my first game, I had like 50 puzzles for a sokoban type game. But playing through them I realized once you solve them they were just plain tedious to execute. And the entire game design hinges on that tedious mechanic. Scrapped it. Whatever. I had fun learning to code and making puzzles and learned the value of testing things with friends very early on
@@panampace at least you've got some experience out of it. And maybe it's not as bad as you think, and you can repurpose parts of this game to make something new and fun.
Speaking as an indie dev myself, just because you can make a primitive game over weeks / months, doesn’t mean you’re ready to finish a game jam. The time, dedication, and skill required is immense. I wouldn’t be surprised if he participates in a year or two though.
@Matthew Koon You don't need to be good dev to participate in game jams, quite the opposite, they are often intended for beginners! What kind of gatekeeping nonesense is that?! And he has more than enough skill by now to participate.
@LightningWarrior 10 I wonder how often Siri roasts people? You made me think of this random situation: "Hey Siri. Define "joke." Siri: "I'm talking to one." (Not meaning to attack in any way I assure you. Apologies if it sounds like I am)
When people think some options, difficulties and such are simple switch flips, they entirely ignore how such a simple function can take a lot to make work in the first place. Even longer to make it work *properly* . It's not always as simple as change some code lines. Hell it could actually risk breaking the fun or even the game itself at the worst of times Game Development is a lot if time, effort and more
Not the best example, however. Some games just up the damage or some bs in a difficulty setting with absolutely no changes to AI. At least reduce attack intervals, gosh darnit!
@@harshmudhar96 Eh, I don't mind when difficulty setting just increase damage by a bunch. I understand as a dev how nightmarish it can be to try to add smart difficulty markers but please for the love of god don't just increase the health by a ton. Castle crashers for example just did 10x to health and damage and it's one of the worst experiences I've ever played. Skyrim's in a similar boat.
@@harshmudhar96 just the other way round. Because everyone remembers this impact in gameplay good balancing has should remind us of how important playtesting and this part of developement is. Not that it was easy but that this part of polishing makes the differece between a good game and a great one.
this is often an issue in software-development in general... that's why you should NEVER start with the ui... more often than not the client will see the ui (with nothing being done in the background) and assume their software is done already... there are actually tools these days to make usable ui that looks like it's sketched to present to the client... so you have sketched ui mixed with actual ui for those parts that already work
Imagine being talented and dedicated enough to not just make a game on your own, but also make a high quality video series detailing your design processes at the same time! Really amazing stuff!
Very true. So much of this series could have been summarised by _"Mark should have taken a crash course in programming, and then a crash course in Unity, before trying to make a game."_
You’re not a real developer until you’ve worked with a code base that has “managers”, “handlers”, “providers”, “helpers”, “controllers”, and “coordinators.” Throw in both “factory” and “builder” for good measure. Also a catch all “Utils”. XD Note: This is a joke, not an attempt to gatekeeper.
@@QuantumHistorian that's how you know the dude is in a very nice financial place. No preparation at all, joyfully taking his time whit zero financial risks or preoccupations.
@@magica3526 Yes and no. Working on a project is the best way to practice skills. But having a basic grasp of the key concepts (like using managers to store and handle data) means you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. At the end of the day, that saves you time and results in a much better product.
love this series, I'll admit I was a little sceptical when you changed things on your channel but I am really enjoying this, maybe even more than the video essay type videos kutgw
This has been great. If anything Mark is no longer speaking as a journalist without real experience. Shows how different design concepts and actual development really are.
Agree, this new direction, that the channel is taking, is great. These "behind the scenes" videos give so many valuable insights into game development process, and it also inspires the viewer to try and create something new.
The "unglamorous" nature of this series has been absolutely fantastic.... and now I feel like I need to step up my game dev skills lmao. I really am starting to wish my uni course had been more thorough in doing proper (if boring) set up and management, I mean, today I realised that all the pause functionality should of course be handled as a persistent thing rather than setting it up over and over again. My lecturers had just told us to make a pause mechanic one day and had no guide as to how!
I took Unity's certification program and even they didn't tell me about managers and data abstraction for back-end and UI management. Kicking myself for the time and money I wasted. At least it got me started though.
What uni course did you take, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m super split on doing a general programming course or doing something game design specific.
@@OzoneInteractiveMegan Video Game Development in Africa Digital Media Institute (I wouldn't really recommend mine, since it's being rather mismanaged rn). As for taking general programming vs somethign more game design specific, that's up to you.
You've got me so inspired. I've been developing games in my free time for a while now, but I've only ever "finished" one. I'm now trying to learn Godot and actually do things right, and it's a little demoralizing. Thanks for the boost!
I really enjoy that in the devlogs for the game Astortion, the dev actually took a video to go over the entire structure of how the game is saved. The whole Astortion devlog series is amazing btw
There's a really good book called "show you work" by Austin Kleon that talks about sharing you're work as an artist: one of the important lessons to take away from it is you should share something if its either interesting or *useful* which I think more indie devs need to realise because while the structure of how the game is saved will not appeal to everyone it is incredibly useful to a sizeable chunk of his audience and is therefore interesting to them.
Today alone I sat down for 3 hours, just to add 3 more animations to the player, and 2 hours to add 3 animations for an enemy. I could only use two of them, but thats just maybe. The player got 4 directional movement. So each direction needs 4 frames of loopable animation. The player has around 100 types of animation. But this goes for many NPC's and all enemies too. I also have to draw UI,hearts, items, pause,load, walls, floors, tiles, bosses, title screens, menus, buttons, and EVERYTHING! The amount of time I have to use on graphic alone is insane... And then theres the rest. Game design, story, dialogs, programming, cutscenes. There is two programmers helping me too now..! We need to talk. Decide. Plan. Wait for eachother..! Been working on it for six years now. I'm gonna finish this. Hold my beer, guys. Hold my beer!
id suggest keeping track of all your test levels and old stuff, in the final version i would hope to see a 'lost levels' style page that has all the ones you ended up scrapping by the end of it as you find out the feel of level design
any game dev worth their salt keeps a repository in source control so you can go back to the first iteration if you need to. Nothing should be lost, even the mistakes. Ever.
The lost levels would also be a great opprotunity to add in a design commentary track where the thought process is communicated to the player while describing why it was eventually scrapped
The issue with this is that if game mechanics change, the old levels may not function properly with these changes. And if old levels were added, but kept the old mechanics, it would be too confusing/unintuitive to play them since everything would be a bit off from the rest of the game. Perhaps it is still worth considering despite this, just wanted to point out that it may not be as simple as it first seems.
It’s so cool to see you naturally grow and figure these things out. Managers, for example. The example about how difficult it is to change one little thing in a level. These are things that everybody faces as they grow as a dev-super neat to see it documented here. As some others are saying, I will also reiterate by stating that you shouldn’t lose that initial spark to just DO and do sloppily, quick, and as little as possible at the get-go. Prototyping is prototyping. Get good at that. Remember that making tools and editors only makes you better at making tools and editors-it is easy to fall into an endless coding pit where you build another engine inside of your engine and never get around to making your actual game. It’s all about balance and knowing what you NEED. You seem to be on the right track-just tossing my two cents into the pot. Happy Dev-ing~
Ok, I gotta say it, this may be the single best episode in the series. I like the whole thing, and follow it, but as a random coder who tried to get into gamedev, this is by far the more help you could have given to me.
Loving the series, mate. Like another user said, a lot of what you're talking about is known as abstraction, one of the 4 core pillars of writing good, object-oriented code: Abstraction, Polymorphism, Inheritance, and Encapsulation. If you're a new dev/coder and are wondering how to produce better code, look at some articles/videos about those concepts, and you'll really boost your code to the next level.
Tools development is super underrated. It's one of my favorite parts of game development. I love making tools that make, making the game faster and easier. I'd love to see a video in your usual style discussing tools.
Hey Mark, loving the series so far! I use Unity a lot, and if there's one thing I'd recommend you look into, its ScriptableObjects! They are really versatile tools, with a plethora uses, one of which is their ability to be used as the managers you described at the beginning of the video. ScriptableObjects are assets stored in the project, not in any scene, so their data persists between scenes, allowing you to easily transfer data from one section of your game to another, without resorting to Singletons, DontDestoryOnLoad, or the dreaded FindObjectOfType. The options settings are the perfect use case for this! There are some niche details that take some getting used to, like resetting the values at the end of a PlayMode session, but the payoff is totally worth the learning curve!
My thoughts exactly. I really really hope Mark sees these comments, because I want Scriptable Objects to get more of a signal boost over cross-scene manager game objects.
i can imagine the pain you felt when you finally came up with the "options manager" that made things so much more organized, progress looks great though keep it up man, you're going places //and yes i'm a game designer working with coders and artists everyday :)//
This was *FANTASTIC*. :) Thank you. I even shared this video to two of my associates who may or may not be helping to design or 'populate' a game which I may or may not be masterminding.
Great seeing the more tedious elements of game design highlighted here and the importance of workflow optimization. I learned about that waay too late into things.
I feel the same. I coded since my 12 but only in my 18-19 it clicked that I should avoid the things that bog me down and embrace the things that save me time. The default was: to forget the time waste. I seem to reinvent this tendency per hobby btw. Just one day I start to go efficient. Why not since day one? I don't know.
10:00 "Before realizing something ... did I just accidentally make a video game?" That is a mood for any creative person in any field and I love it. Congratulations Mark. Can't wait to see the iteration you do.
FINALLY! Finally one of these "dev diaries" that's not just a stream, that actually shows a peak into the "making games is hard" that people seem so happy to nod along with, but have NO CLUE really what that means. Good stuff. Glad you've gone from just pontificating to actually making. The knowledge from making is worth its weight in gold. When asked, "how do I get in the business?", I've told students for decades, "MAKE SOMETHING! Make something SIMPLE from start to finish! Make Pong, make Space Invaders! You'll learn more than you ever thought you would from making something so simple. BTW, not trying to take the piss (I think I'm using that correctly), I'm actually a big fan and long-time sub. You're one of the few people out there talking and getting it mostly right. I just am glad that someone with 1.2m subs can get the word out that one of the biggest things in game making is; You don't know what you don't know.
@@foobarmaximus3506 I read books "and stuff", when I started making games over 4 decades ago. We had no internet to pull from, but you know that, seeing as you're a pro that "got paid to write software for over 40 years." I too am a 4-decade "writer of software" (actually, Lifetime Achievement Award Winning game maker for over 4-decades, over $1bn in revenue, over 100m units sold as a GAME MAKER, not just "writing software". So, I know a thing or three about doing anything game-making-releated. So, yeah... I'll be me or whatever you're babbling about... LOL?)
As someone who spends most of my time rom hacking/game modding, this video was amazingly relatable. Tool development and automation is a massive advantage in both domains. I also appreciate the attention given to the "boring" settings and saving systems. A lot of times when making those sorts of things you get your own aha puzzle solving moments which are a huge confidence booster and a great test of your dedication and abilities.
A note of caution: while making configuration managers and level editing tools early makes you more efficient than manually doing the things those tools let you do, it makes you more efficient at doing those things, not necessarily more efficient at making good levels or a good overall game. The first step should still be to try your ideas out and establish whether your basic gameplay is fun (and figure out what about the game is key to making things fun), rather than finding yourself with a bunch of tools that let you very efficiently make a boring game, and having to scrap them and make a new toolset that lets you do the things you actually want to have automated. Or as Fred Brooks put it: "Plan to Throw One Away" - accept the fact that the only way to learn what you need to know to make your finished product is to make a broken version first, and embrace it - don't invest significant chunks of time to building specific tools until you know you really want them, but get something you can actually sit down with as soon as possible and plan to rebuild (possibly from scratch) once you've learned from your first attempt.
@@volt43k Yes, he's been doing the right thing, but it's not clear from this episode that he recognises that he's been mostly right in not having developed the level editor tools much sooner.
@@rmsgrey I see what you're saying. His earlier videos make it seem like he understands this - what with him building the minimum viable product and all - but he could have certainly been more explicit about it in this video. Maybe him mentioning how things were configured in the MVP was supposed to lead to that point and he just forgot to get to it.
Thank you for documenting this, Mark. I know it hasn't always been glamourous, but I'm inspired to try myself. Being a game dev has always seemed like a pipe dream to me, but seeing your real life experience has shown that it may be tough, but its achievable!
When it comes down to it, if you're not doing some bleeding edge stuff or learning something new, 90% of making a polished, real game are the same repetitive tasks you'd find in other development jobs. A friend of mine works at a top paying regular tech job and simply hires freelancers to make large parts of his games for him. This way he can choose to only do the parts he finds fun. Just putting this out there because imo this is a valid (and perhaps even the best) way of indulging your game dev passion.
I'm a software engineering manager and that's essentially what I do. I take client requests and translate them into functionalities for my developers to create, but the ones I find interesting I'll usually build myself if I have the time.
Loving this series so far, it's so interesting to follow someone learning this all for the first time, enjoying watching your 'aha' moments as you solve the puzzle of game development. I've played the demo - and it's a big improvement over the original MVP. The character movement is much snappier now, and the proper keyboard controls make such a difference. The levels felt a little easy, but the magnet plays a stronger role in the solutions which is great! Some more 'Future mark problems' for you though: - Having to throw the magnet in order to open each level door feels a bit unnecessary, I kept forgetting I had to do that and found myself confused why I couldn't use the door. - While the non-linear progression is nice, the layout of the hub pushed me to try the levels from left to right - and I never really wanted to skip a level and come back to it. Maybe moving the doors around so they're in all directions from the player, or turning the hub into it's own mini-level to reach all of the doors might be fun (though not challenging, just enough to imply you can pick which door to go down first) - Picking up a key triggering the end of a level seemed a bit odd, felt like I should be going back to a door into the hub level, or doing something else. Having to go back to the hub might make it feel more like there's a purpose to getting the keys, since that's where the locked door is, otherwise the two are a little too disconnected. Keep up the good work!
As someone who never worked on a single project for more than maybe a few months, I'm always impressed when people dedicate years of their lives to making a game. The dread that it could flop and only get a few hundred downloads or something in the end would keep me up at night.
Unless your survival depends on the game's success, most devs are just happy to make stuff. Even if it doesn't sell, successfully publishing stuff can look fantastic on a portfolio.
A few hundred downloads? Pff. I'm honestly expecting like 10-20 downloads at most for the game I've been working on with a friend for over 4 years now. But hey, we'll most likely actually finish it this year, even though I expected we'd be done in December last year ^^'
@@WanderTheNomad That's completely true. I think of the same when I make music - it might not be the most well-executed stuff, and sound a bit strange at times, but I like it and feel pride for what I accomplished. And that's all that counts, not getting >50k Spotify streams...
The demo is incredible! Level 4 and 5 definitely gave me those "aha" moments, however I couldn't figure out level 6 in a reasonable amount of time. Good thing it's optional.
No one can ever state the importance of efficient/fun tools enough!! Totally different field, but several years back a friend lent me one of her two mandolins for a summer, so I could teach myself another string instrument. I found it uncomfortable and my growth was slow, and eventually realized that mandolin just wasn't the instrument for me. Awhile later, I was lucky enough to spend a fair bit of time with her other, primary mandolin, and it played like a dream! I learned more in two weeks than I had in an entire season. I had fully convinced myself I wasn't good at something because the tool itself was lacking. So glad to hear you talk about this.
Hell ya! Sounds like you're really getting it down w/ the editor tools and singletons. Your key ID in the level name solution was interesting but I think it'll cause you troubles down the line. What if you wanted to store 2 keys in one level? Or a bonus collectable like many other games of your genre? I'd recommend using scriptable objects with unique IDs. Then you could just store obtained key IDs in a list of strings in one of your manager classes. You're making really awesome progress though, great work!
I feel like filenames is a "good enough" abstraction here. If you want multiple keys, just pick a delimiter that's allowed in filenames (like hyphen) and update the code that reads levels to do a split on that delimiter. It's not infinitely scalable, but good enough
This is Architecture and Tool Building. As a Software Engineer, it was always difficult to get into Game Development for me because I'm so used to taking this sort of approach, and most people that teach don't do so this way. I'm used to componentizing, segmenting functionality, creating independent systems, and bringing them together to build the whole. Awesome video. This is what takes your game from spaghetti code to a proper game that can be maintained and built on for DLCs, sequels, etc! And it also makes other collaborators appreciate it when having to maintaining it with you!
Feedback: - Starting on the outmost left side of the hub is really annoying by the time you get to level 4. "Pickup the magnet, walk to the right, enter room, do puzzle, return, pickup magnet, walk furhter to the right...". I'd either have the spawn in the middle (two theme's both progressively harder as you radiate outward), or some other method that reduces the time spent to walk from one side to the other. Using the magnet as a key is cute but starts to become tedious (especially if the game had 50+ levels). - Immediately returning to the hub on picking up a key removes the possibility of an exit puzzle (as in also ensure an exit once you have picked the key up). You can always place an exit near the key. - Technically opposite magnets attract while like magnets repulse (right now they do not repulse). Repulsing magnets could also give rise to some interesting puzzles. - The extreme stretchy nature of the chains is really weird and makes it feel more like thin rubber than metal chains. - Most of the puzzles were relatively easy to grasp and execute, with only the last puzzle depending on some quick skill, which was finicky.
I'm glad you're showing this. This is a wall that I've run into in the past and felt overwhelmed by. I get a level and character movement down, and then comes time to structure the levels together, create menus, save and load features, pausing, maybe even a simple cutscene. It's something I dont think about often until it hits me in the face that I baseline *have* to do it to even have a coherent game, but then it seems like a lot because I don't know how to envision such a system interacting with the actual gameplay bits. So this has been useful to me for sure.
Old games coming in packaged with a level editor taught me that making a game is first and foremost making a level editor and then using that to make the game.
Plz more of these! Like you said, there’s a place for the WOW DEMO, WOW PLAYTEST, dev diaries, but this was very informative. And I see people on other dev diaries who although enjoy the entertainment, when certain people are like “I’m not gonna bore you with the coding and how I did it!” And so many people are like “plz do!” So thank you for this and please more in the future!
One quick criticism is that kicking you out of the level as soon as you get the key- mario 64 style- is a bit jarring and might cause issues if you want to add optional collectibles later. Not a massive issue though.
As being a Gamedev myself, I feel how great custom tools just for your game are! Back then I coded every part of the game itself. Every Level had its own handlers and were built by hand while I had to reference components over and over again, tweak other stuff etc. - Then I learned about Prefabs - Then I learned about setting up Managers that are running above all levels (DontDestroyOnLoad) - Then I learned about UnityEvents - Then I learned about writing my own custom EditorTools. Keep up this awesome series, love to learn see people evolving !
I am a fine art oil painter and game enthusiast and find people's feedback extremely useful in my own work, but also terrifying. So that you are showing your work in progress so openly and are open for feedback all the way through is both inspiring and impressive! I think I would be a nervous wreck if I did did the same ;) But I guess you grow thicker skin and get tougher when you put yourself out there?
The only feedback I can give is improving the default controls on mouse and keyboard. Having right click (RMB) be used for grabbing the magnet and middle click (MMB) be used for changing polarity , will be useful for doing these actions at the same time as moving, without having to awkwardly remove your right hand from the mouse.
Basically, what any developer needs is to know before hand which mechanics need a macro, in other words, to be turned into Mario Maker or RPG Maker tools to not to waste too much time.
Great video! I'm glad to see you're introducing tools to help you design, and breaking out redundant features from levels into global managers. One of the things that was beaten into my head when I first was learning to code was that if you ever find yourself using the exact same block of code multiple times in a program, you should spin that code off into its own method/script/object, so I'm glad you're cutting down on some of that cruft. It's already paying dividends, given that you "accidentally" made a new demo! I'm going to check it out later tonight and give feedback.
Everything you've discovered and mentioned in the video is essentially why my entire channel exists! Haha! You also may want to look into Scriptable Objects if you haven't already. They're super powerful ways to manage, handle and move data around between objects in your game! You're really getting into the weeds of some of the struggles and problems us devs have to go through and solve on a daily basis. 😂 Great work so far Mark, the game is looking great! Congratulations!
Well done Mark! You've learnt a lot of fundamentals over these months. The decoupling of your managers and game state, the automation of work! Haha, the surprise level editor! Man this sounds just like my journey. These are the lessons that are really just never covered enough, and I'm very glad someone like you can shed light on that for new devs. The investment into systems to speed up your work, ( such as an in-game level editor - which you should consider tackling soon with all the tools you've added ) are incredible tools and help clean up so much stuff. Good work, I'm very interested to see what you do next.
* Demo Feedback * - I love the last level where the player has to figure out that they can use the magnet to move vertically - I don't know if the extra key is intentional but I think it leads into what you were saying about not wanting players to hit a brick wall on one level - I can't wait for the next vlog :)
The last level really stumped me. i don't know if it was an intentional solution but I just used the magnet on the revolving door to push me up to the platform and when I clicked the switch, the block just got stuck in place because the door just slightly stuck out to block it.
Thank you for highlighting these parts as well. Usually when I mention to my friends that I’ve worked “under the hood” on systems, it feels like I haven’t accomplished much, yet still spent a lot of time working on it.
Yea It's true that u need efficient systems to not get insane, but u definitely need to evaluate if u actually need the systems. Sure they can be time-saving, but sometimes a system that would save u a lot of time in the long run just isn't worth it when u only need 1 level. Always balance the time u put into the systems and how much time u actually save using it.
I‘m currently taking a model on graphics and visualisation. As an end of module project, we are asked to create our own graphics engine and use that to produce an animation of some kind. And when you hear "your own graphics engine", you are easily reminded of eg. Unreal and think to yourself "how am I supposed to create something like that by myself", but that’s not the length you have to go to to create an engine. What you actually need to do is set up a framework of shaders so you can put in any model anywhere and it just… works. Much like what you are doing here.
Really enjoyed the game its really starting to feel good. The only thing that massively bothered me in my playthrough was how clunky the magnet felt: - When I pressed the button to throw I felt like it took way to long before I could actually throw it. - When trying to aim the magnet the guide line feels very jittery which made it hard to tell where I was aiming.
I've loved watching you go from the very beginning to what you have now. Incredibly interesting and exciting to see your progress, and will hopefully inspire a lot of people to take similar steps and not give up. The learning curve is steep and difficult to overcome, but the view from the top is amazing and with far more height to cover when you're ready. Congratulations on your achievement. I look forward to the final game!
My background is in CS but I've moved into analysis/product management years ago. I'd love to get into games but every single job requires that I already have game industry experience! It's so frustrating being forced into software roles I hate while being denied the ones I'd actually be passionate about. The universe is cruel.
A lot of studios, even smaller ones frequently have a developer dedicated to making tools for the rest of the team exactly because of how much of a quality of life improvement they can be especially in level and sound design. I'm super glad you called these kinds of things out. Keep up the good work!
I've played the game and here's my feedback: - while "num" buttons on keyboard work they don't show in game (for example num enter is read as ?) - manually picking up magnet feels slow since I know option for calling it to player was planned - I might be biased on that one - I found lvl that gives you key number 6 (assuming doing them in order) to be annoying since many mistakes required resetting the level instead of simply going back, there were too many options to get stuck - lvl with key number 7 had a similar problem but to lesser extent, however I found throwing the magnet onto bottom button necessary to progres (not sure if it was intended) and had really hard time actually getting the magnet to be where I wanted it to be, magnet would either miss the button or slide off. When I finally got it done it was pure luck after brute forcing this method for ~5 minutes. In general I find this demo to be good, I haven't encountered a single bug and controls were fine, but lvs with keys 1-5 were extremely simple with sudden spike in difficulty on the last 2, I think increasing the challenge on ones with keys 4 and 5 would make difficulty progression feel more smooth. One suggestion I have is adding extra special collectibles to lvls, like strawberries in Celeste, it would add another layer of complexity to existing lvls and enable puzzle noobs such as myself to finish the game while leaving harder challenge to more experienced folks.
@@Psycho-yd7vm it would be cool if there was some kind of animal or bot that walks around, shoving the key from the button so you know that’s not the method. Or better spatial design maybe (haven’t played yet)
That notion of "A little extra work now can save you many headaches in the future" is used in every aspect of game development. It's great that you found this design philosophy at this early stage of development. As a 3D character artist myself, I couldn't tell you how many hours I lost on one of my fledgling projects due to ignoring the importance of good topology in my models before committing to creating the textures and rigging. I eventually had to scrap that project and start over... so yeah, that was "fun". X'D
I believe a more interesting option than keeping a "DontDestroyOnLoad" object, or singleton for your game state, is to keep your data on a ScriptableObject, wich has the intrinsic property of persisting independently of scenes. At least for universally accessed variables such as options. I look forward for every episode of this series, and seeing your progress is really inspiring!
Do not do this for mutable data, as unity will often reset those values on scene changes (unless you specify with the HideFlags). I've always just used additive scene loading to have scenes that hold persistent objects.
I think Mark is going through the Singleton pattern phase. (No shade, I have no idea what the best way to work Unity is. I'm just amused to see a RUclipsr I like going through the phases all dev go through.)
@@Cyliandre441 Personally: When one manager starts communicating with another manager, or when the "children" of a manager starts communicating back to the manager. I.E, removing the manager from the game shouldn't break the functionality of another object. Of course that's not to say you should never ever do it under any circumstance, but it's worth being mindful of and avoiding if you can.
@Jaaaco I don't think you can skip the phases. Basically, there are a bunch of techniques and tools that you learn. You get really excited about them and overuse them. In that process, you learn the limits of those tools and techniques. I could explain why Singleton is considered an "anti-pattern" but there are legitimate uses for it and when to use it is ultimately a matter of judgement you develop through experience. The only phase you might be able to avoid is the one where when something goes wrong, you throw away everything and start from scratch. 99% of the time, you are throwing away a bunch of useful stuff and making a whole bunch of extra work for yourself. The urge to throw away everything ugly is always going to be there. Just remember that urge is almost always wrong and that actually trying to fix the bugs and refactoring is almost always the right thing to do. Unless you're just coding for fun. Then who cares if you're ever done? Just do the fun bits.
Making tools is as important as making actual playable things. The amount of dev tools behind any game is incredible. Glad you made a video on this and it was really cool seeing the ideas you came up with. Like, I would have never thought of using “Invoke” for a tool. Great video please keep it up! :)
This is why devs like to make sequels. It's a shame to throw away an engine and development tools that took just as long if not longer to make than the actual contents of the game. It's why sequels don't take as long as the original, like botw 2... wait, no
It's also funny how devs tend to try to add on to their existing games in the form of DLC, but then eventually just decide to turn their energy toward a full-on asset-reusing sequel. It happened with both BOTW 2 and Hollow Knight Silksong (although both games are still taking just as long as the original to develop, ironically)
Sequels to most things take just as long if not longer than their original counterparts. Sure you don’t have to spend as much time establishing the groundwork, but not only do you have to respect the original and keep its details in mind, you also have to expand on the original in a meaningful way. At least if you want to make a good sequel anyway. Even better sequels go above and beyond.
There is also the Torna DLC but that is more a “we had too much story to involve a playable flashback, and Jin’s past life is that interesting that we can make a game about Torna the country.” Still, it did mean reusing the engine for different gameplay mechanics.
by the way: one of the best aspects of this game so far is imo the art style. also the character animation when jumping, landing throwing and so on. all spot on.
Mark, I'm so proud of you! I follow your channel pretty much since the beginning, and as a software engineer I've seen so many people start and then abandon their indie dev career due to how difficult and long the process of creating a game is. But you're sticking to it and your game is looking so good! It's hard to believe you're learning basically everything as you go. For real, congrats!
*Here's my feedback:* 1. Not being able to aim while moving is kinda annoying. So being able to do that would be nice :) 2. Add sound (this one is kinda obvious but I thought I'd say it anyway) 3. Longer levels would be more fun :) 4. Oh and the eureka moments thing was the best part of the game IMO :D
Aiming while moving would also help the speedrunning aspect of the games you inadvertently attracted given your game had many useful tricks to try speedrunning from the very beginning.
This is so true. As a sound designer I work with a video game company that takes this very seriously and created a set of tools for sounds that are really abstract and although we are only using one is prepared to work on different sound systems (Unity Audio, MasterAudio, FMOD...). And they also built a set of tools so easy to use I can almost integrate all audio by myself or even create simple scripts for situations not created yet on their tools by just simply looking at the ones already available. It really speeds up the process.
So happy to have finally gotten to play the demo! Here's my feedback, echoing what some others have said here. - Idk how I feel about the reset button. Having one just kind of signals to the player that it's possible to get softlocked in your puzzles. And even though resetting is only a button press away, I think the possibility of a softlock discourages player experimentation. - There's only one instance of an L-shaped door that can be pushed here, and it doesn't show up until puzzle 5 or 6. I think you may need to establish pushing as a mechanic earlier on so that the player can more easily discern which surfaces are pushable and which are magnetized. - Simultaneous moving and aiming would be a big plus. It's a bit of a hassle to line up a shot, realize you're off by an inch or two, cancel the throw, move a bit, and line it up again. - I think I'd prefer to have to go back and retrieve the magnet and then find a path to an exit door instead of getting booted back to the hub immediately. The magnet and the robot are buddies, right? It makes sense that our robot would want to retrieve his pal before heading to the next level. Just my two cents. Really looking forward to seeing how this develops!
it's really interesting to see how i started my own game dev around the same time as this series started and in almost every episode you literally talk about the things i've been experiencing in that same time. I've been working on a tower defence game lately and rather than having to reprogram every little thing for every tower I've narrowed it down to creating a useful system where I can make a new tower or enemy in a matter of minutes by playing around with some variables. Yes, making those tool took me about a week but in the long term I'm excepting it will save more muuuuuch more than that.
One of my favorite parts of this series is just showing the iterative nature of development. So much is really just a measure of time and constant updates and tweaks. Trying new things out, identifying new problems, and finding solutions. It's unglamorous but I think seeing a finished game or program gives a little bit of survivorship bias assuming that it was just a straight path from start to finish when in reality is zigzags, looptyloops, and branching dead ends.
It's really nice to see how much you've grown from the first video of this series, when you started developing, wich is in my opinion the best ideia you had for this channel. Wacthing you through this task is motivating, and I have learned so much about game development and life in general. Each video gives lots of insights about everything. Keep up the good work, Mark, with your game, channel and life in general. So greatful to have this content here on RUclips. Cheers from Brazil.
i love this kind of stuff, and the sad thing is that i cant show it to other people cause its just not appealing. thank you for making this video i really liked it, i wished there were more videos like this
DEMO REVIEW --- SPOILERS FOR THE DEMO PUZZLES Just finished playing it and it was very fun! I'm very glad you made it more open as to which levels I decide to play because I got stuck on level three and ended up playing the others before coming back to it. The tutorial was very smooth and I picked up the controls fairly quick. I did not play your previous demo so this was my first time playing any of your game. Level 1 took me a second to realize I could throw the magnet threw the bar. It created an ah ha moment but also had me confused why the magnet could go threw a bar while me (the player) couldn't. I like the idea still but maybe have the bar be like a laser or something that a magnet, but not me, could go threw. Level 2 was really fun for me, I felt clever for remembering that the type of bar the magnet could go through from level 1 and figured out to let it drop through the floor quickly. Good ah ha moment in this one. Level 3 had me stumped for a while so I left and came back to it. It was in another level when I realized I could reverse polarity and change the door without me being there that I realized how to beat this level. It was amazing because I had an AH HA! moment for it while in another level, for this reason I really like the non-linear path. Emphasis on the ah ha for this one because I was stumped for much longer so solving it became much more satisfying. Level 4 was fun as well. I like how the beam that destroys the magnet is not explained before hand and I just find out by walking into it for the first time. It had me lean back and think "hmm ok". It didn't take me long to figure out but still satisfying. Level 5 is my favorite and had me feeling the most clever for solving it. Realizing after a few resets that I needed to set off the second switch instead of the first, and then working backwards from there led to a great ah ha moment. It was all very smooth. Level 6 confused me and I'm not even sure I solved it correctly but I did find a way to beat it. After much trial and error the way I got through was as follows. I flipped the switch on the far right, then went over to the negative block. Then I threw the magnet under the negative block down next to the button but NOT on the button. This is the part that felt wrong, it felt like I was forcing the magnet threw that slit and it landed on the button several times which required me to reset the level each time. Once I got it next to the button, I flipped the switch on the far right so the negative block dropped, but the magnet stopped it from hitting the button so the chained blocked stayed up. If I solved it correctly, it felt weird because of how difficult it was to even throw it threw the slit under the negative block. Another way I tried (but failed) to solve it was to throw the magnet from the far right switch down to the polarity door and try to get it threw the door and momentum it to fall next to the button. I tried this first and was unsuccessful. *Edit* My brother and I figured out the proper way to solve the 6th level lol, it makes much more sense now. I love the reset feature in how quick it is, doesn't feel like I'm being punished for restarting the level which led me to be more explorative in my methods. Also the levels were great in that I never felt like brute forcing my way through by randomly throwing the magnet, but by actually thinking threw them all. I did not experience any bugs on my playthrough. If you want to emphasis an even more non-linear game then perhaps don't have the doors in a row or perhaps the robot enters in the middle of the doors. Controls for the character felt good and I had no issues there. I fell like the chances of you reading this are slim but if you do I love your channel and think what you're doing is really cool!
Honestly felt myself getting excited when you were listing off the dry and unfun subjects at the start. I guess because it's _exactly_ the stuff I want to understand. Yeah, I see what you mean about it but being fun, in and of itself, but it's fun to think about how much you can do with it. Understanding the fundamentals, no matter the field, is what allows you to turn wild ideas into actual products
My Feedback for 2.0: got the aha moment for every single level the character was great to control I played all the levels just because they were fun In conclusion: MORE GAME NOW
Actually I'm working on my own game, and watching Marks experiences with game development was a HUGE inspiration for me. I LOVE your game so far, and I can't wait for it to to release on steam in 2024!
![Kumamoto Masters Japan 2024 | Gregoria Mariska Tunjung (INA) [5] vs. Akane Yamaguchi (JPN) [2] | F](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EIjZybhsWqA/mqdefault.jpg)
Most of what you're talking about here is called "abstraction", despecifying capabilities in order to make them generic and reusable as well as linking related settings and configurations to minimize the effort required to make further changes. It's a core tenet of software development and my primary concern when designing application enhancements for my job. I'd much rather spend the extra time up front designing something that not only solves the current issue, but also related past issues as well as potential future ones. In the end, if done well, it significantly reduces overall complexity while skyrocketing maintainability. It's also a puzzle that I tend to take as personal challenges.
Abstraction is also a core tenet of pure mathematics and its derivatives, such as physics and computing.
@@461weavile Abstraction is a core tenet of the reality we live in. Everywhere you look there will be some level of abstraction. It’s the superpower of reality
The word abstraction has lost all meaning.
Yes, and I find the same approach applies to designing art assets - consider what few repeating base shapes can the reference be created with in a simpler form. Can a basic material be setup for a repeating asset that generates varied textures with a few tweaks?
Yes! The most important rule of thumb of programming is that if you're writing something twice, you should find a way to simplify it
I’m so grateful that you focused on the “boring stuff” in this video. It was very illuminating. Thanks!
There are actually programmers who like to work on those "boring" frameworks rather than gameplay and me as a game-designer I am happy they exist and do all that stuff.
@@Gemraw I'm one of those. I'm more exited by working on the technical implementation than doing the art and game design.
I love this stuff, making things easier is what I like a lot about game dev
@@KilgoreOnDrugs me too actually. The most fun thing about software development in general for me is building classes and tools that make me build the actual fun features so fast. It's much more fun than stacking a "quick fix" just to than spend crazy amounts of time working around that "quick fix". I'm glad this video was made.
"And yes, I realize that 'future Mark problems' are starting to stack up a bit."
Welcome to game development. Or software development in general. Or really, making *anything.*
yea that feels about right.
It is lovingly called "Technical Debt" 😅 It is a core tenet of "what the f**k, it's already morning"
Just life in general
Eh... when you stick to your scope, plan accordingly and have scaleable code its not that bad
Those are not future mark problems, those are future mark challenges. The way is the goal and so on ;) enjoy the ride and I'm so curiously looking forward to the video about sound design!
Here is my feedback:
-I totally got the eureka moments in every level
-It will be easier to automatically grab de magnet
-I got softlocked many times so the restart was nice. I dunno if it will be better for players to get less stuck than the reset
-Initially I thought I should return to the key hub, that made me feel as if the level endings were anticlimactic
-I'll love to move while aiming, it feels more fluent
-The key as a concept and progress tracker is nice but I don't know how well it fits in the game. The doors weren't like the key type so it doesn't make sense to open them with it, also it's kinda weird to just throw them thru the pipe... maybe a fuse or something that restores the energy will be better
-Maybe it will be nice if the polarity affects the magnet character, for example making the positive smile and the negative sad
-The main character could shine more while aiming, maybe a subtle movement in the eyes following the aim
Overall I loved it and am really thankful that it was free for everyone so I could try it ♥
I agree that the puzzles felt a little anticlimactic- there was a lack of the sort of "victory moment" most puzzle games give you when you've solved the puzzle and run to the exit door or push the last block into place, not something i really noticed until it wasn't there
I love the idea of the magnet character being affected by the polarity.
I think moving while aiming might lead to some bugs. At least I've seen something similar in speedruns of other games, the player would jump at a wall and shoot a weapon with recoil at the same time, causing him to get out of bounds. Video game physics can get a little tricky when there are multiple things colliding with each other at the same time.
I also thought it was weird we didn't need to return to the start of the level. I think the fact you finish the 1st tutorial level by throwing the magnet at the pipe and then going to hub, but all the rest are finished by just touching the key.
I got used to it by the end, but it deffo felt "off" the first couple times.
Also, the 2nd to last level made me feel like a big brain smartey pants, deffo dialed in that 'eureka' feeling a lot. It's great.
@@Sirozha1337 Speed runs are cool though.
As a software developer, I'm really impressed with how professional your approach has become in this short time span! Credit where credit is due!
Just to clarify it for everyone who's starting: when Mark said: "it's worth putting in some extra effort at the beginning' he did not mean before the MVP, before you haven't first inspected your core idea(s) are worth pursuing and which are not.
Fail fast. Fail early. Inspect and adapt.
Made it pretty far into developing my first game, I had like 50 puzzles for a sokoban type game. But playing through them I realized once you solve them they were just plain tedious to execute. And the entire game design hinges on that tedious mechanic. Scrapped it. Whatever. I had fun learning to code and making puzzles and learned the value of testing things with friends very early on
A
@@MegaCardGuy B
@@kasane1337 C
@@panampace at least you've got some experience out of it. And maybe it's not as bad as you think, and you can repurpose parts of this game to make something new and fun.
I'm so glad this series is still going. Extremely informative, fun, and engaging.
Now that Mark knows how to make games, he can take part in the GMTK Game Jam, one of the biggest Game Jams ever
Speaking as an indie dev myself, just because you can make a primitive game over weeks / months, doesn’t mean you’re ready to finish a game jam. The time, dedication, and skill required is immense. I wouldn’t be surprised if he participates in a year or two though.
@@chaosmkmk Hey Siri, define "joke"
@Matthew Koon You don't need to be good dev to participate in game jams, quite the opposite, they are often intended for beginners!
What kind of gatekeeping nonesense is that?!
And he has more than enough skill by now to participate.
@LightningWarrior 10 I wonder how often Siri roasts people? You made me think of this random situation:
"Hey Siri. Define "joke."
Siri: "I'm talking to one."
(Not meaning to attack in any way I assure you. Apologies if it sounds like I am)
We got to tell him about it!
When people think some options, difficulties and such are simple switch flips, they entirely ignore how such a simple function can take a lot to make work in the first place. Even longer to make it work *properly* .
It's not always as simple as change some code lines. Hell it could actually risk breaking the fun or even the game itself at the worst of times
Game Development is a lot if time, effort and more
Not the best example, however.
Some games just up the damage or some bs in a difficulty setting with absolutely no changes to AI.
At least reduce attack intervals, gosh darnit!
@@harshmudhar96 Eh, I don't mind when difficulty setting just increase damage by a bunch. I understand as a dev how nightmarish it can be to try to add smart difficulty markers but please for the love of god don't just increase the health by a ton. Castle crashers for example just did 10x to health and damage and it's one of the worst experiences I've ever played. Skyrim's in a similar boat.
@@harshmudhar96 just the other way round. Because everyone remembers this impact in gameplay good balancing has should remind us of how important playtesting and this part of developement is.
Not that it was easy but that this part of polishing makes the differece between a good game and a great one.
That's why comments about "just adding" an easy mode for Soulsborne games are extremely ignorant. But, what can you expect of games journalist.
this is often an issue in software-development in general...
that's why you should NEVER start with the ui... more often than not the client will see the ui (with nothing being done in the background) and assume their software is done already...
there are actually tools these days to make usable ui that looks like it's sketched to present to the client... so you have sketched ui mixed with actual ui for those parts that already work
Imagine being talented and dedicated enough to not just make a game on your own, but also make a high quality video series detailing your design processes at the same time! Really amazing stuff!
While also working on the usual videos, and one of the biggest game jams
mark finding out about managers after like 6 months into unity is kind of hilarious
we've all done it, amazing vlog as always mark!
Very true. So much of this series could have been summarised by _"Mark should have taken a crash course in programming, and then a crash course in Unity, before trying to make a game."_
You’re not a real developer until you’ve worked with a code base that has “managers”, “handlers”, “providers”, “helpers”, “controllers”, and “coordinators.” Throw in both “factory” and “builder” for good measure. Also a catch all “Utils”. XD
Note: This is a joke, not an attempt to gatekeeper.
@@QuantumHistorian that's how you know the dude is in a very nice financial place. No preparation at all, joyfully taking his time whit zero financial risks or preoccupations.
@@QuantumHistorian this is a much more effective way to learn
@@magica3526 Yes and no. Working on a project is the best way to practice skills. But having a basic grasp of the key concepts (like using managers to store and handle data) means you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. At the end of the day, that saves you time and results in a much better product.
love this series, I'll admit I was a little sceptical when you changed things on your channel but I am really enjoying this, maybe even more than the video essay type videos
kutgw
Wow this is a surprise cameo. Good musician AND good taste in youtubers
This has been great. If anything Mark is no longer speaking as a journalist without real experience. Shows how different design concepts and actual development really are.
Woah! I'm coming to see you in Nottingham next week! I love how similar people end up having other similar tastes.
Agree, this new direction, that the channel is taking, is great. These "behind the scenes" videos give so many valuable insights into game development process, and it also inspires the viewer to try and create something new.
@@noisemaker0129 glad you left that comment, I was like… “Good musician, eh?”
_clicks on Dadi’s channel_
👁🫦👁 uuunnnnhhhh yeaaaahhhh
The "unglamorous" nature of this series has been absolutely fantastic.... and now I feel like I need to step up my game dev skills lmao. I really am starting to wish my uni course had been more thorough in doing proper (if boring) set up and management, I mean, today I realised that all the pause functionality should of course be handled as a persistent thing rather than setting it up over and over again. My lecturers had just told us to make a pause mechanic one day and had no guide as to how!
I took Unity's certification program and even they didn't tell me about managers and data abstraction for back-end and UI management. Kicking myself for the time and money I wasted.
At least it got me started though.
@@ghostderazgriz Well.... at least Mark is here now to set the record straight for us fools xD
What uni course did you take, if you don’t mind me asking? I’m super split on doing a general programming course or doing something game design specific.
@@OzoneInteractiveMegan Video Game Development in Africa Digital Media Institute (I wouldn't really recommend mine, since it's being rather mismanaged rn). As for taking general programming vs somethign more game design specific, that's up to you.
You've got me so inspired. I've been developing games in my free time for a while now, but I've only ever "finished" one. I'm now trying to learn Godot and actually do things right, and it's a little demoralizing. Thanks for the boost!
"And so I abused my internet fame to get someone much smarter than me to build that exact thing I just described"
fantastic line
😅
I really enjoy that in the devlogs for the game Astortion, the dev actually took a video to go over the entire structure of how the game is saved.
The whole Astortion devlog series is amazing btw
true, that series is awesome
There's a really good book called "show you work" by Austin Kleon that talks about sharing you're work as an artist:
one of the important lessons to take away from it is you should share something if its either interesting or *useful* which I think more indie devs need to realise because while the structure of how the game is saved will not appeal to everyone it is incredibly useful to a sizeable chunk of his audience and is therefore interesting to them.
"Making menus, save system, progression checking, controls mapping, options and more..." As an indie dev, it hits hard
Today alone I sat down for 3 hours, just to add 3 more animations to the player, and 2 hours to add 3 animations for an enemy. I could only use two of them, but thats just maybe.
The player got 4 directional movement. So each direction needs 4 frames of loopable animation. The player has around 100 types of animation. But this goes for many NPC's and all enemies too. I also have to draw UI,hearts, items, pause,load, walls, floors, tiles, bosses, title screens, menus, buttons, and EVERYTHING! The amount of time I have to use on graphic alone is insane... And then theres the rest. Game design, story, dialogs, programming, cutscenes. There is two programmers helping me too now..! We need to talk. Decide. Plan. Wait for eachother..!
Been working on it for six years now. I'm gonna finish this.
Hold my beer, guys. Hold my beer!
Give us the links when you can ✨
@@_emory I somtimes upload to this channel 😇😇
id suggest keeping track of all your test levels and old stuff, in the final version i would hope to see a 'lost levels' style page that has all the ones you ended up scrapping by the end of it as you find out the feel of level design
any game dev worth their salt keeps a repository in source control so you can go back to the first iteration if you need to. Nothing should be lost, even the mistakes. Ever.
The lost levels would also be a great opprotunity to add in a design commentary track where the thought process is communicated to the player while describing why it was eventually scrapped
He should use Git to keep versions
This!!! This whole thread is full of amazing ideas.
The issue with this is that if game mechanics change, the old levels may not function properly with these changes. And if old levels were added, but kept the old mechanics, it would be too confusing/unintuitive to play them since everything would be a bit off from the rest of the game. Perhaps it is still worth considering despite this, just wanted to point out that it may not be as simple as it first seems.
It’s so cool to see you naturally grow and figure these things out. Managers, for example. The example about how difficult it is to change one little thing in a level. These are things that everybody faces as they grow as a dev-super neat to see it documented here.
As some others are saying, I will also reiterate by stating that you shouldn’t lose that initial spark to just DO and do sloppily, quick, and as little as possible at the get-go. Prototyping is prototyping. Get good at that. Remember that making tools and editors only makes you better at making tools and editors-it is easy to fall into an endless coding pit where you build another engine inside of your engine and never get around to making your actual game. It’s all about balance and knowing what you NEED.
You seem to be on the right track-just tossing my two cents into the pot.
Happy Dev-ing~
Ok, I gotta say it, this may be the single best episode in the series. I like the whole thing, and follow it, but as a random coder who tried to get into gamedev, this is by far the more help you could have given to me.
Loving the series, mate. Like another user said, a lot of what you're talking about is known as abstraction, one of the 4 core pillars of writing good, object-oriented code: Abstraction, Polymorphism, Inheritance, and Encapsulation.
If you're a new dev/coder and are wondering how to produce better code, look at some articles/videos about those concepts, and you'll really boost your code to the next level.
Tools development is super underrated. It's one of my favorite parts of game development. I love making tools that make, making the game faster and easier. I'd love to see a video in your usual style discussing tools.
Hey Mark, loving the series so far! I use Unity a lot, and if there's one thing I'd recommend you look into, its ScriptableObjects! They are really versatile tools, with a plethora uses, one of which is their ability to be used as the managers you described at the beginning of the video.
ScriptableObjects are assets stored in the project, not in any scene, so their data persists between scenes, allowing you to easily transfer data from one section of your game to another, without resorting to Singletons, DontDestoryOnLoad, or the dreaded FindObjectOfType. The options settings are the perfect use case for this! There are some niche details that take some getting used to, like resetting the values at the end of a PlayMode session, but the payoff is totally worth the learning curve!
My thoughts exactly. I really really hope Mark sees these comments, because I want Scriptable Objects to get more of a signal boost over cross-scene manager game objects.
i can imagine the pain you felt when you finally came up with the "options manager" that made things so much more organized, progress looks great though
keep it up man, you're going places //and yes i'm a game designer working with coders and artists everyday :)//
This was *FANTASTIC*. :) Thank you. I even shared this video to two of my associates who may or may not be helping to design or 'populate' a game which I may or may not be masterminding.
Great seeing the more tedious elements of game design highlighted here and the importance of workflow optimization. I learned about that waay too late into things.
I feel the same. I coded since my 12 but only in my 18-19 it clicked that I should avoid the things that bog me down and embrace the things that save me time. The default was: to forget the time waste.
I seem to reinvent this tendency per hobby btw. Just one day I start to go efficient. Why not since day one? I don't know.
This series is just Mark slowly discovering and internalizing the core tenets of software engineering. Love it.
10:00 "Before realizing something ... did I just accidentally make a video game?" That is a mood for any creative person in any field and I love it.
Congratulations Mark. Can't wait to see the iteration you do.
FINALLY! Finally one of these "dev diaries" that's not just a stream, that actually shows a peak into the "making games is hard" that people seem so happy to nod along with, but have NO CLUE really what that means. Good stuff. Glad you've gone from just pontificating to actually making. The knowledge from making is worth its weight in gold. When asked, "how do I get in the business?", I've told students for decades, "MAKE SOMETHING! Make something SIMPLE from start to finish! Make Pong, make Space Invaders! You'll learn more than you ever thought you would from making something so simple. BTW, not trying to take the piss (I think I'm using that correctly), I'm actually a big fan and long-time sub. You're one of the few people out there talking and getting it mostly right. I just am glad that someone with 1.2m subs can get the word out that one of the biggest things in game making is; You don't know what you don't know.
Did you intentionally make an HTML reference for sarcasm?
@@gavind351 Umm... yes, yes I did. ;)
@@foobarmaximus3506 I read books "and stuff", when I started making games over 4 decades ago. We had no internet to pull from, but you know that, seeing as you're a pro that "got paid to write software for over 40 years."
I too am a 4-decade "writer of software" (actually, Lifetime Achievement Award Winning game maker for over 4-decades, over $1bn in revenue, over 100m units sold as a GAME MAKER, not just "writing software". So, I know a thing or three about doing anything game-making-releated. So, yeah... I'll be me or whatever you're babbling about... LOL?)
As someone who spends most of my time rom hacking/game modding, this video was amazingly relatable. Tool development and automation is a massive advantage in both domains. I also appreciate the attention given to the "boring" settings and saving systems. A lot of times when making those sorts of things you get your own aha puzzle solving moments which are a huge confidence booster and a great test of your dedication and abilities.
This is a game development series not rom hacking and game modding.
I keep getting stuck in slog after slog but these updates always give me such motivation
A note of caution: while making configuration managers and level editing tools early makes you more efficient than manually doing the things those tools let you do, it makes you more efficient at doing those things, not necessarily more efficient at making good levels or a good overall game.
The first step should still be to try your ideas out and establish whether your basic gameplay is fun (and figure out what about the game is key to making things fun), rather than finding yourself with a bunch of tools that let you very efficiently make a boring game, and having to scrap them and make a new toolset that lets you do the things you actually want to have automated.
Or as Fred Brooks put it: "Plan to Throw One Away" - accept the fact that the only way to learn what you need to know to make your finished product is to make a broken version first, and embrace it - don't invest significant chunks of time to building specific tools until you know you really want them, but get something you can actually sit down with as soon as possible and plan to rebuild (possibly from scratch) once you've learned from your first attempt.
Have you been following this series? What you described is exactly what he's done already.
@@volt43k Yes, he's been doing the right thing, but it's not clear from this episode that he recognises that he's been mostly right in not having developed the level editor tools much sooner.
@@volt43k just randomly feel into this video and i think it's good that he mentioned it.
@@rmsgrey I see what you're saying. His earlier videos make it seem like he understands this - what with him building the minimum viable product and all - but he could have certainly been more explicit about it in this video. Maybe him mentioning how things were configured in the MVP was supposed to lead to that point and he just forgot to get to it.
Sage advice!
Thank you for documenting this, Mark. I know it hasn't always been glamourous, but I'm inspired to try myself. Being a game dev has always seemed like a pipe dream to me, but seeing your real life experience has shown that it may be tough, but its achievable!
When it comes down to it, if you're not doing some bleeding edge stuff or learning something new, 90% of making a polished, real game are the same repetitive tasks you'd find in other development jobs.
A friend of mine works at a top paying regular tech job and simply hires freelancers to make large parts of his games for him. This way he can choose to only do the parts he finds fun. Just putting this out there because imo this is a valid (and perhaps even the best) way of indulging your game dev passion.
I'm a software engineering manager and that's essentially what I do. I take client requests and translate them into functionalities for my developers to create, but the ones I find interesting I'll usually build myself if I have the time.
Loving this series so far, it's so interesting to follow someone learning this all for the first time, enjoying watching your 'aha' moments as you solve the puzzle of game development.
I've played the demo - and it's a big improvement over the original MVP. The character movement is much snappier now, and the proper keyboard controls make such a difference. The levels felt a little easy, but the magnet plays a stronger role in the solutions which is great!
Some more 'Future mark problems' for you though:
- Having to throw the magnet in order to open each level door feels a bit unnecessary, I kept forgetting I had to do that and found myself confused why I couldn't use the door.
- While the non-linear progression is nice, the layout of the hub pushed me to try the levels from left to right - and I never really wanted to skip a level and come back to it. Maybe moving the doors around so they're in all directions from the player, or turning the hub into it's own mini-level to reach all of the doors might be fun (though not challenging, just enough to imply you can pick which door to go down first)
- Picking up a key triggering the end of a level seemed a bit odd, felt like I should be going back to a door into the hub level, or doing something else. Having to go back to the hub might make it feel more like there's a purpose to getting the keys, since that's where the locked door is, otherwise the two are a little too disconnected.
Keep up the good work!
As someone who never worked on a single project for more than maybe a few months, I'm always impressed when people dedicate years of their lives to making a game. The dread that it could flop and only get a few hundred downloads or something in the end would keep me up at night.
Unless your survival depends on the game's success, most devs are just happy to make stuff.
Even if it doesn't sell, successfully publishing stuff can look fantastic on a portfolio.
In that case, it's important to make something that you yourself would be proud of at the end of the day, even if zero other people like it.
Ah, it's simple, you make one just because you _want to,_ not because you desire popularity, money, or success.
A few hundred downloads? Pff. I'm honestly expecting like 10-20 downloads at most for the game I've been working on with a friend for over 4 years now.
But hey, we'll most likely actually finish it this year, even though I expected we'd be done in December last year ^^'
@@WanderTheNomad That's completely true. I think of the same when I make music - it might not be the most well-executed stuff, and sound a bit strange at times, but I like it and feel pride for what I accomplished. And that's all that counts, not getting >50k Spotify streams...
The demo is incredible! Level 4 and 5 definitely gave me those "aha" moments, however I couldn't figure out level 6 in a reasonable amount of time. Good thing it's optional.
Level 6 also has a great aha moment.
8:23 Ah, script automation. One of the wonders of Unity. Also, keep these tools around for other games you make! It'll do you a solid in future :D.
As a professional game developer I must say, this is truly impressive and not just for a beginner, it’s impressive period!
Love this series! You started out by saying "no one cares about this stuff" and I was like "I do!!!"
No one can ever state the importance of efficient/fun tools enough!! Totally different field, but several years back a friend lent me one of her two mandolins for a summer, so I could teach myself another string instrument. I found it uncomfortable and my growth was slow, and eventually realized that mandolin just wasn't the instrument for me. Awhile later, I was lucky enough to spend a fair bit of time with her other, primary mandolin, and it played like a dream! I learned more in two weeks than I had in an entire season. I had fully convinced myself I wasn't good at something because the tool itself was lacking. So glad to hear you talk about this.
Hell ya! Sounds like you're really getting it down w/ the editor tools and singletons. Your key ID in the level name solution was interesting but I think it'll cause you troubles down the line. What if you wanted to store 2 keys in one level? Or a bonus collectable like many other games of your genre? I'd recommend using scriptable objects with unique IDs. Then you could just store obtained key IDs in a list of strings in one of your manager classes. You're making really awesome progress though, great work!
Why can you not just make the key have an ID and write it to the key list on collect? Edit: Oops thats exactly what he said
I feel like filenames is a "good enough" abstraction here. If you want multiple keys, just pick a delimiter that's allowed in filenames (like hyphen) and update the code that reads levels to do a split on that delimiter. It's not infinitely scalable, but good enough
This is Architecture and Tool Building. As a Software Engineer, it was always difficult to get into Game Development for me because I'm so used to taking this sort of approach, and most people that teach don't do so this way. I'm used to componentizing, segmenting functionality, creating independent systems, and bringing them together to build the whole.
Awesome video. This is what takes your game from spaghetti code to a proper game that can be maintained and built on for DLCs, sequels, etc! And it also makes other collaborators appreciate it when having to maintaining it with you!
Glad the game is coming along nicely. Will check it out asap. Also please don't forget about us Linux users when you release that game.
Mark thinks this is the boring stuff but this is my favorite episode so far.
Feedback:
- Starting on the outmost left side of the hub is really annoying by the time you get to level 4. "Pickup the magnet, walk to the right, enter room, do puzzle, return, pickup magnet, walk furhter to the right...". I'd either have the spawn in the middle (two theme's both progressively harder as you radiate outward), or some other method that reduces the time spent to walk from one side to the other. Using the magnet as a key is cute but starts to become tedious (especially if the game had 50+ levels).
- Immediately returning to the hub on picking up a key removes the possibility of an exit puzzle (as in also ensure an exit once you have picked the key up). You can always place an exit near the key.
- Technically opposite magnets attract while like magnets repulse (right now they do not repulse). Repulsing magnets could also give rise to some interesting puzzles.
- The extreme stretchy nature of the chains is really weird and makes it feel more like thin rubber than metal chains.
- Most of the puzzles were relatively easy to grasp and execute, with only the last puzzle depending on some quick skill, which was finicky.
I'm glad you're showing this. This is a wall that I've run into in the past and felt overwhelmed by. I get a level and character movement down, and then comes time to structure the levels together, create menus, save and load features, pausing, maybe even a simple cutscene. It's something I dont think about often until it hits me in the face that I baseline *have* to do it to even have a coherent game, but then it seems like a lot because I don't know how to envision such a system interacting with the actual gameplay bits. So this has been useful to me for sure.
Old games coming in packaged with a level editor taught me that making a game is first and foremost making a level editor and then using that to make the game.
Plz more of these!
Like you said, there’s a place for the WOW DEMO, WOW PLAYTEST, dev diaries, but this was very informative.
And I see people on other dev diaries who although enjoy the entertainment, when certain people are like “I’m not gonna bore you with the coding and how I did it!” And so many people are like “plz do!”
So thank you for this and please more in the future!
One quick criticism is that kicking you out of the level as soon as you get the key- mario 64 style- is a bit jarring and might cause issues if you want to add optional collectibles later. Not a massive issue though.
Even Nintendo recognized this at the time, which is why the 100 coin stars don’t automatically eject you from the level in SM64.
@@TheCrewExpendable And then they decided it would in Sunshine.... for some reason.....
As being a Gamedev myself, I feel how great custom tools just for your game are!
Back then I coded every part of the game itself. Every Level had its own handlers and were built by hand while I had to reference components over and over again, tweak other stuff etc.
- Then I learned about Prefabs
- Then I learned about setting up Managers that are running above all levels (DontDestroyOnLoad)
- Then I learned about UnityEvents
- Then I learned about writing my own custom EditorTools.
Keep up this awesome series, love to learn see people evolving !
I am a fine art oil painter and game enthusiast and find people's feedback extremely useful in my own work, but also terrifying. So that you are showing your work in progress so openly and are open for feedback all the way through is both inspiring and impressive! I think I would be a nervous wreck if I did did the same ;) But I guess you grow thicker skin and get tougher when you put yourself out there?
To think I just re-watched the entire series last night, went to bed and woke up to a new episode! Loving this series so much!
The only feedback I can give is improving the default controls on mouse and keyboard. Having right click (RMB) be used for grabbing the magnet and middle click (MMB) be used for changing polarity , will be useful for doing these actions at the same time as moving, without having to awkwardly remove your right hand from the mouse.
Beginning Mark: I can't just do surprise demo drops every video
Ending Mark: Suprise demo drop!
Thanks for telling us
My brother in christ video got uploaded -11 seconds ago 💀💀💀
Thanks
Best comment yet
You’re welcome dude.
Really clever game, love the channel, excited for my first game jam!
Basically, what any developer needs is to know before hand which mechanics need a macro, in other words, to be turned into Mario Maker or RPG Maker tools to not to waste too much time.
Great video! I'm glad to see you're introducing tools to help you design, and breaking out redundant features from levels into global managers. One of the things that was beaten into my head when I first was learning to code was that if you ever find yourself using the exact same block of code multiple times in a program, you should spin that code off into its own method/script/object, so I'm glad you're cutting down on some of that cruft. It's already paying dividends, given that you "accidentally" made a new demo! I'm going to check it out later tonight and give feedback.
Everything you've discovered and mentioned in the video is essentially why my entire channel exists! Haha!
You also may want to look into Scriptable Objects if you haven't already. They're super powerful ways to manage, handle and move data around between objects in your game!
You're really getting into the weeds of some of the struggles and problems us devs have to go through and solve on a daily basis. 😂
Great work so far Mark, the game is looking great! Congratulations!
Well done Mark!
You've learnt a lot of fundamentals over these months. The decoupling of your managers and game state, the automation of work! Haha, the surprise level editor! Man this sounds just like my journey. These are the lessons that are really just never covered enough, and I'm very glad someone like you can shed light on that for new devs.
The investment into systems to speed up your work, ( such as an in-game level editor - which you should consider tackling soon with all the tools you've added ) are incredible tools and help clean up so much stuff.
Good work, I'm very interested to see what you do next.
* Demo Feedback *
- I love the last level where the player has to figure out that they can use the magnet to move vertically
- I don't know if the extra key is intentional but I think it leads into what you were saying about not wanting players to hit a brick wall on one level
- I can't wait for the next vlog :)
The last level really stumped me. i don't know if it was an intentional solution but I just used the magnet on the revolving door to push me up to the platform and when I clicked the switch, the block just got stuck in place because the door just slightly stuck out to block it.
@@goldmemberpb that's part of what I love about it :)
Thank you for highlighting these parts as well. Usually when I mention to my friends that I’ve worked “under the hood” on systems, it feels like I haven’t accomplished much, yet still spent a lot of time working on it.
Yea It's true that u need efficient systems to not get insane, but u definitely need to evaluate if u actually need the systems. Sure they can be time-saving, but sometimes a system that would save u a lot of time in the long run just isn't worth it when u only need 1 level. Always balance the time u put into the systems and how much time u actually save using it.
I‘m currently taking a model on graphics and visualisation. As an end of module project, we are asked to create our own graphics engine and use that to produce an animation of some kind. And when you hear "your own graphics engine", you are easily reminded of eg. Unreal and think to yourself "how am I supposed to create something like that by myself", but that’s not the length you have to go to to create an engine. What you actually need to do is set up a framework of shaders so you can put in any model anywhere and it just… works. Much like what you are doing here.
Really enjoyed the game its really starting to feel good. The only thing that massively bothered me in my playthrough was how clunky the magnet felt:
- When I pressed the button to throw I felt like it took way to long before I could actually throw it.
- When trying to aim the magnet the guide line feels very jittery which made it hard to tell where I was aiming.
I know nothing about this but the way you present it is not dry and boring at all! I love watching this series, keep it up!
Enjoyed the game! Each level was satisfying to play
I've loved watching you go from the very beginning to what you have now. Incredibly interesting and exciting to see your progress, and will hopefully inspire a lot of people to take similar steps and not give up. The learning curve is steep and difficult to overcome, but the view from the top is amazing and with far more height to cover when you're ready. Congratulations on your achievement. I look forward to the final game!
My background is in CS but I've moved into analysis/product management years ago. I'd love to get into games but every single job requires that I already have game industry experience! It's so frustrating being forced into software roles I hate while being denied the ones I'd actually be passionate about. The universe is cruel.
A lot of studios, even smaller ones frequently have a developer dedicated to making tools for the rest of the team exactly because of how much of a quality of life improvement they can be especially in level and sound design. I'm super glad you called these kinds of things out. Keep up the good work!
I've played the game and here's my feedback:
- while "num" buttons on keyboard work they don't show in game (for example num enter is read as ?)
- manually picking up magnet feels slow since I know option for calling it to player was planned - I might be biased on that one
- I found lvl that gives you key number 6 (assuming doing them in order) to be annoying since many mistakes required resetting the level instead of simply going back, there were too many options to get stuck
- lvl with key number 7 had a similar problem but to lesser extent, however I found throwing the magnet onto bottom button necessary to progres (not sure if it was intended) and had really hard time actually getting the magnet to be where I wanted it to be, magnet would either miss the button or slide off. When I finally got it done it was pure luck after brute forcing this method for ~5 minutes.
In general I find this demo to be good, I haven't encountered a single bug and controls were fine, but lvs with keys 1-5 were extremely simple with sudden spike in difficulty on the last 2, I think increasing the challenge on ones with keys 4 and 5 would make difficulty progression feel more smooth.
One suggestion I have is adding extra special collectibles to lvls, like strawberries in Celeste, it would add another layer of complexity to existing lvls and enable puzzle noobs such as myself to finish the game while leaving harder challenge to more experienced folks.
+1 on the collectibles. It would be a nice way to signal “skill required” besides the puzzle element
If you are talking about the final level - you were not supposed to throw the magnet onto the button.
key number 7 you get by simply stucking the metal box so it doesnt go up, not throwing the magnet, thats why this method took so much time to you
@@Psycho-yd7vm it would be cool if there was some kind of animal or bot that walks around, shoving the key from the button so you know that’s not the method. Or better spatial design maybe (haven’t played yet)
That notion of "A little extra work now can save you many headaches in the future" is used in every aspect of game development. It's great that you found this design philosophy at this early stage of development.
As a 3D character artist myself, I couldn't tell you how many hours I lost on one of my fledgling projects due to ignoring the importance of good topology in my models before committing to creating the textures and rigging. I eventually had to scrap that project and start over... so yeah, that was "fun". X'D
I believe a more interesting option than keeping a "DontDestroyOnLoad" object, or singleton for your game state, is to keep your data on a ScriptableObject, wich has the intrinsic property of persisting independently of scenes. At least for universally accessed variables such as options.
I look forward for every episode of this series, and seeing your progress is really inspiring!
Do not do this for mutable data, as unity will often reset those values on scene changes (unless you specify with the HideFlags). I've always just used additive scene loading to have scenes that hold persistent objects.
It is so nice to see how your improve both the game and the methodology. Congrats Mark, it looks really promising!
I think Mark is going through the Singleton pattern phase. (No shade, I have no idea what the best way to work Unity is. I'm just amused to see a RUclipsr I like going through the phases all dev go through.)
The typical I see a new pattern, I use a new pattern everywhere :D
Ha, that was my first through as well. Although I don't think it will be a huge problem considering the scope of the game.
@@JohnWellingtonWells When would it become a problem?
@@Cyliandre441 Personally:
When one manager starts communicating with another manager, or when the "children" of a manager starts communicating back to the manager.
I.E, removing the manager from the game shouldn't break the functionality of another object.
Of course that's not to say you should never ever do it under any circumstance, but it's worth being mindful of and avoiding if you can.
@Jaaaco I don't think you can skip the phases. Basically, there are a bunch of techniques and tools that you learn. You get really excited about them and overuse them. In that process, you learn the limits of those tools and techniques. I could explain why Singleton is considered an "anti-pattern" but there are legitimate uses for it and when to use it is ultimately a matter of judgement you develop through experience.
The only phase you might be able to avoid is the one where when something goes wrong, you throw away everything and start from scratch. 99% of the time, you are throwing away a bunch of useful stuff and making a whole bunch of extra work for yourself. The urge to throw away everything ugly is always going to be there. Just remember that urge is almost always wrong and that actually trying to fix the bugs and refactoring is almost always the right thing to do. Unless you're just coding for fun. Then who cares if you're ever done? Just do the fun bits.
Making tools is as important as making actual playable things. The amount of dev tools behind any game is incredible. Glad you made a video on this and it was really cool seeing the ideas you came up with. Like, I would have never thought of using “Invoke” for a tool. Great video please keep it up! :)
This is why devs like to make sequels. It's a shame to throw away an engine and development tools that took just as long if not longer to make than the actual contents of the game. It's why sequels don't take as long as the original, like botw 2... wait, no
It's also funny how devs tend to try to add on to their existing games in the form of DLC, but then eventually just decide to turn their energy toward a full-on asset-reusing sequel. It happened with both BOTW 2 and Hollow Knight Silksong (although both games are still taking just as long as the original to develop, ironically)
or silksong
Sequels to most things take just as long if not longer than their original counterparts.
Sure you don’t have to spend as much time establishing the groundwork, but not only do you have to respect the original and keep its details in mind, you also have to expand on the original in a meaningful way. At least if you want to make a good sequel anyway. Even better sequels go above and beyond.
There is also the Torna DLC but that is more a “we had too much story to involve a playable flashback, and Jin’s past life is that interesting that we can make a game about Torna the country.”
Still, it did mean reusing the engine for different gameplay mechanics.
by the way: one of the best aspects of this game so far is imo the art style. also the character animation when jumping, landing throwing and so on. all spot on.
"What I came to realise is that Unity is a tool for making games." - GMTK, 2022
Only took him few months! Way better than me!
How long did it take you to fully realize what Unity was used for and how to use it efficiently?
I absolutely love what you're doing with this series. Thank you so much for digging deep. Really helps!
babe wake up new GMTK just dropped
Mark, I'm so proud of you! I follow your channel pretty much since the beginning, and as a software engineer I've seen so many people start and then abandon their indie dev career due to how difficult and long the process of creating a game is. But you're sticking to it and your game is looking so good! It's hard to believe you're learning basically everything as you go. For real, congrats!
*Here's my feedback:*
1. Not being able to aim while moving is kinda annoying. So being able to do that would be nice :)
2. Add sound (this one is kinda obvious but I thought I'd say it anyway)
3. Longer levels would be more fun :)
4. Oh and the eureka moments thing was the best part of the game IMO :D
Yayyy feedback from TH!! :D
Aiming while moving would also help the speedrunning aspect of the games you inadvertently attracted given your game had many useful tricks to try speedrunning from the very beginning.
This is so true. As a sound designer I work with a video game company that takes this very seriously and created a set of tools for sounds that are really abstract and although we are only using one is prepared to work on different sound systems (Unity Audio, MasterAudio, FMOD...). And they also built a set of tools so easy to use I can almost integrate all audio by myself or even create simple scripts for situations not created yet on their tools by just simply looking at the ones already available. It really speeds up the process.
So happy to have finally gotten to play the demo! Here's my feedback, echoing what some others have said here.
- Idk how I feel about the reset button. Having one just kind of signals to the player that it's possible to get softlocked in your puzzles. And even though resetting is only a button press away, I think the possibility of a softlock discourages player experimentation.
- There's only one instance of an L-shaped door that can be pushed here, and it doesn't show up until puzzle 5 or 6. I think you may need to establish pushing as a mechanic earlier on so that the player can more easily discern which surfaces are pushable and which are magnetized.
- Simultaneous moving and aiming would be a big plus. It's a bit of a hassle to line up a shot, realize you're off by an inch or two, cancel the throw, move a bit, and line it up again.
- I think I'd prefer to have to go back and retrieve the magnet and then find a path to an exit door instead of getting booted back to the hub immediately. The magnet and the robot are buddies, right? It makes sense that our robot would want to retrieve his pal before heading to the next level.
Just my two cents. Really looking forward to seeing how this develops!
it's really interesting to see how i started my own game dev around the same time as this series started and in almost every episode you literally talk about the things i've been experiencing in that same time.
I've been working on a tower defence game lately and rather than having to reprogram every little thing for every tower I've narrowed it down to creating a useful system where I can make a new tower or enemy in a matter of minutes by playing around with some variables. Yes, making those tool took me about a week but in the long term I'm excepting it will save more muuuuuch more than that.
“Hangs around like a bad fart” is going to be a go-to phrase for me from now on
Loved it too xD
One of my favorite parts of this series is just showing the iterative nature of development. So much is really just a measure of time and constant updates and tweaks. Trying new things out, identifying new problems, and finding solutions. It's unglamorous but I think seeing a finished game or program gives a little bit of survivorship bias assuming that it was just a straight path from start to finish when in reality is zigzags, looptyloops, and branching dead ends.
Hey, this is a really cool series and game! Are you planning on releasing Linux binaries, or source code, at any point?
It's really nice to see how much you've grown from the first video of this series, when you started developing, wich is in my opinion the best ideia you had for this channel. Wacthing you through this task is motivating, and I have learned so much about game development and life in general. Each video gives lots of insights about everything. Keep up the good work, Mark, with your game, channel and life in general. So greatful to have this content here on RUclips.
Cheers from Brazil.
i love this kind of stuff, and the sad thing is that i cant show it to other people cause its just not appealing. thank you for making this video i really liked it, i wished there were more videos like this
i love that braid wasn't forgotten by everyone. Still one of my favorite games.
DEMO REVIEW --- SPOILERS FOR THE DEMO PUZZLES
Just finished playing it and it was very fun! I'm very glad you made it more open as to which levels I decide to play because I got stuck on level three and ended up playing the others before coming back to it.
The tutorial was very smooth and I picked up the controls fairly quick. I did not play your previous demo so this was my first time playing any of your game.
Level 1 took me a second to realize I could throw the magnet threw the bar. It created an ah ha moment but also had me confused why the magnet could go threw a bar while me (the player) couldn't. I like the idea still but maybe have the bar be like a laser or something that a magnet, but not me, could go threw.
Level 2 was really fun for me, I felt clever for remembering that the type of bar the magnet could go through from level 1 and figured out to let it drop through the floor quickly. Good ah ha moment in this one.
Level 3 had me stumped for a while so I left and came back to it. It was in another level when I realized I could reverse polarity and change the door without me being there that I realized how to beat this level. It was amazing because I had an AH HA! moment for it while in another level, for this reason I really like the non-linear path. Emphasis on the ah ha for this one because I was stumped for much longer so solving it became much more satisfying.
Level 4 was fun as well. I like how the beam that destroys the magnet is not explained before hand and I just find out by walking into it for the first time. It had me lean back and think "hmm ok". It didn't take me long to figure out but still satisfying.
Level 5 is my favorite and had me feeling the most clever for solving it. Realizing after a few resets that I needed to set off the second switch instead of the first, and then working backwards from there led to a great ah ha moment. It was all very smooth.
Level 6 confused me and I'm not even sure I solved it correctly but I did find a way to beat it. After much trial and error the way I got through was as follows. I flipped the switch on the far right, then went over to the negative block. Then I threw the magnet under the negative block down next to the button but NOT on the button. This is the part that felt wrong, it felt like I was forcing the magnet threw that slit and it landed on the button several times which required me to reset the level each time. Once I got it next to the button, I flipped the switch on the far right so the negative block dropped, but the magnet stopped it from hitting the button so the chained blocked stayed up. If I solved it correctly, it felt weird because of how difficult it was to even throw it threw the slit under the negative block. Another way I tried (but failed) to solve it was to throw the magnet from the far right switch down to the polarity door and try to get it threw the door and momentum it to fall next to the button. I tried this first and was unsuccessful.
*Edit* My brother and I figured out the proper way to solve the 6th level lol, it makes much more sense now.
I love the reset feature in how quick it is, doesn't feel like I'm being punished for restarting the level which led me to be more explorative in my methods. Also the levels were great in that I never felt like brute forcing my way through by randomly throwing the magnet, but by actually thinking threw them all. I did not experience any bugs on my playthrough. If you want to emphasis an even more non-linear game then perhaps don't have the doors in a row or perhaps the robot enters in the middle of the doors. Controls for the character felt good and I had no issues there.
I fell like the chances of you reading this are slim but if you do I love your channel and think what you're doing is really cool!
I'm really impressed with you, it took me about 2 years to start thinking about that kind of stuff when developing games
Can't wait to see what this video will be retitled to 😜
Honestly felt myself getting excited when you were listing off the dry and unfun subjects at the start. I guess because it's _exactly_ the stuff I want to understand. Yeah, I see what you mean about it but being fun, in and of itself, but it's fun to think about how much you can do with it. Understanding the fundamentals, no matter the field, is what allows you to turn wild ideas into actual products
My Feedback for 2.0:
got the aha moment for every single level
the character was great to control
I played all the levels just because they were fun
In conclusion:
MORE GAME NOW
Actually I'm working on my own game, and watching Marks experiences with game development was a HUGE inspiration for me. I LOVE your game so far, and I can't wait for it to to release on steam in 2024!