Hi, my name is Mark and I am - still - making a video game about
magnets. So it's been a little while since we last spoke but in that time,
three things have happened to me that have inspired me to get off my butt
and finally start to bring this game to the finish line. So, here's what happened...
Okay so the first thing was definitely the response to the demo I put out at the end of
the previous video. I put out a demo to address some of the most negative feedback I'd received
on my minimum viable product. So people thought the character controlled like junk? Well, I spent
a month making a much better character controller. People thought the mix of platforming and puzzle
solving was a bit confusing. So I stripped out the platforming and focused exclusively on
puzzles. People thought the game wasn't magnet-y enough, so I gave the magnet a face, the power
to change polarity, and made sure every single puzzle was inherently based around magnetism.
And all of those changes received pretty good feedback, but I think the best response came
to the design of the puzzles themselves. You see, I spent a lot of time just kind of working on the
craft of puzzle design, specifically to get more of those 'aha' moments. I've spoken about those
before: basically when a player feels stumped by a seemingly impossible puzzle and then suddenly
sees the twist at the heart of the conundrum and is able to make the logical leap to solve it.
And so did I achieve that with this new demo?
Well I think I'll let these let's play videos speak for themselves:
HARRY: Okay what is this? So when this button is down I want to be here. So how do I do that?
I don't know. I'm thinking. This is what the robot does when he thinks. He just swings the
magnet back and forth. Ah! Did you hear that? That's the sound of me maybe figuring it out.
Oh that's so smart. Oh my goodness, it was worth it!
MARK: So that made me feel pretty confident that I was on the right path with my puzzle design.
But it also just felt awesome to have made this thing, these puzzles,
put them out into the universe for people to then find them, play them, and have a strong positive
emotional reaction to a thing I had made. To have noises come out of their mouth. It was almost
like casting a magic spell on people. It felt really cool, it's not something I've done before.
And it inspired me to, you know, make more puzzles and package them up in a finished
game. It inspired me to get off my butt and finally bring this game towards the finish line.
And so I... didn't, and instead stopped work on the game entirely for a month to make
a completely different video game, which ended up being Platformer Toolkit.
Look, I had this idea for an interactive video essay and if I have an idea to do
something and I'm excited about the idea, it's really hard to not just focus on that thing
intently until either I burn out or the thing is done. And so that's what happened with Platformer
Toolkit. But it was also the second thing that inspired me to finish my game. You see,
Platformer Toolkit was very much inspired by this whole series: I wanted to take my
experience of making a platformer character and share it with people in an interesting,
interactive video essay. But also the development process of Platformer Toolkit was
massively informed by everything I've been talking about on this series.
So I made quick and dirty prototypes of some of the key mechanics. I made a minimum
viable product with most of the systems turned on but only a fraction of the content. And I
released demos early in order to get feedback, which would help the development process.
Following these steps allow me to speedrun the game development process and get Platformer
Toolkit up to the same point as Untitled Magnet Game, but in the space of a few weeks rather
than a few months. But then I went further with Platformer Toolkit and actually finished it.
You see, the game jam was fast approaching and I realised that I need to either finish this thing
now or it will never get done. Snd so I did. I, you know, completed the development process of the
game. I learned a lot about how to finish video games - definitely more on that towards the end
of Developing - but I also saw just how good it feels to take a creative project and finish it.
I mean, for one thing, you get to put it out into the world for people to enjoy. Platformer Toolkit
has been played by almost 100,000 people and the comments and reviews have been wonderful.
You also get to flush this thing out of your brain and stop thinking about it all day, every day,
for weeks and weeks on end. And also you kind of get permission to move on and do other things.
And I realised that I want all of this for Untitled Magnet Game. Like as much as I'm enjoying
working on this game - it really is an absolute joy - I don't want to be making a video game about
magnets for the next 10 years of my life. I want to get it done and then move on to other games,
in other genres, with other art styles, and solve other design problems. And so I felt
inspired to get off my butt and bring this game towards the finish line. And then I just didn't.
Instead I worked on the game jam and another video and then just kind of procrastinated.
But then there was thing three that inspired me. Okay, so soon after I had started working
on Untitled Magnet Game I started seeing clips for a game called Elechead. This is a
2d platformer about a robot who throws an object around in order to solve puzzles.
That's pretty close to what I'm working on - doesn't feel great! And so when the game
came out, even though it's exactly the sort of thing I would normally love to play,
I just didn't play it. Because, you know, partly out of spite. Partly out of jealousy - the game
was getting amazing reviews. And partly because I didn't want to sort of accidentally steal
any of the ideas. But then a few weeks back I finally gave in and played the game. And,
yeah, it's great. It's really good, it's well designed, deserving of the great reviews,
and different enough from what I'm working on for the two games to co-exist.
But it was also hugely inspirational for me. And this is going to sound like a bit of a backhanded
compliment, but I was impressed that the game had gotten such good reviews - reviews I agree
with - despite the fact that it doesn't have an epic storyline. It doesn't have state-of-the-art
graphics. And it doesn't have millions of puzzles - in fact, the game is very short. It's only a
couple of hours long. But what it made me realise was: I think in my head, Untitled Magnet Game was
kind of impossibly large. Too big for me to think about ever finishing it. But then I look
at a Elechead, and that level of scale and scope and ambition actually does feel attainable. If I
think of Untitled Magnet Game as having a similar number of levels, and a similar sort of storyline
to something like a Elechead, that is something I could actually do. That is something I could
finish. And so I felt inspired to get up off of my butt and bring this game to the finish line.
And this time I actually did do some work on the game! And in the last month or so I
have done so much work that has brought the game so much closer towards being finished.
So what I really mean when I talk about bringing this game closer to the finish line
is there's a lot of stuff in this game that is not finished, not finalised, not properly implemented,
or just not implemented at all. It's just in my brain or in a notebook. These are things that
I've been leaving for another day or putting on the shoulders of future Mark. And this process
is about saying: today is another day. I am future Mark. And it's time to get cracking.
So first things first, there is of course the character - but I'm actually
really happy with that now. I think that is pretty much final code and final animations
and final sprites. I'm happy for that to be the character in the complete game.
But the magnet needed a lot more work. So what I finally decided to do was split the magnet
into three distinctly different characters. So this is the first one you'll meet in the game:
he's called Max, he is a basic red magnet and has no special abilities. Which is probably why
he looks a bit miffed. Then you'll meet Maggie, and she has the power to switch polarity and swap
places with her sister Meg. And so it's like two characters on the same magnet. And then finally we
have Magnus who is a big chunky boi. And the fact that he's so big means that instead of him being
attracted towards magnetic sources, he is the magnetic source and stuff attracts towards him.
Now this took a lot of time for me to implement into the game. Lots of design work and problem
solving and iteration. Until I realised that the solution had been staring me in the face
the entire time. You see, back in the MVP, every magnetic object was its own bespoke,
uniquely-crafted thing. Which was kind of dumb. So in the end I made a generic magnetic panel
which can be resized and placed pretty much anywhere you want. You can put it on the ceiling,
or connect it to a moving block, or a weight and pulley system, or put it on these swinging gates,
or put it on the tip of a magnet. Make it invisible and now you have your own
personal magnetic field to play with. That should lend itself to some really cool puzzles
about manipulating the shape of the world. And with that I finally have the cast of characters
for the final game. You'll meet them throughout the experience, one by one, then maybe they'll
come together for puzzles. Maybe you'll chat to them and have a little banter with them.
I don't know that's still for another day. Bad Mark! But can't do everything today.
Another thing I did was finalise some of the core mechanics in the game. So I built
a better moving block with these little lights on it to show you where it's moving. I also
built a magnetic block that can be made into any size you like. For this I built a system
where you can split up the sprite into different bits, put the corners into different places,
and it automatically tiles the edges to match. And then I put this out on my discord and everyone
went 'Mark this already exists, it's called nine slicing, and it's been in Unity forever'.
And so I felt like a bit of a doofus for wasting so much time. But I'm glad I found
nine slicing because it's been hugely useful in so many things I've been working on since then.
I also brought the laser beam back from the MVP, and gave it a bit of a facelift.
I've also been learning a bit more about shaders in Unity which I used for the laser beam and this
computerised display for the laser receiver. Shaders are amazingly powerful: very cool,
very complicated. I feel like I'm only scratching the tip of the iceberg- that is a mixed metaphor
there. I feel like I'm only scratching the... surface of shaders. That's how words work. I
also made a ridiculous conveyor belt, again using the generic magnetic panel, and spent way too long
bug fixing a thing where I can make it change direction. And a few other mechanics as well.
Another thing I have been putting off and putting on the shoulders of future Mark
has been sound effects. I know just how important sound design is to making a game
feel alive and polished and complete, but it's very easy to just put it off
until the future. But it is the future! The future is now baby! And it's time to put in
some sound effects. So these are some of my favourite ones that I have put in...
*Door Creak* *Drill Whirr*
*Laser, Musical Notes Rise*
*Clang* *Suction Pop*
I also put in some placeholder music, just to kind of give the game
a bit of a different vibe. But in terms of the actual soundtrack, that is again another future,
future Mark thing to figure out. I've had a few people reach out to say 'hey, I'm a composer,
I could make music for your game'. And thank you for that - I'm just not quite ready for
that conversation yet. So at some point in this series I will do a much more public
call out for composers for me to hire. Until then, please be patient.
Another thing that I have been sitting on for a long time has been
backgrounds. So in both demos I just have a really basic checkerboard tile effect in the background,
but people have said that's a bit boring. And I agree. If you look at other platformers and
puzzle games they have these amazing images in the background that really give these games a sense of
place. And so I wanted something like that for my game, but I couldn't quite figure out the best
way to do it. I mean, I needed something that was visually interesting and evocative and colourful,
but at the same time it needed to be easy for me to make with my pretty limited art skills,
and also didn't distract too much from the more important puzzle elements. Luckily,
I figured out a nice solution. So the first thing was not to do with the background at all,
but actually those puzzle elements. I boosted the 2 pixel black border to a massive
4 pixel border which I think makes everything look better and more chunky and fun, but also
helps them to pop off of the background. But in terms of the background itself,
well I found this image on Google from OpenGameArt and thought it looked pretty sweet. Threw a shader
on it and chucked in the background of my game, and yeah I was really happy with it.
But I was also inspired - that's kind of the theme for this video - I was inspired to make
something similar for myself. I mean, it looks pretty easy to achieve. It's just some basic
shapes in silhouette with, you know, the colour grading from back to front gives it that sense
of depth. And so this is what I came up with: I built a number of background plates. So this one
is some buildings off in the far distance. This is the back wall of the factory with some windows.
And then light comes streaming in through the windows. I've got some random pipes moving around.
Some boilers. Some objects hanging from the ceiling. And some objects more in the foreground.
Put them all together on different layers, and have them move at different rates, and baby
you got yourself some parallax. I then played around with shaders and post processing to give
it a more interesting vibe. So I put on a gradient overlay to give the space a bit more shape,
and push it further into the background. I also put on a really harsh bloom which gives a retro
pixel banding effect to all of the gradients. I put on some colour adjustment to add some colour,
and then a split tone effect and... this is looking pretty good! I finished it off with
some little bits of movement: some random dust particles, some steam coming out of these boilers,
these gauges with moving needles, and flickering lights. Put it all together and it now looks alive
and polished, and I'm really happy with this. I think this looks really cool, and best of all it's
really modular - so I could swap out the boilers for a different object, change all the colours,
and now I have the background for world two. And then world three and four and five and so on.
The final thing I wanted to achieve in this development sprint was to nail down
the transitions between levels. So in the first MVP, people thought it was weird that you leave
behind the magnet from stage to stage. And in the second demo, people thought it was weird
that when you collect the key it just sort of instantly boots you back to the hub. So I had
to build a new system that made a bit more sense, and made sure that the character and
any magnets in the scene all went to the next level. And so this is what I built.
*Pulling cork* *Pop* *Sucking sound*
Okay, so it's a bit silly - but I think it's fun. I think it will be really satisfying when
you've finished a hard puzzle for this to be the ending. And it goes on nicely to the next
stage where we see a little title card for the name of the level, and then the
character pops out the pipe on the other end. That should make each level feel more eventful
and should give more of a sense of place to this whole factory that we're moving through.
And so with all of that, the game really feels much much closer
towards being complete. It might not look hugely different from what you've seen in the past,
but with these steps I've taken, I've ticked off some really big things that
the game has needed. Like finalising the magnets and chucking in sound effects.
And so while I've got many, many months still left ahead of me,
some really cool things have been finished. And that feels really motivating.
So what is left to do? Well, I've got to figure out some kind of context or story for the game,
and some kind of story giving mechanism as well. I also need a name for the game. It can't be
Untitled Magnet Game, that joke has already been done. Gotta do the soundtrack. And...
oh yeah, the big one, content! Gotta build lots and lots and lots of levels, which of course is,
you know, the biggest thing in the game. And it's going to take, you know, months for me to
do. But I feel like I've got a really good base to build them on now, and so I can really focus
my time and attention on just making loads of levels. And so that is what we're doing next!
And so here's my challenge to myself: I won't come back to make another episode of Developing
until I have made... 30 puzzles for this game. And then we'll see if they're any good
and how many more I need to make after that. Thank you so much for watching,
thank you to anyone who gave feedback on the second demo, and thank you for your patience
while I'm working on this game. Obviously a lot of my GMTK video making time is spent scratching
my head over bugs in Unity, but I think it'll be really worth it. I'm really enjoying making
this game and I think just being a game developer is going to make me a better video game critic,
analyst, whatever the hell I am. So thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon!
I don't know how long it's going to take me to make these levels. But I'll see you again.
Probably. Yes I will! Yes of course, we're gonna finish this game. Let's do it. Let's get it done.
Finish the game! Finish the game! Finish this video, somehow! Uh... stop