Hi, my name's Mark and I am making a
video game called Mind Over Magnet,
a delightful puzzle platformer
about, you guessed it, magnets.
Now, when I returned to game development after
my Christmas break, I noticed a very interesting
button in my Steam Developer Dashboard
thingy that I can't show you due to NDAs.
Basically a button to submit
the game to the next Next Fest.
This is Valve's online games convention
where developers can share demos of their
upcoming games and it's proven to be
a pretty powerful marketing technique.
I mean, look what happened to
the very addictive poker-based
roguelike game Balatro in
the last one in February.
So I knew I had to submit Mind Over Magnet
to the next Next Fest happening in June.
I just needed to create a trailer, make a demo,
and fix one very annoying thing about my
game that's been bugging me for months now.
Let me explain.
♫ Music ♫
Okay, so my game is pixel art, right?
But the sprites are pretty big.
I mean, compare Magnus to Mario, or Madeline.
This means that a typical room
might fill up 1280 by 720 pixels.
So if you're playing on a really old
720p monitor, great. Pixel perfect.
And if you're playing on a nice
1440p monitor like I do, cool.
We can just double all of the pixels.
And if you're playing on a really nice 4K
TV, then I can just triple all of the pixels.
But what about 1080p, the most commonly used PC
screen resolution according to Valve's surveys?
Well, that's a bit tricky because
that's 1.5 times bigger than 720p.
And, well, there's no such thing as half a pixel.
Now there's a few different
solutions to get around this problem.
One is to just let Unity figure it out.
Like add an extra pixel here and remove an extra
pixel there to make all of those half
pixels fit onto a full pixel grid.
But as it sounds, that's not perfect.
And things can look really squiffy and ugly,
especially when it comes to
angles and curved surfaces.
Another solution is to use anti-aliasing
to feather all of the edges.
But now everything looks blurry and it's no
longer that crisp, retro-looking pixel art.
And solution three, or C, forgot what we're doing,
is to keep the pixels as they are but have
a stonking great border around the screen.
And now everything is small and zoomed out.
Now I tried all of these solutions.
I put in a setting in the menu for pixel perfect
mode that would add borders around the screen.
I coded up a system so it
would systematically only
add anti-aliasing if the pixels couldn't
be multiplied by a nice round number.
And at times I wondered if maybe
players just wouldn't notice the ugly,
squiffy pixels and it was just a me thing?
But ultimately it felt like I was trying
to find the least worst compromise.
And I spent a long time going back
and forth between these things,
trying to find one of these three solutions that
would kinda, almost, sort of work for the game.
Now of course there is a fourth solution
but I don't even want to think about that.
And I mean it would work but
I don't even want to say it.
Okay fine, I'll say it.
I could get rid of all the pixel art and replace
all of the graphics in the game
with brand new 4K ready artwork.
But that... but that would be mad, wouldn't it?
So I replaced all of the pixel art in
the game with brand new 4K ready artwork.
I took every sprite, tripled it in size,
and then remade it using Photoshop's vector
tools like the pen tool and the shapes.
That's every button, every door, every decorative
object, every magnet, every UI element.
And you know what?
It didn't actually take as
long as I thought it would.
I mean my pixel art is already pretty chunky
and made up of simple shapes with basic colours.
I also chose not to use this newfound pixel real
estate to add in extra details because I wanted
things to still be super readable when crunched
down to a smaller display like the Steam Deck.
And I also chose not to remake the background art.
Instead I kept that as pixel art and just threw
on a depth of field filter to blur it out.
But no one needs to know about that, right?
That can be our little secret.
And after all of that work I'm actually
really happy with how the game looks now.
Magnus has way more charm and character.
The game no longer looks like yet
another generic pixel art indie game.
And the game just works.
You can put it on a 4K TV
or a 1080p monitor or the
small screen of a Steam Deck and it just works.
It just works.
And the funny thing is, in the
end I probably spent more time
trying to find a good compromise than
I spent just remaking the art assets.
And so I've learnt a really good lesson from this.
Well, two lessons.
One is just plan ahead.
I made the sprites long, long, long before I made
the final camera system and just kind
of hoped that they would work together.
They didn't.
I mean, there's this button in Unity for
a pixel perfect camera and I kind of just
assumed I could turn that on and things
would be perfect, which is dumb and naive.
That is not how it works but I know that now.
But the other lesson is sometimes it feels
like a good idea to try and find a compromise
or a loophole or a workaround but
that's kind of the lazy way out.
And sometimes it's just better
to bite the bullet, knuckle down,
and do the hard work to make an actual real
solution that's going to work properly.
So in the future I'm gonna save myself some time
by just skipping ahead to doing the real solution.
Okay, so with that kind of a nightmare out of
the way it was time to move on to
the next thing - making a trailer.
Now this is something I've put off
for a long time simply because my
game just isn't done yet so there's not
a lot of stuff to show in the trailer.
I mean I finished World 1 but if I just show
that then the whole trailer is gonna be the
same footage of the same turquoise-y sewer
system over and over again for two minutes.
Not a good depiction of what
my game is really about.
So I decided to use the ancient
art of "fake it until you make it".
Quite literally make it in this case.
Because I've got a load of stuff that isn't
quite done yet like these levels that haven't
been playtested and are currently using the
blueprint background design I use for development.
I've got some half-finished backgrounds and
some different mechanics that
aren't implemented fully yet.
If I throw all that stuff together I can make
some content that isn't 100% going to be in
the final game but is pretty indicative
of what the game is going to be like.
Side note, I actually think I did
too good of a job with this because
after I posted the trailer I got
a number of comments from people
congratulating me on finishing the game
which I will take, thank you very much.
It's not actually done. It's all fake!
So with this new content I then recorded
myself playing through those levels.
I didn't have any music on but I did keep the
sound effects on so those can be in the trailer.
Also, at the risk of talking
more about screen resolutions,
I recorded everything in 4K but
the trailer is only 1080p so I
can crop the most interesting bits without
having to zoom in and lose image quality.
I then threw this footage into Adobe Premiere and
cut out all of the most interesting little clips -
you know, interesting animations or depictions
of mechanics or narrative beats or whatever.
Now as for music, I do actually finally have a
composer for the game now so I can
shut that very large Google form.
Thank you very much for
submitting your name, everybody.
They're not quite ready to work on the game yet
so for this trailer I just went to my
favourite audio source, Epidemic Sound.
And the cool thing about Epidemic Sound
- and this video is not sponsored by
Epidemic Sound but if you go to the
description and hit my link I will
get paid by Epidemic Sound - is that when
you download music you don't just get the
full song but also the individual stems
like the melody, the bass, and the drums.
This meant I could isolate the drums and have it
so the footage changes on the drum beat like so.
In terms of the narrative arc of the trailer,
I start with just really simple stuff like
using the magnet beams to lift up blocks.
Then I slow things down to introduce Magnus
as a character, then show what Magnus can
do as a game mechanic, and then have a
rapid fire montage of other stuff you'll
see in the later half of the game like other
magnets, other mechanics, and other worlds.
And then end with a nice call to
action to wishlist the game on Steam.
Now this is not the best trailer ever made - I put
it together in like the course of a single day,
I also don't have a huge amount of footage
to use, and I'm simply not Derek Lieu,
you know, the guy who makes all of those
awesome trailers for every indie game.
But I think it serves its purpose for now.
And also I posted it on YouTube
and other socials and it pushed
the game past 30,000 wishlists which is
pretty good before Next Fest even begins.
And then finally there's the demo.
Now I'm not 100% sure how much
stuff I want to have in the demo.
Like the trailer, if I just
have world 1 in the demo,
that's not going to be very indicative
of what the whole game is like to play.
So maybe it should also have world
2, or half of world 2, or whatever.
So I need to start making some of that.
But in any case, I think I just need
to get working on finishing this game.
Because like, going back to Balatro, you
might have noticed that the game built
up a huge amount of hype during Steam Next Fest,
and then launched for real a couple weeks later.
Pepper Grinder is kinda similar:
it's launching about one month after
the end of its Steam Next Fest debut.
And so if I'm going to showcase
my game at the Next Fest in June,
I should probably look to
release it in July or August,
and that's not hugely far in the future,
and so I'd better get on with this game!
Now in the last few weeks I
have discovered a pretty good,
not to sound too grandiose, production
pipeline for getting this game done.
It's very much inspired by
Valve's approach to making Portal,
which I discussed in that video
on Valve's playtesting philosophy.
It basically works like this.
On Tuesday through Thursday I
work on new content for the game.
New levels, fancy new backgrounds, or
new cutscenes. Anything new for the game.
On Friday I work on bug fixing.
I take a few items off of my
ever-growing Trello to-do list
and try to find a good way to solve that
bug, and then do some more bug fixing.
And then at the end of the day I take what
I have, test it, and export a new build.
I then give it out to some playtesters,
usually like a few randos on Twitter,
but a maximum of three playtesters.
Then on Monday I check my Twitter DMs
to find some nice playtesting footage.
I watch the whole video through and make as many
notes as possible for things I want to change,
like bugs, or places that need more polish, or
levels that are too easy or too hard or too fiddly
or have some exploit that I didn't foresee
when I was developing that part of the game.
Now I've had some version of this process
throughout the game's development,
but I feel like I'm really perfecting it now.
Like, in the past, I've given
builds to too many people in one go.
That just ends up with way
too much footage to watch.
It's just overwhelming, and if one person
stumbles upon a bug or an exploit it's
really painful and not very useful to then see
that same thing crop up in nine more videos.
Also I've given out playtest builds in the
middle of the week, and then I'm just kind
of stuck because I can't do anything
until I get the playtest footage back.
So doing it on Friday means people play the game
over the weekend when I really should
be taking a break and playing Balatro.
And so with this process the game
is really starting to take shape.
New content starts out a little bit rough and
experimental but then quickly gets playtested,
and stuff that's been in the game for
a long time, stuff in the early levels,
has been seen by so many playtesters
and had so many little tiny tweaks
and bug fixes that it's now starting
to get seriously polished and good.
And so with this process I feel
somewhat confident that the game
will be done shortly after its Next Fest showcase.
But I can't do that if I'm standing here
rabbiting onto you about what I've been doing,
so it's time to get back to
development for some time.
I've got to run a playtest,
or watch playtest footage,
or make new content for the game,
or do bug fixing or play Balatro.
See the aforementioned schedule, compare it
to today's date, you'll know what I'm doing.
As always GMTK Patrons can play the latest
build whenever they want but if you're not
supporting the show financially - and I mean
why not - you can just wishlist the game
now on Steam and you'll be notified when the
demo is available during the next Next Fest.
Thank you so much for watching
and I will talk to you soon.