The mistake every new game developer makes

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This time on Developing, I want to turn my game idea into reality. But, first, I need to explore my history of failed game-making attempts, to figure out where to begin.

=== Credits ===

Prototype Footage

It Takes Two - https://youtu.be/QbMF1nCiIkQ
Ori - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTksBJeoa1A
Subnautica - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwWkAxzXxeQ
Cuphead - https://twitter.com/StudioMDHR/status/1046082248573882370
Slay the Spire - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLITSvCz2rk
Last of Us Part II - https://youtu.be/KW4JlxAEAE0
Fall Guys - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ZBzHMvVCE
God of War - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lreYsdHT54w

Game Footage

Artwork - https://www.kenney.nl
Character Controller - https://pressstart.vip/tutorials/2019/10/15/104/perfect-jumping-in-unity.html

Music By: LAKEY INSPIRED @ https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired
License for commercial use: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported "Share Alike" (CC BY-SA 3.0) License.
YouTube Audio Library

=== Subtitles ===

Contribute translated subtitles - - https://amara.org/en-gb/videos/wEwExtiemjy0

Last time on developing, I picked my game engine 
- Unity - and I started to learn how to use it.

But now it's time to reveal the idea for my 
game and, well, get started with making it.

But where does one begin when developing 
a game? And I think this is a vitally

important question because, as you are about 
to see, if you take the wrong direction

when you start developing a game it can be 
disastrous for the project. Let me explain.

Okay so let me start with the idea 
for the game. I am going to make,

and brace yourself because this is crazy, a 2D, 
side-scrolling, platform game. Yes, I know, every

indie developer starts by making a side-scrolling 
platformer. But I think I have some good reasons.

I love the genre. Platformers are 
relatively easy to make in the

grand scheme of things - it’s not a MMO at 
least. And I've made loads of videos about

platformer level design and character 
design which should prove helpful.

Now this is also going to be a, brace yourself 
again, platformer with a unique twist. The

idea is that the character in my platformer is 
magnetic which means they will repel away from

some platforms and attract to others. And you 
can change your polarity with a button press.

The idea actually came from this game: The 
Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons. In this

game you have a magnetic glove power-up which 
allows Link to repel from some surfaces and

attract towards others. You can also use it to 
pick up large metal balls for puzzle solving

and use it to fight enemies. It's a really cool 
mechanic but it does feel somewhat limited by

the genre, the top down camera perspective, and 
of course the limited technology of the Game Boy.

So I thought… what if I were to borrow that 
game idea and put it in a different genre:

a fast-paced, 2D platformer. Something 
akin to Celeste or Super Meat Boy. A game

where you have to master the magnetism 
for speed and fluidity and precision.

So that is the idea. And the question now 
is: where do I begin with it? Do I just

jump into Unity and start coding? Do I jump into 
Photoshop and start making some artwork for it?

Do I start thinking about the storyline 
or the characters? Where do I begin?

I'm going to level with you: this is not the first 
game I've ever tried to make. Ever since I was a

little kid I've come up with ideas for games, and 
at various points in my life I have tried to make

those games in different tools and whatnot. But 
I almost never finish those games and I think

the reason is the same, every single time: I 
start in the wrong manner. Let me show you.

So I got this folder from my parents house 
and it is full of notes and sketches and

ideas for a game I was going to make a few 
years before I started Game Maker’s Toolkit.

That is actually just a mouse mat for 
Starcraft Ghost. That game never came out,

did it? That might be worth 
something actually, put that in the eBay pile.

So this game was going to be called Carter's 
Curse. It was about famed archaeologist Howard

Carter, the dude who discovered Tutankhamen's 
tomb. And, in my game at least, he would also

awaken an ancient Egyptian curse meaning he'd 
have to fight zombies and mummies and ancient

Egyptian gods. I remember spending hours and hours 
drawing all of this stuff. I mean… what a nerd!

Anyway. So how would you go about fighting these 
enemies? The answer: playing Picross puzzles.

Picross is this logic-based, grid-based, puzzle 
game… a bit like Sudoku. Nintendo's made loads

of Picross games. I was really inspired by games 
like Bookworm Adventures where you have a puzzle

at the bottom of the screen, and completing the 
puzzle does damage to enemies in a little fight

scene at the top of the screen. And so my idea was 
kind of the same: you'd have a Picross grid at the

bottom of the screen and Howard Carter would 
be fighting monsters at the top of the screen.

So I jumped into development. I was making the 
game in an app for iPad called Codea which lets

you make iOS games on your iPad. I'd actually 
previously used it for a very standard Picross

app for iOS so I knew I could probably code 
it, but I wanted the graphics to be amazing so

I jumped into Photoshop and just started 
making loads of sprites and animation frames.

I actually have a Dropbox folder that is full of 
sprites and animations. I made loads of different

characters, I made finishing moves for Howard 
Carter, I made an introductory cutscene, I made

menus with big juicy buttons 
to press. I really got into it.

But then I realised something. 
Something quite important. Something

quite detrimental to the project. The game wasn't 
any good! It was really bad, it wasn't fun at all.

And the more I coded it and 
the more I developed it the

more I realised what the problem was: Picross 
just doesn't have enough depth for this

type of game. You can't really have tactics 
or strategy, you can't change what you're

doing depending on which enemy you're fighting, 
and ultimately it was immaterial that you were

fighting enemies. You could ignore that entire 
top part of the game and the game would still

work because all you're doing is just playing 
Picross puzzles. So it meant that I didn't have

the ability to make the game more difficult 
or more interesting depending on which enemy

you were fighting and it meant the player was 
just doing the same thing over and over again.

I had made a game that was shallow and repetitive 
and dull. And maybe I could have fixed it but I

was so far gone at that point and so demoralised 
that I just kind of scrapped the whole thing.

So what was my mistake? Well, with many, many years 
of hindsight… it's been almost a decade now… it's

pretty obvious to me what happened. And it's 
this: when you're making a game there's a bunch

of different things you have to create. The main 
ones being the music, the art, the game design,

the story, and the code. And now it's easy 
to think of them as being equal… but they're

not. In a lot of cases, the game design is 
not equal but instead it is the foundation

upon which all the other parts sit. And so if you 
get that bit wrong the whole thing falls apart.

I mean you can fix the bugs and you can 
redraw the graphics, but if the gameplay

is fundamentally flawed well the whole 
project can sometimes be unsalvageable.

And this is pretty much what happened 
to me. I spent so much time on the art

and animation that by the time I 
finally got around to the gameplay,

I realised that the whole thing was flawed. 
I had basically built a house on really

shaky foundations and then I was surprised and 
upset when my toilet fell through the floor.

Embarrassingly this is not the only time this 
has happened to me. I wanted to make a film noir

point-and-click adventure game with a unique 
procedural generation clue system - but

I spent so much time on the story 
and researching the time period that

I never got around to actually 
designing that system.

And I wanted to make a fast-paced 
modern twist on the mobile game

Snake but I got bogged down in bug fixing 
and trying to get the movement code perfect

that I never found out if that game was 
any fun before I got bored and burnt out.

So every time I've tried to design my 
own game I've put other elements like

story and graphics ahead of the gameplay. Why?

Well I think it comes down to making two very 
wrong assumptions. Assumption one is that the game

always felt kind of cool in my head, so I just 
kind of assumed that the game would be fun

when I made it. Obviously that was wrong. And 
assumption two is that I'm not able to find out

if the game is fun until I've built the 
game. I have to just kind of keep making

the game and at some point I'll realise 
if it's any good… right? No, wrong again.

And this is all very cringe-worthy to say because 
now the answers are so obvious. But they weren't

obvious then - it's only since doing Game Maker’s 
Toolkit, since researching game development, since

interviewing dozens and dozens of game designers 
that I now know how most successful games start.

You see game designers have loads of ideas all 
the time and I'm sure they all seem amazingly

fun in their heads. But the best game designers 
know that their brains are horrible smelly liars.

The only way to know if a game idea is 
good is to build it, to test it. But

instead of having to build the entire game, 
designers just have to build a… prototype.

A prototype is just this small scrappy test bed 
for an idea, just designed to see if the idea

is fun or not. These prototypes are 
usually incredibly ugly with just

unfinished art or basic shapes or sprites stolen 
from other games. They're often buggy and broken

and they have nothing in them but the bare minimum 
features needed to test that mechanic. They are a

just functional enough version of the 
game idea, built as quickly as possible,

with the only purpose being to see if that game 
idea works. Is it fun or interesting? Is it

worth pursuing? Is it a strong foundation 
upon which to build the rest of the game?

And so that's what I'm gonna do. This time I'm 
gonna get it right. I’m gonna focus exclusively

on making the prototype and I am 
going to be extremely disciplined

and not do anything other 
than just test this game idea.

So in terms of art, I'm just going to pull stuff 
off Google Images. There's going to be no music,

there's no story, I'm not going to think about the 
name of the game or the name of the characters.

I'm not gonna start designing an app icon 
for a game that hasn't even been built yet,

Mark, you idiot. The code will definitely 
be buggy and broken because I'm still just

learning Unity, but it should be good enough

to see if this idea works. Just a sandbox to 
test out game mechanics and see what's fun.

So let's get started, and open up Unity.

The first thing I needed to do was to have a 
character who can just move left and right and

jump, so I just have it apply forces to 
the rigidbody when I hit the right keys.

This already had some problems, which wasn't a 
great start, but I got there in the end. Then

I put a magnet in the scene and needed to make it 
so the character would attract towards the magnet.

Now to get this working I had to become an 
expert programmer, I had to use my galaxy brain

coding skills, so I limbered up my fingers and 
typed in the following line of code… how do I

move a rigidbody towards another object. 
Okay, yes, I Googled it, found some code,

and slapped it in my project. But I did make 
sure I understood how it works - it basically

finds the direction between the character and 
the magnet and applies forces to the rigidbody

in that direction. I also tweaked the code so that 
it would speed up as you get closer to the magnet.

Then I made it so you could turn off the magnet 
with a button press which had the intended

effect of keeping the character's velocity 
going, sending them flying through the air.

So if I slap a platform up here I can attract 
the character towards the magnet then let go

and jump up here. Which does feel pretty 
good… but it's a little hard to control

things. This code maybe isn't perfect, 
things get out of hand pretty easily.

But as I was researching this stuff, I 
stumbled upon something really useful in

Unity. It's a built-in component called the point 
effector, and it's basically… a magnetic field.

I don't know how I missed this, the icon for it 
is literally just a magnet. Here's how it works:

you give a GameObject a collider and a point 
effector, and then set an attract strength.

And now when a rigidbody is in the collider, 
it's attracted towards the center of the field.

You can also use Unity's layer mask system to 
make it so it only attracts certain objects.

So this would certainly make the game 
a lot easier to make, so I decided to

remake the prototype. And, yes, 
the game feels more grounded.

It's easier for me to tweak things 
and I can do cool stuff like

if I put the attract point on the poles of the 
magnet, this happens - which looks pretty sweet.

But when I made this second prototype, for 
some reason… not quite sure why, I decided

to not use Mario this time, but replace him with 
a picture of a magnet for the main character. And

this kind of gave me an idea: what 
if the character is not magnetic,

but there is a magnet in the game world. And the 
character can walk over and pick up the magnet.

To achieve this I used Unity's built-in 
joint system, it's another component.

This allows you to connect two rigidbodies 
together using different types of joints like

hinges and springs. So now the character is 
essentially holding the magnet and if the magnet

is attracted to a piece of metal, the character 
goes with it. Until you let go of the magnet,

and now you can walk around again. 
And that gameplay I wanted before,

with using the trajectory of the magnet to 
send your character up to a higher platform,

that can still be achieved by just 
letting go of the magnet in mid-air.

Plus it allows for all sorts of 
other things, like you can have

two magnets, or more. And you could maybe, like,

place the magnet up here, then get an enemy to 
chase, you turn off the magnetism, and splat!

Oh this is kind of cool, actually. Maybe this 
could work. Suddenly the game felt way more

interesting than my original idea, which I have to 
admit I was starting to get a little bit worried

about. When your character is magnetic and being 
attracted and repelled it's very easy to feel

a bit out of control, but having the magnet be 
a separate object means you get times where you

are completely in control as the character, and a 
bit more out of control when holding the magnet.

Plus, I was a bit worried just how many ideas I 
could come up with for a game where the character

is magnetic. But as soon as I had it as two 
separate entities, the ideas just started flowing.

Plus I really like games where you move back and 
forth between two distinct types of gameplay,

like, think how Mario Odyssey changes when 
you do and don't have the hat. So in my game,

the character is nimble and can jump really high 
without the magnet, and slow and leaden when

holding the magnet - but, of course, that magnet 
allows for all sorts of amazing possibilities.

Now I shouldn't be surprised that an even better 
idea emerged during the prototyping process. As we

saw in the GMTK episode The Games That Designed 
Themselves, it's pretty common for new ideas to

emerge during prototyping. Take a look at the 
game Crypt of the Necrodancer: when that game

was originally designed, it was just supposed to 
be a roguelike with a tight time limit in between

your turns. But as the designers made it, they 
realised that it would be even more interesting

if, instead of it being on a timer, 
it was set to the beat of a song.

So prototypes aren't just a way to 
test and prove the validity of an idea:

they are a way to generate 
new and even better ideas.

Now during this whole stage I made 
another interesting discovery in Unity:

this one is called sprite shapes. And 
it's generally used to make really cool

organic level design, like you 
might see in the Ori games,

but for my purposes I just put on a blank colour 
and this allowed me to make level design really,

really fast. I could just snap together a 
prototype area by dragging handles around

like doing something in Photoshop. So I built 
the prototype again and this time I wanted the

character to be a little bit better to control, 
something closer to a real video game character.

Now I don't want to get bogged down in 
coding movement and jumps, so I downloaded a

character control script off the internet. 
It works really good, I can focus on tweaking

it or remaking it or whatever in the future: 
right now I don't want to put time into that.

Also in this prototype I started looking 
at some more mechanics like being able to

throw the magnet and then being able to 
recall it back to you like Thor and his

hammer. And because the magnet rigidbody bumps 
into the character's rigidbody, it gives you

this little bit of feedback when you catch the 
magnet. It's like free game feel, it's amazing.

And then I came up with various scenarios 
that you could use the magnet in, like

throwing it at a wall to create a platform. 
Maybe connecting it to a piston and then

disconnecting it at the right time to send 
it flying. Maybe switching its polarity to

jump between two conveyor belts. Or how about you 
weigh down this platform, stand on the top of it,

and then change the magnet's polarity to shoot you 
up in the air? Whoa this is actually pretty cool,

right? This is looking like a 
video game. This is pretty fun!

And this really was the point where I felt like 
this game idea certainly has some potential. It's

original: I've seen a bunch of magnet-based 
games but nothing quite like this.

It allows for both platforming and puzzle 
based gameplay. It feels like ideas for this

game just flow really easily so I can build 
loads of different levels. And, best of all,

it's just really fun to play. I can just jump 
into this scene in Unity and pick up a controller

and it's quite enjoyable. That 
is surely a very good sign.

And so this is the power of prototypes: 
you can use them to test if a game idea

is actually any good. And, if you're really lucky,

you might find that new ideas emerge 
during that prototyping phase.

Now I think you do have to have a certain level 
of discipline here, you really do have to say ‘I’m

not going to focus on anything extraneous right 
now, just the gameplay’. And, I mean, it is hard.

Like, in this video I didn't show you the entire 
week I spent looking at particle effects and

shaders and UI elements and things like that - I'd 
gone right back to that old behaviour of getting

distracted and carried away by stuff that just 
doesn't matter right now. But luckily I caught

it in time and scrapped that prototype, before 
getting back to the stuff that is important.

And ultimately I think it worked out: I ended up 
building something that I think is pretty fun,

that does have potential, and that I am excited 
to work on. My previous games which I tried to

make when I was much younger were built with a 
sort of blind hope that the game would be fun,

which isn't the most confidence-inducing 
way to make a game. But now it feels like

I'm building on a really strong foundation 
and so all those other aspects - the story,

the music, the artwork - that can be built with 
faith that the underlying foundation is solid.

And so I feel like this is 
the way to start making games:

building a prototype. The only question 
is: what the hell do I do next?

I guess we'll find out next time, in the 
next episode of Developing. Thank you

so much for watching and I hope you'll join me 
on the next episode of this journey. Goodbye.

The idea actually came from this game, 
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons.

Damn it. From this game. Oops.

From this game. It came from this game. This 
game. This game. This game: The Legend of Zelda:

Oracle of Seasons. The idea actually came from 
this game: The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons.

That was pretty good.