Our small studio is developing a cute little game about life and we are documenting every step of the development process in our monthly vlog.
Episode 5:
Episode 4:
Episode 3:
Episode 2:
Episode 1:
The vlog is targeted towards fellow developers and people who aren’t developers but are interested in the process of game development (like some gamers for example). To make the videos available to a broader audience, we won’t be going way too much in technical details but we are going to be showing lots of development footage like concept drawing/3D modeling and explain the essentials of our game’s mechanics.
We are rather inexperienced when it comes to making videos and vlogs but we think that this is a great way to communicate the development process and I’ll be very happy to hear some feedback from anyone who watches the video. We want to improve and make more interesting content so if you would like to see something particular from the development process or have any remarks, I’d love to hear them! It would be interesting to have a discussion on vlogging when it comes to game development. Also if anyone is doing something similar to this, feel free to drop a link to your video here or in a PM.
Thank you, Dave! The game is an endless runner which by means of symbolism (expressed with objects in the level design) tells the story of life. Life is pretty linear and definitely not endless so it doesn’t seem like a suitable theme to wrap an endless runner in at first sight but we’ll be talking about that in a future video.
At this point we are a lot further in the development of the game than what we show in the video but we don’t want to reveal actual content yet.
Good job guys - nice work on the video. It’s good to see your enthusiasm and humor (improving Mitko! :)). Having a laid back and up beat working environment is very good and makes the troublesome and stressful times more bearable.
Tell Val thanks for the tip on lazy lowpoly concept art development. Gonna borrow that one!
A couple critiques on the video and the process detailed in the video -
PROTOTYPE??
The video is well made - and entertaining - but where is your prototype? There might be missing information not relayed through the video, if so disregard.
From the video it appears you are progressing down a development path without prototyping mechanics. How can you tell if your ‘idea’ is going to be fun? The feeling from previous videos is generating revenue is an important part of your progress. To generate this revenue - the game has to be FUN! Part of really knowing if the game will be fun is a prototype. A prototype also helps work out difficult mechanics that look great on paper and concepts but don’t quite work as expected when implemented.
To me - it seems you have put in a lot of time so far on this project, writing design document, developing style guides, creating concept art - and could spend at least another month on initial art assets and coding up the base systems for the game. This is 2 months of hard work on a game - you don’t even know if it will be fun to play.
Where is the prototype - which would give a much more solid indicator this is a good concept - which would confirm to your team this game is going to be fun to play?
How much time was dedicated to filming & editing? Seems like a pretty big time sink that could be better spent prototyping/designing/developing, although you did state at the end of the video - this ended up longer than you initially anticipated.
Not to criticize your outreach efforts at all - this is good - just keep in mind you might start projecting a bit of - lack of focus on the product/project if the videos start to become too long and indepth.
But I like the concept of gaining fans by producing shorter “inside the startup indie studio” vibe you have established.
At 2:40 in the video Mitko says “during development it is needed to maintain direction”… What it sounds like is “during development it is needed to maintain the erection”
[Cross post correction] On the other thread I misspoke (kind of) regarding joystick controls on mobile. I originally thought you were talking about an ad-on joystick - a peripheral device to attach to a phone. Something like this
So my comments were under this inaccurate assumption.
With respect - I apologize for the misunderstanding and as a token of good will would like to direct you to a thread I started in relation to one of the questions I think you had asked in your previous thread.
Hey Animator! Very glad you liked the video and it’s so cool that you remembered us and my previous post! We appreciated your input in the other thread and took your notes into account. We might even even quote some of them in a future video (since we would probably talk about the discussion we had in that thread). Once again, your reply is spot-on:
Yes, having fun on the workplace really boosts the creative process. We’ve found that throughout the day we are only 100% productive during 3-4 hours. Having fun - cracking jokes/watching videos/listening to music, etc. Helps us lay back for several minutes and recharge before we continue. Over the years we’ve had various people in the team. It turns out that more quality work gets done when working with less-skilled developers who are easy-going and contribute for creating a fun environment as opposed to skilled ones who are rather uptight - that’s our case, I’m sure there are people who would gladly argue with that
We’re very glad that you found Val’s tip useful! If anybody gets an idea, learns something new or gets motivated from watching our video, that’s a win for us! The next videos to come will be more development-packed so there will be more tips and workflow previews in future.
Oh yes, we agree with you on the prototype part 100%. We did start with a prototype before even writing the GDD actually but we decided to omit that information in the video because we didn’t know how to structure it well and weren’t sure if it’s important enough. However you saying that makes me think that we should have said something about it because if a beginner developer decides to watch the video and tries to follow our steps they might end up putting a lot of work into a game that’s not fun. Then again, that’s what being a beginner is sort of about In the video we show a basic player mechanics prototype flying over static terrain but the truth is that we had level generation and the core mechanics way before that. As I stated in a previous video, we are currently on a quite later stage of development than what we show in the video and as soon as we start releasing content, I’d be happy to share the first prototype we had along with that.
We wrote the script for about 1 day, then it took us one more day to shoot it (we sometimes have to make many takes because we are inexperienced and often mess up). Finally the editing and rendering took us one more day again. So in total - 3 days. We wanted to have a discussion about the spent time on the Unity subreddit but our post there wasn’t taken very well for some reason (it was appreciated in the gamedev subreddit though). Making a vlog definitely takes much more time than writing blog posts and we still can’t quite weight the pros and cons. Right now the videos we upload definitely don’t pay off for the efforts we put in to make them but we think that stacking up more content will attract more people and may result in more useful and interesting discussions like this one (and the one in the previous post). Getting to meet more developers and forming “long term relationships” is gold. At this point we don’t expect the channel to gain huge popularity and bring considerable income because we don’t regularly upload videos (hence the name “Game dev occasionally”) but it is a fun way to reach out to other developers.
Ops! I guess that improving Mitko still has a long way to go :p. I’m trying to speak more slowly and clearly but it’s actually very hard because it feels very unnatural to me. If you notice, I start off speaking slowly in the video and slowly gain speed.
We are actually aiming to do this exactly. We will definitely be including support for physical controllers like the one you linked but we still haven’t reached that point. Want to first develop and refine the native touch screen and accelerometer controls before adding joystick support.
Quite some time passed but we just uploaded Episode 2 of our game dev saga. This one I was personally hyped about because we show and talk about the actual development process, not only GDD and concept art theory.
We got a new microphone for the camera so the speech should be a little bit more audible now plus we don’t waste time trying to synchronize the speech recordings from a cell phone with the video (as we did before). This video is even longer than the previous so I guess making short videos is not our specialty but I think that in order to show and talk about the development process properly, we need a bit more time
And finally, we answer the question about the:
I answered it here on the forum, but in the video we also show some gameplay footage!
So we just uploaded our latest video! We called it “The GRASS Video” because…well…we make grass in it but we also talk about other stuff like our own vertex painter tool and the level design approach.
We’re really having fun filming these vlogs and I hope you have fun too watching them
Oh the texts written on the whiteboard behind you cracked me up but only fellow Bulgarians would understand it. You should start translating those or even better - write in English by default. Anyways, great video as always I enjoyed it a lot!
How many vertices is the grass mesh per segment now that you are using a custom artist tool? And also does it support LODs? This thing looks like something I’d buy if you put it up on the Asset Store. Would it work on a smooth surface?
Hehe, we wrote that text a week ago and we just left it on the board. We were wondering if we should erase it prior to filming the video but we thought that whoever manages to read it will have a laugh so we left it.
The vertices and polycount of the grass depends strongly on how dense the artists paint it but after numerous tests we found out that 20K vertices for the grass per segment is alright we got a steady 50 FPS on a Galaxy S4. We don’t have an automatic LOD system for the grass and so far we don’t seem to need one. We completely turn off the grass and all other child objects of segments further down the road and so we don’t have huge polycounts at all.
And yes, the grass painter works with regular models just like it works on low-poly ones. It doesn’t care about smoothing groups at all.
Hi Sarfaraaz,
Thank you so much! Yes, these videos are all uploaded to Youtube and this is pretty much the only place we upload them to. We are also on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dreamteckstudio/ and there we post whatever is on our mind but we don’t do it daily because we constantly forget from all that work we have
Also anyone who wants to chat can drop us a message at team@dreamteck.io
With a two-week delay in schedule we finally have Episode 5! In this episode we take a look at the music creation process for Lifeslide as well as the music manager which blends tracks seamlessly during gameplay.
but we’ll be talking about that in a future video.
Gonna borrow that one!
In the video we show a basic player mechanics prototype flying over static terrain but the truth is that we had level generation and the core mechanics way before that. As I stated in a previous video, we are currently on a quite later stage of development than what we show in the video and as soon as we start releasing content, I’d be happy to share the first prototype we had along with that.