Five Years of Indie Game Development - Sapiens

[Music] hi everyone I'm medic Dave and I'm the solo developer of this game which is called sapiens sapiens has been in development for about five years now and I've really only worked on in about two and a half years of that time initially it was just a hobby project sort of ramped up development over the last year or two and this video I wanted to do a summary of the progress over the past year I did a video about a year ago that went over the previous four years of development but I'll also do a quick recap first of that four year period and then go straight into this year so let's go right back to the beginning to start with and this was basically just a terrain engine and I didn't really even know if it was going to be a game or what I was doing but I was just sort of missing around it pretty quickly started to look quite interesting though so I started to post about it on YouTube and I started to sort of work on refining the graphics a lot I rewrote the atmosphere shaders a number of times until I found something that I was quite happy with and then I started working on the materials on the terrain and also added some objects and got them all looking good in the world too I added a physics engine and started messing around with the VR support then I added shadows and worked on to the rendering more trees worked on the water quite a lot and then I went a little bit crazy and added a climate model to the world and started using that to drive biomes and added a bit more diversity with sort of placeholder models and the deserts and then along side the rivers and everything then I decided it was time to add some interactivity to the world and actually turn it into a game I did it on the theme which was going to be people instead of sort of sci-fi er which I did initially thought and so if I was gonna have paper I was gonna need good good animations support so where are the trees and models that before had been to the hard-coded into the game no started using blender I started bringing up models and exporting out boned animations and all that kind of stuff and using the GL tier file for bit then I wanted to get the building mechanical and and work on the building of campfires and walls and digging the terrain and at this point it just started to feel a little bit more like a game it was then that I decided to ditch the low poly look and go with this smooth normals look into the leafy textures and grass and stuff and honestly this was probably the best decision they made through the entire process I think that at this point it really developed its own graphical style that said it set it apart from from where it had been before and this was also then the time that I decided on the name sapiens and and really it just suddenly all came together at this point and felt felt like it was going to be a thing around this time also I spent quite a lot of time on the user interface and thinking about how the game was actually gonna play and how it's gonna work and I ended ended up adding a skill system at this point and in a bit of a research tree which ended up quite different but still was it was important to start thinking about this at that time after that I spent about six weeks porting the entire engine from OpenGL to Vulcan that was perhaps a little bit crazy but I was just feeling quite uncomfortable about carrying on with OpenGL at that point I knew I still had a couple of years of development and the landscape was changing quite rapidly so I thought it was time then you know make the call and I decided to go Falken and ultimately that was a really good decision too because I really increased my frame rate substantially and it helped me to further my own skills and graphics development it also means that my engine is going to be a bit more future proof course now we'll get to the side of this year and I'll talk about what I've worked on in a bit more detail the first thing that I worked on was bids I thought that it would be a good idea to get him sleeping through the night and that you should be able to play speeds and sides to the houses and stuff and so I made it so that you could clear grass and that those the resulting grass would then turn them to hey once you had hay you could then use that to to craft bids quite a lot of implications to add in this fairly simple feature and I ended up redoing a bunch of the terrain sort of placement tools as well as the storage areas I went and redid how all the storage areas worked to allow for sort of grass turning into hay and things like that and I also looked a bit on snapping of building components together and sort of fish now they might connect a bit more I think it's quite a lot on the AI and basically rewrote the entire AI system previously it had been a hive mind sort of best fit system where you know if there was a job that needed to be done it would just find the closest sapien and go from there kind of thing whereas I thought it would be nice if it was a more natural system where each individual sapien had sort of wants and needs and decided what they wanted to do based on what they could see and you know what needed to be done around them and I've stuck with that new system and I think I think it's really good as it's providing quite natural kind of interactions and stuff and this was also when I added the waving interaction and that to this day is still the only interaction they have with each other but that will change very soon and I worked a bit on the water sort of sparkles and stuff and and on the fire particles as well the next thing I did was to replace all of the UI with 3d models so all the buttons or the panels and even even the text is embossed and let's using the same rendering code as what's written during the world this was quite a major job at the time but it's really paid off it's given me a really consistent look throughout the user interface and it's also very easy for me to create new elements by just creating new models and blender and when I go to use them in the user interface I can resize them quite a lot before having to create new models and everything's all pixel perfect when it's rendered on the screen I also added on all of the order markers so this was really kind of vital to just show where you had actually queued up with actions that the sapiens needed to complete and give you something to click 'insert in many cases to actually go and cancel those orders and I worked on the skills system a bit more and actually made it so that they needed to learn how to craft fire in order to light a fire and this was still a bit clunky at the time but it was a good start and sort of set me off in the right direction things are going quite well in there I then went on to add chickens to the game I did this because I really thought it was time to start thinking about how hunting and was gonna work as well as like tool-making in just the general crafting system as well and I haven't really taken it any further than this I haven't added any new animals in fact I think hunting is broken at the moment but getting started with chickens and hunting at this point was a good thing to do they made it a lot clearer what all the systems were that I needed to get in place for this to work properly and I'll be adding a whole bunch of new animal types and working on hunting again very soon mix a head of thatched houses and I quite a bit on the whole kind of process of building so they actually have to stack the resources at first and then start building I also got them carrying multiple items at a time so they could stack up to the smaller items like branches or hay and sort of carry multiple things and I think quite a lot of time writing my own raycasting code I was using the physics engine to do this before but I had struck quite a number of issues with doing that and in the end I figured it was probably easiest to just write my own code so it's never pixel perfect ray casting so when you're looking at an item you know that that's you know that it's going to get selected and yeah that was well worth doing you know it's a great solution that I've come up with and it's working really well and then I first added the quick action menu which I've stuck Worthen is definitely gonna be in the game it's a really nice quick way to queue up orders you know to chop down trees or to gather things or you know just a contextual menu and it's working really well I also added the ability to queue up placement orders for any kind of objects or a branch or a rock or whatever and I think this is gonna be awesome in the game it's gonna make it really customizable and really make it so that you can build it whenever you like it was very early stages at this point and I've continued to improve it a lot but it was this O'Groats kind of started then I started working on a crafting system sort of didn't go that well to start with really but I was I managed to make it so that you could craft some Spears and some sort of X he'd stood to chop down trees I was trying to make it sort of as quick and sort of contextual as I could so you just basically placed like a spear on the ground and then they would come and sort of bring parents and builder but it wasn't really gonna work out especially when you started it when I start thinking about smelting metals and things were that actually needs some kind of you know smelter or you know fearless to actually do it so yeah I mean that this was a good start and at least say it had the ability to craft some things but I've actually quite changed it significantly since this time throughout this period toe is constantly refining so that the building mechanisms and how everything works they're just there's just so many things that fade this year the general has just been a huge amount of refining the user interface and refining how things work I then spent quite a long time on path finding it was all very well adding the ability to place objects any way you like but it caused quite a few problems with path finding they have to then be able to walk on things at your place and they have to be able to like walk around fences that you've created out of individual items and that potentially could be get very slow and it really needed a good solution so I made a really good start on that and it's all pretty solid still needs to be a work from here but it's you know it's going pretty well this was also when I decided to use Tokyo poni as the sapiens language I haven't really taken that far I mean that you know just the auto-generated name still but it's just really cold I think toy components are fantastic fit for sapiens and it's just really cool using a constructed language in the game I then decided to spend about two weeks adding virtual reality support I'd be keeping VR in mind for some time and really the the engine is designed to support the air that the user interface is designed to support support VR so it was another one of these sort of points in the development where as like well if I'm going to support via it's really time to make sure that everything works so yeah it took about two weeks to sort of get everything up and running it's still very rough around the edges and it's gonna need another few weeks of work and I'll probably do that right near the end just before release but yeah my goal was to have VR support at launch and we'll see how that goes but it's just awesome it's so cool being and in this world and VR and that just it feels so immersive and so cool then I looked back at the skill system and the crafting system again I made it so that you now place craft areas instead of just placing the sort of final crafted item on the ground and this is a much better system that's gonna allow you to sort of queue up multiple craft orders and sort of allow for more automation and stuff I also sort of connected everything up so that the various things that you could craft were sort of locked behind required resources and required skills and it was all kind of nicely connected and it's still like this now so yeah I think it's working really well you basically said I have to learn a particular skill before you can then craft a particular item before you can then perhaps harvest a particular resource and it's all got this really nice sense of sort of progression and achievement my focus was on getting to the point where they could cook chicken meat over the fire and I got that whole kind of process in place so they could go right from sort of learning how to hunt to then learning how to butcher creating crafting butchering knives butchering the chickens and then learning how to cook the meat over the fire which they've also had to learn how to craft so chicken baked was a good test case and I'll be adding a whole bunch of other progressions like that for other items and things that you can craft and build next up I added the aging of sapiens and I added children and I added the sort of elders and pregnancy and all of that kind of stuff and that was all you know really vital to the game and I think it was the right time to get in and do that I also added a bit of genetic variation made it so that genes can be passed down to children for things like hair color skin color eye color and I added facial animations as well which I think really adds a lot I haven't actually fished it out very much yet you know that's more content that will be added later but have just seeing them smile and everyone being able to close their eyes at night it's a good important step forward then I went back and looked at rivers again rivers have been a difficult problem for me in this game because the terrain is procedurally generated and you know the way that you know the scale of the world works you can't just erode the terrain and have sort of rivers nicely flowing down from mountaintops and stuff that's just completely not technically feasible so I had to sort of get a bit creative and figure out ways of doing there so yeah we're going to much detail here but that basically built the terrain around the rivers the rivers became the kind of base building block of the whole world and everything else was built around them and it's it's given a really nice look and then good rivers and a good base to build and build the world around an excited Steam Workshop support so right from basically when I added lower to the game I decided that modding was gonna be a really big thing and sapience and so I'm trying all the way along I've been really trying to make it as model as possible there's not even the concept of Sapien and the engine itself it doesn't know the difference between a rock or a tree or a sapien or a chicken so you you know as a mod developer you could get rid of all of that stuff and make a completely different kind of game so yeah the mods are gonna be extremely powerful and very flexible so that's why I thought it was a good time right now to actually add mod support so that right when we first get into alpha testing and stuff people can start making mods and start really you know requesting extra features from the engine and stuff that they need that's also meant that I had to move a few things out of Lua and over to see and I decided to create a whole kind of separate sea based plug-in system as well just just for a few things like particles and terrain generation things that really needed extremely fast performance and I also rewrote my math library and my serialization library and it just did a whole bunch of work here on performance and yeah just making it really rock-solid for models as well and they went back and looked at how the game would actually start until now you'd sort of been flying all over the map looking for tribes trying to sort of look who was there and it was a bit clunky in a bit sort of strange and not really a good way I think to sort of start for game so I thought I'd work on this kind of new map mode where you could have a top-down perspective very kind of high distance so that you're quite well zoomed out and you can get a good feel for the lay of the land and that there would be a really good way to start the game so you can actually see all these different tribe markers you can sort of inspect them quite quickly and jump between them and find a good good starting point the idea of these are little bands of hunter-gatherers that are sort of moving around and you're choosing one that you're probably end up sort of settling down and then growing into a larger settled tribe I'm not ruling out nomadic playstyles but I think for now less the focus was on just getting getting the buildings and a system working and getting you settling down I also refined their placement tools and added this nice little rotation and translation kind of interface and that's just totally transformed the way that you can now build and play stuff it still needs more work as most things do in the game but you know it's another big step forward [Music] then I started to think about adding farming and realized before I could really get into that I needed seasons because farming and sort of growth cycles of plants doesn't make any sense if you don't have seasons so I went through and made a whole bunch of different sort of model types for each season and I made the terrain sort of changed that there was a snow level that sort of came down I had to redesign all the biomes work so I've got this whole sat at AG based system now that works fast enough for the sort of mess of terrain scale with the snow level changing and everything I think seasons really like really adding a huge amount to the game you know like this is another one of these big things where it's just made it so much more real it's made it feel a lot more alive in the world it's really kind of breathing and changing around you which just it's just awesome it says so good to finally have this in here I think with the weather is probably the next big thing that's going to do that and I'm really looking forward to doing there I think having some clouds and rain and snow and stuff falling it's just gonna be awesome but I'm holding off on that until I have a really good solid sort of case for a gameplay-wise I guess at this point like game play really is just my focus so at least I have a good reason to put it in for game play I'm not doing it but you know with us going to happen before release obviously and then with seasons in place I was able to finally add the planting of trees and plants and I've been looking forward to this for so long now so this is really good to finally get it in place and what I came up with I think is working really well so you basically just used sort of the same sort of building more placing interface to decide where you want the fully grown tree to be any once you've sort of placed it they will come along and dig a hole in plant the fruit or seed or whatever is required to make the tree grow there and as it is now you'll just have a mound of dirt for the first sort of season or two and then in the first spring you'll get a sapling grow and it will stay like that through a whole year and then after that it will grow into a fully grown tree and I think you know it's fairly simple and it just works really nicely and being out of just actually grow food now and sort of feature sapiens is a huge step forward gameplay wise and also that the creativity that it allows you know the ability to make gardens and stuff around your houses and things is just great and I've really just scratched the surface I think you know it's gonna be a whole bunch of different plant and tree types and ornamental plants and different things that you can sort of place around the place yeah it's starting to really feel pretty good with as far as all that is concerned and now we're starting to get near the end of the year and I started looking at the relationships between sapiens I didn't get all that far with it but I just sort of assigned this initial kind of relationship score and made it so that the sort of pregnancy and things were sort of tied to that a little bit it was it was a bit of a can of worms to be honest and it kind of I think I've got a bit of thing a bit of thinking still to do on all of this but I think the relationships and the AI and the sapiens themselves is really what makes this game enter is and an end it might be challenging at times for me but you know I'll get there and it's quite fun and quite rewarding to work on it too so yeah I'm looking forward to carrying on with some of that in the next year I also had a good playtesting session here I was actually able to play the game and build up food supplies and grow the tribe as sort of they had babies and you'll grow older and stuff and so at this point it was actually a playable game with gameplay and it was really the first time that I'd really felt how fun this game is gonna be so this marked a line in the sand where the game is now you know playable so I'm switching to a more play test-driven development stuff I find this to be a really fun and rewarding part of development where you can basically play the game note down all the bugs and sort of gameplay issues that you find and then spend a bunch of time just fixing them and sort of repeating their cycle over and over until you have a game and then we get to the final devlog video this year from just a couple of weeks ago I worked again on pathfinding and made it so that they can now walk mini kilometers quite happily and not have any issues with pathfinding they now split their pads up into smaller chunks and instead of trying to sort of do it all at once and then so yeah path fighting is now working a lot nicer well I was working on there I decided I wanted a follow camera so I wanted the ability to kind of keep a close eye on a sapien and just watch what they're up to and follow them around this worked really nicely and it was actually so nice that I kind of decided to integrate it a bit more into the game and make it quite a fundamental part of the kind of user interface and I've since also made it so that you can tap between different sapiens so it's a nice way to kind of keep an eye on everyone and just switch switch through and look where everyone is and I just tied it up a few other user interface issues as well so that brings us to the end of the year and to the current state of development overall I'd have to say it's been a really good year and I've made a lot of progress I had kind of planned to have an alpha out by the end of this year so my plan is to just slowly send it out to a few alpha testers and really only maybe have you know a couple of hundred testers max before release so you know that was always my plan and I'm gonna stick with that but I sort of thought that it might happen before the end of the year except I think probably the biggest factor here is actually that the YouTube video that I did at the in the last year kind of took off and got lots of lots of views and I got heaps of feedback which it's actually been really really useful and there's men that I've kind of got the confidence in my direction without the real need to get get play testers to actually give me that feedback so I'm already very much aware of a lot of the issues in the game and my to-do list is already quite long so I really do appreciate that feedback and it's really making quite a difference to me and motivation levels as well so please do keep it coming you know I do read all the comments but over the next 12 months I guess it'll be more of the same or very similar to this year it's going to be a lot of adding refining all of the elements that are already there but hopefully quite a lot more of adding content too and I think you know once we get them to the sort of April May of next year I'd really like to be getting stuck into adding content and really have some alpha testers on board at that point too and all going well hopefully I'll be doing one more video like this at the inner next year and then launching the game very soon after but we will see so just a couple of other things the music that you're listening to right now is the same for sapiens that is written by the very talented composer John and console aqus and he's going to be doing a substantial amount of the original soundtrack alongside myself so I'm very excited about that he's stiffly a more talented composer than I am but you know I think together we should be able to come up with a really nice mixture of tracks and have a awesome soundtrack for the game sapiens has a page on Steam so please do go and add it to your wish list I do not have a patreon or anything like that so if you want to help support me with the game then just you know keep leaving leaving comments please definitely add it to your wish list and if you want to get even more involved come along to the discord there's a link it there's a link in the description and come and have a chat there too so from here I'm gonna take a few weeks off over Christmas and spend some time with my family and get stuck into again early next year and yeah next year is gonna be a very busy year and hopefully by the end of it we'll have a game to play so I hope you like what you see here and we'll see you again in the new year [Music]

Channel: Dave Frampton

Views: 190,234

Keywords:

Id: YEhOhNgoZHI

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/majicDave]

In the video I've gone over the full five years of development so far. I know the project might seem a little crazy and over ambitious, but I'll get there, hopefully only a year or so left to go.

I'm also doing an AMA over on r/gamedev: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/e8vp6b/five_years_of_indie_game_development_ama/

[u/Always_One_Upped]

Great video, really enjoyed the commentary, visuals are nice!

[u/RecallSingularity]

AAAAAAH! This is so incredibly awesome! I love the love you are pouring in here. It really comes across in the setting, the narration ... wonderful work!

[u/PeteMichaud]

Looks great! I was really surprised because I am working on a game that is quite similar thematically, although I have made a number of different choices that make the games quite distinct. Also, you are significantly farther ahead than I am :)

Good luck!