How One Change Rescued my Indie Game!

hey what's up guys it's Ben Bon and welcome back to the 51st slime dead Vlog in this de vog I created a new start screen and added some new weapons to the game also if you're new here slime peep is a fast-paced rogalik where you must kill and capture slimes to stop the corruption that has infected your land without further Ado let's get into it so to start let's go over a pretty huge change to the whole look of slime keep for the longest time I've gotten feedback that slimes in the game were too hard to see and distinguish from the background so once and for all I wanted to set off to fix this and to do so I figured that an easy way would be to add white out lines to all slimes and bosses in the game now while this sounded like a great idea I didn't want to have to redraw every single Sprite in the game so I found this really awesome tutorial by Daniel illet for a Sprite outline Shader in unity and after going through with the tutorial I could simply add a newly created material to any object such as a slime and boom and now had this really good looking white outline I then added in a new setting to the settings menu where if you select this checkbox all slimes and various other objects in the game such as item drops and bosses will gain outline honestly I'm super happy with how this turned out and I think the setting makes the game look so much better overall and I even think I'll make it the default setting when the player first opens the game so let me know what you think next up let's talk about the start screen right here after clicking off of the slim keep logo the player would be taken to this house area and while cool I got some feedback that this house area was a bit limiting as the player couldn't actually exit it so I decided to completely rework the start screen area now I can actually leave the inside of the house and if I do so we can see three different rooms rooms I can enter if I head over to the left we can see we have the challenge mode statue this statue used to be in the player's basement but I thought it felt a little more impactful by moving it to its own room then if I head over to the right of the house we can see the Slime Rush statue this statue also used to be in the basement but again I thought it was a bit cooler to give it its own room but finally if I head up above the house we had a brand new room being the shooting range which was highly requested by one of my composers and play testers in this shooting range the player can simply talk to this guy select any weapon they have unlocked and be able to shoot this weapon at an array of targets it's nothing crazy but I do think it's really nice to give the player the opportunity to play around with all the weapons youve unlocked before actually going through and purchasing it in an actual Run next up I had in these doors blocking off these slime rushian challenge mode rooms if the player doesn't have them unlocked and I added in these signs telling the player that they have to beat the Slime King to unlock these two modes and yeah I think this adds a bit of intrigue to the player as he really want to beat the Slime King and head back to this Hub area to see what's behind the doors and by this point I was going to be done with the Hub area but I couldn't help think that it felt a little bit weird that the player could go right left and up from their house but not down so I said screw it thought this down area would be the perfect place to move the tutorial and boom basically recreated the whole tutorial in the game if you don't know previously the player could play the tutorial in this open blue void and while not terrible I did have to admit that it felt a little bit weird and not ideal so for the new tutorial while very similar in content I decided to move each segment into to its own unique room that were all connected while this did make the tutorial a bit more linear than before I do think it made things more clear and fun to explore and I also tried to add in a few more interactable sections such as this part where the player has to dash over the pits in the game to teach them by doing instead of telling so yeah that's the new tutorial in the game as well as everything in the new start screen so let me know what you think but what I think is I have a deal for you see I might have lied in the past as right now slank Peep has over 177,000 wish lists on Steam which is awesome but I think we can make this number even higher so as a bit of a deal I'm proposing that if we can get this number to 20,000 before slime Cube launches I will release the game with a 20% discount at launch sounds good well if so make sure to hit the link in the description to wish list the game it literally takes like 2 seconds to do so and hey you're contributing to a greater cause thanks but moving on a few devlogs ago I talked about how I changed the boat rooms in the game which the player must visit to fight the final boss if you don't know as ually I made the boat rooms have a chance to spawn every day that increases as the player progresses instead of guaranteeing them to spawn every day I also made the boat rooms not spawn right next to the player's house like they used to and added in this boatkeeper NPC who charges the V to take his vat now with these changes implemented I got a whole lot of feedback from you guys in the comments some positive but I'd say mostly negative regarding these changes so I decided things needed to change and using your feedback I did just this firstly I removed the percentage spawning stuff and made it so boat rooms would spawn every day no matter what and lastly I changed the boat taking fee from getting less expensive as the player progresses to becoming more expensive as previously the player really couldn't even take the boat early on as it was so expensive I thought these two changes alone really seem to fix a lot of the issues of the boat room so yeah there you go next up let's talk about this death screen it's been in the game for a while now and while it does the job it needs to do it's definitely not my best work artwise and lydc in my Discord server noticed this and opted to create his own version of it that looked like this which was so much better than what I originally made so I started implementing this death screen in game and shortly after we had this which looked really cool now while the screen was quite similar to the Old Death screen lydc version had a few new features that required some work firstly this area on the right was meant to display the Slime that killed you as well as a cheeky death message or joke to go along with that specific slime or cause of death so I created a new system in game to keep track of which slime deals the last BL of the player and got a bunch of Health from some of my play testers with unique death messages for each slime SL cause of death in the game then with all this implemented the death screen just felt so much better and if you see this slime here on the right lydc actually plan to create high resolution images for all these slimes in the game that'll be implemented eventually which was sick but moving on I got some feedback from my play testers that there weren't enough weapons in the game so let's make this devlog even more jamack with new content and make some more new weapons so first up I created this banjo weapon it B basically just shoots three random music notes that are pretty short ranged overall this weapon is nothing crazy powerful but it does have a pretty high fire rate next I created this bazooka launcher which was a pretty fun weapon basically instead of firing normal projectiles upon clicking the Bazooka launcher will launch a bazooka rocket from the sky after a few seconds at your mouse position it does pretty high damage making it a really good room clear but the explosion is quite small and the rocket does take a few seconds to drop down making it a bit more skill-based as a player has to predict where the slimes will jump in order to get a hit overall a really solid and unique weapon in my opinion but next step we have the blow gun this is just a pretty simple weapon that shoots quick darts towards enemies with a pretty high fire rate and low damage nothing too special about it but it's just a fairly decent weapon overall moving on we had the bubble wand this weapon shoots short ranged low damage bubbles but also has a super high fire rate meaning you can kind of spam it it's a pretty solid room clear but will require the player to get up close and personal if they really want to do its work next we had the splitter this weapon fires a projectile that after a second or so slows down to a halt and explodes into a bunch of small projectiles again like other weapons so far this one is a good room clearing option but has a fairly slow firing but something that isn't meant as much for room clearing is the deck of cards weapon this deck shoots random cards that have any value between 1 and six on them and the value on the card is equivalent to the damage the card will do to slimes adding in a bit of Randomness but still making this weapon quite powerful moving on we had the gummy Gater which was a fairly standard machine gun that shoots Gummies at slimes that bounce off of them when damaged overall a pretty high DPS and good choice next up we had the ic1 19 which was kind of your average pistol similar to the player starter pistol but doing a bit more damage and this weapon definitely isn't a reference to one of my all-time favorite games but for the next weapon we had the party hat that shot a bunch of small confetti pieces at a short range it's pretty similar to the bubble wand and banjo mentioned earlier but does a good job bursting slime's Health at a short range but a weapon that didn't have a short range was the robot which was one of my favorite new weapons that I added similar to the Bazooka launcher this weapon didn't fire standard projectiles but instead upon clicking releases this little robot guy who trots in the direction that you shot in after this robot guy collides with an enemy or any terrain he will explode doing fairly high damage great for killing clusters of enemies and it's just really satisfying to see him Trot along but next up we have the coiler which shot these lightning bolt projectiles this weapon may seem pretty s at first but what makes it cool is the fact that these projectiles bounce off of the enemy that they hit and then we target the next closest enemy admittedly this effect may not work 100% of the time but I still think this weapon is quite cool and for the final weapon I added for now was the unknown ore this weapon just fires a random projectile from any of the weapons in the game this means you could get a super weak small projectile or a super powerful huge projectile it's all of chance which makes this weapon pretty fun to use and yeah that's all the new weapons that I've added to slimee super happy with all of them so let me know what you think but now for the final thing I worked on in this slimep Dev vog was build size optimization see right now the standard build for slimee was 515 megabytes now this wasn't terrible by any means but some of my play testers suggested that I should really try to get this number lower so first I realized that I never actually been building my builds with compression on so Splash and my Discord helped me out a bit with this and I ended up changing the build to use lz4hc compression whatever that means and boom just like that the build shrunk down to 345 mbes now this is pretty good but I wanted to push things further first I went through all the Assets in the game and realized that there were a lot of spreads and audio clips that I had imported into the games files but just weren't being used so I spent some time going through these files and deleting the unnecessary ones and by the end of this We Shrunk The build another 20 MB down to 326 next I realized that most of the build size believe it or not not is not actually held in the game scripts or art but rather the audio right now I was compressing the audio using Unity built-in audio compressor by a quality level of 50 but after some testing I realized I could go even lower down to 30 without the audio quality sounding any worse as well as optimizing the sampler right here whatever that does and after going through all the audio files in the game and applying these changes we now have the build down to 227 MB a nearly 100 MB decrease from the last build but we still weren't done I generated this build report from unity and used it to find the biggest files in the project then I made sure to delete these files if unnecessary or use crunch compression to shrink them down after doing all this we saved a whopping 2 megab from the last build but hey I guess it's still progress but that's where I ended this compression Journey I'm sure I could have made the ending file size even lower but hey getting the build down from 550 MB to 225 is pretty cool in my opinion but that's all I for this Vlog I hope you liked it and if you did please consider subscribing and wishlisting the game on Steam it really helps anyways I'll see you in the next one bye

Channel: BenBonk

Views: 10,433

Keywords: indie, indie game, indie game devlog, dev log, unity game devlog, game dev, game development, unity dev, unity, unity devlog, slimekeep, slimekeep devlog, benbonk, steam game devlog, dani, codycanteatthis, I made a game, making a game, game jam devlog, i made a game in a day, i made a game in a week, i made a game in 24 hours, roguelike, roguelike devlog, new weapons, rougelike weapons, i added more weapons to my indie game!, adding new weapons to my game, upgrading my indie game

Id: 2mHjy7dGxZU

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2024