Making the Ultimate Platformer Game in 30 Days | Devlog 1

have you ever dreamed about publishing your own game and making a million dollars in the process well I have but it's clearly not working this year though I want to change that and so I'm going to challenge myself to make a full game and sell it in only 30 days and I just can't make any old trashy game because well my savings are dwindling and my YouTube ad Revenue isn't cutting it the first thing I need to do is pick what kind of game I want to make it obviously has to be fun but my art skills are uh yeah I've always been a fan of games like speedrunners Fancy Pants adventurers and Super Meat Boy so I'm just going to take all of those ideas and bunch them together into one but what do I make the actual game in It's always important to pick the best engine for any project because picking the right one can save you a lot of time and potentially a lot of headaches now I've tried a lot of them out there but there is one I haven't tried and that's game maker it's really well suited for 2D games like mine and one of my favorite Platformers is made in it it's it's also completely free to export to any non-c console platform and for games you'll be selling like mine there's just a onetime fee which is pretty affordable and it's forever they also sponsored this video so that also helps okay I literally have no idea how to use this luckily they have some great starting tutorials and in no time I was able to get this cute little guy up and running there was a bit of a learning curve as the interface is like nothing I've ever experienced and they used their own programming language called gml but after a while I started to really enjoy it this is my player and it's treated as an object in the object I have access to different functions like create or step then I can easily program any movement and I can also easily import different Sprites which I got from this goat Dany and change the animation of the player depending on certain conditions and the ground was really easy to implement as they have an auto tiling feature which lets you select what tiles are connected and automatically does it when you draw right now it just feels heavy to move and it's just like any other game out there remember this needs to sell a million copies okay there's a simple trick we can use which can make the game feel 100 times better with one times the work usually save this for later on but hey there's no time like the present juice particle effects this makes the player feel like they're actually interacting with the environment squash and stret every time we jump and land let's scale the character so it looks more cartoony and bouncy and finally a cool Ghost Trail effect it's a good visual indicator that the player has change direction and well it just looks pretty cool and with that the game feels so much better and it barely took any time there's literally nothing going on in this game right now the level design in Platformers is just as important as the player controls and luckily I have absolutely no experience with that so let's do it one thing I really liked about Fancy Pants Adventure they made use of a lot of Curves for their platforms which I haven't really seen any other Platformers do that she would soon realize why most games do not use such said slopes I wasn't sure how to go about it and there weren't many resources on it but I found an asset in game Maker's asset store that lets you make curved surfaces the other option is to pick a set of points and procedurally build a curved surface the player can collide with this only works for physics objects and requires a lot of math H by this time I had already spent a few days on this and I was already at my wit's end because I had no idea what I was doing and how to make slopes work slopes why precise colliders oh my existing code does not work for slopes luckily game maker has a built-in function called move and Collide which basically takes care of all of those fancy maths to make slopes work but it did take me a while to make it feel good rotating the player depending on the slope angle adding slips so that the player slides down the slope making the jump not too floaty and some other helpers like jump buffering which lets you press the jump key even before you're completely on the ground and coyote time which lets you jump for a certain time even after you've left the ground I then decided to add some more features like wall jumping and sliding so there could be a bit more variety on what the player could do and it wouldn't feel so boring after a while as I was making the first level I realized just how many bugs my player controller had so the first level the tutorial level took me days to finish and here I was thinking that Platformers were easier to make than any other game okay I really need to get through the other levels so uh huh so I had to take a few days off to move and the deadline for my game is set so I couldn't move it around so this just got a whole lot more complicated after a few days I finally had a chance to sit down and work on the game but by this time I was super tired from moving everything around and I did not want to work on these levels so I did what anyone else would do on a tight deadline I worked on less important and not so necessary features nice to have like the menu I mean how else will people start the game I also worked on a save system which took me forever because I've literally never had to do one but I ended up finding a perfect tutorial from game maker on how to make one that way the player won't lose their progress and they can see their high scores now the only thing I didn't like about this is that in game maker there's no way to easily drag and drop UI to the screen to put it where you want you have to manually coat it so I was manually positioning all the buttons and then changing the pixel values one by one until they were perfect I'm sure there's a better way but I did not have the time nor the energy to figure out how to do it but game maker has been working on adding this and over the past few years they've been adding a lot of cool features so I should really focus on the levels shoot I hired my friend to help with the music and decided I only wanted Acappella for every sound because I like to make my life more difficult I also thought it fit the character style pretty well and there's not really any other games that use Acappella so I didn't want to be like the other girls you know at first it was rough because we didn't know what we were doing and apparently in Acappella you need a lot of layers of voices so that it sounds good together then you need to make sure each beat combines on each of the tracks and it doesn't help that the program we were using Cakewalk kept closing and losing our progress and it was just super buggy to work with but while he works on those Banger soundtracks time is running out to finish the game it's finally time to work on the levels bro what my computer stopped working luckily I have a Mac laptop and I backed all my progress to the cloud so I was easily able to Port it over and work on it there but I am just a little bit slower over overall on the Mac cuz I am not used to it I finally started working on the levels and only with 15 days left to spare as I worked on the levels I realized introducing new curves and unique events made my controller not work so again each time I made a new level I had to fix my controller it's really fun to have bugs everywhere and now after all that I only have 10 days to make the game and I've been going to sleep at 3 and4 a.m. and I am severely lacking sleep and right now I'm also lacking sleep this why I'm so hyper luckily at some point after so many fixes my controller started working in most occasions I'll take that but the cat is really spaghetti so no one in the light of the day must ever see this cuz it's just really bad it's really bad then I decided to split up the levels into Worlds so that every 10 levels you would have a new challenge to overcome and the game would always feel fresh but this did end up adding a lot of complexity for each new feature I had to code that feature and that ended up breaking my controller more in certain spots this also meant that we needed a soundtrack for each of the worlds cuz I'm just going to have the same sound play on each world so my friend definitely had a lot of work in it for him I realized it was extremely timec consuming to make the levels not so much because of the design itself but because I had to test it each time and the game is literally so difficult that it would take me an hour or two just to get past the starting section in one level but I had to make sure the level was fun and possible to beat so there was no way around this oh I think aby's cooking up some fire [Music] soundtracks I like that a lot that is a certified Banger I started looking into publishing the game and then I realized that to upload the game on Steam first they have to review your profile and verify your identity which takes a few business days and then you have to have a coming soon page for around 2 weeks so there definitely wasn't going to be an opportunity for me to have this game up on Steam by my deadline and there's no way I'm going to finish 50 levels publish it in 4 days and also record this video you're watching right now yes I am doing this in like one day two days before the deadline and I have to edit it I'm stressed luckily my It uncle checked my computer and he found out I had a ram issue so by trial and error I removed each RAM and found out which one was the Troublemaker this one right here take them to jail so now I was actually able to work much faster F because I was on my native workpace but I still need to make some sacrifices because I do not have time do not have time to finish this donut I want a donut me donut so what I'm going to do is I'm going to tape off world five and I'm going to complete up to World 4 and then I'm going to publish it to itch.io which is a place where you can publish indie games so technically I'll have met the requirements and then after this deadline I will finally get some sleep finish World 5 and then public it to steam hopefully by the time you're watching this you can either buy or wish list the game on Steam link down below now each level does technically take less than 30 seconds to beat but it actually doesn't because you will die a lot of times before you even beat the level and if you want to get the three stars per level good luck it takes me 1 to 3 hours just to do it and I made the levels player feels great to control and the levels are fun unique and very difficult which was what I was going for now I really enjoyed game maker after using it it felt like I had a lot of control over the code and it's great for 2D games which is exactly what I was doing I definitely recommend checking it out if you're interested in making your own games or maybe even switching game engines the link is down below I'll also be porting this to mobile after after after sleep lots of sleep but for now you can play it on h. and with that boom I made and sold a game in only 30 days if I can do it you can do it too

Channel: samyam

Views: 24,672

Keywords: samyam, gamemaker, game maker, sam yam, devlog, dev log, game dev log, 30 days to make a game

Id: 1TEUVmbI6Rw

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 29 2024