One Month of Game Development | Dream Game Devlog 1

hi there my name is Caleb and I am making my dream game about this little guy traveling across dangerous Barren lands filled with Rogue robots with nothing but his trusty instrument in the last Dev Vlog I showed you how this project started off and what my plans are for the future I mentioned that I was struggling with creating the environment for the game as I wasn't very happy with how the wall tiles were turning out and to be honest starting to doubt my ability as an artist so for the past month I've been on a quest to solve this issue and to finally conquer the mountain of environmental art but sorry for spoiling the progress but the final product out of this past month is just this piece of mockup art but I still thought this Dev vog was worth making as I learned quite a valuable lesson let me [Music] explain okay so before I show you why or how I got to the state of this project I want to explain why I'm so obsessed with getting the environment right and there's three main reasons to this the first is the fact that the environment takes up quite a large portion of the screen if you remove the characters and the UI you're pretty much just left with the environment especially in 2D games where you can't really see the objects up close so making up for this screen space is pretty crucial obviously there are some exceptions to this where you leave it minimal due to the Casual nature of the game but this leads to my next point the environment is a great way to communicate story to the player these minimalist games are great and all but it's no holl night having a deep lore and world can create very memorable experiences one of the best ways to deliver on this is through the environment the reason it took me so long to beat holl night is because I was completely immersed in the world finding intricate details and little secrets within the lore and this is something that I would love to to try and replicate within my game the final reason is that I'm completely obsessed with tile sets something about them from their blocky nature contrasting with how detailed they can really get brings this constrained freedom for an artist like myself and this is something that I really Thrive with having constraints but at the same time complete control like for example participating in a game Jam where you can create a completely brand new game with the constraint of a theme I find really enjoyable so in conclusion I really wanted to get these tile sets and the overall environment right because it's one of those tasks which if I get right I can prove to myself my ability as an artist but visual barriers are not the only problem I was faced with for many years indie game developers have been faced with the challenge of creating Dynamic tile sets which change due to the environment around them with the procedural generation nothing can be foreseen level designers are of no use in these Dangerous Waters for only the gods of RNG can help us now so many algorithms so many barriers so many suggestions within the comment section of my last video but which shall I choose shall I go down the dangerous and unknowing path of way function collapse shall I make my own rule tile system or shall I carry on with the Enemy that is unity's built-in wuol tile system oh Jes aside creating these tiles to dynamically change depending on how they're placed was something that I was a little stuck on so in the last video I asked you guys if you had any suggestions and there were a ton and really good ones as well but there was one that really stood out basically I showed this video in my last video which was a tutorial on how to create custom tile data in unity and the guy who made the video posted a comment saying how he could give me a free version of this Unity package he made which could potentially fix the problem which is just so cool the fact that I have a community which is able to sacrifice their hard work to help me is amazing if you don't know about the one and only vihan he's a legend he makes some great tutorials tailored towards Unity developers so if you're a Unity developer yourself I recommend checking some of his stuff out so with with this new package I had cleared this barrier quite easily I haven't quite dived into the package yet so that will be the next thing I will be doing okay so now it's finally time to make these tiles the tile sets I had at the time I didn't really like very much so instead of trying to fix them up I restarted with a new empty canvas and I did this a lot while trying to make these tiles by the way so you're going to see quite a few iterations of these tiles my inspiration behind the environment at the time was natural Barren wastelands sort of like a desert however this again changed quite a lot you can probably tell that I'm not very good at sticking to an idea however I recently saw the new Dune movie and this brought a lot new found motivation to jump into this kind of world so I'm definitely going to be experimenting with that a bit more but nonetheless I had to start somewhere so I just started to experiment with single tiles especially with the colors I had pure F to the side where I kept my inspiration and reference the inspiration came a lot from scorge Breer so I really wanted to try and replicate their vibrant style which meant getting the colors just right but still I wasn't very happy with how the tiles were turning out I decided instead of focusing on the color I would just try to get the form and details of the tiles right so I decided to draw out some Stone textured walls as the desaturated tones help me better FOC focus on my priorities and looking back at this now I think it doesn't look that bad but my stubborn head decided to restart once again and go for something a little different and I retried so many times once I found something I didn't like about it I would scrap it and restart and as you might have concluded this was leading to nothing so in the midst of my foggy head I decided to blame it on the colors in the hope to find a conclusive palette on lpck but when I tested it out in a mockup I didn't like any of them and this is where things got really unbearable it felt like everything I was making was turning out to be pretty dull and amateur sure it looked okay and probably decent enough for the game I was trying to make but for an artist it was not something that I was willing to be proud of and this began to lead me down a path of doubting myself as an artist what I was experiencing is what many people call Art blocks which is either when you're just completely unmotivated to create anything or when you try to create something you end up feeling unsatisfied with your artwork now this doesn't just happen this had to come from something so I set out on trying to find what was making me feel unsatisfied and came to the conclusion that it was this little square in the bottom right hand side of my screen the very thing I thought was crucial to create something amazing was the very reason I wasn't creating something amazing my inspiration having these amazing pieces of inspiration in the corner of my eye kept myself from admiring my own artwork and instead caused me to compare it I was falling into a hole a deep hole a hole of Shame fear but this gave me power yes great power and with great power comes great responsibility so I ultimately decided to close the window put on some studio gibli jams and create this final piece of environmental mockup purely from my own imagination I decided to draw out just a very standard environment with just a simple grassy area and I've got to say having nothing to compare your artwork to is pretty refreshing creating this mockup brought so much joy as I was finally feeling happy with what I was creating and in the end I was [Music] so yep that's it you just watched an entire month's worth of dedication and hard work but that is the truth sometimes you're faced with these barriers and you just kind of have to get over them but before you go I just want to say thank you so much for the support on my last Dev Vlog I was hoping for maybe around 4,000 views at most so it's pretty cool to see that I was very wrong I've had so many great conversations with you guys in the Discord server and of course replying to your really encouraging comments if you're sad the video is over though be sad no more cuz you can listen to a podcast which I was on hosted by the ramble cast but seriously these guys are very cool and you should go and give them a listen oh and one more note before I go I have exams coming up so I might not upload another video for a little bit so wish me luck and with that said thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Caleb Gilbert

Views: 61,628

Keywords: gamedev, videogames, devlogs, jetpack, jetpack03, jetpack chicken, devlog, game dev, game development, video game dev, video game development, game developer, dream game

Id: zpbaulATcdY

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2024