Hi, my name's Mark and I
am making Mind Over Magnet, a cute puzzle platformer
about, yes, it's true, magnets. Okay, so in the previous episode of Developing,
I talked about getting my game ready for the Steam Next Fest, which is a week-long
showcase of demos for upcoming indie games. So I put together a polished demo
featuring the first world of my game, and also a Steam store page with screenshots
and animated gifs, and a snazzy teaser trailer. However, with just two months to
go before Next Fest kicked off, I realised that there was a pretty
big problem with each of these things. Both the demo and the store page featured
a massive placeholder - an unfinished asset that really needed to be changed before I could
confidently show Mind Over Magnet to the world. However, there's a good reason why
those assets were still placeholders, and it's because I could not
make the final asset myself. And so, for the first time in my game dev career,
it was time to hire someone to help me out. Here's how that went. ♫ Music ♫ Okay, so basically everything in
Mind Over Magnet is made by me. I've done all the writing and programming code, all the artwork and animation, and all
of the game design and level design. Okay, sure, some stuff has
been made by other people. Some super smart folk on the
GMTK Discord have contributed chunks of code when I've gotten
stuck on a programming problem. I got my dad to create a 3D animation
of a giant robot arm so I could trace over it in pixel art and pop it
in the background of World 4. Oh, and all of the sound effects are from
- still not a sponsor - Epidemic Sound. Plus, I could not make this game
without the help, advice, feedback, and bug reports from my many playtesters,
nor the financial backing of my Patrons. Here's a shoutout to the 180 new people who have joined the campaign since the
last episode of developing. You're amazing. Anyway, everything else is made by me. But please do not take this
as some gross brag about me being a multi-talented auteur genius
who can turn his hand to anything. In truth, I'm a pretty average
programmer, writer, designer, and artist. And the game would frankly be much
better if I hired someone to make, well, pretty much every part of the game. Which makes me wonder why I exist. What am I contributing to this? Uh, let's park that
existential crisis to one side. Anyway, the whole point of developing was for me to see every part of this
process up close and first hand. To see what it's like to code a
jump arc, or to draw out a tile map, or to film and edit a trailer,
or to design a bunch of puzzles. All so that I can share that
experience with you fine folk. However, there are two major things that
I just do not have the skills to make, and they are way too important for me to muddle
on through, or to cobble something crap together. I need to hire someone to make these things. And that starts with the soundtrack. Because yes, music is so important to a game. Music can be the beating
heart, or the soul, of a game. Some of my favourite titles, my
memory of that game is as much tied to the music as it is to
the storyline, or the gameplay. Music can elevate an experience. But I do not have any musical
ability or talent whatsoever. I cannot string together a single line of notes. So I'm going to need someone
else to make this music. Now, sure, I could use some pre-existing
tracks from a music library, or an album. And in fact, some amazing games like Braid,
Her Story, and Hotline Miami use pre-existing music rather than getting a
wholly original soundtrack. But that can be a little bit risky. You run the risk of your audience getting a
copyright strike if they stream your game. And your music can just show up
in the weirdest places imaginable. So I decided that I wanted to get
all new music for Mind Over Magnet, to hire someone to make original tracks. But I had one hesitation. Because I know so little about music - I mean, I don't know the difference between
an octave and a treble clef. I thought quavers were just
really delicious crisps. So how do I even talk to a composer? Do I have to hum the music I want them to make? Do I tell them what tempo
or BPM the music should be? I really needed some advice. So I called upon probably the biggest
expert in this field, Austin Wintory. Austin is an award-winning composer behind
the soundtracks for games like Journey, The Pathless, and Stray Gods, plus
loads of other games and movies. And I asked Austin, "Does it matter that
I don't know how to talk about music?" AUSTIN: "It's all good. None of your cohorts in the directing side
of the table know how to talk about music. The common response to that has become, 'Just try to articulate the
emotion that you're interested in. Don't question how we get there. That's my job to figure out. That's the burden I'm taking off of your
shoulders by being part of the project. That's the whole idea.'" MARK: Ah, that really put my
mind at ease, to be honest. I realised that I don't need to
talk in the language of music. I just need to talk about the
creative vision for my game. The feeling, the emotion, the vibe I'm going for, and then let the composer translate
that into beeps and boops. And so it was time to hire a composer. Now in a previous episode of Developing, I put out a call for composers and
received over 850 submissions to my form. Which is amazing, but also completely
overwhelming, and let's be honest, it was impossible for me to
look at every single one. But I did read through a lot of bios, I listened to a lot of samples, and
I looked at a lot of proposed fees. Though, let's talk about money in
a future episode of Developing. Now among all of those people, one
person really did catch my eye. Zach Jones is a game designer
and composer living in New York. And not only did he give me lots of great samples, but he picked out some specific songs
that he thought would fit my game. And so I was able to grab them from Bandcamp, chuck them into the game itself,
and just see how it felt. ♫ Music ♫ Yeah, not perfect, but
definitely along the right lines. And it gave me confidence that Zach would be
able to make great music for Mind Over Magnet. Now I'll fast forward through the next bit. We got on Zoom, we decided to work together,
and then I had to write a contract. Comment down below if you want a
three hour spin-off video about the exhilarating fun of writing a legal document. And then we were finally able
to work on the project together. And I started by telling Zach what
I wanted for the music for World 1. I said, "World 1 is a sewer system. The vibe is slightly mysterious and spooky,
but with an air of hope and excitement. Perhaps you could incorporate or take
inspiration from sounds of running water, dripping water, rats, chains, etc." And then, a little while
later, he came back with this. ♫ Music ♫ Mmm. I like it. I do like it, but it's not quite right. But then I remembered something
else that Austin told me. That making music is actually
a very iterative process. AUSTIN: "I often will say, 'Assume that what
I send you first is not going to be it.' Because how we'll get it is in the iterative
process of you reacting to a piece of music. And I just come up with
literally anything, and then that becomes our flag on the map that you can
go, 'Actually, two clicks west and one south.' So we start to build up data on what that means. That's the iterative process." MARK: So with that in mind, I wrote back to Zach and told him exactly what I
didn't like about that song. I told him that it was a bit too clubby, like high tempo and energetic
with these loud and harsh drums. Those are kind of distracting
and cognitively overwhelming, which is not good when you're trying to
learn game mechanics or solve puzzles. I also thought it was still a bit too dark
and moody, and I wanted something more light and optimistic to fit the cartoony
characters and kid-friendly gameplay. And so Zach said, "Okay, on it," and
came back a little while later with this. ♫ Music ♫ Yes. That is perfect. That, as they say, slaps. I mean, these headphones aren't even plugged
in and I can tell you this music is great. This is exactly what I was looking for. It's moody and evocative, but there's still
an air of hope and fun and playfulness. And it has a great beat, but
that blends into the background, letting you focus your mind on the puzzles. This version was just great. I had, as they say, no notes, and so
it just went straight into the game. And now I simply could not imagine
this game without this wonderful music. I feel like this music makes the game better
than it actually is, if that makes sense. And so this process was a huge lesson for me. I learnt so much about
collaborating with other people. I mean, for one, I realised that I
don't have to make everything myself. It's okay to let other people
into the creative process, and they will surely contribute something
better than I could ever make for myself. Number two, I don't need to be able to speak
the same creative language as an artist. I can just tell them what vibe I'm going for, and it's up to them to translate that
into music or artwork or whatever. And three, they're probably
not going to get it perfect the first time they do it, and that is just okay. Make sure you bake revisions into your contract,
give as clear feedback as possible about what you don't like, and then hope that they'll get it
on the second, third, fourth, or fifth time. And so this experience was invaluable,
and it really helped me when I was trying to commission something for my other
placeholder, the Steam Capsule Art. Yes, I am more of an artist than I am a musician, but the Steam Capsule Art is
so important to get right. This is the YouTube thumbnail of game development. It has to stand out in a crowd of other games. It has to look fantastic and
appealing and exciting, and I just didn't feel like I could do that myself. This time I called upon a great
3D artist called Grayson Evans, who makes these utterly adorable,
toy-like, Funko Pop models in Blender. And he's also done promo artwork for Devolver
and box arts for games like Love 3 and Skatebird. So I reached out and we agreed to work together. This time I had a much clearer
vision of what I wanted. I wanted the cover to be exciting and dynamic, and to show off the two main
characters, Uni and Magnus. And I was also able to share some things that
were inspirational to me, including the box art for Super Mario Bros. 2, the Fez box by Brian Lee
O'Malley, and the box for the new Braid remaster. Just like before, the first
stab wasn't quite right for me. The proportions felt off and
the design wasn't quite right. Uni's head is supposed to
be like an old CRT monitor, and Magnus is supposed to be a real chunky boy. But as I learnt from my dealing with Zack, all I had to do was offer my
feedback and ask for another stab. And so we went through a few different
iterations, with Grayson making drafts in Blender and me pointing out changes, until
we got something I was pretty happy with. Now unlike the music, I was able to take
the artwork and kind of work on it myself. There were things I wanted to change
just to put my own personal spin on it. So I pulled the character away from the
background with some more contrasting colours, I moved some elements around and
I added some smoke and sparks to Uni's wheel to make it look a
bit more dynamic and exciting. These are all things that
Grayson could totally have done, but I was happy to do them myself
to put my own personal spin on it. And so overall I think it
turned out really nicely. Definitely a lot better than
the original capsule art. I think it makes the game
pop, it makes it stand out, and I'm excited to put it on the Steam
store page and have it shown to the world. So now I really am ready for Steam Next Fest. I've got a demo with some professional music,
and a store page with a professional capsule art. Now I wanted to make sure the demo was
all grand before putting it on Steam, so about a month before the Next Fest I put it
on itch.io to get it in front of a few people. Unfortunately itch decided to feature the
game on the home page for about a week, and so the game received 10,000 downloads. Which is definitely more than
I was bargaining for. Oopsie! So I got a lot of feedback and bugs before
Next Fest even began, but crucially I found out that the Mac version just did not work
and crashed in all sorts of bizarre ways. I don't quite know how to fix it and so decided
to just focus exclusively on Windows for the Next Fest launch, and I'll look into Mac and
Linux versions for the actual game launch. Sorry about that. And so now I really am ready, and with four weeks to go before Next Fest
I submitted the game to Steam and Valve... rejected it. Okay so there are game files in the depot,
but they're not live on the default branch. Right. Sorry. Confusing. Let me try again. Three weeks to go, I submitted the game
again, and Valve rejected it again. Okay this time I accidentally uploaded the
Mac version instead of the Windows build. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Okay let me change that. Two weeks to go, I submitted
the build again, and... failed. Again. Three times in a row? Is Valve gonna
send me a t-shirt or something for that? Okay so this time I had set the launch option to
be mindovermagnet.exe, but I didn't mention that the exe is in a subfolder called momdemo
and so the Steam client can't find it. Urgh. Okay. One week to go. Holy moly this is getting close. I submitted for the fourth time
and this time it was accepted. Thank god. That was a bit squeaky bum time there. Phew, I'm not messing with that thing again. Even though there are things I would like to
change in the demo, I'm just keeping it as it is. I'm not changing that again. And so now all I have to do is
wait for Next Fest to begin. So it's a week later, June 10th at 6pm. Next Fest has officially started. I loaded up the website, hit refresh,
and then found a massive list of games. I scrolled down, and down, and down. Okay, where is my game? Let
me check the puzzle tab. Okay, puzzle platformers? Not here. Nope. Ah, finally. Magnus, hello. Yes, this is the thing about Next Fest. I mean, for June's event there
were around 1,800 demos to play, and more than 300 of them
were tagged as puzzle games. And so in a crowd of Tactical Breach
Wizards, I Am Your Beast, a Riven remake, Arranger, and a new Crashlands
game, it's pretty hard to stand out. And it can feel pretty demoralising to see
your game hidden underneath a massive stack of, let's be honest, much, much better games. So did anyone play my game? Well, actually, yes. Despite all of the competition, a
whopping 9,640 people played the demo, which I'm really pleased with, and that resulted
in an extra 3,961 wishlists, which is fantastic. I'm now heading into launch
with over 40,000 wishlists, mostly thanks to all of you watching this video. The game even got picked up by some websites and
YouTube videos, which was really cool to see. But even more important than all
of that, I got loads of feedback. Across Twitter, YouTube comments, emails, Discord
messages, Steam forum posts, and itch.io comments, I received hundreds of pieces of feedback, as well
as bug reports, and ideas, and feature requests. The overall sentiment is that people generally
liked the game, but just felt like the demo was a bit too short, and the puzzles
on offer were overall a bit too easy. But I'm fine with that, because I know that the full game will just naturally
address both of those problems. Now in terms of the more nitty gritty feedback, well, I created a spreadsheet where I could
list every piece of feedback that I received. I could then file it into a category
like bug, or idea, or accessibility. I could give it a description. I could decide how much I agreed
with the feedback from one to five. And then, perhaps most importantly of all, I counted the number of instances
of seeing this feedback. Now, sure, there were probably
much better ways to do this, like a form or a subreddit where
people can vote things up and down. But the one thing I did like about
this is that people were generally not biased by seeing feedback from other people. So if twenty people told me the exact same thing,
they were saying it independently of each other. So I kinda knew that it was
something worth addressing. So what were the most common
pieces of feedback? Well, the number one piece of feedback is that
Uni, the main character, moves too slowly. In some levels that require running
back and forth across the screen, it can be pretty boring to just slowly
perambulate from left to right and back again. And you know what? I do agree. I mean, it's no coincidence that I have a
secret run button when playing in debug mode. I've just hesitated to change it because
changing Uni's speed would break several puzzles. But I learnt this lesson in the previous video. Sometimes you just have to take the difficult
decision, put in the work, and fix the thing. So I upped Uni's max speed
from nine to about eleven. That's pixels per second, maybe? I
don't actually know what that number is. But that's a 20% speed increase,
and I think it does the job. I just now need to go through the
whole game and tweak things to stop you from breaking puzzles with your new max speed. Up next, a large number of people
were confused about whether or not they needed to take Magnus with
them at the end of this puzzle. Fair enough. So I changed his dialogue and had
Uni squeeze through a small gap, which I've previously telegraphed as
being too tight to take Magnus through. So this level, which I've talked
about a lot in a previous video, actually just does not make
sense anymore, I don't think. It has gone from being surprisingly difficult to being so simple that multiple people
said it breaks the flow of the game. So I'm gonna either move it, or
just pull it from the game entirely. But then, you know what the next most
common piece of feedback was about? This completely trivial, unimportant,
background water dropping animation. So many people thought that the
low framerate animation looked off. Like a lot of people. Same with these completely
pointless nuts and bolts. I got a lot of feedback about them, like how
they should make a sound when they hit things. And while both of these would normally be extremely low down on my list
of things to fix, go on then. I've changed the water dropping animation,
and now the nuts and bolts make sound. And look, maybe this is because when
you ask people to provide feedback, it's sometimes just a lot easier to point at
and describe trivial background things like water dropping rather than more general high
concept stuff like level flow or difficulty. Or maybe it's because the demo is just at a level
where it is overall fine, maybe even kinda good, and that the only thing to really talk about
now is tiny trivial background animations. I will happily take that. And so, with that said, that was
my Steam Next Fest experience. And the question is, would I recommend it? Yes. Because even though it was pretty
demoralising to see my game hidden under a pile of hundreds and
hundreds of amazing indie games - and let's be honest, my game
would be hidden even more if I wasn't a YouTube guy with a million subscribers - despite that, Next Fest still was worth it. Because for one thing, I got loads
of fantastic feedback from a wide range of people, all of which
will help improve the game. Plus submitting the game to Next Fest felt
like a practice launch for the actual game. I got to figure out all of the
weird quirks of Steamworks, and so the actual real launch
should be a lot more smooth. And perhaps most importantly of all, it just
gave me a really strict deadline to hit. It forced me to get a big chunk of the
game ready, polished, and presentable. And so I'm actually in a pretty good place. I'm not going to hit the July or August
deadline I mentioned in the previous video, sorry, but the game really will
be done in the next few months. So hopefully on the next episode of
Developing we will talk about the final, final stages of game development. I hope you will join me. Subscribe to this YouTube channel
so you don't miss an episode, and of course, please wish list the game on Steam. Thank you so much for watching, I'll see you soon.
