My Biggest Mistake after One Year of Gamedev! | Farewell North - Unity Devlog #15
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- Опубліковано 27 чер 2024
- Wishlist on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/14...
Join the Discord: farewell-north.com/discord
Twitch: / farewellnorth
Twitter: / kylewbanks
Website and Email Newsletter: farewell-north.com
I made a huge mistake.
Over the last year I've been working on Farewell North in a bit of a bubble, sharing progress updates here and on Discord, but without giving anyone else the opportunity to play the game for themselves. Well, that changed this month as the alpha of the demo went out to the very first play testers and the results were (luckily) not as bad as they could have been. Still, there's a lot of room to improve!
In this devlog I'll show you their feedback, what went well and what didn't, and what I'm doing to iterate on the game to incorporate their feedback. Oh, and there's also an update on when YOU can play the demo!
I hope you enjoy the video, and please leave your thoughts down below. Don't forget to like, subscribe and of course, wishlist the game on Steam!
Original Score by John Konsolakis: www.johnkonsolakis.eu
Background Music: Venkatesananda - Jesse Gallagher
Farewell North is my personal passion project, an open world adventure game about restoring color to a dark and desolate archipelago where all color and life has left. You play as a collie working alongside your human companion to explore, solve puzzles, evade monsters, and restore color to the islands.
#devlog #gaming #videogames #indiedev #indiegame #gamedev #unity #unity3d #madewithunity #steam #steamgame #journey #blender - Ігри
Comfy Boy 😍
I believe a comfy boy Easter egg is a necessity for the game
maybe there could be a console in the car or in one of the houses that could be used to play it
can't wait to play! I randomly discovered your channel on youtube when browsing, and have stuck around for a while. keep up the great work :)
Awesome, thank you!
Flying monsters that could track the player at a distance when they reveal color could make an interesting challenge.
oOoOO what sounds really interesting
first time i noticed that the dog's ears move around in its idle animation and !!! i love that
It's always the little things 😊
Great Dev Log! The solution for the gate animation is great! I would intentionally stand there and bark just to see what all she says!
Some of the best perspective puzzles I have experienced were in the Witness, but some were very hard to recognize. I think the key is to have something that becomes associated with the perspective puzzle. Maybe the girl sits on a rock somewhat nearby and gives a indicator line like “I’ll let you explore” when you’re in the puzzle area.
Thank you! The witness is a game I haven't checked out but has been on my list for ages. Perhaps it's time to try it out, for "research" purposes 👀
Kyle banks and codeer. the two horsemen of white silhouette profile pictures.
well i'm honoured to be in the company of codeer :)
For someone who worked in isolation you did an awesome job and it's not too late for taking feedback into consideration.
I'm so glad to have been part of this early playtesting phase ! 😃 Keep it up, dude !
Thanks for all the help testing mate!
Looks great. I'm thrown back (and happy) by how creative the gameplay is and how well the art style has turned out. Being a great developer was known. Being a great art director is a pleasant surprise. Congratulations. Looking forward to seeing the final.
Thanks so much! Seems I learned a few things going back and forth on mobile UIs with you ;)
Great insights kyle! Love the progress, the solution with the girl telling the dog to move is brillian.
Congratulations for making it this far ! , I love how you see your game open mind balance between feedback and working hard on improving.. hope you have fun journey till you the release date. Keep it going.
Thank you! Will do!
Great devlog Kyle! I'm proud to be the car crasher XD
Ahaha thanks for finding that one, and on the first day of testing too!
It could only have been you, crazy mountain driver ! 😉
Comfy Boy! Having three dogs ourselves, my wife and I loved this idea. :D
Fantastic to see the changes you've made based on feedback! Good luck with your demo and test plan.
Thanks Skeffles!
Awesome video! The game looks beautiful as always. It is really kool to see people playing your game and finding the bugs. Them doing something the developer did not expect always fascinates me. Best of luck in finishing the game. Looking forward to it. Keep it up! :)
Thanks so much!
How did I not see this video in my subscription feed?
I've joined the discord so I hope I don't miss out on future videos.
Unfortunately I think a lot of people missed this one, I've been told UA-cam didn't send push notifications for it :/
Welcome to the discord though!
Missed this because I'm on holiday :) But this was a great devlog... just don't be stressed about the feedback. It will all help you shape up the game and we all know you work hard on improving it again and again. The bugs you mentioned were naughty, but somehow to be expected and WAY better than if it ran smooth, but people didn't like the theme or the gameplay. THAT would have been bad news.
We belive in you Kyle!
Thanks so much for the support, hope you had a great holiday!
I don't have my PC yet but as soon as I do this game is heading to my wishlist
Thanks so much! Always exciting to have a new PC on the horizon
Thus will definitely help others 🙂
Thanks 🙏
Hope so!
Thanks for letting me test and grumble about the camera movement!
Thank you for testing and grumbling about the camera movement 🙏
Great stuff!
Love the game, it's so beautiful already!
Thanks Mel!
A thought on random dialogue: As someone else said here, some of us would be tempted to trigger random dialogue options (like the girl's "you're in the way" comments, or her comments while petting) over and over and over again right from the start, just to hear them all. The thing is, if you do that too early, then you become familiar with the dialogue too early and it loses its sense of naturalness and spontaneity when you start hearing it later in the game. I wonder if there's a way of avoiding that, perhaps by limiting the randomisation per situation or with a time. E.g. At a given gate, she says a line once, and thereafter just says, "Chesley..." or just, "..." until a timer runs out, then repeats the same original line. Only at the next obstacle (or after maybe a minute or so - time to force the player to focus on other things) does she move on to the next randomised line. In some ways, that's actually more natural behaviour than simply cycling through a list of comments.
Come to think of it, it's actually a similar concept to the side-quest problem in open-world RPGs - if every open-world option is available from the start, you can get obsessed with side-quests and sometimes that detracts from the gameplay experience, either by destroying any sense of narrative rhythm or by making the main quests too easy when you get to them because you've already levelled up too far, to the detriment of the challenge.
Essentially, there's such a thing as too much freedom and too much randomness. It needs to be present, to create immersion, but to maintain rhythm and narrative sometimes it can be helpful to gently steer that experience.
Potato :)
Thanks for the suggestion! It's definitely a hard balance between being responsive and being "natural." You've got some great ideas here and I'll see how I can try to incorporate them into the game.
very good job mate! 👏👏👏
Thank you Junior 🙌
I can't play the game as I don't have a computer, but I still love this wimsical masterpiece... Keep up the good work.
Thanks for watching, glad you enjoyed :)
The visuals are luscious!
Thank you David!
Just a year eh? That is some serious work. You should be proud.
Thank you very much! Just a year on this but 6 or 7 years of work that led to making this game
Awesome video. The game is looking promising.
Thank you very much, glad you enjoyed
oh man you scared me! I thought you were going to say all your files got corrupted or something :P I'm glad to hear you got some great feedback from your play testers and I'm really excited for future updates!
Ohh noo! Thankfully not haha, plenty of backups to ensure that never happens XD
I've experienced with people complaining about camera controls also. I've sort of figured the more camera/mouse controls you give the better lol. Nice advice about "input value gain"
Haha yeah seems like that's the case. Hopefully I've got some reasonable defaults now, but it's good to know that players can tweak them to their liking.
As an ex professional QA tester - I offered (basically for free) some time ago to help with this if you were looking for any... oh well glad you got some some feedback and some constructive criticism. Not just the usual - looks great, very atmospheric, music is amazing - etc. Good luck with the rest of Alpha / Beta.
First round was just for friends and family, wider rollout is still coming up if you want to join in.
@@kylebanks In a couple of weeks time I have no job - thanks Covid for another loss, so I will have some free time :)
Quality content/video 👍 very chill
Helps me relax
Thanks, glad you enjoyed 😊
@@kylebanks yup keep up the good work 😌
That’s comfy boy of course
UA-cam notifications are kinda fecked. The only notification came from the discord :/
dang it youtube!
I can't wait to play I think the game looks amazing
Thank you very much!
You give me so much inspiration to make my own game. But I can never think of any original ideas.
Thank you! Don't worry too much about being original, just start with an idea you're passionate about and over time it will grow to have your own unique flavour to it. Most game ideas, including Farewell North, are shaped by the experiences we have in other games. It's extremely rare for a truly novel idea to come from nowhere.
@@kylebanks
this is gonna be sick
let's hope!
The game looks very nice for now!
thanks!
@@kylebanks With pleasure!
This is so inspiring
That's awesome, really happy to hear that 😊
Comfy Boy!!
🐕
I love border collies! :D Also, this game’s environment is so pretty!
Thank you ☺️
@@kylebanks :)
this is an awesome looking game, looking forward to playing it. whats the software your using around 6:53? is that bug tracking software?
Thanks! That's GitHub Issues
@@kylebanks thanks, I must check it out
Comfy Boy!! :)
We always learn from our mistakes, this what usually helps us to learn and become better
Absolutely!
Comfy Boy
Comfy Boy😂
he’s lucky he’s living in edinburgh i wish i could live there, when i was there it certainly was a very inspirational place
I am really lucky to be here, it's an amazing place
Hey, quick question, are you using a signed distance field in a shader and editing the material at run time to produce the color restoration effect? And which render pipeline are you using? Thanks!
I'm not using SDFs but that would certainly work, and I'm using URP
I wonder how an camera could be used to both capture the moment in the beautiful scenery and how this item could be used to shape gameplay.
Maybe instead of radial lighting that goes a short range from the dog, a camera could be used to reach out a further but in a narrow field. Could even have a negative effect, say spawning monsters a distance away and attracting them near the location it was used. A negative effect could discourage it's use or make sequential use deadly.
almost like a forward cone shape you mean? Oh and the monster idea is great, that's actually how it works :) They're attracted to any color source, including the little ping, and will attack that first
@@kylebanks A forward cone is good way achieving this idea. Glad you like the monster idea.
Is there any other way to enter for beta testing? I barely use Discord, but I've followed you on everything you've listed and I have been watching you since around late January this year. I'm really excited for this game so if theres anyway I can help beta test I will.
Of course yeah, you've been super supportive and comment on every video. If you're on discord can you DM me, otherwise email me: kyle (@) kwbanks (dot) com
I'll be sure to add you to the list.
I hope you'll be selling the soundtrack. Absolutely loved the music!
Haha thank you but the music in this video is part of the UA-cam audio library, it's not actually part of the games soundtrack 😅
The song is Venkatesananda by Jesse Gallagher
this art style looks promising
but i have a question about this bubble shader transition between colors
whats name of this effect or how u achive it
Thanks! I think I just replied to this question from you on the latest video
Hello, good devlog
Hey, thanks!
🍻
Cheers!
9th!...I guess!
nice
I'm also here. 🙂
would you say that you have completed the game besides bug fixing and testing, or will you still be adding new features?
In terms of the demo it's feature complete, mostly just polish and improvements to be made. For the full game though there is still a lot of content and functionality left to build
Haha, the car crash was fun!
Is this inspired by spirit of the north by any chance?
I wouldn't say so no, but I did play it as part of my research into other similar games in the genre
I know my PC can't run the game but i still added it to my wishlist
Thank you!
@@kylebanks You're Welcome :)
If i get a new PC I'm going to try this game
It a little bit reminds me the first tree
I can see the comparison, but the gameplay is pretty different to be honest
@@kylebanksit just in both games you're an animal and the environment looks similar
Why was the menu bar German?
Recording was from a German playtester, but the settings menu hadn't been translated yet
@@kylebanks makes sense, thank you!
How do I speak out Edinburgh? 1. Edinburur or 2. Edinburg? :)
Edinbruh is the common pronunciation, but anything other than Edinburg is somewhat accepted. Edinburg is a hard no though 😬
@@kylebanks ok thanks! :D
Ah, play testing... I got a friend to test a very early build of a mobile infinite runner I was working on. Got a text a little later: "I got to level 16!"... Meanwhile in my own plays I usually got to level 50+. I tried to replicate his result and discovered that only way to do that was to play the most boring game ever - something like 30 minutes of next to no action. Take-away: the game *really* needs a tutorial and hints.
And yeah, hardware, screen resolutions, input devices... >_<
...and don't talk to me about pause bugs >_< >_< >_
Ahaha yeah testing sure brings out a whole load of unexpected things XD
Second !
so close!
algorithm
🙏
second one here
close though!
How do you make the girl white, but blue? lol
If you're asking technically, basically it's just applying a gradient in her shader
@@kylebanks hmm ok thx i’l look into it :)
First one here👍🏻
Woohoo!
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