hello everybody my name is Julian of flow graphics and this is my game lens Island I'm an indie developer at Brisbane Australia and I've been working on this game for the past two years and now with a friend working on it with me and I've got this idea from BW dev he did a similar video and I thought what a great way to showcase where I'm at now and how far we've sort of come with this game and anyone you watching can see if you get the whole scope and the whole idea of how we
actually built lens Island from the ground up so starting for beginning I drew a lot of different inspiration from totally different games for lens Island I guess the best way you could sort of describe it is a combination of all these games with a whole bunch of things that none of these games have it's hard to explain but the origin of lens Island came from a game I made in university called tension and this is my game that I made as a student and basically all the components and all the building blocks actually started me
sort of making lens Island was this you can see these little weird cloak people running around and this is what lens Island used to be this weird dude here two years ago I'm you can click on trees and knock them down there was a really really basic sort of built base building system where you could build houses and foundations and walls and things and and this was it this was me two years ago I looked looking back this video now it's pretty weird but the whole concept of the game has changed and evolved I used
to have this idea this big sort of circular map spreading out and then now it's split up into islands so there's the player island where you build and create and you can interact with the whole island and build a base or a house anywhere you want on the island then you can go to the town the town's a separate island where you can buy and sell and trade and do quests and interactive all the villages and explore and then there's a dungeon so this is a somewhat of a dungeon crawler game as well and there
is a whole level of dungeons and caves and there's tons of tons of weapons and quests and all sorts of things so it's a multi-faceted game the best way I can explain it is a bit of Base building a bit of crafting a bit of open-world stuff a bit of combat and RPG elements a bit of sims all that like you saw that sort of plethora of game logos before it's a combination of all those things made into one idea it's a big scope but it's the scope I picked and it's what we're creating so
as you saw before the first couple months is really just adapting that original player controller and the sort of the brief sort of structure of the game that I had originally and making it into LANs Island and it didn't take very long to me to actually start to develop a brief and an aesthetic and an idea I downloaded a bunch of low poly asset packs and textures and models and things just trying to get an idea of what I wanted game to look like as I started to build up the systems and the base building
we find the UI and really worked hard to actually develop a concept you can see there's a massive jump in time from three to twelve months and I'll sort of m.i.a for a little bit I stopped working on the game for about six months or eight eight months or so and then I started working on it again a year ago and starting from a year ago I've just started to really pick up the pace because I work full time I have a full time job but from about twelve months in I started to sort of
just really accelerate upwards I started working on the quest system and the dialogue system building out the actual island levels and the town level a little bit building a dialogue system and a whole questing system with the UI with all the different saving in between those different elements and all the different configurations you can have it was really hard for me like you may notice I'm a graphic designer I'm an artist I'm not a programmer or a game designer I do have a degree in game design I did study it though like programming it's not
easy and it's not easy to build all of these like huge monumental systems at a core to the game completely from the ground up I tried a bunch of different sort of asset PacSun and and scripts and systems like for the inventory and for items and things and I ended up just scrapping all of them and just building it all myself because AI just wasn't good enough for game design to use those other systems I didn't understand them properly but B they also just didn't have the functionality that I wanted so like you can see
this is all just testing this is when I very first started to test her enemies a Halak you just saw and trying to develop the town map and first building out that ID and the layout this this also changed but the actual shape of the map stayed pretty much the same as well as building sort of interaction within the game building the UI building care fires and all those objects and really trying to sort of try and create some game loops for the first time make it so you can do a quest you pick up
an item it gets equipped to your hotbar and then you can actually go out and chop some wood and a quest will track how much wood you chop and then you can come back return the quest and cash in your gold adding beds all sorts of interactable items to the game this is the sort of the core focus of this sort of few months leading up to where I am now was trying to sort of develop what the game is and the systems that make it work and you can see the aesthetic slowly adapting and
changing this is when I made the big combat update to the game so I added in a whole bunch of swords and shields and bows to the game and where you can actually properly sort of fight things so that was really fun you could see these enemies that I have I haven't worked too much in the enemies ever since because I've been working on a whole bunch of other systems but I do have a really big combat update that's actually coming to you guys next week so stay tuned for that but you can see I've
just had a lot of mucking around with combat and fighting and trying to figure out what's fun what's not fun what I needed to work on and what sort of direction I wanted to head originally I was honestly thinking of lenss Island as a tower defense game that may surprise me but my original thought process was there's an island that you live on and you can build towers and things are always coming sort of at you from the ocean from all directions and you constantly have to fend them off but it just didn't quite fit
the brief I wanted I wanted a nice serene place where you can build a home for yourself and just sit there by the campfire and then if you want to you can go down into the dungeons and fight things and I think that jus allottee in the game is what's really made it special to me and what I really think people are gonna like about it because you can take the time to to build and just you know knock down trees and and mine some stone and explore the island there's a lot to explore and
a lot of things actually reward you for exploring but you can just sort of live the simple life and cut your wood and make a beautiful home you can farm and then you can sort of sell all that produce to the people in the village and and build like this whole sort of lifestyle for yourself and it's fully customized it's like building a house and sims it's completely tailored to you you can build anywhere in the island and interact with the island however you want so I think farming to the game was a really big
one too that's where you can actually place crops down and there's a whole sort of UI system where there's different farming resources and you can click drag them and plant them and everything's based on a day/night cycle system so you can sleep or you could stay up through the night when it's nighttime and as time progresses throughout the game the world is constantly changing and morphing you know with the crops that you plant they start to grow and grow and you can harvest em a couple days later and the trees you chop down they grow
back so because it's a sort of living breathing world it makes it really interesting and adds a jus ality the game where you can spend the time on your Island building a life for yourself living off the land or you can fight the enemies and go down to the dungeons and treat it more like a dungeon crawler sort of Diablo style game and there will be a lot of content in both of those areas for different types of people and this is where progress started to really speed up for lands Island because I feel like
the first 12 months was a lot of trial and error I had a lot of course systems and things that are created that I knew the game needed no matter what but it really was a big testing phase trying to really hone in the concept for the game and sort of decide exactly what I wanted and this was a really big shift when I went to sort of 18th 19th month mark because I've got a friend this is where I went from a solo developer to to developers this is my friend Mardon he didn't have
a good photo so I created this little stick figure for him and this was huge because I am an artist and I could now create art this was a really big change because I was always developing the systems of programming and doing all the stuff that took up all my time but I didn't have enough time to make any of the art assets so the game progressed really really quickly in the aesthetics because I could make all these beautiful weapons and make all of these assets and it was just a ton of fun and this
is why I just yet I really really started to love making the game even more at this point because Marlin could work on the systems and the programming while I just had fun making art and it's something that I hadn't done for years at this point it was something that I really wanted to do but I just simply couldn't because I had to code I had to develop systems and I can start creating all these assets for building and creating trees and creating cliffs and all the stuff used to actually fill out a level and
all the stuff that you use to build your house in the game I'd use speed tree for the first time and learned how to actually create trees and create sort of foliage and and that was pretty fun I was pretty interesting to have a new tip speed tree before but it's an awesome program I could highly wreck if you haven't used it and yeah this is where things start to get really exciting because the whole aesthetics and the whole sort of visuals of the game really really progressed really fun at the same time Madden was
working on the background changing adapting those systems making them better making them so all the stuff that I made he could sort of remake it from the ground up in a more safe and to sort of like sturdy way where they weren't could it break when we scaled up the game and yeah it look progress is flying ahead well this is about 19 months ago we're about sort of 24 25 months and development now and the password of five months or so is sort of skyrocketed ahead where I've been working really hard on level design
and finishing and actually creating these islands as a main player island that you actually spend a lot of your time on but as well as that actually creating the town and starting to work on the dungeons and all the assets that filled those islands and those those are areas and it's been a pretty crazy journey to think I came from this little cape man two years ago to now to this sort of living breathing environment with all these different sort of ecosystems and things you can do it's pretty awesome and I really really enjoyed making
this game I've absolutely loved creating these YouTube videos and showing you all what the games looking like and taking you all with me and I'm going to continue to do that there's a big road ahead I'm not gonna launch a game until around December so there's plenty more progress to be made and I really want to keep including all of you along with me and get your feedback and try and make the best game that I can with all the views so it's going to be a fantastic journey ahead thank you so much for all
of your support if you've been subscribed for a long time comment frog in the comments if you're new here subscribe for more content as always everybody have an amazing day I'm Julian or flow graphics see you in the next video
