They Dared Me To Make A Game...

I'm a 3D artist and in this video I made the biggest mistake of my entire career 4 years ago I posted this image on the Battlecat subreddit it's my favorite mobile game as you can guess from The Nightmare fuel but unfortunately Battle Cats never saw my post hey Daniel we're big fans of your work and we're wondering if you'd like to make us a 3D Battle Cats game as a promotion no I can't I've hardly touched a game engine in my entire life hey Battle Cats I would be happy to do it just let me

know when you need it done by 3 weeks I mean there's no way game development is that hard well guess we're starting from scratch how to make a game 12 hours that's light work too easy I spent the first day figuring out what I'm even supposed to do with this stuff you think blender has a lot of notes boy do I have news for you I also had to learn an entire coding language apparently it's similar to python you know what else is made in Python NASA wait that's not NASA check it out I made

parkour simulation you you can't jump over the first blender time I made the basic cat model based on the mascot of the game I cooked up some cell shading and now all we need is this outline effect I've made one or two shaders and blender so I'm not too worried about you have to code the shaders you have to learn openg GL and code your own shaders why did they let me do this well that's two languages learned for one video at least it works now and I don't have to why do I even speak

at this point So the plan is basically an open world battle simulator in the game you build an army of cats to fight eldrich Horrors and conquer the entire world so I'm I made the basic chasing and health and knock back oh that's not look how they just go flying all we're keeping it approved green l in the spirit of minimalism I wrote this deranged 500 line script attached to every single unit on screen battlecats units have a lot of different stats and attributes and I went through and scripted each and every one of them

it's not clean it's not optimized but at least it works never mind I started making the dog next it's kind of a difficult shape to make in 3D since my only reference image is this Random 3D print from 5 years ago but I got the job done and now the real work begins they were getting stuck a lot so I tried to give them a little jolt whenever they this is fine I can work with this okay now they're making Towers I didn't program that they're just pink cat that's a real classic basically just make

a Tic Tac and then you're done this guy has area attacks which I think was a pain to implement my notes just say drawing cryptic glyphs and symbols with this image attached so I don't know what I did but it works now so that's good you know what it is starting to look like a real battle now let's completely Break It Battle Cats goes up to 100 units at once so I want to do about the same limit at 60 FPS currently I'm not quite there almost though I found this cool thing called the profiler

that shows you how long every part of your code takes as it turns out my problem is all of the code let's say you have two teams of three and they all need to know where the closest enemy is simple just measure the distance to the other team and pick the lowest one that's 18 calculations total make it teams of 50 and now we're up to 5,000 calculations every single frame this is going to run worse than cyberpunk I made a grid based system where units only get updated if something in the area triggers it

and they only check the nearest sector and there's a maximum on top of that all right moment of truth still fine I guess I'll move the 4 million quad toothbrush 100 units is running smoother than my brain right now but can we do even more I kept optimizing until I forgot what grass looked like and started clearing even bigger numbers 150 units 200 units 3 300 units all right 300 dogs versus big tank who will win oh with that the first week was over but I spent so much time optimizing I kind of forgot to

make a game that you can play at least it's not going to get any more difficult right right week two rise and shine ladies and gentlemen Battle Cats has more than 700 different cats most of them have second third sometimes fourth evolutions and right now we have three yikes I only have six pages of them myself but basically you're working with six Rarities you got the normal cats normal being maybe a poor choice of words all the way up to Ubers and legends which these are just that's just a normal cat why is this even

in the game they are the most powerful and rare units to get but there's more than 250 of them and it would take me like 2 weeks just to model one so I started just going down the list of normal cats and I guess we'll just see how far we get axe cat has better attack and uh an axe gross cat has nothing gross about it cowc cat is really fast bird cat can just fly oh no what what what have I done how is this even possible oh yeah remember the part where I got

this up to 300 units and wasted way too much time on that 400 units 500 unit 600 unit 700 units plus and 1,000 at 40 okay I'm done now I'm sorry Fish Cat this one's a solid pick get him in the game lizard cat I've been told this doesn't actually look like a lizard uh yeah okay ever heard of Google wait Titan cat this one has fingers so it's my least favorite to model but I can't stay mad at that face get in there finally I made B aluga he's way more expensive and less powerful

than the others but trust me there's a reason for this these already look insanely good especially since they're the most basic designs from the entire game we didn't even get to the real stuff oh what a cute cat I wonder what that button [Music] does man I love this game I'll link it in the description it's free and you should play it after a long week of modeling and painstakingly optimizing these things vertex by vertex there's only one thing that can come next and that's more model what are we just going to have one enemy

I've got a lot of personal favorites but I got to keep it simple since I'm running out of time so I only made the snake those guys the pig the bear the red snake the Unspeakable Saint Pig and assassin bear and it only took me oh no it is pretty cool just to watch them do their thing but that's not really a game so what do we do about that boom you play as a sphere hear me out I spent like a whole day learning about interfaces so I could remake the game's battle system one

to one you can press the number keys to summon specific cats or you can even click and drag like this you can go first person mode you can zoom out for a better overhead Vision but we're still missing a couple things number one the entire world it's finally week three so I need two things to wrap this up environment and progression I started mocking up an upgrade screen in Photoshop and yeah this one took a while I spent like 4 hours picking out fonts just to end up buying a font making plugin and making my

own two of them actually I made the tabs in the cat list when you click on them they do a little spin that's maybe a bit much you can spin them around with the mouse the upgrade button shimmers you can have plus levels why is this menu more fun than the entire rest of the game all that's left is the open World part and we've got 3 days awesome I made an actual player model based on gamoto from The Game's Expedition mechanic but I do have an important question are his ears just really long or

does his head just look like that next I started on the island we got Cliffs mountains caves maybe we can put some ruins in here you can't have a grassy field simulator without grass so imagine my surprise when scattering half a million quads of it ended up being kind of a process I wrote some shaders to make it wave in the wind I don't think wind works like that but that's fine I was getting so much done but it still felt like absolutely nothing and I was getting stressed do I continue trying to make an

entire open world before the time is up or do I look Inward and ask myself what was I thinking what possessed me with the audacity to think I was going to make an open world in three new plan I converted my grassy field into an arena platform and there's this big rock right in the middle wonder what it does sound effect instructions what happens when you break the rock boom Q heartbeat Q drone sound and spawn the button and when you step on it pick a random Vector spawn a base Wave 1 just has a

bunch of dogs and when you beat it there's a cage break the cage to unlock the next cat get XP buy more upgrades rinse and repeat I scripted out 50 waves in total and made 10 different base models to pick from it gets pretty hard with multiple bases per wave and you can't take too long or else assassin bears come out and jump scare you there's a main menu there's a safe system you can Sprint now but it's risky because you splat on your face depending on how long you sprinted for this is a necessary

feature and with that it's pretty much a complete game but I want something big for wave 50 so we got to go all the way back to balaluga remember how I said cats can evolve well this cat has a second form and it's uh maybe not a cat anymore balalan pasalan has a special ability that freezes every enemy in a massive range I buffed his damage a little bit hopefully that's enough oh before I send it to the Battle Cats to get their reaction I got some professional game developers to judge my work from 1

to 10 Battle Cats is celebrating their 10-year anniversary so if you want to try it it's a good time since they're giving out a bunch of free stuff during the next couple months download the game for free on iOS or Android using my link in the description please and thank you so yeah you got to temper your expectations a little bit no no my expectations are on the ground anything you show me I'll be impressed by all holy okay okay so like a resource Miner Yep this is so pretty how do you end up in

there I don't free him wa what just happened did I did I did I win o I like the ominous noise I don't know if I want to do this is something going to like come out of it I'm kind of scared oh oh no what what all right the real game begins I like that it's like a pond yes let's go oh oh I got to free him I think I'm going to upgrade this guy straight away o what is that is that like a little snake that's cute oh I died no oh xat

leveled up that's really sick actually I'm liking the art style it is very like breath of the wild ass what the hell is this thing gross cat that's his name mhm that's mean why is he called that he's not gross he's beautiful I'm really surprised how good this looks I don't think I could make youi like this in G I've just been putting it off I think I'm going to upgrade production speed again yeah I've broken your game already a lot of times People's First Games aren't games this is a game oh they're going they're

going okay why are they making a tower what were you saying oh my what is that that model is great I bet the moose and yay oh no no what is that thing oh no oh my God I am extremely impressed absolutely nailed it I really liked a lot that you could click and drag to spawn your cats such a small little thing that most people probably wouldn't even think of it my biggest criticism is probably there's not enough visual feedback room for improvement there graphically it is pleasing to look at the model are pretty

well made I would give it a solid 8 out of 10 it blows my mind that you went from no experience to this in only 3 weeks I think it's cool man one of the more enjoyable parts of the game was kind of anticipating what you'd need to upgrade it's like a meta game within the game hardcoding all of the Waves was a good idea they all felt unique and different but you got like the obvious Jun with the camera it was a little empty I'm going to give it a 7.5 out of 10 the

actual game design the balancing and the feel are really really good the thing that would improve it would be stuff like animations more juice and just polish game development is so big whatever you have been afraid to learn is probably the thing you should go for next in the end I overestimated how much I could do and it was still a lot of work but when people enjoy it after all that work oh my oh got it oh got it it's a good feeling and most importantly Battle Cats loved every last part of the cow

doesn't have UTS wait did I forget no