I made a game about magnets (Developing 16)

Hi, my name's Mark and I made a video game about magnets. It's called Mind Over Magnet, it's available on PC and Mac, and if I did absolutely everything right it should be available to buy right now on Steam. But before you run away and buy like 16 copies for yourself and your friends and everyone who lives on your street, let's just take a moment to look at the final, final steps I had to go through to get this game onto Steam and into the world.

♫ Music ♫

Okay, so in the last episode of Developing I said that I had locked the content down. I had to stop myself from making any new features or mechanics or puzzles or cutscenes or anything else. I had to work on polishing the content I had already made. But I did want to make one final little addition to the game. You see, one of the most influential things on creating Game Maker's Toolkit was the developer's commentary system in Valve games like Portal and Left 4 Dead.

When you've got this mode turned on you get these little audio commentary nodes that when you click on them someone from Valve will pop up and tell you how they made that bit of the game. And this feature just completely opened my eyes to game design as a craft. When these clever people from Valve talked about creating game mechanics or teaching things to the player, about guiding their eye, about creating puzzles, or running play tests, it just blew my mind and it kicked off a lifelong obsession with learning about game design.

And seeing as that obsession took me all the way through my game journalism career, through to making Game Maker's Toolkit and making all of these videos, all the way up to making my first proper Steam game, I thought it was only fair for me to put a developer commentary system into my game as well. So if you finish Mind Over Magnet you'll be given the option to play through the game again with developer commentary turned on.

Now there are these little speakers in some of the levels and when you use them you'll get a voice note from me telling you how I made that part of the game.

But okay, that really was the very last feature and now it was time to do one of the most important things - root out all of the bugs. So I put together a crack team of testers on the GMTK Discord and had them run through the game with a fine-tooth comb looking for any problems, bugs, or issues they could find. No matter how big or how small, just tell me about it. And they found a lot of bugs. Like, there were almost 100 things for me to look at, including if you turn off the magnetism just before Magnus connects he'll bounce off the ceiling at an awkward angle.

If you mash the change polarity button on this level the platform can get stuck midway. And this one actually came from an anonymous tip via email from someone who played the Next Fest demo, but if you bind move to the mouse scroll wheel you can rapidly scroll the mouse to make Uni speed along like a jet engine. Now I wanted to fix all of the bugs but I had to make sure I was spending my time wisely, so I put all of them into a spreadsheet and gave them a score from 1, meaning inconsequential visual glitch that doesn't really matter, all the way up to 5 for critical game-breaking bug that really needs to be fixed.

Then I could rank the spreadsheet in numerical order and make sure I started by working on the really important game-breaking stuff before running out of steam and just kind of going "eh, it'll be fine". Now some bugs were pretty easy to fix, others took a lot longer to root out, diagnose, and solve, and there were some bugs where I thought I had fixed them, only to find that my fix had created a bug somewhere else in the game, so we had to go through several rounds of QA testing to make sure everything was fine.

But after a few weeks of that my playtesters either found all of the bugs or just got bored and moved on because there were no new bugs coming in and I was able to put together the final release build and upload it to Steam.

That also meant that I could request a bunch of Steam keys to give out to friends and family and members of the press who have very generously written reviews and done interviews with me and written features about the game, none of which I have read because none of them have been published as of the time of me recording this little video that I'm doing a week ahead of launch. Fingers crossed they're all very positive and not at all mean about the thing I have spent the last three years of my life working on.

Anyway, I'll save all of that stuff for the inevitable "how did the game do" video that will come out in a few weeks time. And so now, all that is left for me to do is to go into Steamworks and press that big green "release the game" button. I think it's green, I haven't actually looked at the button, I'll put up a video of the button now. Is it green? You tell me.

And so, here we are. The game is finally out, it's done, it's released, people are hopefully downloading it, buying it, playing it. What a wild ride. Because I announced my plan to make a game at the end of 2021 and it was not supposed to take this long, but here we are three years later. And so after making character controllers and level editing tools and user interfaces, transition shaders, sound effects, and puzzles, after releasing prototypes and builds and demos, after getting feedback and bug reports and advice, after changing the game's genre and after changing the game's entire art style, after all of that, it is done.

Now of course I could not have done this alone, so I wanted to take a moment to thank all of the people who helped me get to this point. That includes Zach Jones who put together an incredible original soundtrack that just elevates this game to a whole new level of quality, Grayson Evans made the awesome promotional artwork, Rahul Gandhi provided legal services for contracts, my dad made me a 3D animation of a giant robot arm which I incorporated into the background of World 4, TheGamingBrit suggested the name of the game, and various GMTK Discord people helped with chunks of code, including Sophie Stevens and Dom Harris.

I'd also been remiss not to shout out a few Unity assets I just couldn't live without, including Text Animator from Febucci Tools, DoTween from DemiGiant, and my custom scene picker from Kira Lord. I ran so many playtests for this game and people were so generous with their time, so thank you to all of my friends and family members and GMTK Discord users and social media strangers who recorded themselves playing through the game.

I also got so much amazing feedback and advice from professional game makers, including Patrick Traynor, Oliver Granlund, Austin Wintory, Alan Hazelden, Jonas Tyroller, and more. Thank you for sharing your experiences and listening to my problems and my woes. And finally, a massive thank you to my supporters on Patreon who literally funded the game and gave me the time and space to make this whole dang video game. Okay, enough chat, I really hope you take the time to check out the game.

It's available on PC and Mac as I say, and it also runs really nicely on a Steam Deck if you've got one of those. I made sure it fills the screen fully and all of that good stuff. I will be back in the future with a full post-mortem on this whole project, but until then, thank you and have fun.