- [Linus] Took me a while to find that bug.
But yeah, that, that was, that was BS.
That was BS right there.
That was crap.
Game development is notorious for long hours,
job instability and early burnout.
So when Gigabyte reached out to sponsor this video
featuring their AERO 16 and AERO 17 Creator laptops
we thought, "Hey, these things are super powerful.
Why don't we try them out
as a game development workstation?"
I mean, how hard could it really be?
- [Plouffe] It's really hard. Seriously.
- Fun fact.
This guy actually came to us
from the game development industry.
So all right Plouffe,
what did you manage to make
in the 12 hours that I budgeted for this project?
I mean, it's pretty much drag and drop these days, right?
- Sort of actually, I mean, in some ways, yes,
it's a lot easier than 20 years ago.
Instead of creating an engine from scratch,
you can purchase - or depending
on your business model and revenue, even freely use -
a number of development kits
like Unreal Engine, GameMaker Studio
or Unity like we've got here today.
They graciously lent us a Pro license to make this video.
- Yep. That's a pretty normal thing that happens a lot.
- Okay.
- Suck it haters.
- Anyway, that's the game, that's it.
- Yeah. Enough of- enough.
I know better than to think that's the game.
Oh God. Oh my, what is this?
(Plouffe laughs)
Oh my goodness.
- [Plouffe] So when I went to make this guy,
the actual sprite like it didn't work for some reason.
So I had to use a different sprite
for the jumping and falling animations
so it would actually show up.
Otherwise you'd be invisible while you were in the air.
- [Linus] Ah cool. That would, oh-
- [Plouffe] Hell yeah.
- [Linus] So as you guys can see
it's a simple 2D platformer.
Even though Plouffe has game development experience
it's mostly in level design and art.
So rather than trying to, scratch build something
he chose a really excellent tutorial
from Coding in Flow that you guys
could actually also follow along with.
We're gonna have that link down below.
Now that I know that you're a level designer
I actually have much, much higher-
- [Plouffe] Expectations.
- [Linus] Yeah. What's funny about this is that-
- [Plouffe] Please don't.
Please don't have high expectations.
I made it in like 12 hours.
- [Linus] The thing is that, like, now that I know that
someone else did all the animation and programming-
- [Plouffe] Sure.
- [Linus] And that your background actually is level design.
No, I do have high expectations.
I mean, I really feel
like that saw was placed very poorly for-
- [Plouffe] What?
- [Linus] For level flow.
- [Plouffe] Oh sure. Yeah.
This is level one and this should be a lot easier.
(Linus laughs)
- [Linus] Okay.
- Considering the time invested
it is kind of impressive though.
So we used free assets
from the Unity Asset Store.
Namely Pixel Adventure 1 by Pixel Frog,
FREE Casual Game SFX by Dustyroom
and Casual Game BGM #5 by B.G.M.
And there's some pretty cool details in here.
- Yeah. Everything's animated.
The saws are actually rotating.
They're not animated to rotate.
So they're physically like rotating in that space.
One of the problems with that is
that it's got the bounds box
on it or your collision box.
So if the collision box isn't perfectly square
it'll kill you a little differently
based on where the saw is.
It's fully animated, there's background music.
I added like an actual start screen.
There's a end screen for when you get to the end.
See there's the checker flag, you're a winner.
And if this was actually built out
the quit button should actually close the game.
Right it doesn't do anything because we're just
in Unity and it's called Jump for Joy.
It's the best game ever.
It's not.
- [Linus] I mean this is really cool.
So whether it's an indie, AAA,
or project that lies somewhere in between
you can use these types of templates
as a base to start from, and then slowly add maps,
unique gameplay mechanics, hazards, and enemies
and bring your creation to life.
I mean, it is really cool
when you think about how someone
with absolutely zero experience could come in
and create something like this though.
- [Plouffe] Yeah.
It, it might take them a few more hours.
A few tutorials in,
I was actually starting to move forward a little bit
on my own 'cause I
- [Linus] 'Cause you remembered how to do it?
- [Plouffe] I remembered how to do it.
Yeah. Not, not so much the coding aspect
of it because I was never a programmer.
I didn't do well in all my programming classes
but I can follow a script,
and I know when to look
for missing things that should be there.
- [Linus] Tell me something though.
How does the sponsor fit into all this?
- [Plouffe] So developer kits and engines,
they have become a bit more robust over the years
but you still need assets
and you need code to tell those assets what to do.
So you write your own code in Visual Studio
for C, and then for smaller games or light scripts
it doesn't take a lot out of processing power.
A general rule is that outside of specific roles
like audio design and, you know, high poly model creation
you only need a bit more performance to develop the game
than your recommended specs to run it.
And the main reason you even need that extra bit is
that the optimization happens at the end.
- [Linus] Which would be why so many games end
up being left poorly optimized
because that's when you ran outta money.
I mean, what percentage of the game development process is
that tidying everything up optimization?
- It's the 80/20 rule, right?
80% of your work is happening at the end of the project.
- [Linus] So then what we showed here today - no offense -
could have been done on a pretty basic laptop.
- [Plouffe] Yeah.
- [Linus] But with either the AERO 16 or the AERO 17, I mean
would you say we've got enough grunt to deal
with AAA game development
like a God of War or Horizon level game?
I mean, they've got a Core i9, RTX 3080 Ti level
mobile GPU DDR5, desktop class performance, right?
- [Plouffe] Yeah. I mean, obviously
we didn't have the assets
on hand to load up a project like that.
But from my past experience, other than
waiting longer when making major changes or compiling code
or building the project, the experience isn't
that different compared to a high end desktop.
- [Linus] Obviously the biggest benefit
of using a laptop for our project like this
is the portability and built-in battery.
I mean, last Friday we actually lost power to our building.
- [Plouffe] I had to leave. My apartment still had power
so I basically saved the project,
packed the laptop up and headed home.
Luckily it wasn't raining,
but if you got caught in the rain with a laptop
make sure to get subscribed
for our upcoming video about laptop repair.
- [Linus] Yeah. That one's gonna be really good.
Colin's working on that.
We've got a bunch of different laptops
and we're gonna like simulate horrible situations
and see how bad it is to repair them.
Now, I don't know what your deal is here.
Maybe you just wanna flex a little bit
but you said I'm supposed to try your student project next.
- [Plouffe] Oh yeah, sure.
So if we have time - not to flex -
- [Linus] Let's do it, let's do it. I wanna try it.
- [Plouffe] All right, all right.
All right, it's great.
- [Linus] Heroes of Space, here we go.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Wow. I'm getting like a very Captain Keen kind of vibe.
- [Plouffe] Yeah. We were going for like Metal Slug meets
like Captain Keen or something similar.
There's a weird bug where his- what's going on there?
Oh my God. Okay. That bug's not supposed to happen.
- [Linus] What? Keep going. That-
- [Plouffe] So those are the projectiles and I don't know-
but I don't know why they're getting stuck.
It worked fine at home.
Oh my God. Okay. Something's messed up.
Maybe it's the aspect ratio or something.
- [Linus] Oh, whoa.
I just gotta go right up to him.
I mean what's the point of the gun, if you have to-
- [Plouffe] It's broken.
- [Linus] Sword gun. I mean he did work on Gears.
- [Plouffe] It's broken.
I've worked on real games.
This, this one is a real game.
It's just also super broken.
- [Linus] Did I die?
Am I stuck here?
- [Plouffe] No, I think you're stuck.
Can you shoot 'em? Can you shoot 'em and kill 'em?
- [Linus] Nope.
- [Plouffe] You're just slowly taking damage.
- [Linus] Oh.
- [Plouffe] Nice.
- [Linus] Are- are they supposed to be shooting at me too?
- [Plouffe] Yeah. Yeah.
All the projectiles are just broken right now.
- [Linus] Oh.
- [Plouffe] I don't know why.
Normally they shoot at you and stuff.
It worked when I played it, I was like, oh sweet.
Everything works still.
- [Linus] And it's like 3D and everything.
- [Plouffe] Yeah. So we-
- [Linus] Ow.
- [Plouffe] Yeah, these guys drop bombs
and they're a little hard to
shoot when your projectiles don't work properly.
- [Linus] Okay. Let's try loading it back up.
I wanna see it working properly.
- [Plouffe] Yeah, sure. Okay.
Now just shoot and see if everything-
Hey, see? I knew it would work.
- [Linus] Wow. It's got like recoil and everything.
- [Plouffe] Yeah, yeah. It's got screen shake.
We worked a lot to actually get that stuff
to feel really good.
There's a whole video by I think Verbia [Vlambeer]
or something where they talk
about like how screen shake and just knock-back
makes a game feel a lot better.
- [Linus] How much fun would it be to play a game
sitting right next to one of the lead developers
so that you can criticize them in-person when things suck.
- [Plouffe] Like a bomb falls on top.
- [Linus] It would be exactly this fun.
And it's great.
Final level.
Ah, is there a boss?
- [Plouffe] There's a boss. Yeah. There's a boss.
(both cheer)
That's pretty much it.
I don't think we really had an end screen anyway.
- [Linus] So a lot of your stuff wouldn't really benefit
from like color-calibrated 4K OLED display.
- [Plouffe] No.
- [Linus] But 16:10 aspect ratio.
Ability to hook up up to three additional displays.
Like there's no way you'd work on a single monitor
and do development.
- [Plouffe] No, no there's too much you need.
- [Linus] So you got two Thunderbolt 4 ports,
one HDMI port with the included adapter ma-jiggy.
It is sort of a bummer
for like a more professional-oriented machine
that you have to have an adapter for ethernet, USB type A,
got a DisplayPort and an HDMI on it.
But at least they include it and it's compact.
So you know, you don't have to like
run out and buy extra stuff.
So then, final question, going back to the first game.
Was making that game easy?
- [Plouffe] God. No.
Oh, you meant the first game.
- [Linus] Yeah.
- [Plouffe] Oh, I thought you meant this one.
- [Linus] No.
- [Plouffe] Oh. Yeah, the first game was a lot easier.
- [Linus] So if you don't mind using pre-made assets
and following tutorials, making a game can be easy
but not only will that barely get you out the door
anytime something does go wrong
due to a missed tutorial step or a typo in your code,
you're gonna have a much harder time troubleshooting.
So for Plouffe,
obviously having enough experience to build something
like the second game we looked at today,
it's gonna help a fair bit.
But if you don't know anything about C#,
you might not know to look for a missing semicolon
or misplaced bracket, let alone something more complex.
So if you've never used Unity or another program
common issues that people might fix every day
could seem as mysterious as our product lineup.
Just what will come next at lttstore.com? Screwdriver?
Ah, no, no, probably other things.
But in the meantime, you can check
out our sweatpants.
Big thanks to Gigabyte for sponsoring this video
so that we could pay Plouffe to develop games.
Once again, this time using the AERO 16 Creator laptop -
not your best work - on top of the great specs
we talked about earlier
it's also just got solid construction
with a CNC'd aluminum body.
It comes with Windows Hello
and Microsoft Azure AI
and Wi-Fi 6E to to make sure
you've always got the best wireless connection
whenever you're not using
the included wired Ethernet connection
when you're downloading or uploading huge asset files.
So you can check it out at the link down below.
Thanks for watching.
Are you a developer looking for something to take
to and from work or are you thinking
about making indie games in your spare time?
Let us know in the comments and if you like this video
make sure to check out our tour of Monolith Productions
from a few years ago to see what a real studio looks
like. Hint, it has a lot of people who look
kind of like this in it, but more, more neck on the beard.
- [Plouffe] Oh, whoa, whoa.