 It took me a while to find that, but 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? It's really hard, seriously. Fun fact, this guy actually came to us from the game development industry. So, all right, Ploof, 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, Game Maker Studio, or Unity like we've got here today. They graciously lent us a pro license to make this video. Yeah, 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 God, what is this? Oh my goodness. 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. Ah, cool, that would, oh. Hell yeah. 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. Expectations. What's funny about this is not- Please don't, please don't have high expectations. I made it in like 12 hours. The thing is that like, now that I know that someone else did all the animation and programming, 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 level flow. Oh, sure, yeah, this is level one and this should be a lot easier. Okay. Considering the time invested, it is kind of impressive though. So we used free assets from the Unity asset store, namely Pixel Adventure One by Pixel Frog, free casual game SFX by Dusty Room, and casual game BGM number five by BGM. 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 bounce 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 checkered flag, you're a winner. And if this was actually built out, the quit button should actually close the game. Right now 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. 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. Yeah, 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 remembered how to do it. I remembered how to do it. Yeah, 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. Tell me something though. How does the sponsor fit into all of this? 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 of processing power. General rule is that outside of specific roles like audio design and 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. Which would be why so many games end up being left poorly optimized because that's when you ran out of 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. So then what we showed here today, no offense, could have been done on a pretty basic laptop. 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? 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. Obviously the biggest benefit of using a laptop for a project like this is the portability and built-in battery. I mean, last Friday, we actually lost power to our building. 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 upcoming video about laptop repair. 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. Oh yeah, sure. So if we have time, not to flex. Let's do it, let's do it. I wanna try it. All right. It's great. Heroes of space, here we go. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wow, I'm getting like a very Captain Keen kind of bug. Yeah, we're going for like metal slug meets like Captain Keen or something similar. Oh, there's a weird bug where his, what's going on there? Oh my God. Okay, that bug's not supposed to happen. What is that? So those are the projectiles and 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. Oh, whoa, I just gotta go right up to him. I mean, what's the point of the gun if you have to stick? It's broken. Sword gun. I mean, he did work on gears. It's broken. I've worked on real games. This one is a real game. It's just also super broken. Did I die? Am I stuck here? No, I think you're stuck. Can you shoot him? Can you shoot him and kill him? Nope. You're just slowly taking damage. Oh. Nice. Are they supposed to be shooting at me too? Yeah, yeah. All the projectiles are just broken right now. 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. And it's like 3D and everything. Yeah, so we- Ow. Yeah, these guys drop bombs and they're a little hard to shoot and your projectiles don't work properly. Okay. Let's try loading it back up. I wanna see it working properly. Okay, sure. Okay. Now just shoot and see if everything- Hey, see? I knew it would work. Wow. It's got like recoil and everything. 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 Verbeer or something where they talk about like how screen shake and just knock back makes a game feel a lot better. 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? Like a bomb falls on top. It would be exactly this fun. And it's great. Final level. Is there a boss? There's a boss. Yeah, there's a boss. Oh, oh. Yay. That's pretty much it. I don't think we really had an end screen anyway. So a lot of your stuff wouldn't really benefit from like color calibrated 4K OLED display. But 16 by 10 aspect ratio, ability to hook up up to three additional displays. Like there's no way you'd work on a single monitor in game development. No, no, there's too much you need. So you got two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one HDMI port with the included adapter, the 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 display port 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? God, no. Oh, you meant the first game. Oh, I thought you meant this one. No. Oh yeah, the first game was a lot easier. 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 Sharp, you might not know to look for missing semi-colon 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? 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 word. On top of the great specs we talked about earlier, it's also just got solid construction with a CNC aluminum body. It comes with Windows Hello and Microsoft Azure AI and Wi-Fi 6E 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 liked 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. More Nick on the beard.