Well we did it! After months of polish and shine, our first game Snavi is finally up on the Apple iOS app store! It's completely FREE! We are so excited to be sharing this with the world!
Seeing this screen makes us so happy! The game is actually released!
Well, okay, *virtual pat on back* ... now back to work!
Work on new game
Last week was Thanksgiving, so we gave our fingers a welcome break from the hustle-and-bustle of the keyboard world. But we didn't take a break from game design!
We started brainstorming ideas for our next game. This is an exciting phase in game development because we can let our imaginations run wild with ideas small and large, many of which we probably can't realistically get done in our time frame. But it is still important for us to bring out all of our ideas in the early phases of game design. This way, we can take all of our ideas, ask ourselves "What is feasible given the amount of time we have?", and begin chiseling away at it until a real do-able game starts to emerge.
Chiseling away until we see our game underneath the layers of ideas!
Our next game is going to be much cuter than our previous game Snavi. Mary has started designing our next character, and based on the early prototype, we are thinking about naming her "Pumpkin" :-)
Our loveable protagonist, affectionately known as Pumpkin.
I also got a chance to start working on our "area effect" system. In our game, different objects will affect the environment around them, such as temperature, water rate, light rate, etc. Not only that, but certain effects may overlap. For instance, you could have an object heating up the air around it, and another object cooling it down. In the middle of the overlap region, the temperature should be the average of the temperatures around it.
I managed to get the prototype working fairly quickly. In the below GIF, the red bubble is a 100 degree F zone, the white bubble is a 32 degree F zone, and the blue bubble is a .75 M/S water rate (example is heavy rain or something...although that's a lot of rain!).
As Pumpkin walks through each environment, her stats change based on the environmental manipulators' stats.
Unity MonoScript shenanigans
For our next game, I have been experimenting with an idea to have XML elements loaded at game startup dictate which Unity components get attached to instantiated game objects during initialization. I also wanted us to have some level of control in the Unity inspector over which scripts are actually used for the components depending on which XML property is used.
This lead me to the Unity MonoScript object!
I'm going to write a full tech tip on MonoScript in the near future, stay tuned!
But to give a brief summary, MonoScript objects are basically objects that represent a script type, not a instantiated script itself. The are also fully serializable for inspector view! This allowed me to have an inspector field where I specify which script I want to instantiate at runtime without actually requiring an object of that script instantiated in our scene first!
Inspector field specifying a script that I want to instantiate as a component, it's a MonoScript type.
Follow us on Twitter to get updated when we publish the MonoScript tech tip!
For this feedback Friday, we reviewed a demo of an upcoming game Dissension by @DisguisedGames. We LOVE pixel point-and-clicks, and this game shows great promise! The atmosphere, the music, and the beautiful pixel art left us wanting more, so we can't wait to see the full game! Below are some of the screenshots during our playthrough. Definitely check out the game on itch.io and leave the developer your feedback!
One thing that stood out was that the inventory system in this game was very unique. Instead of a typical "slot-based" inventory, you actually get a bag and real pockets where things fit. This helped with the immersion and honestly I would like to see more games with this style (at least in games where this type of system makes sense - not all games should, but for this one it definitely worked well).
Awesome inventory mechanic
Dissension by @DisguisedGames is available as a demo on itch.io here, check it out!
Interesting Links
Over the past week I discovered the fabulous YouTube series "Clark Tank" (see the playlist here). They go into deep dives on current trends in the industry and such. It's very useful for research for figuring out what type of game would do well in the current market!
While watching that series, they were discussing a new site called Game Data Crunch (https://www.gamedatacrunch.com/). It's a tool for selecting various tags / genres of games and seeing all the public data on them in a curated manner. I used it to determine how crowded the market is for our upcoming "cute"/"UwU" casual game. It was super helpful! I was able to see all the released titles on the charts, how many reviews they have, and a bunch of other meta-info. I highly recommend it!
That's it for this devlog! Have an amazing week!
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