#nzgamedev

[urukyra]

My friend just launched their game on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/1078270/Sprocket_Rocket_Rumble/ it's been a privilege watching it go from creation to polished product . . . . . #fun #gamedev #indiedev #multiplayer #BattleRoyale #fastandfurious #nzgamedev #womeningames #girlsbehindthegames https://www.instagram.com/p/B2yKwaZnbNE/?igshid=14ktgczxscudx

[jimaroonie]

Air Tennis v0.2 playtesting at #NZgamedev meetup!

[monkeypatchtech-blog]

Ludum Dare, Ecosystem Game, and a dev blog

Ludum Dare 35 results are in for Polymorphic Menagerie, and I don’t have a dev blog yet. Let’s fix that!

So, 3 weeks ago I made a critter-caretaking game over a span of 48 hours, for the Ludum Dare game jam. I’m quite happy with how it turned out, and I think I can do interesting things with it. I’m currently working on a sequel/full version, which will be a mixture of a virtual pet and an ecosystem/ranch sim. No name as of yet.

I DO, however, have a project plan for the game. Currently, this exists as a wall of post-its. Good enough for a solo dev, right?

The plan is to use this Tumblr blog as an official dev blog. I’m also on Twitter as soron_dev, where I’ll likely be posting more off-the-cuff stuff (as well as smaller updates on the game).

[urukyra]

Yes, another free game, Curse of Anubis. It's an endless runner, made in 2018 by five of us. Launched just now on https://jaegrace.itch.io/curse-of-Anubis #endlessrunner #freegame #2dgame #indiegame #nzgamedev #madewithunity #egyptiangoddess #anubis https://www.instagram.com/p/B6pz-VNn0SF/?igshid=13pjs01k1wjrz

[urukyra]

My first day with Marvelous Designer... Loving it! . #cuteanimal #marvelousdesigner #noob #gamedev #indiedev #nzgamedev #npc #indiegames #ai #clonethegame https://www.instagram.com/p/ByUR78fn-di/?igshid=1wx2zuhpcm4hu

[urukyra]

Progress! Menus! Hampsters! Cube delivery service!

Oops reads like an intro to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (thanks for all the fish...). No! No, its a nice game! Hampsters are NOT on the Menu. 

Last week our intrepid playtesters busted out all the moves. @spritersblock threw cubes off the catwalk; without them its not possible to finish the game (our tutor says = instant course fail). Then he jumped into the abyss below, and wandered off into the surrounding cave, making it an entirely different game (like Jim Carrey in the Truman Show).   

So we tasked our trusty navmesh agents, the hampsters, with the dire responsibility of securing our passing grade: deliver crucial lost cubes to the right places so the player can finish the game. Now these being hampsters of very little brain, need explicit instructions via C# code...suffice to say I was ecstatic when they finally did what I wanted! 

One problem: everything worked fine on Level 1, but on Level 2 the cubes slowly dropped below the hampster-agent, so when she dropped it at your feet it fell through the floor down to the level below. A “fail” by any measure. So I tentatively wandered over to our tutor Woody and said “When my hampsters deliver cubes...” He stopped me and said "I love this sentence already”.

I love being in an industry where weird sentences are a regular occurrence. Actual things friends have said: "Today I get to animate the avocado!”. Or.. “I can’t get the penny-farthing back inside the spaceship.”  

“...and when she puts the cube down it falls through the floor". As teammate Jordan patiently explained, the obvious answer is to turn off gravity. Of course. As you do. Silly me. 

So now you can still solve the puzzle even if you go a bit wild with what is clearly a "highly dangerous" cube. I hope you to keep it "This way up!". 

PSA ...no actual hampsters were harmed in making this game. 

I added theme music and ambient sounds (thanks John French's free audio asset download). And I made some UI based on freebie panels from GameMakers Toolkit (eg Credits page). 

Then I made (Illustrator CC) some 'cube' panels (eg Pause Menu and Settings). 

They might not be Picassos but all the buttons respond to hover and click, and  function as advertised. 

 So the game basically functions & I am a much happier camper this week. Alpha launch in one week!  

Clone. The Game.

[urukyra]

DevLog5: Big Announcement! Today is Launch Day for Goodest Boi (previously known as Lost in A Forest)

I’m sooo excited to announce the game is finished and is hot off the press NOW up on itch.io here, for you, our thousands of loyal alpha fans to download for free! It’s official name: Goodest Boi...

Please download it, unzip it, and leisurely wander around inside the world we have made. Enjoy! Feedback.appreciated.

[urukyra]

Lost in A Forest Game DevLog 4

A video clip of the beta build of our game.....I hope you notice at the end the new volume sliders for each of the audio asset types. I started with Alexander Zolov’s excellent simple tutorial here. However, I’d spent quite a bit of time tweaking the volumes to balance the various audio in the game. I had to do actual maths to adjust the script for the different maximum volumes for each AudioSource, adjusting each maximum volume in proportion to its initial volume setting. I was pretty pleased with myself for getting that done in one class. 

I also followed a great series of Brackeys tutorials on making menus, including one that helped me with making the UI stretchy, and sized for different monitors. Since I don’t have a downloadable build yet, only time will tell if that worked!

From Vinnie’s lovely storyboard art,  Kyle created two .mp4 scenes (an intro and outro) that tell the story behind the game. Up to then we had mostly been working in separate Main Menu and Game scenes (with Scene Fusion TM). So of course, Murphy’s Law, when we were under pressure, and put them all together, everything broke. When a scene loads, it resets various settings, which breaks, among other things, the audio and UI systems...

Kadin did  the heavy lifting on debugging each bit; I (for example) fixed the lock cursor settings (described last devlog), restarting the particle effects, and ensuring the scene names in the build settings match the loadscene script...so between us on Friday the game was ALL WORKING!! Yay!! 

I also created a “Escape to Skip” panel for the new intro, for when a player doesn’t want to go through the intro again. An issue that I have identified, but haven’t yet fixed, is that it takes about 7 seconds to load the game, and given the long intro we have the potential to load it in the background using  LoadSceneAsync and allowSceneActivation - that’s first thing on my list for tomorrow.

It’s currently being playtested, so once we get feedback sorted, we'll be putting this game up on itch.io. Maybe as soon as a week or so ..

So watch this space!!! You saw it first here.

You can also follow me on

Twitter @JayneMGale 

Insta @JaeGrace0

I’m also devlogging on another game on itch.io https://itch.io/t/407942/minatoa-an-exploration-puzzle-game

[urukyra]

Devlog 3 Lost in a Forest: UI

I got the navmesh dog barking properly (switched to a Coroutine) I got busy on getting the UI to function. I’d made a Figma wireframe of the proposed workflow.

The team’s feedback was we just needed: 

a Main Menu with a a Start, How to, Quit (and later we realised we needed Credits); 

on the game scene a Pause Menu with Resume, Main Menu and Quit. 

I added a confirm Quit to these Quits because, I roll like that. (As in ...I make enough stupid mistakes that hitting the quit by accident seems all too personally relevant.)

The team also decided to make intro and outro clips instead of a win screen and backstory. Vinnie and Kyle were tasked with that.

Vinnie had made a set of lovely UI assets. Hooking these up into a set of screens was a treat. I liberally used the great UI tutorials that Blackthornprod has made for example this one on main menus. 

I also created three screenshots from the game itself as placeholder backgrounds, which the team liked enough to keep. 

The main hiccup was that the cursor kept disappearing and turning non-functional after entering the game scene. Turned out (thanks to my buddy Sean) that the lock cursor checkbox in Unity’s standard first person controller (FPC) works in Update, and continually over-rides my instructions to unlock the cursor. 

Solution: uncheck the FPC cursor lock setting, add a line to the FPC script to set the cursor lock for the player in Start, and Bob, as they say, was my auntie. So now take a wee look at the Main Menu and Pause Menu IN ACTION! 3,2,1...

[urukyra]

Alpha trailer of a game by my friend Hamish... Looks like it'll be atmospheric

#gamedev #indiedev #nzgamedev #Alphagame #vrgame