Sunday, September 27, 2015

Here's to a great partnership with Back To Basics Gaming

I'm extremely happy to report that we've signed with Daniel from Back to Basics Gaming as our publisher :D


We have discovered that we're a tad lacking in the marketing department. We're extremely new in the indie dev industry. We basically only entered into it in the middle of 2015 - needless to say, we don't know many people yet.

What's great about Back to Basics Gaming is that they take over the marketing and PR for our games - freeing up our time to do what we love to do - making games! Not having to worry about those things will really help a great deal!

Dan has already taken over Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant (check it out, the game is on sale at the moment for $0.15!), and our future titles we'll definitely leave in his capable hands as well.

It was a good week!

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Massive FREE collection of Assets for you Unreal 4 devs out there

As you probably know by now, our engine of choice is Unity (did you know it's just Unity, and not Unity3d like so many people out there tend to call it?). But I just had to mention about this asset that just became available on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. It's a massive asset set for Infinity Blade, you know, that awesome mobile 3d game? Check it out:


The image above obviously doesn't include stuff like sounds and effects.

Oh, and did I mention that it's FREE? DAMN!

Here's a snippet from the blog post over on the Unreal site:

You’re probably wondering what all is included for the production budget to amount to millions of dollars in content. It’s enough to make an awesome game! Here’s the TLDR on the 7,600 assets shipping in eight packs (all characters are compatible with our standard skeleton):

  • Infinity Blade: Grass Lands is the earthy citadel adorned with stone set pieces and beautiful props.
  • Infinity Blade: Ice Lands is the wintery fort set deep within a glacial enclave.
  • Infinity Blade: Fire Lands is the radiant castle interior laced with unforgiving paths, dramatic props and flowing lava.
  • Infinity Blade: Warriors includes loads of assets for crafting fierce heroes.
  • Infinity Blade: Adversaries has even more content for a making wide variety of rivals.
  • Infinity Blade: Effects gives you visual effects ranging from fire and smoke to lightning and magical reactions.
  • Infinity Blade: Sounds includes thousands of raw audio files and sound cues. 
  • Infinity Blade: Weapons presents a vast array of melee weaponry, including never-before-seen swords and axes and also a few Infinity Blade fan favorites.
That is a super cool set of assets for your game if you're an Unreal guy or gal, so check it out here: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/free-infinity-blade-collection-marketplace-release

And here are links to the individual assets:
Let's all give a massive thanks to the developers of Infinity Blade for being so generous! And have fun making cool stuff with these awesome assets!

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Some progress for Catch a Falling Star

I am very happy to report that we're making excellent progress on Catch a Falling Star! Our plan is to have a playable alpha version available for the public to test very soon - within a week or two.

The main platform we'll be using once the game is finished to store stuff like high scores, currency balances and inventory will be PlayFab, but until then we are just going to have a very basic High Score system. We're thinking in the line of simply entering your name after a game and it gets posted to a online server and stored in a MySQL database or something like that.

Luckily, I've already figured out how to do just that, Unity has a really cool WWW class which makes posting data to a website url extremely simple, and getting the result of that back into the game is just as easy.

Then, we had to redo the way the baskets work in the game. Baskets will purely be a cosmetic thing, and one won't be better than the other in terms of game play. But, the little snag we ran into is luckily now sorted. Not all of the baskets have been created equal, they all differ slightly on how they look. To give you an example, this is the default basket that will be unlocked when you first play the game:


Very simple. However, we have some baskets that look a bit different, and don't fit into this "template" for lack of a better word. See this one for example:


The part that catches the star is not in the center anymore because of the cup's ear. So, having each basket as one element wasn't going to do the trick, so we have decided to split them up, and have each one consist out of 5 parts. See here:


This solves our problem, and at the same time also gives us a bit more free reign when it comes to creating new baskets. Basically, the part in the middle is the main section of the basket (or cup in this case hehe). Our various colliders are part of that section, and if the basket happens to have additional parts in the outside, they'll be there, but won't affect anything else except for the aesthetic of it all :)

We had to replace about 3 of them though, but the end results are great!

Also, I added a moon to the main menu screen, just to spruce things up a bit - and it moves wow! It moves slowly across the sky. Here's a short clip demonstrating it, as well as some game play :)