Hello, everyone!

We just published Paw Pals for the GMTK Game Jam 2021. We made this game in less than 48hs and we are really happy with the results. Hope you can try it and have fun with it!

Paw Pals is a game where you manage a bunch of kitties trapped on the top of a tree. Your goal is to investigate enough of the big book of “How to get down of a tree for dummy kitties” while making sure your kitties have enough food.

But here is the catch: Your kitties have personalities and some of them may not be too happy about working with others therefore making them feel more and more stressed. High levels of stress will make the kitties work a lot less so take care of the kitties!

Features:

• Lots of cats to discover and make friends with
• 4 Unique areas
• The big bucket for fishing
• Balloon Bay for sending kitty explorers
• Scratching Posts to lower cats’ stress
• Big book of knowledge to learn how to get down of trees if you are a cat
• Multiple cat traits making the clowder diverse
• Fun for the whole family

Hope you have fun with it and stay tuned for more updates regarding my other projects!

Hello, everyone!

Last time I wrote here we were around the days 45 day of quarantine in my country. Now we are around 110? Not sure really... Well, it can't be helped ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Anyway, in other news, have updates on all the projects I am working on!

Summer Snow Day

Chad already started with the second chapter. Well, actually, he already sent all the scripts and I just have to add them. I didn't start with it yet because we have a last small bug to fix from chapter 1. Once it is finished, we are going to officially start with the second chapter which should take a lot less with all the working base chapter 1 will leave to us.

These last weeks had been a most of tweak and get everything in order before continuing from my side. Also, I know that Chad had been working on the main menu so we have that too working from our side. We had been thinking about how the save files are going to work and that. Hopefully, all this pre-production will result in a better game.

Is This Still Tennis?

This is the project placeholder name we gave with FuNaNdMoRe to a project we are working on during our free time. Yes, you read well, with FuNaNdMoRe! The last game we did together was Billy's Barricade in 2012 for the Newgrounds Game Jam 8, if we don't count Divine Carnival in the Bayou and Order of the Narwhal were FuNaNdMoRe came to add his awesome music. If you are insterested in games we made together, remember to visit the page of Fun+Mono in my blog.

Both of us had been working and learning a lot about videogame development through these many years. Even though, we got to met each other almost two years ago. Well, a month ago, more or less, we decided to start working on a small web game as a nostalgic thing for Newgrounds.

We are still trying out the mechanics and we don't have 100% defined what the game is going to be but for now, we have an otter protecting its baby otters from evil enemies that throw stones to them. If you checked out my Twitter account you probably saw already a gif of it but if not, go and check it!

Roque's Life

The truth is that we still don't have a final name for this but we are using this one as placeholder. This is the game we are making based on Sense of Unity, a game we made for the Stay Safe! Jam.

So far, we have the mechanical parts of the menu, the editor and the some of the special tiles of the gameplay. We had been working slow on this since most of the team members have other jobs but we are ready to start adding art to the game. Hopefully, we will be updating a lot more soon.

End

Hope you are doing well and taking care of yourself during these difficult times. I don't have any more news but please consider following me on Twitter for the latest news. Good luck and thanks for reading!

Follow me on Twitter!

Hello, everyone!

Long time I don’t write an update here so I decided to make some time for this. Hope you are taking care of yourself and everyone during these strange times.

New features for Summer Snow Day

With Chad we had been adding new features to Summer Snow Day. There was a small period with no updates but now things are running smoothly.

Some of the new updates include the addition of video clips between moments that give them a huge new feeling to the game. Also, I think they will be of a high quality since Chad is an expert at editing videos and he will make some great results with the tools he has.

I think the only downside Summer Snow Day project has now is the legacy code I made. I had learned so much since we started and now I am carrying with some crappy code. Anyway, I am making some refactors so this won’t affect on the long run.

Other projects

Regarding other projects. I am working in two other ones.

One of them is based on Sense of Unity, a game we made for the Stay Safe Jam. If you didn’t try it out yet, please consider playing it.

What we are planning to do is to expand on the mechanic we had and even add a level editor in game.

(Character made by Hugo Miraballes)

One of the things that gives me special interest in this project is the fact that we are coding it using Test-Driven Design. Probably the first thing I learned at my new job is TDD and I was looking forward to use it in my personal projects. Since all the programmers for the project work at the same place, we all know TDD and therefore we decided to give it a shot. Also, we believe it will help the game to develop faster and to be less prone to bugs.

We are still working on it of course. But one highlight I can give, as you had seen in the character picture, we are making a rework of the theme and it will be a lot more friendly and cute one than the plague doctor. You will be playing as this old owl helping people while you travel through your long journey. But that is what I can show so far. Hopefully I will have more to show in a near future.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, I had been talking with a long time friend and we are playing to make a game again together. We hadn’t decided on what yet but I would love to work with him again and I hope this happens.

Other than that, I am going to start having a different approach for the games I am working on. Till I don’t see that the project is advanced enough to say “well, looks like this is really happening” I will not add them on Working on or even give them names if that depends only on me.

This is mostly because I had seen a lot of projects started and died because of lack of work on them (from all the members including me). But don’t worry, I will still keep adding updates and showing on stuff on my twitter account.

More

This is the day number 45 of official quarantine in my country (day 46 for me because at my work they decided to start just one day before the government announced). Though it has been a very stressful moment, I have to admit that things managed well in my country and everyone I know is safe as far as we know. I hope you are taking care of yourself too.

Also, this week I received an email from Steam that my newest payment for YBit earnings was ready. Sadly, I also received an email from the bank saying that I won’t get my money till I show some documents that I can’t recall. I will call the bank on Monday and see if I can do something about it but this kind of things always make me think about how difficult is to freelance outside of the country and how much needed is the payment to PayPal option from Steam.

For last, I am having a great time at my work. I learned a ton of new things and I am excited to learn more of them. I read a book called The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier and I am reading Conscious Business by Fred Kofman. These both books helped me to learn a lot of negative things that happened at my last work and I can’t believe how positive is my new workplace when taking care of its employees. So just wanted to tell you that I am really happy right now and feel blessed for my opportunities.

Thank you for reading and stay safe!

Hello everyone!

I know it passed less than seven days since my last post about a new game but… Sense of Unity is a new game and it’s out now!

The game was made in Unity for the Stay Safe! Jam and it was made by a total of 8 persons including artists, programmers and game designers.

I had never made a game jam game with that big amount of people and it was incredible fun and worth it. Hopefully we will get to make another game together like this in the future.

So please go and try it out!

Hello, everyone!

I have updates regarding all my current projects. Half of them, almost finished. So, here we go!

Unblocky is complete

For Unblocky we have already completed the game. Just a few tweaks with the playstore and a final version for the japanese language left.

Regarding the playstore, we have a few problems with the privacy policy. Google asks us to make a privacy policy for the game, which we made with a creator I found only, but apparently, it wasn’t enought. We are still not sure what else do we need but we already contacted support.

While we work on that, we are also waiting for the final revision of the Japanese language. Hopefully, we will get both during the next week.

Once we have these two things. We aim to make a soft-launch, in order to fix bugs in case they appear, and after that, we will make a full release for Android while we also make a release for a web version which will be at Newgrounds (with medals and leaderboards) and itch.io.

Finished Summer Snow Day UI

We finally finished the Summer Snow Day UI! It took a lot longer than expected, but I can say I am pretty happy with it.

From now on, we will be focusing in the characters expressions and poses. Hopefully, from now on, things will move a lot faster. Sorry for the delays, but they were totally worth it!

VR Escape Game

From here, things are still moving really slow. Hopefully, during the following weeks it will be a lot faster.

I had re-made all the input settings with the new VR Steam API (which is poorly documented) and I made a new grab system which I hope it will give the player a better feel and more customization to the artists regarding on how to interact with the objects.

Stickerboy final revisions

For last, regarding Stickerboy, we are in the final revisions. I think we will have soon a release for web and a upcoming release for Android.

One of the changes the client asked was a negative feedback when pasting a sticker in a wrong place. Good thing they noticed the need of this because now it is a lot clear. We had been working in this for so long in our spare times that we sometimes lost the notion of what does the game need.

This and other changes had been added to the game. Hopefully, this will be the final revision for the web game and we can start showing the game to you.

Buy me a ko-fi!

For last, I made a Ko-Fi account. All the money I get from it, if I ever get something, I will use it for developing games. So, if you like them, please consider donating a ko-fi to me!

Thanks for reading, please stay tuned for more updates!

New game called Blight

Hello, everyone! I have a lot of news. The first one is, if you haven’t check it out yet, a new game called Blight.

The game was made for the Extra Credits Game Jam #3. I am planning to make a post-mortem in a near future, but meanwhile, please consider trying it out and let me know your thoughts about it!

Bunch of updates for Unblocky

From all the projects I am working on right now, this one is probably the one with the fastests progress so far. Thanks to the simple mechanic, we are being able to focus already in polishing (although we still have to add a few more things to the gameplay).

So far, we have planned three modes and only one still needs more work. The modes we have planned are:

• Traditional – You have 5 seconds to mark every pattern. Each round, you get a new pattern.
• Arcade – You have 5 x Ammount of patterns to finish the whole sequence. Each round, you get a new pattern. Also, there are special nodes that can give you more points or make you re-think the movement because they block specific directions. We still have to make more special nodes for this one but it is already fun to play it.
• Zen – Is like traiditional except you have no timers. You can take all the time you need to play it.

We also have this already in the PlayStore and we are being able to test it directly from there. Rollouts for Android work a bit slow but this is the best option since we can also add friends as beta testers and give them the updates automatically. Hopefully, will give you a lot of more updates in a near future.

My other projects

While I work with these projects, I also keep working in the other two ones. For Stickerboy we are sending the client all the updates they had been asking. Most of them are balance changes or small changes so we are hoping to realease it soon.

Regarding the VR game. Things had been really slow because of our jobs. It gets really difficult to get everyone to be available the same day so the updates we had been working on had been more an individual thing. The good thing, is that I re-made most of the game to work in the latest VR Plugin so we had been able to update the Unity version.

That will be all for now. Please consider following me on Twitter for the latest small updates and thank you for reading!

Link to the original post: https://monoflauta.com/2019/03/17/unblocky-modes-and-more/

Original post: https://monoflauta.com/2018/12/09/all-characters-from-summer-snow-day-and-more/

Summer Snow Day

Hello, everyone!
We finished presenting all the main characters from Summer Snow Day. The last one, Honji, is the main character and the one you will control during your adventure.

Also, Chad published a wip of the in gameplay finish result which you can check here! Even more, we are having a big progress on the visual side of the game. From my part, I had been working on the postprocess that will let Chad control and give a great feeling to the game. If you want to have the latest updates consider following the Happy Ghost Studio twitter account!

Saiba-Run

The results of the Epic Mega Jam 2018 are out and we didn’t make it once again. Sadly, we had a lot of issues when using Unreal this time. Being the only member that could update the project, because of repository issues, plus a bug where the intro video would only display in the computer where the project was published, leaded us to a result we weren’t looking forward.
As a team, we are not sure if we are going to participate in another one of these ones. We had too many issues, probably because inexperience, that we would normaly don’t have in Unity. Maybe, in a future we try again but for now, we need to rest a bit from Unreal.
You can play the game HERE.

Framework Goat

I also had been updating Framework-Goat. I added a bunch of new changes and also added an UpdateManager that will help to optimize big Unity applications. Probably, going to keep adding new updates now that I will have more spare time for projects, leading to have more ideas and utilities I can add to the Framework.
As a changelog of the last time I posted about the Framework, I added:

• Added UpdateManager, this will be a huge performance improvement when using a lot the update functions
• Changed Start for Awake and added Stop All Themes option to the Sound Controller
• Added a Clear and Subscribe clear to EventManager
• Fixed a null reference when removing events in the EventManager

StickerBoy

We had been adding audio updates and new mechanics to the StickerBoy game. Now you can paste stickers and get points because of it. I also created a wave editor so Kevin can edit easily the waves and balance the game from there.
So far, the game is getting better and better and giving a lot of fun when playing and making it. Hopefully, we finish with a nice polished game.

That's all for now! Please consider following my Twitter account for more updates!

Hello, everyone!

This week I had been working on a new game called Shot Wave, a game made for the Unreal Engine 4 Summer Game Jam 2018.

It has been a really intense weekend because it was not only a game jam, it was also the first game we do in Unreal Engine 4. So please, go and check it out!

Hello, everyone!

This week I had been working on Skeleball, a game made for the Minimalistic Jam #3. It has been an intense week at my work but, luckly, I managed to make some extra time and worked on this with Galit “shoze” Weisberg and Iván Piccione.

I coded this game in Unity using as base my, under construction, Framework Goat. I think it is always a good to test for frameworks to be used in game jams.

Anyway, please, feel free to try it out!

Also, please consider following me on Twitter!

Hello, everyone!

So I have a few news about Summer Snow Day and other stuff!

In case you haven’t met Kie yet, she was presented on Happy Ghost Studio’s Twitter account and Facebook account. With a great t-shirt that says “the end justify the memes”. I think it’s one of my favourite outfits so far.

Apart from that, we had been working on the UI of the dialogues system. And it looks we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

Having the option dock totally working and the menu option panel showing up gives us an almost complete version of the dialogue system UI. Working with the canvas system of Unity had been, sadly, a complete nightmare. I guess Unity and neither Unreal, as far as I know, aren’t ready to make a complex UI for any resolution as Flash scaleform system was. Hopefully, they will take care of this and make something as good as that in a near future.

In other news, I had been making a few AR prototypes for a freelance work and also some of my students showed their games at the school, please follow their Twitter account!

Thanks for reading and please consider following me on Twitter!