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Hello, everyone!

I have updates on Is This Still Tennis, Summer Snow Day, Dice Brawler, and Ostrich Run. So let’s start!

Power-ups, fixes, and feedback for Is This Still Tennis

If you follow me on Twitter you have probably noticed a lot of updates related to Is This Still Tennis. The most visual and engaging one is probably that we have the three power-ups working as intended. This doesn’t mean we won’t be updating or iterating them but they are pretty good enough already so that is great!

The projectile with fire deals damage for a few seconds to the enemy. The projectile with ice freezes the enemy for a short amount of time and then deals a fixed amount of damage. And last, the lighting projectile stuns the enemy for a few seconds. These are the basic effects of the enemies, but depending on the enemies’ traits, they will apply different effects!

These are not the only updates, we also added a dirt projectile that if it’s not hit will cover the player’s vision for a few seconds, an armored enemy that you need to make a base amount of damage in order to actually hit it and more small ones.

Apart from these mechanics, we also had been working on a lot of feedback and a general game feel. Some examples are that the projectiles now move with a curve effect or that there are some leaves of enemies spawning when appearing on top of a tree.

Dice Brawler now has an inventory system working

For Dice Brawler I had been working on a new inventory system that the player can interact with when reaching a rest area. I am still figuring out the basic loop of a match and discarding some ideas I had before for some that I believe will suit better the game mechanic.

My goal next is to make a way to get new items, improve the way you get spells, and start filling the game with more content. I already added a few spells and items but I want to add a lot more to it.

After that, I will try to see how to get some placeholder assets and probably upload a demo for it in order to get some feedback and get someone who wants to make art for it. I am also willing to pay instead of giving a rev share if someone is interested!

Other games’ updates

We had been also working on Summer Snow Day and the Ostrich Run remake. I don’t have too much art to share with them but I will write some updates so you know what we had been doing!

For Summer Snow Day we are working on the side plot stories. We already added three new parts with a character I don’t want to reveal in order to not spoil. You probably had noticed that I had been posting less about this game on Twitter and that is mostly because it is becoming harder and harder to find moments where I won’t spoil you anything but please stay tuned for updates and I will try to share as much spoiler free possible!

The other game we had been working is on Ostrich Run, we already have a way to place doors to the rooms in our level editor but we are still missing a way to show the whole on the path and not only in the room. That will be probably our next goal and from there we should be able to start adding enemies and playing the levels!

That is all for now. Thank you for reading!

Twitter Account - DevBlog - Ko-Fi - Twitch (Spanish)

Hello, everyone!

I have a bunch of new updates since the last update three weeks ago. Luckily, I had been able to keep the same pace or even improve it for some of the projects so I am pretty hyped about this new workflow I had been able to keep.

This time, I will bring some updates regarding Is This Still Tennis, Dice Brawler, Summer Snow Day, and the new Ostrich Run. Also, funny how most of the names are placeholders, sorry about that. So let’s start with the updates!

Adding feedback and content for Dice Brawler

One of the projects that got most of the updates is my Dice Brawler game, which I will probably need to start thinking of another name since you are actually a wizard and I guess that Brawler doesn’t make too much sense as a name right now.

Updates I had been working on are from one point adding more and more content to the game like new spells. Apart from it, I had been working also in the looting system for the player. Lastly, I started working on a way to show more information about the spells you have and how the dice you are throwing will affect them.

My next goals for it are to improve that way of showing information that I had been working on and then start adding some placeholder FX for the spells while I keep adding more enemies and spells to start making the game feel filled with content.

Is This Still Tennis gets more and more feedback

The other project I would say that got the most progress is Is This Still Tennis which with FuNaNdMoRe we had been adding a lot of extra feedback and improved the general game feel of the game.

It is difficult to list the whole list of things we added to the game these last three weeks but my favorite ones are all the tiny details we added to the enemy life bars, the camera footage when something important happens and the good amount of sound effects we added for now.

Also, one extra thing to mention, this has been a pretty good project to stream on Twitch which has been a really nice thing to have!

Summer Snow Day free-time events

Meanwhile, for Summer Snow Day we had been working on adding more free-time events. The last one we worked on is the free time events when picking Kie.

We are still missing a lot of free time events but we have almost half of the characters done which is pretty nice. I think these free time events will give the player an important decision on who they want to share more time with and reward them with extra information about their favorite characters.

Ostrich Run level editor progress

For the full version of Ostrich Run, we are still working on the level editor. We already had a way to make the main paths the last time.

Right now, we are focusing on being able to create rooms that will give more freedom to us and the players than the original levels we created. After that, our focus will be probably centered on being able to add the enemies so we will hopefully have something pretty close to playable soon!

Those are the news, for now, thank you for reading, and remember to follow me on Twitter if you want the latest updates!

Twitter Account - DevBlog - Ko-Fi - Twitch (Spanish)

Hello, everyone!

I will be showing a lot of updates today from my different projects. These last weeks had been beneficial and I think I finally found the proper work routines for me because of that I had been able to make a lot of progress in general. Hopefully, this last for a long time!

So let’s get with the updates!

Is This Still Tennis rework in progress

Lately, I had been able to do a bunch of work for Is This Still Tennis. Some of it was thanks to my Twitch streams but I had been also working on it outside of it so I am pretty happy with all the updates. Also, FuNaNdMoRe has been able to make a bunch of progress regarding art and we already have something looking a lot more polished than before.

Right now we are able to configure different enemies, projectiles, and levels. They already have an unlocking system and a way to choose which level goes next. With this, we should be able to polish the current firing mechanic and add more variety to it. Let’s hope this trend of good progress continues!

Dice Brawler battle core is completed

One of the biggest progress on my side is that I finally got to complete the battle core for the Dice Brawler game. It has taken its time to be completed because I wanted it to be solid as rock regarding the code. It should be something that can support a huge amount of enemies with different behaviors and have a player unit that also supports a lot of new settings.

Right now, I can add a huge set of spells with different conditions and effects that are used by the Wizard. Also, I can add an x amount of enemies that also participate in the battle and they can have different behaviors. Apart from all of this, the Yahtzee mechanic is also working. You can check if you want a gif with almost no art about this in one of my tweets.

Apart from this, I will be starting to look for artists that want to participate in the project. I am willing to pay for the art or split share revenues if we ever have revenues. So, if you are interested, please don’t hesitate on sending me your portfolio!

Other Projects

I had been also working on two other projects. The more classic one at this point is Summer Snow Day. Chad has been able to provide again more scripts and we are again back on track by adding more and more content. It feels like less and less left every time we are able to add another script.

Also, the other big side project update is that we started to work on a full version for Ostrich Run. This has been one of my proudest game jam games and I am very happy that we finally found a way to make a full version of it. By now, we just started with a level editor that our goal is that users will be able to use to create any kind of level and share it with their friends. Hopefully, more updates about this one in the future!

Affiliate on Twitch

This week I finally reached the number of followers needed for Twitch Affiliate and it felt really cool. This is a new medium for me and I had been trying to learn a lot about how to properly work on it and I still have a lot more to learn.

My goal with Twitch is to build an audience with which I can share a good time, which helps me motivate even more to work on my personal projects (been working perfectly with Is This Still Tennis) and hopefully helps me to have an audience once I release the games.

That will be all for now, thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more updates!

Twitter Account - DevBlog - Ko-Fi - Twitch (Spanish)

Hello, everyone!

This time I am bringing you a set of 6 useful Unity Editor tricks that you probably didn’t know about unless you paid a lot of attention to the whole Unity editor or someone told you about them.

The incredible thing about these tricks is that no matter how long you had been working with Unity, there is always the possibility of you not knowing about them. I had, more than once, seen someone do something incredible with the editor that I didn’t know about and it was there, in front of my eyes, all this time. So let’s get started and I hope you find them useful!

Lock your selection in the inspector tab

One of my wow moments, when I was studying videogame programming in a career, was when someone showed me how to lock my selection in the inspector tab. At the time, I was working on Witchcraft and we had a bunch of drag-and-drop game objects to list fields that needed to be placed also in order. This was a lot of time and was very frustrating if you accidentally misclick and lost the reference to the game object you were dragging stuff into.

When someone showed us the possibility of actually locking the inspector view this saved us a lot of time. We were now able to lock our selection, go to the game objects, select all of them and just drag them into the list we wanted. This one is a time saver so if you didn’t know about it, please try it out and start using it since it will help you a lot.

Use Debug mode in the inspector tab

Maybe you had been struggling sometimes with being able to see private field values during runtime in real time and you had been filling a bunch of debug logs or using the debugger from your IDE. Or maybe, you just wanted to know what was the current private value of a class you can’t modify for whatever the reason is. For that, you can set up the inspector tab to use its debug mode!

As you can see, after enabling the Debug mode in the inspector tab, you will be able to see the private vars of your classes so you don’t need to use other methods anymore in case you need to see how those values are updated in realtime.

Open multiple tabs of the same category

One thing I didn’t believe was that having two screen monitors at the same time was a lot more useful than having only one. I think the same goes for having multiple tabs of the same category at the same time. You just don’t find it useful until you start using it. Though, to be honest, this one is a bit more casually useful than two screen monitors.

In order to do so, first, you will need to add a second tab of whatever you want to have two.

And then you can lock one of those two once you find what you wanted to keep and use the other one to keep navigating.

In this case, I am doing this with the Project tab since I had found it useful in the past when re-organizing projects. Remember that having your project folder structure tidy is as important as having your code tidy!

Setting up layouts

You probably know that you can re-arrange the setup of your Unity editor by dragging the panels to the sides. That is a nice thing but sometimes you just want to go back to where you were. For that, you can always click on Layouts->Default.

But wait! There is more. Not only that, you can re-arrange your layout to any configuration you want and use the Save Layout option to name it and keep it with your other layout settings. I found this particularly useful because the Test Runner tab doesn’t come by default and I like to have the Animator and Animation tabs handy all the time.

This is my standard layout though, knowing that I can quickly go back to it, I feel a lot more comfortable arranging it all the time to the most useful setup depending on what I am currently doing.

Set up different aspect ratios for the Game tab

One normal mistake when developing games for the first time is to not take care of different aspect ratios. This depends a lot also on the platform you are developing at. For desktop games, you may want to cover a wide range of landscape positions if your game is full screen but maybe only one resolution if your game runs only in windowed mode for whatever the reason is. This becomes more difficult when you work on mobile games and have to take care of a broader variety of resolutions but easier when you work for a browser game and use a unique resolution.

So basically you can go to the Game tab and select the aspect you want. Even more, you can add more of them. For example, for my Newgrounds games, I usually use one of those resolutions since I feel it is very standard to translate from a desktop game to a browser game. Meanwhile, on my work computer, I used to have a bunch of mobile resolutions until we started using the Device Simulator package.

Filter your project search

Another time-saving thing is to know how to filter your searches in Unity’s Project tab. There a few things you can do here that are usually overlooked.

• Search for specific types (you can even type it by using t:NameOfTheType).
• Use the label system that Unity provides.
• Save a search to have it handier for the next time (this one will appear over your folder structure).
• Toggle invisible packages to be or not visible.

Knowing that these exist will help you to re-organize your folder structure and find things faster than before.

Wrap up

I hope you found some tricks you didn’t know about and that these new tricks help you maximize your production speed in video games. The fun part of making video games is being able to iterate fast, not searching for stuff or dealing with difficult tasks in the editor.

These were just a few of the “tricks” that you may or not know, of course, there are other things you can do with the default editor so I encourage you to know to go and look for every button you can find in each tab and try to figure out what it does! Maybe you find something new for you that will help you from now on.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more content!

Twitter Account - DevBlog - Ko-Fi - Twitch (Spanish)

Hello, everyone!

So, one of the biggest updates will be regarding these two first streams I did this week. But! I also have updates regarding my current projects and, in part, thanks to the streams I worked on. So let’s get started!

First two streams

This week I made my first two streams where I worked on my personal projects. If you know Spanish (yes, sorry about this, they will be only in Spanish to make them easier for me since it is my native language) you can follow me and join whenever you want on my Twitch channel.

For me this is a full new experience, even using Twitch, but I had already learned a lot and I am looking forward to learning more about this since I had been having a lot of fun. Even more, I am pretty happy with the results of the two streams.

In the first one, I was able to make a lot of playable content for Is This Still Tennis in just two hours while talking. Not only that, I was expecting to have an average of 0 to 3 viewers and I got an average close to 10 so that was pretty good!

In the second one, I didn’t almost share the stream and this was clearly visible with the number of people watching it. Though I just wanted to check how many of the last ones would join, I see that in the future will be kinda a must to share the link more.

In resume, it was a great experience, and can’t wait for the next stream!

Is This Still Tennis

This week, including the part I streamed, we started working on the new mechanic for Is This Still Tennis and I think this one is very promising to the point it may be the final one. I wrote about this one here but a short summary would be that now you get to aim the projectiles in something similar to charging the projectiles.

This week I was able to make the enemies fire projectiles while using an Object pool and also the feedback and movement of the player aiming the projectiles. I think the next step will be that you are actually able to return the projectiles to the enemies. This will be probably done during the next week so stay tuned for more updates!

Dice Brawler spell conditions

The other game I made a bunch of updates on was Dice Brawler. I had been defining some new things regarding game design and I feel like the game is going in the right direction right now which really motivates me to keep working on it.

Also, in my latest stream, I did a lot of TDD and worked on a bunch of new spell conditions that I can combine between and use for different spells for the wizard class (which will be the only one for the moment right now). Hopefully, I will be having sooner than later a new gameplay showing exactly what I was thinking for the wizard and it becomes something fun to do in the game.

Other projects and Newgrounds Supporter Status

Apart from these, we hadn’t been able to work on Summer Snow Day yet since we are needing some extra time for the scripts, but just wait for the updates which hopefully will come sooner than later!

Also, I had been planning the other project game regarding possums and hopefully, I will start sharing more stuff about it this next week!

For last, I also renewed my Newgrounds Supporter status! If you had been an active member of Newgrounds and loved the community, consider becoming a supporter!

That should be everything, for now, please stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for reading!

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Hello, everyone!

Today I bring you a lot of new updates regarding a lot of different subjects. So let’s start!

Starting to stream on Twitch

One of the most significant updates is that I will start streaming on Twitch how I work on my personal projects. The downside, at least for this website written in English, is that the streams will be in Spanish so sorry for that. Hopefully, if you know English you will be able to join and I will also be uploading the videos to Youtube so you can always check the version with subtitles if you are interested.

I am expecting to make a lot of mistakes in the beginning so please be patient with me if you join, but hopefully, with practice and time, you find this new channel useful.

Re-work on Is This Still Tennis

And one of the first things I will start streaming is the re-work for Is This Still Tennis. As you may know, we had been iterating a lot around the mechanic of Is This Still Tennis and now we have a new proposal that FuNaNdMoRe made.

The new proposal looks a lot more like a mobile game than a web game maybe because of the hand but I think it can totally work and we both want to try it out! So, hopefully, we find it entertaining and we stick to it from now on with more updates coming soon!

Working on the Wizard for the Dice Brawler

Another game I got back to work on is the Dice Brawler. I had already shared updates before for it but because the artist couldn’t continue with the project I just paused it for a while. Now, with the streams coming ahead and also because I had been re-thinking the idea for the game, I got back to work on it.

One of the new decisions I made is to focus on the Wizard class since I think it works better with the Yahtzee mechanic I thought for this game. From there, I improved the dice system and I already started with the spell mechanics based on all the dice the player throws. Hopefully, I will have the first concept working sooner than later.

Other projects

Apart from all of this, for Summer Snow Day we are waiting to get more dialogues to add to the game. As I always mention, this is something we don’t want to rush and take our time for it. Maybe we can also start working on the minigames in the meantime with placeholder art. That is something we need to figure out.

For last, I had been talking with matchboxmox about making a game together. For now, matchboxmox made a lot of concept art and we had been talking about ideas on what we are expecting from the game.

The main idea so far is that you manage a garage workshop with a bunch of possums and you need to fix the cars other animals bring to you. This is still in talks and we had been iterating the idea but hopefully, I can show you updates sooner than later!

Thank you very much for reading this far and stay tuned for more updates!

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Hello, everyone!

This time I will share with you some different ways to create Scriptable Objects in Unity. I will try to also share with you different examples of how I did use these creation methods in my previous games.

If you are wondering, why you want to use a Scriptable Object, I think the best you can do is to check out the official Unity documentation for Scriptable Objects but here is a short list of how I am used to using them:

• Avoid data duplication by storing configs in one file
• Have setting files that anyone without coding knowledge can modify
• Make different sets of settings to playtest and be able to switch them during runtime
• Store reference to different kinds of sequences
• Have different levels with their editors as I did for YBit.

And these are only the most common ones for me, there are a lot more uses for them and your imagination is probably the limit since they are pretty useful!

Defining the Scriptable Object

First of all, in order to define a Scriptable Object class we will need to create a new one that inherits from Scriptable Object:

public class ScriptableObjectClass : ScriptableObject
{
        //Stuff
}

Once you have it, now you are to find a way to create the scriptable object. How you decide to create an instance of it will depend on your needs.

Three different ways of creating Scriptable Objects

There may be more than these particular three ways but I found these to be the most common for me and I think they are pretty useful for most, if not all, situations.

For example, if you are going to create these instances manually each time you want to create a new setting or behaviour, you can do the following:

[CreateAssetMenu(fileName = "NameOfTheFile", menuName = "My Scriptable Objects/ScriptableObjectClass")]
public class ScriptableObjectClass : ScriptableObject
{
        //Stuff
}

As you can see, here the scriptable object will have an attribute on it with the information:

• fileName – Name of the file when created
• menuName – Full path for the menu selection. Each / will add another inner level

And this will result in the following:

As you can see, with this attribute now when you do right-click in the Asset tab and go to Create you will find the full path to create it.

I am using this approach for my Dice game where I create class configs and unit configs. If you looked carefully, you can see that below the My Scriptable Objects option in the last screenshot there is a Class Config one for example https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/svg/1f609.svg

The last option let you create a Scriptable Object just in the position where you did right-click. But, let’s suppose you just want to create it in one specific folder and even more, maybe you want it to override its values depending on external factors that default values can’t be hardcoded into the class. For this, we can do the following:

[MenuItem("ScriptableObjectCreator/CreateCustomScriptableObject")]
public static void CreateCustomScriptableObject()
{
	var scriptableObject = CreateInstance<ScriptableObjectClass>();
	//Do custom stuff you want to the ScriptableObject instance
	AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(scriptableObject, "Assets/Custom/Path/filename.asset");
	AssetDatabase.SaveAssets();
	AssetDatabase.Refresh();
}

Here we are using a MenuItem attribute for a static function. The value of the MenuItem is the path you will have at the top:

Then, inside, we are creating an instance of that ScriptableObject we defined before. We have a place to make the custom modifications we want to do and then we use AssetDatabase methods to save it at the path we want.

For this one, I don’t have extra code to show because it will really depend on your needs but I have an example of how it could work and maybe this approach brings ideas to you. As some of you may know, I am currently working on a visual novel called Summer Snow Day which has a ridiculous amount of dialogue. Like really, a lot.

To manage those dialogues, we have a huge amount of spreadsheets with all the input data which then we have as .csv files:

Because we are used to making a lot of modifications to these dialogues, we decided to create a tool:

This tool basically looks for all the dialogue files we have in the project and creates a scriptable object with the transcription of those in the needed folders leaving something like this:

Thanks to this, we are now able to update all the file dialogues at once and use all these scriptable objects in our game by loading them through resources without the need to manually assign them to anything.

Filling it with information

Now only the last step is left. The easiest way to use them is to start adding fields to the Scriptable Object class and then add a reference to a MonoBehaviour or load them through Resources.Load at a specific path. While these are not the only way to use them, they are certainly the most common ones.

If you have read up to down here, thank you very much for showing interest in this! Perhaps I make a new post with different ways of using them with examples.

So that’s all for now. Thank you and stay tuned!

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Hello, everyone!

We released Stonks to the PlayStore, Newgrounds, and itch.io.

Stonks is a meme investment simulator game where you will be given the ultimate dream of knowing how well you would do if you invested your money without having to deal with the financial loss. The main feature of this game is that it uses real stock and crypto values. So you will be playing with real-life data!

FEATURES

• Stocks purchase and sell simulation
• Crypto purchase and sell simulation
• Fixed Term Deposit simulation
• Tons of Fashion Objects you can buy for fun
• Memes

CREDITS

Artist: Agustín Inclan

Programming: Lautaro Bravo de la Serna & Facundo Balboa

Music: Santiago Bravo de la Serna

Please take a look at it and leave a review if you can! I will soon be back to Summer Snow Day and Is This Still Tennis updates on my Twitter account also so make sure to follow if you are interested!

Thank you for reading!

Twitter Account - DevBlog - Ko-Fi

Hello, everyone!

So I have a lot of new updates from the latest weeks.

Chapter 5 from Summer Snow Day is officially under construction

Last week we had been officially working on chapter 5 for Summer Snow Day. We aren’t sure exactly how many chapters the game will have but I believe we already have more than half of the main story.

Of course, there is a lot of polishment to do and we also have to add the side plots the player will be able to do during the main character’s free time plus the missing main plot story. Though a lot is still missing, it really feels nice when we start a new chapter. It makes us feel like we reached a new achievement.

Created two new free tools

Last week I released two tools:

One is the Newgrounds API Helper which I wrote about it here. This helper is a wrapper that tries to be more friendly for developers that use mostly Unity when trying to use the Newgrounds API. It also tries to simplify its use by making the request through a single calling method or giving extra performance functionality.

The other one is the Giphy Unity Requester and I wrote about it here. The tool lets you use the Giphy API in a simplified way in Unity. It also becomes very simple, at least for me, to use because it uses UniRx to manage async calls.

I had a lot of fun doing these tools and I hope that someone will find these useful. I know that I am going to use the Newgrounds one pretty soon for the Stonks game we are working on and I think I will be using the Giphy one pretty soon too.

Stonks

We also had been making a bunch of content for the game Stonks, which apparently we are going to keep calling it that way. The game right now is almost complete! Only bug fixing, some missing art assets, and a few improvements we want to add are missing.

The features of the game will be to be able to trade with stocks and crypto, create some time deposits and you can buy random objects to show how wealthy you are. Our goal is to make the game available for web and Android for now so stay tuned if you are interested!

Is This Still Tennis

We keep trying to make the game as fun as possible. After a few tries, we had been thinking that the current approach is not enough to make the game as fun as it could be so we decided to start testing new mechanics.

There is a lot to do once we have the correct one but we hope we are going to get there. We are currently trying out a more baseball mechanic so let’s see how it turns out!

That’s all for now so thank you very much for reading and stay tuned!

Twitter Account - DevBlog - Ko-Fi

Hello, everyone!

In the last game jams, I had been re-doing and re-doing a wrapper for the Newgrounds Unity API over and over again. It wasn’t been redone from scratch because I reused the basics of the last version but I kept adding improvements to it.

I never got to have something very complete for it, the most complete one was used for making Yemita since it was for the Newgrounds July Jam 2021 and it used the medals and scoreboards features.

I personally was very grateful for the Newgrounds Unity API implementation but I always tried to make a wrapper around it to simplify my needs and call it as easy as possible. Without having to throw a lot of references everywhere or worried about it being duplicated.

Because of this, I decided to create the Newgrounds Unity API Helper!

Newgrounds Unity API Helper

The Newgrounds Unity API Helper is a wrapper that tries to be more friendly for developers that use mostly Unity when trying to use the Newgrounds API. It also tries to simplify its use by making the request through a single calling method or giving extra performance functionality.

Even the API is already very useful as it is and you can do everything with it, I personally preferred to always create a wrapper in order to work more comfortably. The main goal of the wrapper is to simplify the use of the API and even add a few performance tricks. Feel free to use it or ask for help if you need it/propose improvements by using the Issues section.

And you can read the whole documentation on how to use it in the readme.

Of course, you can still do everything with the official one, but if you are trying to use the API for the first time, don’t have too much or simply you feel the official version may be a bit too difficult, consider using this wrapper I made.

Let me know if you use it and how was your experience with it! I hope someone finds it useful :)