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Hello, everyone!

I am going to write today the updates I had been working on since I came back from holiday. These updates are related to Stonks, Is This Still Tennis, the dungeon with dices game, and also a quick update about other projects!

Stonks

I am still not sure if we are going to actually call this game Stonks. Because of its meme nature, I think it actually may be a good name.

These last weeks we had made a lot of content for it. We already have a fully functional stock and crypto screen. We also have a working progress surety screen and more content is on the way.

Being able to play with stocks and crypto already is letting us know how playing the game feels. There is a bunch of work to do but we are now pretty sure that we want to have a mobile version of it. The game feels a lot more of an “on the go” game than a web one. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we are not going to publish it for the web too, just that our main focus may shift to mobile.

As an extra update, Lauta talked with a friend of his team at work and now we have a new artist that joined us. Hopefully, we will be able to start replacing our programmer art with more pretty content. It will also let us focus our work on programming and gameplay instead of trying to figure out how the UI will be or how we are going to make it look good. And lastly, of course, he is going to make a better job than us so I am sure it is a good idea.

Is This Still Tennis

Another project I had been working on a bit more is on Is This Still Tennis. I had been searching for new sets of projectiles, enemies, and configurations in order to give more variety to the game.

Since Roberto already did most of the enemies, if not all of them, I focused on adding a new one to the gameplay so I decided to go for the alligator. With that one, I had been trying out to do a different setting for the projectile. What I came up with was a way to faster projectile than the ones that were happening already. This, in my opinion, gives a better feel of progressive difficulty than adding one of the other ones we have already planned that give more a feel of variety.

We are still not sure how the final order of enemies and configuration will be, but I think we should keep adding more variety for the projectiles and set the difficulty in the speed since it was a bit difficult to get that feeling trying out other things.

Dungeon with Dices

For the dungeon with dices, I can say we finally have the main battle frame working. It has all the basic mechanics, including the Yahtzee-related gameplay, and it actually feels really good!

Not only that, the good thing about how we are approaching development is that we are fully using TDD on this one. From the core to the views are fully tested and this is already giving a lot of advantages when trying to make changes related to testing out new things.

Our main focus right now is on adding clearer feedback to the user. Even we have the main mechanics working, there is still a lot of confusion on what is happening. Also, we had been trying out adding 3D dices (in the screenshot it is not clear enough but that six-dice is animated). There is still a lot to do but this one is looking really promising.

One of my main goals for the development of this game is to make it scalable. I think we should be able to add new behaviors for enemies pretty easy and also I am looking forward to adding new classes, rooms for the dungeon, and stuff like that.

Maybe, we even release it somehow as early access once it doesn’t have placeholder art and it is actually playable and not just random battles, and we try to build from there adding updates. I feel like this approach would be the most natural one.

Other projects and updates

For last, I had been also working on the casual mobile game I mentioned in my last development post but I didn’t work too much on this one since my main goal the last weeks was to actually have a working version of Stonks.

Also, for Summer Snow Day, Chad came back from his holidays and we are planning to keep working on it as soon as possible. Since making the scripts takes a lot of time, at least to give them the quality they deserve, I will probably start tackling down some of the minigames we still have to make. This way we can keep having progress on the game and give him extra time to work on the scripts.

And I am not sure if you had already read this, but I made a new post about every way to communicate Unity’s MonoBehaviour scripts. This is my first programming-related post of the year. If you are a programmer and the title appeals to you, please consider reading it!

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