Developers Diary Day 95

Alright!!!! its finally here. after weeks of testing, fixing bugs and then testing again i'm finally ready to click submit on the iTunes store...( i use ready loosely because its a completely terrifying process of waiting 2 weeks for a complete and total stranger to judge my game all gladiator thumbs up or down style. ) but its a relief to be mostly done with the game. after i submit this one i will have to spend a day next week converting it over to a free version (same game just with ads) i was going to try and have an IAP (in App Purchase ) to turn off ads but after days of struggling to understand the gibberish i gave up. currently its out of my wheel house.  after that i need to switch gears and make the android version of both. good news is that bits an incredibly easy process thanks to Unity. for the most part it should just be a simple click of a button then waiting about 5-10 minutes while it reimports everything. then i just build and upload to Google Play!! nice and easy.

so thats it! thanks for sticking around and reading what its been like to create this game. hopefully with in a few months i'll start a new developers blog and we can do this all again with a different game! which means new challenges, new frustrations and new things to learn! Thanks for stopping by and supporting this developers diary! (i will post a final post in this developers diary series about the launch of the game when it becomes available!!)

Developers Diary Day 82

We have reached that point where we are so close i can taste it.  the gameplay is FINISHED. the hats? MODELED!! the Guis built and looking pretty! all i have left to do is figure out in app purchases and linking to Facebook/ twitter! fingers crossed that won't take more than a few days!!  pardon the exclamation points...it would appear i have an excitement abuse problem... I'm seeking help.


BUT over that last week we've done a ton of reveals. including lots of new screen shots. wanna see a few? sure ya do!!

These reveal some new features like Jumping and honestly my goofiest idea for this game Snowman Selfies. each unlockable snowman will have a unique scene in which players can take a screenshot and post it either to Facebook or twitter. hopefully this will encourage the game to grow past the initial spurt from the games launch and give people the opportunity to brag on how legit their snowman looks while wearing that Fruit hat you've always wanted...Yup....that has is really in the game... 

we also revealed our latest playable character (and my personal favorite!) Sam Flurry.(seen above rocking the Walter White hat and sporting the Game Of Snows t-shirt).
i've also been trying to do a lot of online preexposure for this game. i've been hitting the forms and indie game websites as well as trying to get into contact with people who write articles and preview games.

other than that i've just been working away on the behind the scenes stuff... getting my bits of code to work, implementing features and so on.  i'll post an update later this week to let you all know when i officially send this game off to iTunes for Approval.

Developers Diary Day 75

So Welcome to day 75. I find that we are in a good news bad news style situation. Good news is every single day we get closer and closer to finishing Run Frosty Run and clicking that delightfully satisfying "Upload Binary" button on the apple developer site. (this moment while exciting does lead to two weeks of stress about that game getting approved BUT thats its own kind of exciting. )  The Bad news is this game has been a bit harder than we originally anticipated.  While the game in itself is not overly complicated we ran into several issues we didn't expect.  for example we ran into the issue of the Ground prefab pieces moving faster than my colliders could detect. now this wasn't a hard fix but it just took some time. but when you have 20 or so issues popping up, even if they are relatively easy to fix it adds up.

I've slacked off a bit in the last few weeks as far as the developers blog is concerned... the reason for this is mainly that the pretty bits of the game are all (mostly) finished. the snowmen are modeled & animated. the ground prefabs built and the obstacles spawning beautifully!  these last few weeks have all been about lists! (see look at you, your bored already...whens the last time you read about a list and got giddier than a 12 year old girl at a one direction concert) Basically everyday i sit down at my computer with my college ruled note book and i work my way down a list of things i need to do.  this progresses at about a 1 completed/2 more added ratio. slowly the bugs fade away, the game becomes smoother, and the User Interface becomes prettier. currently I'm sitting at about 14 items left to check off and about 16 things left to model. (things that haven't yet been reveals so stop being nosey and be patient! )  so we are certainly getting their. the biggest goal for this week is to finish up most of these issues and hopefully put together an official announcement trailer.  

After the lists are finished we will move on to the hardcore testing phase. we will play the game so many times that the next time winter rolls around we might take a baseball bat to our neighbors beautifully crafted snowman and then we will play the game some more.  we will make our friends families and significant others play it. we might even stand on a street corner with a sign that says " Will Loiter for play testers" and then we will submit the game to apple (pushing the aforementioned satisfactory button)


One final note on things we've been working on is trying to connect more to our indie gamers. we've been hitting the "inter-webs"  and posting on forms and attempting to get ahold of people who might want to review/preview RFR in order to get it out to the masses. this is, as always, the hardest part. convincing people that your game is better and worth their time more than the latest flappy bird clone is harder than programming any day.


as always please sound off in the comments below with any questions, comments or advice you may have. and if you haven't yet please take a moment to swing by our Facebook page and give us a like!
Thanks!

Developers Blog Day 50

So it would appear i let time slip away from me and missed the update for this week. so allow me to remedy that today!

The Biggest thing we've been working on the fix in up the GUI's and connect all GUI's to their proper actions. for example we have an unlockable screen which has all the snowmen you can unlock through the course of the game (these are bought via collectable in game currency). i've finished making it so if the snowmen are locked it displays a silhouette of the locked character along with the price to unlock said character. if the character is unlocked it shows an unlocked icon and if the character is selected it displays a third different icon.

Above Locked, Middle Unlocked, Bottom Selected.

from there i've moved to making the correct snowman(or women) spawn in the main level. we also adjusted the obstacle spawn script so that it eases you in more than it did before.  the script basically works like this. first it picks a random number between two variables minRange and Max Range. then  once the timer exceeds that range it spawns a random obstacle Prefabs (of which we have about 14 different ones built as of right now. there will be more) these Prefabs range from a simple one tree blocking one of four lanes all the way to 3 obstacles blocking 3 lanes. originally it didn't care how far into the game you were it would simply chose one of the fourteen and spawn it. we felt this created too much difficulty right out of the gate. so we added a bit of control to lock out certain prefabs until the player has reached a certain time. also we added a bit of code that slowly lowers the MaxRange variable so the game continues to get harder and harder. YAY CHALLENGE! The biggest thing right now we need to work on is getting the animations on our snowmen to play properly. the default one works great but we have an animation for moving left and right that don't work so well. they start to play then stop in the middle.  i'm quite certain this will be a very easy fix tho and should take no time at all!  once we get that done we will be (mostly) done with the main gameplay! then we just have to move on to the little extra things we want added in like loading screens!

Before i go i'll leave you with the interesting issues we've had this week.

FIRST. we have a snowflake magnet power which does exactly as you'd expect. except its a bit of an over achiever. Basically we hadn't gotten around to programming the snowflake destroy script. so when the snow magnet power kicks on it calls in EVERY SINGLE snowflake spawned over the course of you current round giving you this weird little snow shield...

SECOND!  it's VERY important to delete by type > history when importing models into unity... if not you will accidentally spawn a snow demon into your game and have nightmares for the rest of the week... 

As always please leave us a comment below and let us know what you guys think or if you have any questions! also if you haven't yet please stop by and give our Facebook page a Like! Thanks

Developer Diary Day 40

So last week was crazy busy over here at WSS. good things are happening(more game progress related than financially....we are still broke, but thats part of the charm....i think?) we are making tons of progress on our new game and we've revealed tons of new info over that last week via Facebook. the biggest bit of news we announced was the official name. Run Frosty Run.  i think its got a nice ring to it. 

We also revealed 3 of the playable characters (pictured below), Ben Frosty, little Billy Snow, and Veronica Hail.

and finally we revealed a little bit of gameplay for you guys.

This week is all about optimizing and animations! (yes our snowmen will do more than just slide down the slopes in a t-pose) we are getting closer and closer every day to getting the main bit of gameplay down. then we just have to do all the other bits of the game. hopefully those won't take nearly as long as the main game...hopefully.

i'll try and upload a video showing the snowman's animations if i get time this week but i make no promises!!!

as always guys please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think of the game progress so far, and if you haven't yet please stop by our Facebook page and send us a like. 

Developer Diary day 34

hey guys,

UPDATE TIME!

over the last week we've been busy with a bit o' polishing, and a much larger bit o' programming and modeling. we also started what we call Reveal Week. basically everyday this week we will be dropping a piece of information we currently hadn't released yet. so far we've shown off two playable characters.

this is the character we revealed today. we've named him Billy Snow. now its early enough in production the model might change a bit and even his name might change. but odds are he'll stay pretty close to what he is now.

This one was the first one we decided to show off. His name is Ben Frosty and he's our default snowman.  he's the one that appeared in the coming soon banner on our Facebook. So i suppose he's more of a rereveal but still we're counting it.

The plans for this week (outside of the reveals) are to get the obstacles working better and sized better, get Ben frosty rigged. (rigging is the process of applying bones to a character model or mesh. this lets me animate the character with out having to move individual vertices. ), and work on modeling a few more meshes and terrain pieces.  i'll try and stop back by towards the end of the week and post all the reveals on here so you guys can check em out.

as always please take a moment to leave us a comment below, and if you haven't already stop by and like us Facebook page. looking forward to hearing from you guys!

Developer Diary Day 26

Hey Guys and Girls! Sorry for the long delay in updates. its been a busy couple of weeks. i flew down to Salt Lake City to visit with a buddy of mine, who also happens to be the other guy helping on the Project Frosty (not its official name by any means, just a temp place holder so we can stop calling it that snowman game.) Anyway, we've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on the game. so not a whole lot of visual bits to show off but i did want to go ahead and show off a screen shot of how its coming along .

Still pretty early in its development BUT its coming along nicely.  There is however still a ton of work to do. we still need to create the animations for our wonderful little snowman, create some obstacles because, while i agree with you the scenery is beautiful i don't think the world is ready for a road trip game, and we need to add in a few more elements which we aren't ready to reveal just yet...sorry guys. we will have more info for you guys soon! 

As always please leave us a comment below to let us know what you think of the game so far, and if you haven't already, stop by our Facebook page and leave us a like. its how we judge our self worth as a company and as human beings....