Hello, everyone!

Is this time of the year where I make a huge resume of all the stuff I worked on in 2021 and make some weak promises about what I am going to make the next year. You can read my last year’s one here!

I will be talking about Summer Snow Day, the four-game jams I worked on this year, the bundle in which YBit appeared, the tools I worked on, my programming posts, and more. You can skip parts if you don’t feel like reading about something, it is already a great honor you came up here.

Summer Snow Day

One of my main focuses this year was Summer Snow Day. With Chad and Lauta we had been making a lot of progress. Last year we started it over and focused a lot on making the most polished game possible while applying good programming practices that would help us add a lot of content.

Last time I said that probably this year was going to be close to being finished. I don’t want to promise this again and fail you! But I can say we finished up to chapter 4, most of our updates now are polishment and adding extra dialogue content. As far as I know, we are probably adding three chapters more while we work on the minigames and add keep polishing the game.

Is This Still Tennis

This year we experimented a lot when working in Is This Still Tennis. We had been mostly trying to find what changes we can do to make the game a more fun experience and not a game where you just swing the mouse around and hope to hit something.

Also, Roberto had been working on new characters, animations, and small details for them to make them more unique. I still didn’t show much of that because we didn’t fully integrate those details but we will soon!

We aren’t rushing this game because we both have a lot of work already but I like the slow pace and enjoy the project. I will personally try to make more updates this following year but, as with Summer Snow Day, I won’t promise anything just in case!

4 Game Jams in one year

Making games for four different game jams through the year was a lot of fun. I always recommended participating in game jams, even made a post about tips from my first 11 game jams and a post about tricks you can do for game jams.

During this year I worked on Ostrich Run, Paw Pals, Yemita, and Puppet Manor. I can’t stress enough how fun and a cool experience this was. Of course, I can’t work on game jams one after the other one, but having a team and working on these distributed through the year was a fun experience.

First of all, we did Ostrich Run and, I shouldn’t say this, but it was the game I enjoyed the most doing and releasing. It was a pleasure from start to end and I would have loved to continue this one but since Roque’s Life failure, we decided it was the best to leave it as a game jam game instead of falling in love as I did with the idea.

I feel like this was a gem game for a game jam. I made a whole post as a post-mortem about it but, if I had to highlight something, was how we used the time. We dedicated the perfect amount of time, in my criteria, to make each part and I think we made really good decisions, given the low amount of time, during the prototype time.

The next game was Paw Pals. In case you are interested, here is a post-mortem post about it. I think it was a fun game to make, definitely something new at least for me because I never worked on a game of this type. Many things could have gone better but I loved the feel the artists gave to it and the general concept of these kitties trapped on a tree working together to go down and I think the balance of the game worked out well being a game that was so difficult to balance in that short amount of time.

During the third game jam of the year, we did Yemita. This was a tricky one because it needed to work on the browser since it was for the Newgrounds Game Jam. Still, I loved how we added a Japanese vibe to the game and all the small details we put on it. I think the biggest problem for this one was the camera but it was quite a challenge to make it quick, fun and with a nice controller in such a small place. You can read more about the development here if you are interested.

And for the last game jam of the year, we made Puppet Manor and yes, it also has a post mortem you can read if you want. This one was a new challenge for us because none of us made a horror game before. Also, I think it was the first time where the scope went kinda out of hand so it was a good experience to have and try to solve during a limited time frame. Anyway, I had a lot of fun with the challenge and loved all the youtube videos we got from people who recorded themselves while playing it.

YBit in Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid

It was a great pleasure to help those in need by participating in the Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid. The bundle raised over 900k when its primary goal was 500k. I think it was a huge success and I hope it was a great help for those in need.

I know that YBit wasn’t a huge contributor to the number. I doubt anyone had said “Hey! YBit is in this bundle, I will get the bundle!” but I am glad that it helped to bulk the number and I am glad that most of the buyers thought that the main goal was to help people instead of just getting a bunch of games.

Made some tools

During this year, I had fun working on tools that would help me in my day-to-day development. Not only at my projects but also at my current job.

One of those tools was the Unity Portability Tester that lets the user check if a given feature is portable in terms of assets as the assembly definitions work in terms of scripts.

• 

• 

The other tool was the Unoptimized Sprite Finder that lets the user search for unoptimized sprites given criteria based on atlas and sprites use.

Apart from these two, I also kept updating a bit my Framework Goat but nothing big as I am not using it too much currently.

Programming Posts

Apart from all of these, I also started to add extra content to the blog such as posts about programming.

The full list of posts this year is:

• 4 Horsemen of the Game Jams: 4 nasty tricks to get results fast in Unity
• Object Pool using Generics and Factory Method with an Unity example
• 11 Useful Unity C# Extension Methods
• Three ways of coding
• How to make a camera wobble effect

Please consider checking them out if you are a programmer and you find at least one of them interesting from just reading their catchy titles.

Other projects

One of the topics for last year’s resume was Roque’s Life. Sadly, we decided to cancel it. As I said in an old post, it was a really time-consuming project and we didn’t seem to get enough art done. Apart from this, we decided to focus more on other projects so we ended up freeing our time by leaving this project.

Also, Summer Snow Day and Is This Still Tennis is not my only projects. I always look forward to working on multiple projects and I am getting more used to canceling them if I don’t feel like they are going somewhere.

A small resume of secondary projects I am working on that I am not sharing yet would be a game where you can simulate investing in stocks and crypto coins, a game where you fight through a dungeon making builds that customize the dices you use to make attacks or select attacks and a party game where you can only use one button to play a set of skill and psychological games.

I can’t promise all of them will come out, but I will keep working on them and as soon as they are more completed I will probably start sharing about them here and on my Twitter account.

Plans for the next year

For last, most of my plans for this next year are probably really clear if you had read up to here. But here they are if you are interested 🙂

My first main goals will be to continue with Summer Snow Day and Is This Still Tennis. I would love to have Is This Still Tennis released this coming year and it would be great to have Summer Snow Day narrative completed too but I don’t want to rush the creative side.

Then I would love to participate in more game jams. I am not sure how many of them I will be but I think four was a great number for this year. It was a challenging one but we added four new games and I think that was worth it.

Apart from these, I also want to focus a lot more on my secondary projects. This year was a really stressful one in general but I had been working on my calendar in order to dedicate more time to my secondary projects and I would love to make significant progress on those.

Apart from all of these, I would love to keep creating programming tools which I plan to upload for free on my GitHub, keep writing programming articles and I am toying with the idea of making an Unreal 5 project but this is just a wish for now.

I think this will be all for now. Thank you a lot for reading up here, I really appreciate it.

Hope you keep in touch during 2022 and I hope you had a great year in 2021.

Stay tuned! 🙂