Hello, everyone!

It is this time of the year once again when I make a huge resume of what was the year for me and what I plan for the next year! If you are interested, here is my last resume for 2021.

This time I am going to talk about Summer Snow Day, Riverside Rumble, Ostrich Run, A Toad’s Trip, Stonks, programming posts, tools, and other projects. As you can see, it will be a long post so feel free to skip a part if you are not interested in it.

That’s it, let’s start, and hope you enjoy this as much as possible as I enjoyed this year.

Summer Snow Day

We had been working a lot on Summer Snow Day this year. This year we started with having up to chapter 4 completed but, even though we just fully added almost two chapters (and probably only one or two are missing!) we didn’t stop at doing only chapters.

We also worked on a few new mechanics that the dialogue system has. Now we can add branches to the dialogue based on the relationship status and also we finished the implementation of every minigame that the game will have.

The minigames still need art and balance we are pretty happy that those are already defined, fun to play and fresh addition to the game apart from the dialogue system. I think that one thing that is being really achieved is that in every chapter there are new mechanics and systems to discover. This, plus the plot, of course, I think will keep the player with a feeling of discovery most of the time.

This following year, the goal will still be wrapping up the plot but also we made a big plan with everything we need to poolish for the game, this will help us reach the quality we want. We will see how far we get but something I will promise for sure is that we are going to have a bunch of updates!

Riverside Rumble

We also worked a lot with Roberto on Riverside Rumble, known before as Is This Still Tennis. I think the biggest change was that we fully modified the movement of the bat which led to a re-work of almost the whole game in terms of programming.

During this remake, we focused more on some different interactions using power-ups combined with this simple mechanic of just dragging and releasing when the projectile is coming. Given the new state of the game, I think we achieved a more fun experience plus a lot more meaningful regarding strategy since before what we had was just a stick moving randomly in the air. Not only that, but Roberto also has been working on improving a lot of the sprites, animations, and effects. The game now looks a lot more alive than it was before thanks to these upgrades.

Again we are not going to rush the game, but I feel like this year we made a lot of big progress and we have a more clear goal for the game. Things that are on the list to work on are configuring levels to make them a gradual challenge and adding maybe bosses or more enemies. We will see how it develops!

Ostrich Run

The other game we are trying to make is Ostrich Run which you may have played in its game jam version when it was released. We always thought it was a game worth continuing and I guess we finally gathered the team to do it.

At first, we started doing a level editor for it to give the chance for the players to make their own levels and upload them but because of time constraints in the art team, we decided to cut this for now. Because of this, we are now focusing on the new mechanics and giving gamepad support to the game.

I think this will be the right approach since it will let us make a deliverable game in the end with less need for everyone to have enough free time. We are just starting with this but let’s see how it turns out during the year.

A Toad’s Trip

During this year, my original plan was to participate in a bunch of game jams but because of a set of different reasons I got to participate only in one and that one was the Brackeys Game Jam 2022.1, where the theme was “It is not real”. For the jam, we did A Toad’s Trip.

I personally loved working with a lot of new people that never worked with or just worked with in my current job. Also, I had fun with the general mood of the game. I would have liked to be able to deliver a game a little less buggy but because of how things turned we weren’t able to solve every issue and a few popped up once the game was published.

Stonks

At the end of 2021, we started working on Stonks which is a meme game that uses real data to simulate buying and selling stocks and crypto. We started with the basic UI and concept and then searched for ways to just use free resources so we wouldn’t need to maintain the game.

The game was finally released on the 26 of June. I would have liked it to have been a bit more public but I guess the game was just way too hard thing since it was a simulator that used real data. Also, it felt a bit between a simulation and a game and maybe it didn’t get to attract the correct public.

Anyway, regardless of the performance, I think it was a fun game to work on and to add to my published projects so I am still proud of it.

Programming Posts and Tools

Since last year I have been writing posts about programming. This year was no exception and I made a few new ones.

Here is the full list for this year in case you are interested:

• Every way to communicate Unity’s MonoBehaviour scripts
• Make a writing text effect in Unity like those in Visual Novels using UniRx
• How to create Scriptable Objects in Unity
• 6 useful Unity Editor tricks you probably didn’t know about
• How to make a Finite State Machine in Unity using C#

During this year I also made a few tools with open-source git. Some were made for personal use in some projects but wanted to share them as free meanwhile others I made them just for fun or experimentation. Here is the full list in case you want to check them out:

• Newgrounds Unity API Helper
• Giphy Unity Requester

I think that, for this year, the tools will depend more on the opportunity to have something to work with but regarding the programming posts, I still plan to keep adding them during the year so expect more of that in the future!

Other projects

During this year I worked on a bunch of other projects that didn’t see the light yet or are not going to see it. Here is a quick recap of things I did but I will keep it on hold for now at least.

One of them was streaming on Twitch. This was something I started this year and even got to be an affiliate of Twitch but it was a very time-consuming thing and I felt like I wasn’t being able to redirect the audience to other platforms as I was trying to. Because of this, I decided to put on a hold this for now.

Another project I put on hold but definitely would like to bring back to life at some point is the Spells & Dice game. I started this as a solo project searching for an artist and I really trust that the game has what it needs to be a great game but I felt like the approach for searching for an artist for it won’t work in the end. Apart from this, I found an old team member from a game jam and we decided to work again together on a project. Because of this, I will be putting it on hold for now since I really want to focus on that one since we have already two artists on board and a pretty cool idea.

Plans for the next year

So what are the plans for next year? The main ones keep being Summer Snow Day and Riverside Rumble with a new focus on Ostrich Run and this new project that I will announce once it is more developed.

For Summer Snow Day I would love to have all the chapters finished and started with the polishment. Of course, this does not depend on me and again, we don’t want to rush the creative side so we can get the most out of the plot.

Meanwhile, for Riverside Rumble, I think that we may be able to finish the game this year, with the new focus and the new improvements for the game, the path seems a lot clearer so hopefully, we get to wrap it up.

Ostrich Run is just at the beginning of its development, so we will need to see how it develops and how much it takes us to make it as good as we want. I guess I just plan to have some good progress from this one during the year.

For last, it would be nice to start seeing big progress on that new project, but since we are just starting out I won’t promise anything, just as with the other projects, sorry for that!

This will be regarding the main projects. I would like also to go back to participate in game jams but I need to figure out how I actually want to achieve that. Also, I will keep working on programming posts and I am planning to learn new skills that I believe are useful for indie game developers, more updates on that in the future.

So that’s it! I hope you had a good 2022 year and a great 2023 ahead. Thank you for reading this far and please keep in touch!

Thank you!