Lets get right into it with the new version of Flat Fat Cat Bounce I did a lot of changes. I want to introduce the major changes now and explain a little bit about the decisions.
1. Animated Menu
As a first step of a feature I planned for the future I animated the main menu. I know most of you won’t have spend too much time in the main menu, thats why we want to introduce another feature in the near future to set more focus to the main menu. Just as a little hint you will be able to feed your cat and customize the room 🙂
2. UI Remastered
The old windows and interface lack a bit of quality, animations and layouting. I wanted to improve the whole expierence while you are in the menu, on the shop or looking through the map. I improved nearly all dialogs, windows and other UI elements. There are plenty of new animations and new window layouts. I hope the effort worth it and you like the new design just as much as I do.
3. Watch your stars
Did you ever thought while accomplishing a level – Was I fast enough to reach 3 stars? To have a much better overview about how many time left or how fast I have to be to earn 3 stars. I introduced a new UI element in game. This will help you to track time and stars while playing through the levels.
4. New effects
To improve the contrast of different szenes I implemented a new sepia shader, which greys out the background if any dialog is shown. We also changed the matching effect of two cats from hearts to stars and make it a bit more visible.
5. Improved scolling
It is so annoying to scroll the whole map with the slow scroll speed. So I finally implemented the fling to scroll over the map how to should be since start of FlatFatCat. With this small feature navigation around the map should be much easier.
6. Graphics improved
I wasn’t very happy with the old dialogs and menu. So I came up with this new UI graphics. In my opinion they fit much better into the game and are really good looking. Nearly every UI element was touched and changed. There is a lot of new graphics to explore!
7. New sounds
Some sounds were a bit annoying or just not fitting into the game. I changed the dissolve sound from the meow to a more success based sound effect. Also the winning sound changed a bit to make it less annoying.
I hope you all enjoy the new features and appreciate them that much as I do. I really like Flat Fat Cat Bounce and would love to invest even more time into it and release a lot more new features! Nevertheless now the time for new players and a lot of marketing has come. Please leave your comments below and subscribe to this blog.
After the release of the latest patch for Timbertales it is time for a new game project. I gathered the required budget and already created a full concept for the new game project. I will shift my focus a little bit, but first let us speak about Timbertales and FlatFatCat.
Timbertales
The Version 1.3.0 improved a lot of the graphical interface and I am quite happy with the changes. Additional we added a new version to itch.io, I updated the version of Timbertales on Steam and I updated the mobile version on Google Play Store and Apple Store. Now, it is time to wait for user feedback to finally build the full release candidate. Since Timbertales is still in early access, I will gather more feedback over the time the third project will be developed. So I can take a look afterwards in which way Timbertales will be improved for the final release. If you haven’t already check out the new promotion trailer:
FlatFatCat
This game is a little bit harder to describe. Actually I like the game very much and I think we created a very cool game, which is a lot of fun and offers a lot of levels and diversion. Unfortunately it didn’t hit on the market as expected. The main reason for that is the lack of marketing budget in my opionion. The mobile market is quite hard and you need to create a buzz around your game to actually get some downloads. Otherwise your game is lost as many other good games in the void of the app stores. The steam version of FlatFatCat wasn’t performing as good as expected, since the game was fully planned for mobile devices. So in the end we will leave FlatFatCat as it is for now – willing to commit some budget in marketing in the near future.
Shifting focus of Rainware
As I said before I want to realign the focus of our games. With the experience made with FlatFatCat, I made the decision to avoid the mobile market and focus fully on core games. The vision needs to be “Creating games – I will play” that said of course I like Timbertales and FlatFatCat and I am also very proud, that I could release them, but I am a PC gamer since ages and love other types of games. Also the release platforms will change. Of course there will be Steam for PC, but I also want to extend to itch.io and GoG as well as I want to enter the console market including Xbox and PlayStation. (Nintendo switch would be a dream as well :))
Reveal Project III
Last but not least I will give you a small insight for the next project. What can you expect? We plan to create a game mixed with well known Moba aspects in a sandbox type of game. This also includes a lot of gathering, fighting, collecting and crafting. There will be rpg parts as well. This time we will have our first 3D game in an very atmospheric environment. Stay tuned for the next blog entries. We will update you with everything related to the new project and keep you updated about the development progress. The project is scheduled for at least 6 months.
Thanks for reading. Leave your questions or feedback!
I am proud to announce a new patch for Timbertales. This patch includes a lot of graphical improvements and replaces a lot of placeholders in the game. This patch is one of the first steps directing to the full release of Timbertales. Unfortunately I haven’t received much feedback about Timbertales within the last months, I would appreciate that a lot. This would allow me to further improve Timbertales and bring it to a full release. Nevertheless here are the change with 1.3.0:
Improvements
Replaced a lot of text with more fitting icons or shorter text
Improved Multiplayer screen
Improved Challenge screen
Improved Loading screen
Improved Lobby
Improved options
Improved profile screen
Improved game interface
Improved Popups, layouts and font colors
Improved exchange screen (android, ios)
Improved credits screen
Improved ranking screen
Improved mission overview
Added exit button in main menu
New Input fields
Windows and tabs were improved
Removed lots of unused assets and files
Added window animations
And many more small changes to layouts, assets etc. You will explore a whole new interface experience. I also plan to rework some of the units and animations in the near future. I would love to invest more time into the game, but I will need some feedback.
Hey everyone!
This is Day 2 of “Switching from libGDX to Unreal Engine 4”. Today I made some progress… yeah! But first I just wanted to announce that FlatFatCat is finally available on Steam. This was the reason why I hadn’t any time to make any progress in Unreal Engine4 the last days. Sorry for all daily followers, if something like that exists 🙂 Since it was necessary to fix some bugs in FlatFatCat and port the code to desktop platform. Anyhow today I went back to the topic Unreal Engine 4.
Taking Babysteps to achieve easy stuff
My progress is still very slowly, but at least I made something. First of all I was able to spawn some actors by c++ code. I was really proud. After the weekend, I tried to reload my project … and it was broken somehow. So Unreal Engine got stuck at 71% and loads forever. I couldn’t really understand why. So I had chosen another approach. Since I am not very familiar with the Blueprint stuff and I found a book with the title “Develop games with Blueprints and Unreal Engine 4” I decided to give it a try. After some reading I created a new example project and achieved some basic stuff with Blueprints. This in the end helped me to understand the engine even more.
There is still a lot to learn
So I made some progress with Blueprints and understanding the engine a bit more. I still have the problem that the engine is quite heavy on my Macbook 13, but I am so used to develop on OSX that I switched back to it. I will also stick to the books and I have to learn even more about the engine stuff. For now it seems like this will take me at least some more days, before I really can make some good progress. But in the end I think it is worth it, because I have to say of course Unreal Engine 4 looks fantastic and it also helps me to getting more into the c++ development stuff. Last but not least there are actually plenty of jobs for UE4 developer. So I think it is a good decision, even if it has its downsides.
with this blog entry I will finish off my work for today. The entire day productivity was a bit weird, but I will go into more detail. First things first: Today I used my gaming windows PC to develop in UE4 and performance wise it was a good idea. Anyhow it wasn’t that easy to get everything up and running, since I had to install everything again UE4 and Visual Studio. This took quite a while. After that I also installed Blender to get working with some models and try importing etc.
The rough start with unreal
I won’t lie in the beginning and can tell you at this moment I am absolutely lost in UE4 and have no clue what I am actually do. I wanted to start with a simple Board game, so I tried around with building some landscape, getting models into the engine etc. All of this stuff is quite cool and the engine itself looks also very cool. But I haven’t yet written one line of code, which really bothers me as a developer. Everything is so visual and if you are not used to the whole editor it is just overwhelming. I often thought about: Do you really want to stick to UE4? My approach or better said working flow was so much different with libGDX. Most of the time I was writing code. Today, hm, what did I achieve? I watched a lot of tutorial videos, read through many documentations and tried different things to get different things done.
The things getting really fast unreal!
It is very surprising that you can just add a landscape give it a water material, some lights and you have some awesome looking water, but it somehow feels not right to me as a developer. Since I wanted to try out some models and lightmaps, I started with modeling in Blender and just created an easy hexagon for this purpose. Creating the uv for lightmap and exporting the model as fbx was quite simple. Also the import into UE4 works out of the box and there is nothing special to mention about. I was setting up some different cameras and testing around. Everything I actually do is more or less trial and error. Too many things are unclear to me right now and I always have the problem to not know where to solve a problem. For example you can create a whole landscape in UE4 with everything needed or you also can model the landscape in Blender and then import it to UE4. It is somehow confusing to me. Another thing is the blueprint scripting, actually you don’t have to write any line of code, you can just solve everything with the inbuild blueprint scripting.
Outlook
Of course I will stay focused on UE4 and learn a lot more. I hope, I will get more used to it the longer I try out different things or watch tutorials. For now I feel like an absolute newbie in game development, but I achieved an ingame scene today and want to share that one with you:
Make sure to subscribe or follow my blog, because the series: Switching from libgdx to unreal engine 4 just started!
As a small part of my daily work, I want to give blogging actually a bit more focus than I did in the past. So I came up with the idea to write a series about my actual switch to unreal engine 4 and describe the reasons behind it.
Review
Let me tell you something about the history. As some of you might know I already developed and published two games written libGDX: Timbertales and FlatFatCat. I started with the libGDX framework, because I am usually no fan of big bloated engines or toolkits and love to keep things simple. With libGDX I the choice to implement stuff I needed and could write everything by myself, if I wanted to. Most of the time I was actually very happy with libGDX. Meanwhile I am very experienced with it and most tasks are really easy to achieve. Of course there are some downsides. For example implementation of in app purchases using gdx-pay or deploying on iOS could sometimes be pain in the ass. Also the lack of community support is sometimes really nasty. But as I said for me it is a cool framework and I like to work with it.
Unfortunately times change and I definitely have to reach for an other audience within my next game. My gathered experience showed me, that I made the least revenue by now in the mobile market and with in app purchases. The reasons are too few players and the marketing to get more players is quite expensive. I can’t afford that type of marketing, which is needed to make a big hit on the mobile market.
So the strategy changed: I made more revenue with Timbertales on steam sales and Bundles. In addition to that I ported FlatFatCat also to steam, which will be released on steam at the 15th august 2017. With my next game I want to focus even more on steam and maybe enter the console market as well. This is the reason why I couldn’t stick to libGDX anymore, since libGDX doesn’t offer support for consoles in an easy way.
Which engine to use: Unreal Engine 4, Unity, Lumberyard?
With the end of libGDX I had to decide on which engine my future will be build. Important for me is: I have to make money with my games to survive and developing new games actually cost a lot of money. So I need to make a good choice for the future.
I decided against Lumberyard, because it is still in beta and the community is quite small. There are also very few games written on Lumberyard yet. I think it is a very cool engine and if I would develop games in my free time I would at least try it out, but in my actual situation it isn’t a good choice.
So the good old battle Unity vs UE4. I read a lot about both engines and there are so much topics about it. In fact both engines have a big community and both are well supported. They have two different pricing models. While Unity has a subscription model, UE4 takes a royalty fee of 5% if you earn more than 3000$/quarter.
I don’t know exactly why, but I always had a bad opinion against Unity and I dislike C#, if you could write C++ instead. So in the end my decision was to go with Unreal Engine 4. I can write C++, it offers a lot of support and I like the pricing model. I think if I earn money with my games, there is no reason for me not to support a really good engine!
First Steps with Unreal Engine 4
Lets get started: I started with Unreal Engine, created my account, downloaded the engine, installed the engine and started with some exercises from books I bought. The editor looks quite complex and everything is so different compared to writing libGDX. I have a really hard time to get started and get used to an engine approach. But nevertheless I know as a programmer starting is always the hardest part. It is also a step to create a 3D game instead of 2D as I did before. Another downside is my macbook pro 13 has a really hard time with the monster named unreal engine 4 😉 Building times a quite high and I had some crashes as well. A good reason for me to think about using Unreal Engine on my windows gaming PC.
I will try to keep you more informed about my first steps with UE4 this week and provide more details about the development process. Today I just started off the series “My way with Unreal Engine 4”. I hope you enjoy reading 🙂
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