The Path to PC and Return of Cartoon Shading!

This really is exciting (to me at least). Before releasing on Mobile I had spent considerable time tuning the cartoon shaders and finding the right one on the Unity Asset store that worked how I wanted it to. But Mobile is a special kind of beast and somewhere along the road the cell shading and cartoon outlines just stopped working. I was saddened that all that initial work to get this effect was for nothing. But time for an indie dev is the most precious of all commodities, so I had no choice but to finish the million other tasks in order to publish the game.

Here I am, 6 months after mobile release, preparing the game for it’s Debut on Steam. I decided to give the cartoon look one last Hoorah before throwing in the towel. So I went to the folder where all the character materials are kept* and gave Daria Deer some adjustments. I saw nothing. But took a closer look after maxing out line width (from 0.3 to 1) and saw a faint little line starting to show. This moment was the pinnacle of my month. I set the width multiplier of the line to 5 and BOOM! a nice thick line formed. Some adjustments and I settled on 3. Super Panda was from a different artist and needed a much higher setting.

Almost Ready for Steam!

Animal Friends Adventure is almost ready to be published to Steam! This is a huge milestone. It required far more work than I’m willing to mention. The more major components were the input controller. I had to migrate to using Unity Asset Rewired for handling the multitude of controller options beyond touch screen. The User Interface proved to be an enormous hassle. The UI was originally done in NGUI which doesn’t appear to be actively maintained. So I had to still write a custom script to handle controller button presses. The next stage (after initial release) is to fully rework the GUI to use the gamepad for navigating buttons and they’ll highlight when selected (How Sekiro does it). The rest were bugs in character controller and other minor items.

After all the reworking was done there is one last thing to do. The dreaded Promo Video. I have Adobe Premiere and After Effects open behind this browser window (as I type out this update) beckoning for me to start editing. The other night I recorded an hour of gameplay in order to give you all the best 30 seconds ever.

It’s a lot of work being an Indie Game Dev. It’s not some huge party swimming in cash with rooms of hookers and blow. It’s freezing in the home office watching the sun rise and set through the one window as the days go on. But it was a personal choice I made to chase after this passion. Sitting in a corporate office had it’s benefits but it was a soul sucking life.