Game development will be suspended for a few years

Hello everyone,

i am sorry but i have even worse news than last time.
Due to university and part time job being more than I can handle, i don't have any energy or time left to develop Noria.
Thus i will stop the blog posts and development until university is over, which will be in about 3-5years, depending on the fact if i apply for a Master degree after my Bachelor or not.
I do hope that i will be able to continue developing Noria at a later time, however university has more priority for my life right now.
I wish you all the best and I will still answer any comments you post here.

Best wishes
Feliza

long break from Noria

Hi there everyone,

today I have to inform you of the fact that there won't be any blog posts until the middle of august. The reason is that university and exams are taking a lot more time and effort lately and we want to focus on it completely.

Once the blog posts resume we will be back with fresh new game content and lots of time to pursue the development further.

I hope you will check back for the updates once the exams are over.

Best wishes

Feliza

Game update: Menu and map recreating finished

Good evening to all of you,

this week i got some really great news.

Andrew finished the map recreation, so from now on he can work on developing new features again.
He has already begun work on the inventory.

This is the first rough outline of it. We are planning on having different tabs at the bottom for the different places where you can store items. At the top will be information on the weight you can carry and how much the items you carry around weigh.











In addition to the great news on Andrews work i finished the menu and you can interact with objects now. The features you can see when opening the menu will be implemented one by one.

For the next two weeks we will spend our time on renaming the collider names of the objects you can see (trees, rocks, etc.) and resizing the colliders, so the distance between the player and object is realistic.
If we have some spare time after this we will add loot to the trees and stones so you will be able to collect items and see them in your inventory soon.

So look forward to some more updates soon and please leave me a comment here to share your opinion.

Best wishes

Feliza

Zero budget game marketing Part 1

Hi everyone,

this time i got a special blogpost for you ;)

I watched a video at the unity 3d tutorial site about how to market your game without any money and the importance of marketing in general. You can view the slides of the presentation here.


This video is really helpful and interesting. So check out the video and the other sites of Emmy Jonassen.
If you dont have the time to do that read my summary of it here.
The summary will be divided into three parts to keep the posts short and focused on one topic.
 This time i will tell you about the beginning of the presentation and the 1. step to achieve marketing sucess, namely  "Create irresistible promotional materials" .

First of all Emmy talked about how hard it is to become an indie developer and that most games(80%) are developed at a loss(in terms of money).
After that she showed how games made a lot more profit by investing some time, not money, into marketing which boosted their sales a lot.

The next part of her presentation was named "3 Steps to Achieve Marketing Sucess":
Each of those parts had a few subheadlines which i am going to tell you about right now.

The five must have parts of your promotional materials are:

-Trailer video(ingame footage, grab the viewers attention right in the intro, not longer than 90 seconds, give an outlook on further updates, use music/sounds effects and include reviews if possible)
- Screenshots(show them the diversity of your game and the most breathtaking scenes, use a high resolution and a well lit scene)
- press release(start with the important info and grab the readers attention at the beginning of your article, use quotes, give readers your contact info or links to pages where they can find out more about you, add screenshots and a trailer video to your article, use hyperlinks within the text so people can easily reach your own sites)
-landing page(no navigation, grabbing headline, social sharing icons, strong call to action(buy/download) button, captivating screenshots, reviews and contact information)
- development blog(if you work on your game 8hours a day 5days a week blog at least once weekly, use images, add a link to and from your homepage, offer all kind of possibilities for readers to share and follow your posts)

Thats it for the first part.

Next time i will tell you about the step "Score articles in top-tier publications".

So look forward to it and see you next time.

Best wishes

Feliza

Work on Menu nearly finished, map recreation making progress

Good evening everyone,

i hope you are all well and enjoying the first days of spring interrupted by some winter days ;)

In the last two weeks Andrew managed to recreate another two maps.

Meanwhile i watched some interesting live session videos from unity here.
I am going to tell you about one of them in another blogpost soon to give everyone who is interested in game development some important information on marketing.

In addition to that i made some changes to the menu , which are nearly completed.

As for the next two weeks i will focus on improving my knowledge about how to work with unity in order to speed up the development process.

Look forward to the awesome features yet to come and if you feel like supporting this great game by giving us advice or just a thumbs up leave us a comment here, spread the word about this game or simply check out the google advertisement on the right side.

Best wishes

Feliza

Menu refuses to work but splash screen arrived

Good evening to all of you,

this time andrew managed to implement the splash screen(which you can see when playing the game).
The background is temporary until we have our own awesome background image.

I fixed the distance bug in the last two weeks. Well if you set it public and not as a constant it will get overwritten by the value written in the public field. It took a long while until a friend realized the issue and helped me fix it.
In addition to that I worked a lot on the menu and implemented choices and reactions.
So basically everything is ready for some nice interaction with the objects around the player, however even after many hours I am still unable to fix one bug i have there, which makes it impossible to present it to you today.

I am very sorry about that since i was really looking forward to it.
I hope i can fix it in the next two weeks and make one more step into the direction of a fully working interaction system.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

a letter from google

Hi there everyone,

this time i got some good news for you.

The letter from google finally arrived so once we collected enough money from the advertisement on this blog we can rent the server and implement WebGL so everyone can play.
On this note i am really grateful to those who have clicked so far and supported us this way.

Since Luna isnt there to take care of the map creation anymore Andrew is working on it. The result of a reworked map so far is this:

As for the development of the game I am currently working on fixing a major bug(which is that the range at which objects can be identified is not correct).
We are using unitys raycast system for this, however changing the lengh of the raycast from 1 to 200 somehow doesnt change the lengh so its a bit problematic.

I got some things to look forward to for you as well. While working on the maps Andrew also created a starting screen for the game. There you can see the current version, update notes and what you did last time you played.
It isnt finished yet but i am sure it is going to give the game a better feeling when starting it.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Blog Posts will become less from now on

Hello everyone,

we decided not to write weekly anymore since there aren't that many features that can be completed in a week next to ones real life.

For now the idea is to write every two weeks and see how it goes but depending on the outcome of this we might change this again.

As for the status of making the game available for chrome users i am still waiting for a letter from google. Once i receive it we will upgrade our server at the next special offer and then offer a WebGl version for all of you.

Right now we are in the process of learning much more than the process of developing new features.
Diana is practicing her skills to create graphics, I am researching how to best make a graphical user interface so you have a menu with buttons you can click. Andrew is testing out the map editor and recreating the maps properly. Well and Saty our "code controller" is working on getting used to unity.

I look forward to receiving some more feedback from you on the game to improve it further, since every feature should be as good as possible.

Best wishes

Feliza

Map Editor complete

Good evening everyone,

this week Andrew finished the map editor so i am positive that we can soon fix the collider issues on our maps.

Diana finished some tutorials and will now start her first experiments with creating graphics for Noria.

During that time i realized that there is something amiss with the collider detection. Basically the range of the detection is too big and thus not accurate. I worked on fixing this issue but will need some more time for it.

I hope to be able to add a menu with different options for you soon.

Thanks for your continuous support and look forward to the improvements in the next weeks.

Best wishes

Feliza

First signs of a working interaction system

Hello everyone,

thanks for your patience.
After 3 long month we finally managed to get the first bit of our interaction system working.
When pressing 'space' you can now see what kind of object is in front of you.
However it is not always correct what it shows since there are some errors in the map structure which we need to fix first.

I got some more news for you. First the bad ones:

Luna will stop working on Noria in order to focus on her studies at university and her YouTube channel.

Now the good ones:

We got two new members who will support us from now on.
Diana will create new graphics for our maps, after practising a bit.
Our other new member will check our source code in order to improve it.
(The process is called refactoring and the aim is to make the source code easier to read and to increase the performance - faster and less resource consuming.)

As you can see the blog as the game have undergone changes.
For the blog we have a permanent game link on the right side now as well as some advertisement.
I would like you to check the advertisement from time to time in order to support us. We will use the money to rent a better server so all the people using chrome or Linux/other operating systems can play the game as well.

In the game you can now switch between walking and running by pressing shift once. In addition to that our text now has a background so it is easier to read. As well as of course our main feature this week the text changes depending on the object you are investigating.

Thanks for your continuous support and look forward to the improvements in the next weeks.

Best wishes

Feliza

Another break for real life

Hi everyone,

first some important news.
Luna and I will be taking a break for the next two weeks to fully focus on our university exams.

Thus there won't be a blog entry for this time, even though Andrew will continue his work on the interaction system.

After we have finished our exams we will have a time period where we can spend more time on noria again so I am looking forward to our progress then.

This week there was little change from last week and the changes to the interaction system that Andrew made are still being tested.

Thus I hope you will be patient with us and continue following this blog.

Best wishes

Feliza

WebGL wont work

Hello everyone,

I really wanted you to be able to use WebGl as the new player in the browser to play the game even with chrome or using linux.
This however is impossible, since our free webserver does not support the filesize and I do not believe that we are yet at a point where money should be invested. After all you cant play much yet.

Thus i will try offering a windows and linux version so you can download the game and play it on your computer.

Meanwhile Andrew checked out a new tool to create our maps inside of unity and changed some scripts for better colliders. In addition to that our interaction system is making progress step by step.

Luna is currently testing the new tool. If we decide to use it I will write more about it.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Change of plans

Hello everyone,

this week was spent with trying out different things and planning new things again.
As always you can play the updated version here.
Luna added a new map(some collisions dont work though) and partly improved some older maps.

Our new developer Andrew had his hands full trying out raycasts for the interaction system and figuring out how our team and game is structured.

I was busy repairing some code and implementing the feature to determine the player direction once again. Once i finished that i found a great tool to coordinate everyones actions and tasks. For now we decided to try out a program called Trello.

With this program we have many different boards where we can put up cards and in them discuss things or update the status.











During this week it proved very helpful and i believe we will continue working with it in the future.

I believe you remember how we struggled with the automapping feature and some features of tiled.
I still believe that it is a good tool to make simple rpg maps. However we want to be able to adjust the space between a player and objects better and to make better colliders. Thus we are looking into map creation with unity right now.

The consequence of this decision is that it will take a bit until we bring out a new map again and that the map workover we wanted to do will have to wait. So Luna ist currently working on planning out the world map in more detail

As you can see creating a game can often lead to new discoveries, changes of the old plans and improvements born from failure.

I hope you will continue rooting for us and check in once again next week.

Best wishes

Feliza

Hi everyone,

sorry for the late blogpost this time around.

To make up for it i will tell you some great news.
Our team has grown by another member!

We now have an additional developer called Andrew and he will help me with finishing the interaction system faster. He has previous experience with game development and with unity as well and supports us in other areas than developing as well.

As for a new update there will be one next week with a new map for you to explore.
Depending on our progress on the interaction system there might even be new functions concerning the gameplay, but i cant promise that.

This week we were busy planning and testing various stuff. Automapping still isnt working, custom properties arent showing up in unity yet, the maps need a little workover and the interaction system and code recreation are still in work.

Look forward to the update next week.


Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Good evening everyone,

this week we worked on multiple things in order to improve the various methods we are using to do things.

Luna tried getting the automapping feature to work. Due to unknown reasons it isnt working though, even though she checked multiple sources for instructions and followed them. Thus we are currently waiting for the reply of the author of the article which we linked you before.

In addition to that Luna started working on a new map and i hope you are all looking forward to it.
She further explored the feature of custom properties, which we plan on using to identify objects and to save the loot and other things as the properties of the objects itself.

During that time i wanted to implement the raycast. During that process i realised that some parts of my sourcecode disappeared, probably due to playing back a backup... I then decided to implement a new backup solution, so the progress is saved each week after the blogpost.

I will work on recreating the source code which isnt there anymore(detection of the direction and stopping the walking animation when not moving) and update the game after i finish these changes.

Due to our exam period having started in real life Luna and I cant work on Noria as much as want right now, but I sincerly hope that you will stay loyal to us and check back for new updates each week.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Good evening everyone,

this week Luna and I worked on testing out the Polygon Collider2d approach which has been described in the link posted in the previous post.

However there are still some technical difficulties, so we haven't really made as much progress as I hoped we would.
Nonetheless we managed to clarify what exactly we need to do to get this approach working.
While Luna will fix the issues with setting the rules next week, I will create a raycast(see my try of jewel miner) in order to detect the collision with the tiles.

The general idea is to have a collider for each group of objects(like stones, trees, etc) and then by using a raycast that will collide with it i will know what it is and can then start the according sourcecode.

I hope to finish the interaction system soon, so you all can enjoy playing Noria even more.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza

Happy new year everyone,

i discovered an interesting article on the site of our program tiled( see here).

In this article there is an explanation of a feature called auto mapping.
With this we can simplify the process of placing colliders on the objects after setting a few rules.
Basically our rules will be like: if there is a tree on the field add a tree collider to it.

In addition to the advantages Luna has when building maps it is also possible to give the different tiles custom properties.

After i change the import script that Tiled2Unity uses the interaction system becomes a lot more simple.
By having different objects and not groups of objects in unity i can acess the custom properties of each object and thus determine what it is and what loot it gives.

Right now Luna and I are getting used to the auto mapping feature and to the script changes.
Using this approach i am sure that we will be able to finish the interaction system a bit faster than planned.

I hope you all look forward to the next game update, since it will bring many changes and follow this blog in the new year 2016.

Thanks for your continuous support.

Best wishes

Feliza