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