Wäjste Wörx

Perhaps now is a good time to reveal our next project – Waste Works or “Wäjste Wörx” as the original title reads. Mainly its an exploration of several concepts baked into one. Its a casual resource management game with some puzzle and RPG elements added to the mix.

You work at the recycling centre, taking things apart and sorting out components. Sometimes something useful turns up or something more valuable. It’s a click-to-disassemble and avoid dangerous items, while pocketing (long-click) items to your inventory. From the inventory you can inspect items closer. If it looks wearable you can put it on and investigate its effect on your abilities. From there anything can happen. Explore, investigate and shred through the piles of waste.

Rarity is a big thing. For items it ranges from common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary to mythic. For valuables it goes from copper, silver, gold, platinum to obsidian. It’s tough to find the really good stuff! And there is always new things to find – its just a matter of persistence. Collect and sell for funds while trying on larger and larger piles of waste.

Join the Alpha Playtest: Get the App on Google Play

Blender Coffee Cup

For the final part I followed the next part from the #blenderguru tutorial and made a glass cup with coffee. Not bad considering lack of talent in this area.

Blender Donuts and Unity

Following @andrewpprice tutorial is a good way to jump straight into the world of 3D-modeling.
Using Unity for playing with bouncing donuts. Simple materials seems to be imported, however the more advanced mappings (e.g. bumpmaps, nodes) does not follow through. These needs to be reapplied in Unity which means quite a bit of work.

It’s this time a year again when we play catch-up with hands on skills and just playing around. This time by following the very good tutorial on Blender by #blenderguru. It’s a lot of fun especially working out and perfecting the texture and looks of the bread part.

Back to Unity

This summer I made the decision to halt development with Java and LibGdx to give Unity another try. The reasoning behind it being that coding just takes way too much time away from the whole game design process. To prove the point I started out looking at some of Brackeys YouTube tutorials. Safe to say I was convinced and just to have something to work on I decided to pick up my very first game design (since I already had the assets lying around) about that 2D soccer action/adventure and turn it into a proper re-make. Two weeks later it is now released on itch.io! With that out of the way, there is no excuse left to not start fiddling with the next project.

Pixel Art

We are working on and off with our first major game title. It will take a while since we are learning many things along the way – among other things how to draw basic pixel art. It’s fun but at the same time a massive project. We try to apply simplicity while looking for the right feel so at the moment a lot of experimentation is going on. For now focus is on environments with basic 9-tile setups, but also backgrounds and various sprite objects. Trees is another thing we look at.

On another level we have sketched prototype maps and brainstormed about possible content and events for the storyline. We have a pretty decent box for it and the past summers sudden re-interest in D&D-role and basic tabletop games has certainly pushed this effort forward. Hopefully we can soon share more tangible information about this project! 

Ready For Sleep

In a series of unfortunate events, we never managed to upload the app to Windows App Store. The process was everything but smooth. There is a number of reasons for why this is unusually complicated, but it all boils down to that using the specific command for probing processes that prevents the computer from entering sleep requires administrator privileges. While it is perfectly possible to make an app and even build a working public executable – this drawback basically makes it virtually impossible to publish it online via Windows Store or similar. Perhaps Universal Windows Apps are easier to make and get published, but these specific Windows apps written in C# that requires anything special must to go through a very complicated signing process that is impossible to debug. We initially thought that the AppX container would work for this but it now seems like a dead end. Project is put on ice for now.

New Horizons

Over the past weeks I have worked on my very first (well, since 20 years back) modern Windows app! Quite impressed by how far the Visual Studio suit has come over the past years. Tried it briefly on a Gadgeteer workshop five years ago, but never got around to try it properly. Looking forward to see and test how Windows stands out as a viable development platform.

The Ad Sponsored Creative Economy

We have some thoughts about ads and being an indie developer that we would like to share. In the past we have frowned upon ads for being a waste of space and aesthetic expression. It is not a unique position, but lately we have challenged ourselves to rethink this position. What if ads could be the way to build a sustainable business model for small passionate indie studios like ourselves? We have in the past months quickly realized that there are literally thousands of small indie developers that ponder the same question. A recent article even talked about the death of paid apps so the only way forward for the broad mass is in-app purchases or ad support. Well, for once we are gonna take a very constructivist stance towards ads and see where that leads us.

Imagine if a lot of people would realize that ads may be a subtle and playful way to enable young creators to do the stuff they dream about. From now on we will focus on social media and help support fellow developers by having a look at their apps, think positively whenever ads are shown, knowing that everytime we take part of their offer a small developing team gets to build their own dream future.