Farjay Studios

Added a reference to everyone’s favorite chicken place in Breaking Bad, the first is the original and the second is my edit:

And here’s a screenshot in-game:

Another reference in this strange bear game not many caught, it’s this box with an H on it:

It’s near the crashed mail site in Shepard Lake. You can hear buzzing coming from it. Why?

People bring the strangest things with them when camping..

Strange triangle guitars? This may be coming to a Bear Game near you!

Checked the email and got a lot of nice emails from Russian fans. Not entirely sure what happened but I suspect it's because of a gamer called Kuplinov.

That was quite nice of you Russia. Probably won't be able to respond to all your emails. Am terrible at trying to keep up with things and email especially. Am trying though >.>

Someone was nice enough to offer a better Russian translation, cool person:

Проверил электронную почту и получил много хороших писем от российских фанатов . Не совсем уверен, что произошло, но подозреваю, что дело в летсплейщике по имени Kuplinov.

Ok so was following this show/comic called Hunter x Hunter. It's pretty good but the author went on hiatus which apparently is pretty common?

Wait don’t leave yet, there's actually a point to this, shocking! I actually put a reference to it in-game but probably no one is going to get it so will just reveal it. Look at this sign in-game at Shepard Lake:

Let's zoom in on this:

This is a reference to that Hunter x Hunter thing from the first sentence of this blog post, there's something in it called a “Hunter License” which this is a parody of:

See? It’s an obtuse, out of place reference. Can’t remember what I typed in on the card, was probably something stupid but it is in a Wingdings font.

Making a new map in an exploration game such as this is a lot like being a ruthless dictator of a small island country you decide how everything works, watch this episode of American Dad to get the gist of what's being said here:

It’s this episode.

Or play Tropico. But anyways, first things first, draw a general outline of how you want the layout to be, here's the first draft of the Campgrounds:

It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Next you need some terrain textures, usually you'd only want 4-8. Get a few grass textures, maybe a rock texture, sand texture and some specialty textures like ground vines or something. Either go here to make them yourself or buy a bundle of textures via some texture selling store.

Once that's done comes the fun part. And by fun, the tedious and time consuming part. Shaping the terrain. You start off with a flat blank canvas like this:

You get tools to shape it into your dream map, the tools are like paint brushes that do different things. They can raise the ground for hills, lower it for ponds, make it bumpy for being bumpy:

Should have a base texture like grass when shaping. Here's what you can do when you try:

After you're done shaping you get to paint on the textures, sides of hills could be rocky, design paths with dirt, etc. etc.

So while making this bear game it was quite tedious at some points so I watched some new shows on my second monitor to solve this problem. Here are some short reviews of a few:

Black Sails A solid pirate series, mixes in everything from trading, politics to pirate fighting. Apparently Michael Bay produces this too which was a surprise due to lack of explosions.

Cutthroat Kitchen This shouldn't be as good as it is. I think it's because of the host.

Hunter x Hunter Really, really good. It's over 100 episodes and subtitled but if you haven't watched it you must, takes a while to build up to things though. Also if you think it looks like a kids show prepare for the opposite, at one point a villain eats another guy's head, like what was that even

Bob Ross Relaxing af. Watching this marathon on Twitch with the chat at 50k viewers was friggen amazing.

Curb Your Enthusiasm It's kind of like Seinfeld but George is the main character. Got even better when Leon was introduced.

Breaking Bad Ok I know what you're thinking, you haven't watched Breaking Bad yet wtf? Everyone was watching it but I was being pretentious and refused to watch it because it was popular. Def missed out discussing it episode by episode while it was airing.

Fringe Is p good

The 100 Starts off awful but gets significantly better as it goes on. And it has Desmond in it!

Unlimited Blade Works Amazingly well animated, cool concept (heroes from the past fighting for the holy grail) but had no idea wtf was going on at some points. After reading a wiki there's a ton more to this story apparently.

Star Trek Always thought the original was cheesy and boring but the stories are actually quite good.

One Punch Man OH MAN THIS IS EXACTLY MY TYPE OF SHOW. Friggen awesome animation, art, characters, writing, opening theme, everything is just great. This is like the first thing I can be a hipster with too so it's all very exciting. Apparently this show didn't have a huge budget, all the artists were just happy to work on it which is neat.

Time for a exclusive behind the scenes look at Kickstarter Island and it's submissions. First thing I did was set up everything, randomly placed rocks everywhere, placed empty fences for the trees, etc.

Next was inputting the submissions and what grand and confusing submissions they were. All of them were pretty neat and entertaining though:

Here is a rock with a strange and bizarre language:

For the Adopt-a-Tree submissions I had bought a bunch of tree models and tried to match it up with what the adoptee wanted. The Maple and Japanese tree was the most popular. Tried to get special requests in there like a “Charlie Brown esq tree” and I quote... “a fancy-ass magic tree”.

Also glad I got a lot of the references - Warcraft, famous quotes, internet jokes, the Fate series to name a few and of course there were Spongebob refs which is fantastic:

The island should be fun to explore with all the craziness going on.

Take a look at this in-game wall in my bear game, namely the wood texture:

Notice anything suspicious about this?

No?

Well guess what, I stole this texture from real life! This is where the scene of the crime took place:

I went to a lake, took a picture of a wood wall then edited into a texture to be used in-game.

This lake house was nothing more than a pawn in the production of my bear game, used only for it's imagery!

So invisible walls, just what do they have to do with a bear game?

Well when making an exploration game, be you a bear or not, you need to make sure people don't go where they aren't supposed to and fall off the map into an endless pit. How do you accomplish this task? Why it's probably invisible walls/colliders!

Look at this scene:

There's something off about it right? That's right, horrible invisible walls are there and you wouldn't even notice. Here is the same scene with the colliders visible:

These are everywhere but hopefully I placed them correctly so it won't interrupt your bear experience while keeping you from going somewhere you aren't supposed to.

Here's what all the colliders in the lake region look like from above:

The hardest region to setup these colliders in was most def the Mountain region since while the easiest was the caves, hardly had to put any walls there since it mainly consisted of tubes.

Pixel art is a staple in the indie game scene.

Lot's o' game devs like the retro style because they are a fan of the 8/16 bit era or maybe for the performance reasons (a game using this style can usually run on anything including all computers, consoles, phones, etc.) so you wouldn't have to worry whether or not people can play your game.

Also you only have to worry about working with two dimensions which can be crazy easier to program and plan for than having to think about that crazy third dimension.

Not to mention they can stand the test of time, most games from the SNES era still look fantastic today where a lot of 3D games age like milk, though they still have their charm:

This bear game too has some pixel art, sure it was a last minute addition and it's not even noteworthy but kind of running out of ideas for blog posts so here we are.

Made pixel art for the “Achievement” icons, here's a spooky one with added smoke for effect:

It's some kind of skeleton ghoul monster? It's pretty intense.

There are way too many ways to make pixel art and not really a right way so it’s best to google how to make said art if curious. You can use Photoshop, GIMP, even paint. So just type [Your favorite program] + [Pixel Art]

Contrary to popular belief you can't just add a game model to a game and expect it to work. No, sort of like a pet cat or dog you have to tell it what to do or else it will pee on your carpet.

Anyway let's say you are making a game and you want a box in it to turn red when you push a button like the spacebar. Using the C# programming language here's how you accomplish that:

You'd just attach this script to a model to make it work.

It's an extremely simple script but it should give you a general idea of how scripts and models work with one another. For a more complicated example this is the script that makes the chicken work:

Had to write a script for all the different bear related things in this game but some could be shared, the collectable foods all shared the same script with just different values. Though I was able to get help with some of them and worked off templates for the more complicated things. The largest script was the “Save Game” script, it was over 4000 lines long:

Fun times writing and debugging that.

If you want to learn how to write scripts go here. It looks complicated but it's actually quite simple once you figure out how it works.

Needed a cat for this bear game. Just a regular house cat. So I got this cat model:

It was already modeled and rigged, two things I am terrible at when it comes to the video game making. “Rigged” means it's all set up to be animated using “Bones”. The bones can be seen here, they're the colored skeleton:

When you move a bone it transforms and moves the model, for example if you move the leg bone it moves the model's leg:

If it's set up well you can put things into crazy poses like so:

Needed to animate 6 different looping cat poses; sleeping, hiding, batting at something, 2 standing positions and a sitting pose. Some poses:

The top backer reward for this bear game was to make a bear food. There was only one backer and they wanted a berry bush.

Their instructions were simple enough, a short bush found in the main forest with pink berries that turned white.

Since I already had berry bushes I wanted this bush to stand out from the others and basically just stand out in general so people playing would wonder why it looks different, then they'd google to find out it's a backer submission and they'd be like “Hey there's some rich history to this bear game! What a great and unusual treat!” or they'll just be like “oh”.

Anyways first up I drew a concept of it:

Then I opened up a 3D program and made a cylinder which will eventually turn into the bush:

Next the cylinder was duplicated and morphed to look like the stalk, then a sphere was added on top:

Don't worry the sphere will make sense later. After this I went to this sweet site and snagged some textures:

Then I applied the textures:

Now for the sphere to make sense, I took the leaf texture, added it to a flat, 3D plane and covered said sphere with said planes:

You can see how the sphere pulls it together now yeah? Without that sphere making this berry bush would just be the fevered dream of a madman. Anywho now it just needs berries. Made 3 spheres and mushed them together, made them pink and added them around the bush like so:

Finally after all that I just brought it into the game, programmed it to make it collectable with the submitted description and viola:

Spent quite a while learning about video game lighting, mainly outdoor lighting which is actually quite important but also kind of interesting.

First take a look at a base scene with one light and basic settings and no shadows:

Typically outdoor scenes have only one light that simulates the sun and you need to consider these things: Brightness, Direction, Color and Ambiance. Here's the scene with the same light with different settings and some camera effects light bloom:

Brightness is how bright the light/sun is. Direction is where you want the light to come from to show which time of day it is. I typically liked the morning where the sun is at an angle and gives off long shadows. Color is also important to get right, to make a realistic sunlight you want to use a peach color. Finally there's ambiance which is the color of the dark areas and shadows, again you want to use a variant of blue for a sunny day.

See if you simply mess with the settings of that one single light you can get all sorts of effects. For nighttime make the light really bright and white but have the ambiance a very dark blue:

Or you can make the light not so bright and keep the colors dull to create a rain atmosphere:

Plus you can just have fun and create a strange atmosphere, for a spooky area use green for the sunlight and red for the ambiance:

Strange how Christmas colors can be used to make a scene spooky?

Might be highlighting certain features of this bear game starting with Markings.

While strolling around you might come across a strange splotch on a tree or rock:

Curious no? Well this is where your nose abilities come in, increase your intelligence enough and you'll upgrade your nose level, max 3:

Get your nose to a high enough level you should be able to decipher these markings:

Various animals with different personalities have left their mark on various things, some give advice about the area, some reveal secrets others just tell you about their day. There are different tiers of animals as shown by the color of the marking:

So one of the backer rewards in the Kickstarter was to have your picture used as a portrait in a spooky cabin found in the woods. A “Cabin in the Woods” if you will. Here's the submitted picture:

Brought said picture into Photoshop, messed with the levels, added some grunge and shopped in a spooky background:

And this is what it looks like in-game: