Ghost Bunny Games

Monster Manor (name pending) is a spooky comedy adventure, where you and your friends inject into the narrative. You will follow the story of four friends who are trying to unravel the mysteries of the manor, and defeat the monsters you have created.

A Spooky Comedy

Flights, booked! Remote manor by the woods, booked! Four childhood friends finally get a chance to reconnect, after a year apart. They enjoy their peaceful reunion, until the final night when someone goes missing.

Creation and Exploration

Play alone or with friends, with both local and remote multiplayer options. Come up with adjectives, verbs, and names. Draw to life friends, monsters, and much more!

Solve puzzles and explore your environment to advance the narrative, and uncover what is going on at this suspicious get-away.

One issue I found with the game is the scenes were unreadable and generally too dark. Which as you can imagine makes the game appear unappealing on most social media platforms.

When I tried to make the scene brighter, it lost its sense of contrast and mood.

Finally I added localized lighting and it all clicked. The scene is visible but still appears to be night, and maintains it's vibe.😎

The original dialogue system used an world-space canvas and displayed the text as a part of the world. This was pretty cool! I loved how it looked, but unfortunately it could be a bit problematic in practice... The first problem was that it could get cut off or blocked by the environment, which would be a pain to work around and limit how scenes could be laid out. The second and larger issue is that players would constantly need to look at different parts of the screen to read the character's dialogue. Even though the camera would snap the dialogue bubble to be in the same area of the screen, it was still often jarring and distracting.

Possibilities

Option One

Option one is to put the dialogue at the bottom of the screen, this is the standard way to display dialogue and I would easily be able to display the character's name.

Option Two

Option two is to lock the dialogue to the top of the screen. With this option there is no straightforward way to display the character's name. I am still exploring there. However I generally enjoy how it looks at the top, and better fits the composition of the scenes I have already built.

Got drawing working! This turned out to be a bit tricker than I originally thought it would be. I created an overlay camera so that the drawing could be done in 2D while the 3D world was still rendering in the background.

The good news is I am back and working on independent game development! It is great to be back, and in a position where I feel ready to post development progress.

The bad news is I had to let go of Interchange Island, and later on I decided to start pursuing a different project. I made a mistake and started posting too early and too eagerly. I desperately wanted to get something out there that I have made, when I haven’t made something for myself in so long. And overall I was making choices about the game based only on the whims of what is most likely to be successful, rather than having a core vision of what I wanted the game to be like.

Moving Forward

The game I am currently working on is something I am passionate about despite it not hitting certain steam keywords you would expect a successful indie title to have. I feel much more confident about this game’s release than previous games I have worked on. I have an internal demo that I have sent to friends and family, and I have plans for the major milestones that will lead me to a final release.

I have been doing a lot of reflection recently, and I have come to the conclusion, that I am juggling too much. As some of you may know, I was laid off from my game development job in December when HakJak Studios was shut down suddenly. Recently, I have needed to spend more time and energy on my job search along with supporting previous game titles. This is to say, taking extra time to post about my game, make gifs, and plan feature work based on showing visual progress has been taking up a lot of time and energy I no longer have...

Don't Worry!

Part of the reason I am taking a step back is so that I can focus on the game's development! 🎮

I have a lot of plans for the game, and can't wait to show everyone the newest game features and progress when I return.

Thank you for understanding 💖

I created a short build of my game for friends and family to check out and see what they think about the game.

This wasn't easy to do emotionally!

I couldn't help but think of all the problems my game still has, or the rough edges that I am sure would annoy people. It felt to raw to really show people... But I did it anyway.

Here is why

I found out that a number of players were confused by the numbers placed over the towns. This number indicates how many passengers on your train want to go to a certain location. It was obvious to me, the person who designed and coded it. But not to others. If I continued on and waited to test my game, this information could have been lost and lead to further player confusion. But early playtesting nipped it in the bud.

Based on the feedback and helpful comments I got on the poll I made some updates to the game's color.

The changes were pretty minor, because most people said they enjoyed how colorful the game looked.

Above are the game's previous colors 👆

Below are the new colors 👇

They might look pretty similar at first glace, but I removed some extra saturation from the orange which could otherwise be overpowering.

The major change I made was I increased the range of values I used in my colors. A commenter pointed out that my values were very similar washing out the game's appearance.

To show what I mean, here are the two new color schemes in greyscale.

While developing a games, plugins can save development time and produce amazing results! 🔌✨

But I have come across many plugins that I either have to remove or heavily retrofit later on during development... Which isn't fun to do...

What I have found in both my professional game career and working on my own is:

Plugins that are tools are often better in the long run, than plugins that offer a complete solution!

The key difference is flexibility. 🔑

Tools can be used in multiple helpful ways throughout the lifespan of your game! 🔧🧰

Tools include systems like DoTween, Event System Dispatcher, and Text Animator (seen below).

Tools are light weight, and decoupled from your code. They can be used in numerous development cases, and do just what they were developed to do.

How are solutions different?

Solutions are larger prebuild systems that serve as full functionality within your game. An example would be a full navigation system, complete with mini-map and icons. Solutions can be helpful to start, especially for prototyping!

But in my personal experience, they often are too inflexible to changes and will not serve to bring your game to completion. When you want the solution to do something it wasn't designed for, you can quickly run into sticky problems. Not saying to never use solution plugins, just be aware of the risks!

Hope this helps keep your game on track! 🙌

Today I added a day night cycle to the game. The code already had time advancing set up, so I just needed to add in some display hooks. What I did not expect was how much better the game would feel after adding in the day night cycle. It makes it more clear to me as the developer/player when time is advancing and when a new day will start. This is critical in a management game where time management is key!