Hello all you wonderful gamers. I bet you are all wondering what this completely unrelated picture is all about? It's my current work in progress, that's what it is. I've been working on Immortal realm now for over 6 years now. You see, making video games is like a passion hobby for me, a rather expensive hobby because I am no artist (laugh track). Folkvang Studios is one person, me. A pretty small indie game dev studio.
Flashback moment
Way back in 2017 I had some life changing events and a corporate job that was comfy, but it sucked my soul away. So i'd spend weekends in the mountains. But something was missing. My childhood dream of making games, long pulled from my grasp for the basic need to pay rent and buy food. One day while my soul was being crushed by my career, I got an Ad for a game making platform that I won't mention because, while it worked, it was pretty scammy. I made a few cheesy mobile games and this lead me to Unity and Animal Friend Adventures was born.
Animal Friends had a mobile release, but I wanted more for the game, so I started on a PC version. I took a voluntary layoff early 2019, cashed out my 401k and focused solely on Animal Friends adventure. I wrote the AI, game mechanics. I scoured the Asset store for the right cartoony post effect shader and just went to work. 6 am till 11pm 7 days a week.
Then I ran out of money.
and October 2019 I took another corporate job in AI, Where I am now. I don't hate the job, but I really love programming, game making, story writing, directing and the whole creative process. So I still worked on Animal Friends Adventure and pushed it to multiple platforms right around Jan 2020.
Still not satisfied
I wasn't happy with how disjointed the UI was. The game just looked sloppy and duct taped together. So I took advantage of the lockdown to completely revamp the UI. What I overlooked was that the UI was a huge portion of the game and logic. So I basically rewrote the entire game except the AI and some other items.
Then I localized the game in 7 different languages and I had no clue just how much text I actually had in the game. It became an entirely new beast of a project to work on. But I achieved far more than I can remember looking back at all the time spent on this seemingly basic game.
Current Day
Sorry about that little ADHD moment. Seems it gets worse as time marches forward. So I've been working on Immortal Realm and Steam City on the side as I pushed through all the iterations of Animal Friends Adventure. This year has been pretty huge in progress. I switched to Unreal engine (oh my) and am completely focused now on Immortal Realm. If I can someday, Animal Friends will be ported to Unreal as well. But it is actually more challenging to do that I had thought. One thing at a time for now.
The Call to Action
So here's what the plans are, and What I need from you, the awesome gamer. Immortal Realm is an aRPG, so may not be your interest if your here. that's ok. Every purchase of Animal Friends Adventure brings me closer to independence to focus more fully on Immortal Realm. If I can resign from my Corpo job and work 22 hours a day, 7 days a week on Immortal Realm I would do just that. It's something I love doing.
Buy this game
Even if you never play it, I put the price barely higher than a cafe Mocha coffee. I have 700 games in my Steam library (I'm a bit of a gamer) 500 of which I never played, or put less than 1 hour into. I just like supporting the little guy like me struggling to make dreams come true.
Anyway, thank you.
Major optimization update.
Major optimization update.
Made a serious lighting and optimization update. In many cases frame rates went up 3-4 times. Fixed a few weird bugs. Fixed the super annoying stair climb jumping bug. Fixed massive frame rate drop when completing levels. This was caused by mixing cinemachine and normal cameras in the scene.
Issues Optimizing and prerendering scenes had a consequence of wildly inflating the game size from 5 gigs to almost 15. After my move to a new location, I will go through this and see where I can reduce file sizes. There's a few more irritating bugs I need to handle but I only have limited time to get things done.
Quick Fix on backend configs.
Fixed a few things with the config files and prices not updating for character purchases.
Intermediate Patch.
The upgrade to Unity 2022 was not as smooth as I had anticipated. It broke a lot of stuff that "just worked". The more I play the game, the more things I find that bacame broken.
The most urgent was how the player reacts to hits and bounceback. The other area that has been long needing a fix is when the player stomps the monster. The detection has been adjusted for this.
THe Achievement system is also a complete disaster. I have no clue how I had it working and then broke it.
I'm trying my best to make this game great so people will buy it and I can make even better games. It's a terribly painful cycle.
My Apologies (again)
I severely make a mistake when uploading Panda to Steam. It has been over a year since Panda's last Steam update and I had forgotten some process. I also corrected many other issues and rebuilt the app.
I was trying to upload the Linux build and accidentally uploaded to the Windows depot. This broke the game for Windows users. There were also a few settings in the Steam Store I missed that coincidentally broke the Linux release. I'm new to multi-OS games.
I really feel bad that I broke the game for paying customers for so long. I'm a one person game developer and working really hard to make everything work and give updates. Localization was a huge project. But I did this because I believe in making the game in the native languages of gamers.
As I learn new things in the game dev world, I apply them to my release games as well as my current in development game. While this slows down development, it greatly improves everything I am doing.
My Apologies (again)
I severely make a mistake when uploading Panda to Steam. It has been over a year since Panda's last Steam update and I had forgotten some process. I also corrected many other issues and rebuilt the app.
I was trying to upload the Linux build and accidentally uploaded to the Windows depot. This broke the game for Windows users. There were also a few settings in the Steam Store I missed that coincidentally broke the Linux release. I'm new to multi-OS games.
I really feel bad that I broke the game for paying customers for so long. I'm a one person game developer and working really hard to make everything work and give updates. Localization was a huge project. But I did this because I believe in making the game in the native languages of gamers.
As I learn new things in the game dev world, I apply them to my release games as well as my current in development game. While this slows down development, it greatly improves everything I am doing.
My Apologies
I severely make a mistake when uploading Panda to Steam. I was trying to upload the Linux build and accidentally uploaded to the Windows depot. This broke the game for Windows users. There were also a few settings in the Steam Store I missed that coincidentally broke the Linux release. I'm new to multi-OS games.
I really feel bad that I broke the game for paying customers for so long. I'm a one person game developer and working really hard to make everything work and give updates. Localization was a huge project. But I did this because I believe in making the game in the native languages of gamers.
As I learn new things in the game dev world, I apply them to my release games as well as my current in development game. While this slows down development, it greatly improves everything I am doing.
Added linux Support
Real small update.
Added linux Support
Oops I forgot stuff
Deleted a bunch of "Lighting" data and the install size lost 5 gigs of weight. Fixed some missing localization text. So sue me. Actually don't. I only have $6 and a cat named Potato. Add real time lighting to all the scenes. Unity removed this in some version of URP but added it back in. I'm still saddened that my amazing post process work was obsoleted. The game looked tons better back then. I'm rather exhausted from "getting in the groove" and pulling 16 hour days to get this release out. Also quite a few adult only beverages made this all possible. Once I post this, I'll probably wake up at 3am blinded by the monitor light, with a stiff neck and covered in my own drool in my compute chair. I'm struggling to stay awake just to complete this moment of greatness.
A Major update!
Hello everyone. I am pleased to finally have this update done and ready. I'm a team of 1 and this took considerable time because I also have a day job. See, this is a hobby and a passion of mine. I love gaming, I love learning and I live for programming. This was a complete learning experience. From the dreaded UI design all the way to AI and object interactions.
What did I change? A lot. I pretty much rewrote the entire game. It's in the patch notes so I'll lightly cover what and why here.
I was always displeased with the User Interface. It looked like a treasure goblin designed it after sneaking into daddy's magic cabinet and drinking all the happy juice. Not being an artist, I spent a lot of time browsing the Unity asset store for the perfect interface. After 15 purchases, I ran out of money and decided to keep what is now an integral part of the game. It looks great. I had to modify it a lot still, but the end result was consistency. I even had to learn Render Textures to get the 3D characters to display and animate. This also required an unlit shader.
AI is my passion. I completely wrote the AI for this game. It was ported from my 2D game "Super Panda" and adapted to 3D. That was a challenge. Lot's of layer detecting and stuff. I had to also change the detection ranges and characteristics of the different sensors so the characters were aware of their environment. Break a block under a character and it will adapt and not blindly fall off the edge. Silly things like that. I dislike "Waypoints" very much. It's a cheap system and adds complexity to simply drag and drop of a prefab into the scene and having the creature work. In theory I could drop 100 characters from the sky and they'd land and wander their environment without assistance. I loved the challenge of environmentally aware AI. I cannot wait to start my next game and start from nothing.
Boss fights were lacking and I totally reworked this. I added the ability for melee and ranged combat. Get too close they smack ya. Step away and they throw things. This was a step up. Monsters only have one attack form. Melee, ranged or contact. Bosses adapted a bit and this really enhanced their challenge. Also up was such a simple and stupid fix, but it really enhanced the experience. Bosses now turned around to face the player after a "reaction timer". Yes, it was that simple. If player is within a certain range and after a random time passes turn to face them. I tease myself, but this change really made boss battles better. The spider is still terrible, but maybe I'll fix it. Maybe I'll finally get the sales to hire someone to fix it. Who knows. This is my after work hobby for now.
Graphics. Holy cow this was a ton of unexpected effort. This game is also on console and the unity default renderer was slow, horribly slow at 15-40 fps. It looked pretty but console just didn't work well. I changed to Unity URP and no kidding, I got 200fps out of the gate. This required me to go to every material for every object and update it. The auto updater didn't work. So I just had to do this. Then I changed my shader 3 more times. The original one was nice, but it hated consoles. It'd generate some 2 GB file that would cause the game load time to be minutes. Totally unacceptable. So I scoured the Unity Asset store again and found the perfect cartoon shader. The end results were pretty impressive.
I then updated the lighting for each scene. This took an amazing amount of time to adjust. At one point the shadow maps made the game 30 Gigs in size. This was a big no. So I fixed that and the game is back down to 8 gigs in size.
Unfortunately with Unity URP, the custom environment effects are gone. Procedural worlds had a fantastic asset called "Ambient Skies" that did post processing and the effects were stunning. I had to abandon that and I am still sad about it.
Loot was a big thing. Diamonds and fruits were some mythical item earned by some weird reward system. I was like "this is too weird, I am changing this now". So you can loot most fruits and diamonds. It makes coin purses so much more exciting. Also blocks will give out a random reward as well. In all, the reward system got a fancy update and is more exciting.
So my programming style wildly differs from the Udemy courses I've taken in the past. for me, each object is responsible for itself. The player whacks a brick, the brick feels this and does it's thing. A monster detects and does it's thing. Self aware objects as they would appear in the real world actually presented some curious issues. In the end everything worked well when each object only worried about itself.
Anyway, I'm done chatting up this update. I put a metric ton of work into this and hope you enjoy it. I'm going to do something I haven't done in 3 years and that's play a darn video game. I'm a gamer 100%. This game was just released and I really want to play.
Thank you all, and honestly. Please enjoy my game. I put a lot of time into this because I love doing it.
