Cult of Taal-zuz: a simple management sim

Continuing on from my Tokkitron announcement last month, I did a new game jam project called Cult of Taal-zuz! I swear it’s just a coincidence that I’ve done two game jams in quick succession, and I’m not just planning to keep doing game jams forever. However for a while I’ve been wanting to make a lightweight management (or “tycoon”) game, and I saw another game jam that was a good excuse to finally make one.

Discovering Sprytile

I finally started on the 3rd edition of Unity in Action at the end of last year, so between that and work I don’t really have much bandwidth lately for any other projects. I haven’t abandoned Eschatown, but I’m probably not going to do any work on that game until spring. At that point I’m planning to quickly wrap up the art (especially character sprites done with Character Creator 2D), and then release it.

Using Ink with Unity

Alright, I’m finally building something along the lines of the basic RPG / lightweight management sim I’ve mentioned before! I partnered up with indie author Michael Coorlim for this project. We actually started discussing a partnership back in February, but stuff happened. And by “stuff” I of course mean a global pandemic.

3 Tips: one for low-pol hair/foliage, two for Unity

Last month I mentioned a shading trick I was going to try on my old Phantom Organ Player model, and in this post I explain how that worked out. In addition, there are two obscure but cool tips I’ve learned in Unity, one of which may prompt me to return to a past game idea.

In which I discovered Roll-and-Write games…

A fairly brief and text-only update this month. The main thing I want to share is a kind of game called “roll-and-write“. But before I discuss that more, I should announce that I started a new job! I’m taking charge of the Unity-side of AR projects at BUNDLAR.

Lightweight Management Sim

I teased my new project last month: a lightweight management sim in the vein of Drugwars or Urban Dead. Unfortunately the partnership didn’t pan out (no falling out, we just realized I wanted to work much faster than he did) but I’m going to keep working on this solo. Indeed, a very manageable scope is a large part of why I was interested in this project. This is basically all menus, and that’s all I have time for currently.

The other main motivation for me is that it’s a good excuse for me to finally learn Xamarin. That’s a cross-platform mobile app development framework programmed in C#; I’m very familiar with that language from programming in Unity, so this seems like another good tool to have in my belt.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Merry day-after-Christmas! There’s not a ton in this update, and I’m more or less continuing the theme of last month’s update: regrouping and setting up my next projects.

Unexpectedly, I seem to be onto yet another new project. I was really intending to get back to my turn-based dungeon crawler (really) but an opportunity came up that I’m jumping on. Specifically, I got to talking with a development partner for some projects we are both interested in working on, so yeah I’m doing that now. Good development partners are hard to find, and while I only just met this guy he seems promising, so I’m giving this the ol’ college try.

Basically, he was asking some questions on reddit about how to go about cloning Car Thief. Well as it happens, I’d been considering a series of lightweight management sims like that. I’m a fan of games like Drugwars and Urban Dead, so those seemed like a good way to make some ad-supported games on mobile. Long story short, that conversation turned into an offer of partnership.