Website Updates & Releases Soon

This is just a post to update you all on what I’ve been up to over the last few weeks with both the website & some of the asset store assets. Its not been too long since my last post but I did want to update you one the website changes and the progress of the Save Manager mainly.

Website Changes

The biggest and change that you would’ve seen is the new navigation menu setup. I’ve gone ahead and expanded it to have links to all major products currently active. The reason for this was to help indicate to visitors that there were extra pages for assets / games etc. As the homepage doesn’t illude to this too well. The sub menus also include Scarlet Library under the resources section. This being a code library I’m slowly working on for Unity which houses scripts I use between projects. It is well overdue an update when I get the main goals for this year done.

The other main change is more subtle unless you’ve tried to access some of the assets documentation. As the documentation for some assets have been ported to the website, instead of being an embed of a html export from Notion which it was before. The biggest upside to this is the ability to search the documentation! The solution isn’t perfect, as I’d like the option to add a landing page for each docs but otherwise this is much better than the other idea I was trying and mentioned in my last post. Below is a screenshot of the Mutli-Scene docs as they appear on the site now (https://carter.games/docs/multiscene/):

The only other website changes are in the backend, which should improve the sites performance a tad. The site isn’t on an expensive dedicated web hosting provider so it will be a little slower due to that, but its cheap and works which is ideal for me now.

Save Manager

I have good news in regards to the Save Manager, I’ve finally hit a release candidate for the assets version 2.0.0 release. I’ve been spending the last few weeks working out the bugs as best as I can and automating where possible. It’s a good thing I did this as a large chunk of the asset was not working as intended or was fundamentally flawed. Using my side project to test it, I have managed to get it initializing correctly when imported and updating when new save assets are added. On top of this I had to do a lot of trial and error to get the web builds working, but it does thankfully work.

I expect that asset will be out by the end of the month (ish). I’ve still got the write the documentation and check over the code one more time to remove any redundant logic and improve the API for usage where possible. But I should be on track to roughly hit that goal if I keep at it over the next few weeks when I get time.

Build Versions

Some of you may have noticed some minor releases to Build Versions over last week. This was just to fix up some issues the asset was having with getting assets in the resources folder mainly. There is another update coming this week which changes up the date field in the information asset to use a custom class instead of a string, which should help with regional differences with the date. An example of how it looks now:

That’s it for this update. Hopefully more around the end of the month with the Save Manager release!

New Website Layout!

For a while there has been a notice on the site stating that it under construction. But I have finally gotten around to sorting it out properly. I wanted all the stuff I’ve made so far to be accessible by one click and to keep the menu navigation as simple as possible.

To start I blocked out the rough design I wanted to go for and tried to make it as close as possile to said designs. This was mostly successful with only a few minor changes needed to make it work. Below you can see the before and after of each page:

Home Page

The home page has changed the most over the years. In this latest version I’ve made it really compact and ditched the footer content for a simple logo & copyright notice only. I kept the old intro header as I felt that was okay as is, but the rest has been updated with the asset pages now being a click over their logo’s which also have a little hover animation now.

Initial Design

The Result

The Blog/Posts

The blog section has been rather under used this year, but I hope to change that next year. The initial design was going to be mostly the same, however I ended up going for a much simpler design which just has all the posts in one place with pages for seeing older posts. That being said I did still make some minor adjustments to the setup for the posts that appear.

Initial Design

The Result

Pages

The design for the pages, mostly the asset ones were the ones in need of a refresh. The current page for C.W.I.S is good as it is for now. The old asset pages were muddled or lacking information such as the documentation which is currently a mix of hosted locally on this site or on Notion. The new layout has the notions pages on the site. I did hope to embed the pages so I didn’t need to do too much work, but sadly notion doesn’t let you do that & the solutions online were paid only which was a bummer. Instead I resorted to an export of the Notion page which seems to do the trick as the file size for a page was only a few MB.

Initial Design

The Result

New Content

Just this morning I added a new page to the site, but there isn’t any direct link to it yet. This page is the Unity coding style page, to be followed in all projects in 2-23 and beyond. The idea is to keep the style consistent in all my code assets for both myself and any other contributors who wish to add features to them.

You can see this page here if you want a peek: https://carter.games/unity-c-style-guide/

I am also planning to post more on the site with updates on projects as I go as well as some guides & tips to help y’all out. The idea is to make a post atleast once a month, but hopefully twice if not more. We’ll see how it goes.

Closing Notes

With the website now done, I can focus on some other tasks. I have the year in review to prep which is coming up in just over a week & I still have C.W.I.S to finish off. I can say that a good amount of progress has been made there, leaving mostly polish bits and a few gameplay bugs to fix. Most of the gameplay bugs are to do with missiles missing their targets, so quite bad xD.

Another Website Update & Future Roadmap

I have yet again updated the website look & feel. It has been a while since I last use the website posts section to make announcements etc. but this will become the norm soon as I want to revive the website as a hub of knowledge for everything going on with Carter Games.

What’s changed?

So, you’re probably wonder what has changed. The main change with this website update is the structure of it all. Before there was a massive header menu with a load of items and it was all a little too cluttered. Now there are just three sections, “Home“, “Posts” & “Contact” to keep it super simple and easy to follow for any visitors.

The home page has been updated to have more content on it. Previously it was very bland and simple as the footer was an actual part of the page. Now the homepage contains a summary of every major active or release project to date as well as separate pages for users to read more about a particular project and a main link to the relevant store for the project if it is released. I’ve also added an about section at the top of the page and plan to add a slideshow in the future showing off some of the better-quality projects when I have some to show.

The news section has been setup for future content, including guides & development logs. Currently there are obvious gaps which I hope to start filling up in the coming months so keep your eyes peeling for more here soon.

Other updates

Outside of the website update I spent the time to revamp the brand graphics. If you follow me on the socials you will have already seen this, but I thought I’d mention it here to in case you missed it. Below is a before and after for the logo & banner graphics.

A before and after of the Carter Games logo & banner graphics

Roadmap

Going forward for the next 6 months or so I have been planning out what I want to release and when. These are obviously not set in stone, but itโ€™s a rough plan going forward with a more certain one coming around the new year.

Autumn 2022

Audio Manager 2.6.x

I spent the last long weekend 50/50 working on C.W.I.S & this. The idea is to clean up the asset a little and provide some minor improves to the inspectors as an end-of-life update. That is end of life for the 2.x.x version line, not the asset. The asset has a new 3.x.x line in the works which I have made decent progress on and teased on socials a while back. The new 3.x.x version is still quite a way from being production ready. So, this update acts as a mediator between the two versions, introducing the project settings window for the asset settings as well as some of the new standards all the assets will follow in updates when they are next released. Below are some screenshots of the new inspector looks:

The Audio Manager script 2.6.x inspector look
The Music Player script 2.6.x inspector look
The Audio Player script 2.6.x inspector look
The Audio manager 2.6.x settings provider window look

C.W.I.S Arcade Build

I’ve been spending a lot of time on this game project since I started a remake and progress is good. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to get a good enough looking water shader working from a top-down perspective which is harder than it sounds. I have since settled on a look and continued to work on fixing the existing mechanics to work as intended.

A screenshot of the arcade scene in C.W.I.S

I’ve also spent the time to improve the realism of the missile launchers. Previously they would just spawn missiles from the centre regardless of the number of missiles shot. Now they have the tubes that open before the missile in the tube launches. Itโ€™s a subtle difference but a feature I really wanted to add. At the same time, I was able to fix up the missile objects, so the trail particle now correctly reset instead of using up all the particle returning to the launcher when a missile is called to fire again. I also fixed another issue where only 3-6 launchers were being used due to the same reset logic.

A screenshot of the Unity editor showing a open missile tube on the ship in C.W.I.S

Multi Scene 0.2.x

Some of you may be wondering what on earth is Multi-Scene. Yea I’ve kept this somewhat quite apart from a few teasers on socials. Multi scene is a experimental asset to help with making games that use Unity’s multi scene setup, this is where you load scenes additively instead of one at a time allowing for elements of your game projects to be split up into manageable chunks. If you’ve had a gander at the Carter Games GitHub, you’ll have seen this as a repository for quite a while.

Dark Mode

Link: https://github.com/CarterGames/MultiScene

The last major release was back in February of this year with update 0.1.3 where I added a ordering feature to the interface referencing setup. This 0.2.x update adds a load of new workflow improvements to make using the asset a lot easier. These include scene selection for the scene groups instead of a string field, a lot more control over how scenes load & how often the listeners run when a group is loaded + an editor window to load scene groups at the press of a button in the editor. On top of all that the asset manager is now static instead of instanced based for ease of use. There will be lots more on this when this update is released to go over how to use the asset and were using a multi scene setup can be handy.

A promotional image for the Multi Scene asset.

Winter 2022

Compared to autumn, winter will be quieter with some room to allow one of the above projects to fall behind if it happens.

Leaderboard Manager 2.1.x

The leaderboard manager had an update somewhat recently to fix one or two issues. Since using it in a personal project I noted a few features that could use improving along with a few suggestions or comments from users that could be handy for usability. These include:

  • Option to show equal scores as =3rd instead of 2nd & 3rd for example.
  • Option to change the save location of the leaderboard data
  • Option to not use the display pooling setup, instead having the leaderboard be pre-defined in the scene with the rows in the parent object.
  • Option to view and edit all leaderboards and entries in a editor window of some kind.
  • + All the new improvements I’ve made to my other assets in recent times.

Detective Notes 2.x.x

A bit of a supprise one, but for a while I’ve wanted to make an update to the detective notes app with some clearer art, animations & performance improvements.

Early 2023

The new year is a bit of a blank space for the time being, but I do have a few ideas of things to be doing that year which I’ll list below:

  • Audio Manager 3.x.x
  • Some other minor asset updates (possibly a new Save Manager if I get the time)
  • Anything that has overrun from the previous year.
  • Some new game project planning.

So that’s all for this update, keep your eyes peeled for more updates coming soon!


Website Update & Future Plans

Hey all, J here! So it’s been a while since I last posted on the site and I totally missed the March Monthly Update. This post will kind of count as both the March & April update as I’ve been sorting stuff out behind the scenes. The biggest of which you can see currently. The website has had a complete overhaul with a new theme, new plugins, new graphics & a new layout showcasing all the work I currently have public in a releasable state.

Changes To Carter Games

This nicely leads me on to a change to the meaning of the name Carter Games. Originally, I planned to turn it into its own studio. However, after giving it some though I’ve decided to instead turn it into an alias/publisher that I release my public works to. Given that all the work on here is currently my own anyways there its really any harm in doing so. So, I have been around and updated all the description of the brand where I used We or Studio and corrected them to follow this new narrative. This doesn’t really affect anything currently in the pipeline but leaves me free to make a studio under a different name in the future should I wish to do so.

Current Work

Some may have missed the news regarding Project Tilly which is the game I was working on since the start of the year. So here’s the update I posted everywhere else. Project Tilly is on hold until further notice, this is somewhat due to a little burnout on the project and partly due to a lack of personal ability to complete the project. I did over scope a little, even in the MVP, so I’ll be leaving the project on the backburner until I have the motivation to work on it again or some new ideas for it. Its sad news to those who were interested in it, but I really want to get a new game published this year so I’m focusing on an older project which is already halfway there. This being C.W.I.S, though I’ll likely rename the game for release. I had a working prototype around winter 2020 and I feel like it’s a title that I have some ideas for and could complete in 3-6 months with my current skills. That includes the art side as well.

The Future

Other than that, I have been working on a few GDD’s (Game Design Documents) for some possible future titles. None of these are set in stone yet as they still need fleshing out a lot before I decide which one to move forward on. So. there will be more in this in the coming months. In the meantime, I will be making further improvements to this site & publishing minor updates to existing products. I will be back with another update at the end of May if not sooner with more info on where I go in the future.

That is all for now

~ J