Author: Jonathan

Hi, I’m Jonathan, a Junior Programmer, currently working as in the games industry. I run Carter Games as my indie brand to release under in my spare time. I am currently the only person working on the projects at Carter Games, but the plan is to one day add some people to the team and get a fully indie studio started.

Project Tilly Devlog #2

by Jonathanin Devlogs, Game DevelopmentLeave a Comment on Project Tilly Devlog #2

Its the end of week 2 of development! This week was a relatively quiet week as my 9-5 was draining this week with a lot of bugs to fix on my work project. Due to that not much progress was made this week.

However, most of the backend for the journal system has been made. It is just the implementing and testing that needs doing. Currently the book art is placeholder as the actual book be custom made to fit the art style. Each page can have several elements to it, which can be revealed and hidden using an ID which is defined for each entry in the journal. Pages can be changed using the arrow buttons or the left & right controls for moving around.

The idea of the system is that when the player completed a story beat to add to the journal, we would pass the ID for the entry we want to show to the journal manager, which will unlock it on the journal and call an action to let any subscribing scripts that a new entry has been added to the journal. Entries in the journal fade in when newly revealed, but uniformly fade in and out at a fast rate if previously unlocked.

Next week will be focused on finishing up the UI side of things, testing the page turning, fading, entry unlocking and action system so it all works as intended. If I get time I’ll get to work on a new system.

Project Tilly Devlog #1

by Jonathanin Devlogs, Game DevelopmentLeave a Comment on Project Tilly Devlog #1

Hey y’all, so its coming to the end of the week and as a goal to keep posting at regular intervals I’ll be posting weekly updates on development no matter how big or small the work in the week was, if any. Do note that I work on this in my spare time which is limited and that I work in the industry full-time as is, so I only get around 5-10 hours a week on this at best.

This week was mostly focused on the backend for the main menu & options menu in the game. I wanted to make a system that could work in future titles as well as this one so I took my time to get it to a good spot. I’ve added in most of the options in to the game with their values updating in the global save. The plan is to add fully re-mappable key bindings in the future, but that is down the line a little.

You can see the current progress in this short video:

Year In Review 2021

by Jonathanin Archive, UpdateLeave a Comment on Year In Review 2021

Year In Review 2021

Just like last year, we’re back with another review over the last years progress, what’s new, some stats and what we are planning for the future. While this year has been quieter than last year for new releases, there has still been some excellent progress this year.

The Stats

The stats this year are a massive increase since last year. What needs to be remembered is that all download are organic, meaing we’ve not paid for any adverts and anything, making every user count. So to make gains over the last year is always good. Google Play did rather well mostly due to a few spikes throughout the year on Detective Notes causing an increase in the overall downloads. We also had a good year on the asset store with a new asset and several updates the further improved the existing ones. The only area lacking currently is the games side, but this is going to be worked on next year.

2022

Next year the aim is to work on the games side of things way more while still supporting the existing products on the side. This has already begun with Project Tilly. Now that isn’t the name of the game, its just a placeholder while I think of a name I like for the game. The game will follow a week in the life of Isabelle, a student living alone in a small studio flat. Experience her struggle as she tries to go from day to day, suffering from several mental helath issues such as anxiety, loneliness & depression. The plan is to release new builds throughout the games development to gather feedbacka dn get the bugs out as we make it. We have an early build with a whiteboxed enviroment of the flat level avalible now. Download it and see more about the game on its Itch.io page here: https://carter-games.itch.io/project-tilly

Now this isn’t the only project we have going, we have other ideas that may or may not be worked on in the future. Above are just 2 of the many idea’s that we’ve had recently. These also have project names as it saves coming up with names for them when we don’t have definite plans for them.

Want to keep up to date with everything going on next year? Here are our socials to follow. We hope you’ve had a good year, despite the pandemic and all. Lets hope 2022 is a great year!

Progress Update

by Jonathanin Archive, UpdateLeave a Comment on Progress Update

Progress Update

So, I’ve been quite for a few weeks, that’s because I’ve been busy on the last bits for the year. Here is a quick update on what has been going on and where everything is.

Patches & Updates

I’ve had a few, sadly bad reviews on our deer old Audio Manager. It is due a major update that is on the list for Q1 next year along with a new game prototype. I have the basic for the new version already, its just getting all the edge cases, polishing and testing the asset to ensure it works fully as intended before release. The update is a bit change, though should be easy to follow for our existing users. More on this in the new year.

On the flipside I’ve pushed a small patch to our latest asset Build Versions which automates the build number changes when changing the build increment time option. I have even more for this asset next year, with a possible custom build button with custom auto build file naming saving you even more work!

Leaderboard Manager

So I’ve been working on the new Leaderboard Manager! The new version is a total re-write of the asset to make it more flexible as the current version is rather rigid with only 1 leaderboard supported and no TestMeshPro support. The new version allows for as many leaderboards as you like! so you can have 1 per level if you want. There are more options to display the board, improved backend and more customisation options as well. I’ll be sharing more on this in the coming weeks as I finalize the version of the asset.

Game Prototype?

Yea, I’m planning to make a new game idea in Q1 next year, it’ll be a prototype to start with and if I still like it and people like it too then I will be working to make a full title out of it. More next year!

End of year stats

Like last year, there will be an end of year review where I summarise the stats for all our store fronts this year and compare our progress form last year as well as our goals for the new year!

That’s all for now, speak to y’all soon!

End of November Update

by Jonathanin Archive, News, UpdateLeave a Comment on End of November Update

End of November Update

Its been a few weeks since the last update, but we do have a bit of news to share so here goes.

Build Versions

Build versions, our latest asset, is finally out on the Unity Asset Store after a really long review time, which was around 45 days give or take. The first few days of the asset being live have been great though xD, We’ve had record page views & asset claims which has made it worth the wait. I recently filmed a short overview video for the asset which I’m still working on the captions for as I write this. You can see the video on the store listing or on our YouTube channel. I plan film more of these for our other assets soon so each one has at-least 1 video explaining how to use it xD

Drop Tables

What happened with Drop Tables? yea, I’m still undecided on what the use case this asset is for and how it should be setup to allow it to work with multiple games. Because of this, I’m postponing the asset for now until I get the time to sort this fully xD

Audio Manager Version 3

We’ve notice a few issues with Audio Manager 2.5.4, which we are working on a patch for presently. However we also have a major overhaul coming soon! Its Version 3 baby! Backend wise some of the stuff is getting moved around and the way the asset is used is changed from inspector based to scriptable object based. Mostly this means the asset will be more flexible and hopefully more performant with less laggy inspectors, improved auto scanning, manual scanning options & more! This may or may not come out this year, we’ll see how it goes.

Leaderboard Manager

The backend for the new leaderboard manager changes are ready, we just need to test it & do all the front end stuff xD This is on track, though I’d expect it to be coming out early 2022 as most of the development time will be during and after Christmas and the asset store review team will probably be off until new year by then xD

Games in 2022

We really want to make a game xD With the asset changes currently planned, we should have all of our assets at a decent point where supporting and updating them shouldn’t take too much of our time. So our main goal for next year is to release or make significant progress on a game title. We don’t know what yet, but its our main goal for next year!