itch.io

Hi all. Hope you're doing well.

Story scribe is progressing smoothly. Today I spent most of the day working on an interesting bug which I decided to share some thoughts on.

In our game we show an animation of a book landing on a table. The animation itself is actually a Webm with a VP8 codec and a transparent background. That's a good way to do transparent video according to the unity docs a least.

We ran into the interesting problem with that particular video though... On Android devices when we had the "keep alpha" setting on on the webm for transparency the video lagged horribly. It usually managed to show only a frame or two of the almost 4 sec long video.

I didn't manage to find a reason as to why the video lagged so much with transparency and all the different settings I tried and smaller fixes did nothing. Without the transparency the video played in great quality and without lagging at all.

That's when it hit me. I thought I'd approach the issue from a completely different angle and I did. I used the same video but instead of having a transparent background the background was completely black. I then nabbed a shader online (link below to source) for a green screen style chroma keyed transparency. With that the video worked like a charm and with some minor adjustments it looks excellent now!

So now we have a VideoPlayer -component with a render texture target and the render texture target has a material with the chroma key shader. Simple setup but works really well for our fullscreen video on top of UI.

Hopefully this shader and the mentioned VideoPlayer setup can be of use to you

https://unexpectedend.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/unity3d-chroma-key-shader/

With regards,

 - Pullis, Ticca programmer

Hi

Lately we've been working on some usablity fixes for story scribe.

These include snapping images for the full screen mode (dragging the image left or right results in the current image to snap to the center of the screen) in the show and tell part of the game. These are shown in the first video embedded below.

We've also added the ability to reorder the players inserted for the game as visualized in the second video.

We're working on the game in Unity engine which has been notoriously wonky with UI stuff so doing for example the reorderable drag and drop list seemed a bit annoying at first but luckily we found an excellent UI extension package for Unity. Here's the link to the package.

https://bitbucket.org/UnityUIExtensions/unity-ui-extensions/src/master/

The package has lots of really useful UI components and it is free to use for commercial projects so it was a perfect fit for us. You should definitely give the package a look if you need anything a bit more complicated in your Unity UI.

That's all from me at this point

 - Pullis, ticca programmer

We've been thinking of implementing an AI for the game but an AI that can draw from text based user input as well as an AI that can continue a story based on a users drawing would be rather difficult to implement so we've been concentrating on the multiplayer part.

Helping a user to learn a new language would be a very interesting idea we'll have to look into that.

Thanks for your input!

- Pullis, ticca programmer

I definitely liked 7, 9 and 17 most. Number 18 also had an interesting feel with the bumpers that look scavenged. The idea of a tank with different scavenged looking parts is interesting to me at least.

I'd also recommend searching for futuristic looking current military vehicles like for example the Patria AMV AMOS

( Image from wikipedia here https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiedosto:AMOS_Patria_AMV_Lippujuhlan_päivä_2014_1.JPG )

That was very fun to play. Got me hooked almost immediately. Only thing that bothered me was the sound that played when I messed up. Everything else was very soothing and relaxing but whenever the bass heavy "dun DUUUN" played it kind of broke the relaxing feeling for me.

This is something I'd definitely play on mobile devices with headphones.

The ground texture looks very much like it should have some depth to it like hills that the tanks would go over. It looks a bit flat as is especially with the tank treads leaving marks that look like straight lines.

Otherwise the nuclear winter look and feel is very cool as well as the tanks and the tread marks they leave are a nice touch.

Can the tanks drive through the buildings or are you planning on environmental destruction? I think that would look/be very interesting.

Hi.

We'll definitely be looking into where and how we could use social media most effectively. Right now for example we're hoping to be able to encourage people to send feedback via twitter so we could answer it somewhat publicly so that people could see that work is done on the game.

Reddits also something we've started to look into. There's quite a lot of subreddits where marketing your stuff is not encouraged (for good reason I believe) and we don't want to jump in there only for marketing purposes but hopefully we'll find some way to get some feedback and traction there as well.

We'll also be looking for a good forum specifically for our type of game. Will try and post it here if we find one.

Thanks for your great suggestions!

 - Pullis, ticca programmer

Looks cool and the FOV does put an interesting twist on it. Is there an end goal for the game? What's the player trying to achieve? It might help with coming up name ideas if we know a concrete goal etc.

What type of marketing have you guys ran and was it succesful in your opinion or not?

We're looking to marketing for a mobile party game we're working on and trying out different options. As we don't have a lot of experience on the subject as of yet I'd like to hear some opinions on what worked and what didn't and what you guyd have done towards that.

At the moment we've gone through our options and are looking into google ads and facebooks ads for example. Will post results here once we've tried them out to see how they worked.

https://ticca.itch.io/storyscribe/devlog/134740/whats-new-and-whats-next-for-sto...

Second devlog out. This time I decided to try a long form text about how we ended up with what we have today regarding story scribe. It was a rather long process with lots of designing so that we were able to do something we are truly proud of and I wanted to process the long dev cycle and the bigger decisions that we made during development like going with the medieval theme and adding the metatext of writing a story instead of just images and guesses.

Hope it makes for an interesting read.

- Pullis, ticca programmer

We're also starting to make regular updates on the story scribe pages devlog if you want to keep up-to-date on what we're doing. Hopefully we'll also be able to talk about our design process for the multiplayer functionality for example.

- Pullis, ticca programmer

Hey guys. We at Ticca are making a party game for iOS and Android called story scribe.

The jist of it is to make a collaborative story with the first player making up a story name and first chapter, the second drawing a picture by the chapter, the third writing a chapter based on the picture and so forth.

We're at a point in development where we'd really like feedback on how we're doing and whether we're going in the right direction so we decided to post it in itch.io https://ticca.itch.io/storyscribe

It's already downloadable on google play store in early access and using testflight.

What do you think about it? What parts work and what don't? Do you have ideas how to make it better?

- Ticca dev team
 

P.S. Here are some screenshots