Hey everyone,

Now that my page is up and running, I can share some updates about my game :
100 Keys To Your Heart

First fully playable build (yeah !)

I've just published my puzzle platformer game. It's still in early alpha, but should be fully playable already !

Here is a video of the first few minutes :

Debugging

It took a few days of debugging at the end tho. The longer the game got, the less I playtested it from start to finish. It's crazy how many stupid misstakes can slip in the game, and how all those 5min fixes end up adding up to days.

Level Editor

One thing that worked unexpectedly well tho is my automated system to optimize levels. I built all my levels in Unity using 1x1 blocks. With a simple custom level editor it's fast and easy.

Optimization

I then run the optimization script right before building the game.

• Go through each scene
• Copy the scene
• Find all static renderers
• Merge their meshes into a few big ones.
• Merge their colliders into big rectangles.
• Replace the scene in build settings with the optimized scene.

This divided the number of renderers by 1000 and the number of colliders by 10 to 100 in builds. In editor I still work on scenes with 1x1 blocks of course, but if I need to I can also check the optimized copy of the scene.

For a solo dev, this felt like the perfect workflow for building levels. It's nothing new really, but for example I used to merge things in Blender and import the whole scene as a single mesh in Unity, which was much slower and less flexible. 

Hi,

I've updated 100 Keys To Your Heart to version 0.9, about 90% done.
The game is very close to be finished. It should be released early january !

Main menu relooking

The title is a 3D mesh with some dissolve shaders. The black fade in first, then the yellow. It creates a nice drawing effect.

Cutscenes

I paid a studio on Fiverr to draw some comic strips for the intro and outro of my game. I then split the page into small pieces that I could animate using the Unity animator. I took quite a while to isolate everything into their own sprites and then remake every panel from those small sprites. The animation itself is super easy and fast after that.

Localization

It's the first time I localize something in chinese. It's super scary to work with a language so different. With most language I can sort of understand what's going on, and what word means what, but not with chinese.

Finding the font is super weird. I can't really tell how a font looks like to a chinese speaker, or even if it's readable. Then I realised that you can't include all characters in the game, as there are way, way too many. So the trick I've found is to only include the characters that are actually used by the game.

Unity makes the programming side of things super easy tho, I used to make my own json document, parse it and display it where it should. For this game I just downloaded the localization package, added a script on some prefab and it's done.