Nay 50 Project: Dump Typing & Harrugh Ball

My brother and I started a fun little project inspired by UFO 50, which we're placeholder calling "Nay 50". The idea is that we came up with a bunch of mini game ideas (up to 50) about The Nays. We're also making them as if the characters themselves made them, which is adding a lot more flavor and personality to the presentation and contents of each game.

Because we're coming up with a large variety of gameplay styles, we decided this project would be best in Unity. Starting out, we're only spending about 4-6 hours on each game so we can get through more of them and mainly have quick prototypes done for this project. The first day of this project, we worked on 2 games.

Dump Typing 

The first game we worked on is currently called "Dump Typing". This game is "created by" Pigger and Boney, two of the leaders of the group of orphans. In this game, there are prompts related to the orphans (names and phrases) that pop up, and you must type the word(s) correctly to move the character Chila forward, when racing against Boney.

With this project, I focused on the programming, while my brother focused on the art. I started earlier by making our Unity project with GitHub so we could have version control and easily share it. I haven't really worked on many personal projects in Unity, and it's been a bit since I made a project that used C# (since my previous project at work used Visual Scripting), so it started out by remembering where things were and refreshing my knowledge. I also coded in VS Code rather than Microsoft Visual Studio for the first time with Unity, and I can say that I definitely prefer it overall.

Even though the art in this one is 3D, we made a 2D scene and used 2D exported sprites. I started with the typing mechanic. I hadn't used player inputs by typing before in Unity, so I researched that a bit and used an input field. It looked a little different layout-wise when I was initially testing, compared to the screenshot below, but this is how the final UI layout looks now.

From there, I made a function that changes the text that you must type, depending on a variable. After you press Enter, it checks if you matched the text, switches to the next one.

I set up a timer and sound effects for if the text was correct. I was glad that changing the color and text itself was only 1 line of code each!

Then I set up the movement code. Because Boney moves automatically and Chila only moves when you type the correct prompt, I made separate movement scripts for each of them. This meant also setting up some code to make them stop moving if one of them has reached the end.

While I was writing all of this code, my brother was 3D modeling the characters and background. He exported them out as 2D spritesheets and implemented the animations in Unity. I replaced my placeholder shapes with his final art in Unity and restructured how the whole screen was set up based on that.

And with that, we wrapped up the Dump Typing game! It still has a few areas we'd like to update and fix up, but overall, we spent about 5 hours on the game. So I'm happy with how much we got done in that time. 

Harrugh Ball

The second game is currently called "Harrugh Ball". It's a little dodgeball game that takes place in the desert. This was "created by" Subeebia and Baw, and the idea is that it'll be the Little Kids against monkeys. We only got to making 2 of the players facing against each other for now though.

In this project, I focused on the art while he focused on the programming I started by sketching out a basic layout for the scene in Photoshop. Starting with a sketch to get down the placement and size of the characters. We weren't planning to have a camera that moves, so focusing on getting everything in the 1920x1080 space was how I scaled it out.

Then I started with the background so he could figure out the collisions and space for the mechanics while programming. I made a bunch of different layers so we could do some parallaxing with some of the elements in the foreground or background.

After handing those over, I moved on to drawing the characters. I wanted to have multiple poses like idle, walking, and throwing, but I didn't want to spend too much time drawing a lot of different poses for this little project. So I decided to draw each part on different layers and basically rig the movements to make it faster. I started with the player character, Subeebia.

Then I was going to animate the character in a software called Spriter Pro, but I hadn't used it before and wasn't really sure where to get started because their tutorials were fairly sparse.

I decided to just use something I was a bit more familiar with instead: Adobe Animate. I started with Subeebia's animations and basically imported each part as its own layer, and then motion tweened them to make subtle movements. With Unity, I could have a lot of layers without needing to worry about frames as much. So I started with the throw animation.

I tried out using scenes so I could reuse the same symbols for multiple different animations. It worked out really well. I just ended up having to re-export since it did export all of the scenes rather than one at a time like I was hoping. I also updated the export settings for including transparency, since that didn't work initially at first.

Then I repeated those steps for Baw and eventually had 3 animations done for each character. My brother imported the animations into the game as well.

While I was working on the art, he got player movement down and then also mechanics to pick up the dodge balls that appear in random positions and throwing them. So the basics are there! I was doing some extra art like for the dodge balls, finding music and sound effects, a font, and some other visuals while he was working on this.

So that was it for this Harrugh Ball game! This one was a bit bigger than the previous one, so it took closer to 6 hours for us to put together, but it was all done in 1 night. So I'm happy with where we ended up here too!

And that's it for these first 2 games that we made! I really enjoyed this project, so I'm looking forward to making more of these. We planned about 30-40 mini game ideas. I'm not sure how many we'll get through, and they definitely aren't as in-depth as what you'd see in UFO 50, but it's a fun side project that's been a lot of fun to work on.

CUPdate 84: Mr Marcus World Event

It had been awhile since we did a drawing activity, so my brother and I decided to bring back the Return to Mr Marcus World activity a couple of weeks ago day. This activity always involves a variety of art projects and it really gets us thinking creatively on a variety of mini-projects revolving around our characters.

The first one we did was draw over Steam screenshots that we had to include our characters in them and as close to the style of the game as we could. I drew Gair and Lonny in Afterlove EP, and then Piko, Lonny, and Urom in Goodbye Volcano High. We kept most of the background and just drew characters over it.

Then we drew the base of our characters, and swapped for the other person to draw a different character's clothes over top. The base characters I drew were Zandra and Lee, and my brother drew JrTr and Yaro's clothes over them.

He drew the base for JrTr and Yaro, and then I drew the clothes of Zandra and Lee over them. 

Then we did probably my favorite activity of the day, which was drawing game design levels on paper! We created a level that the characters would be in and it would be something that they'd enjoy based on their favorite games. Then we presented them and talked about them. First was Grenna's level, which was an RPG about Black Fortress, and based on our old RPG Maker 95 game, Cypriss the Elf.

Then Pubby's level was a 2D platformer with endless runner aspects (until reaching the boss). It was heavily inspired by Sonic levels, and based in Neo Obelisque City, which is where he hangs out with his friend Lonny.

So I had a lot of fun with this activity! We tried to think outside the box for more different activities than we usually do, since this is our 6th time doing this activity. It's always fun to do these creative little activities about our characters!

CUPdate 83: Writing Eventures in The Nays

It's been awhile since I last got really deeply into working on The Nays, but it finally happened! So I have a lot of progress to share on The Nays this time for the CUPdate.

I started by writing the SN World Eventure with my brother. We finally found a day that we were both free, so we wrote that Eventure together in one day. 

So after that, we were inspired to continue a project from ~5 years ago where we drew The Nays in the style of Shonen Jump manga panels. So I did a few of those.

During this time, I was also playing Deltarune and replaying Undertale. So all of these combined is what really brought my inspiration back and got me in the mood for working on The Nays again. So the next thing I did was wrote a new Eventure on my own! It's been awhile since I did that. January 2024 to be exact. So this is part of why I've been feeling burnt out, since I really haven't been taking time to write and work on my project. So it felt great to just sit down and write an Eventure. I wrote the Forbidden Beddy Bye World Eventure, which was pretty short, but had some cool new moments that I made up on the spot.

It led me into a whole string of Eventures that I wanted to revisit. There were a few plot points I was considering connecting to Aiml World, so I decided to revisit the Aiml World Eventure. I wrote that Eventure last in 2018, so I figured I could refresh it a bit and flesh it out more. So I decided to completely rewrite all of the parts with just the M Nays so it could include more depth.

After that, I was inspired to draw a NAD for one of the new characters, Mesay. She's Skine's sister. I started with a sketch of her, but then decided to turn it into a full-body drawing as her NAD drawing. I also experimented with keeping the lineart a bit loose and trying to do a faster coloring/shading style. It didn't speed things up a lot, but maybe a little bit.

Then I decided to draw more sketches relating to the Eventures I was writing. I also planned to rewrite the Muko Inc. Delivery Eventure because it's related to all of this. So I did some sketches of some story moments.

So to say the least, I finally found my inspiration and I'm having so much fun working on The Nays again! Starting is always the hardest part, and my exhaustion and lack of motivation is what really held me back. Now that I've started though, it's hard to stop. When I start writing Eventures and planning story moments in The Nays, it's really addicting. It feels great and I've really missed this since it's been almost 2 years since I experienced inspiration this deep. I'm happy that I'm finally recovering from my burnout (for now) it seems!

CUPdate 80: Various Projects

It's been awhile since I made a CUPdate blog post here! I still have these bi-weekly meetings with my friends, but I've mostly just been sharing smaller updates and talking about various projects from sharing my Notion pages during these.

I decided to take this week to cover the various projects I've been working on lately!

To start out, here's the first drawing I did this year of Cipo. It's always a tradition to draw him as my first drawing of the year so I drew him from an Eventure moment.

I also already wrote 1 new Eventure this year with my brother: The Frank Lady Eventure! We've been trying to write all of the older Eventures since those are the main ones we skipped over in writing. It's been fun to reimagine those moments with our modern abilities. I also like going back and finding old music to listen to as inspiration during those parts to really bring me back.

I've also been reading Eventures and proofreading them a bit. I've been wanting to get back in and write a solo one, but haven't figured out which one I want to write yet. I did sketch a few moments after reading some Eventures though.

A side project I did one day was check out RPG Maker Unite since they have a free demo. I tried it out initially when it was in early beta, but now it's officially released so I thought I'd give it another try. Unfortunately there are still some bugs that make it a bit more difficult to use than MZ so I'm not really interested in using it for any full projects. But it was fun to test out and I do like some of the new features and what they're trying to do here.

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Nay Saga Devlog 15: The Final Game Links & Reflections

Over the past year, I've been working on a board game called Nay Saga. This is the last blog post I have where I'll wrap up the process!

At the time of writing this (in December 2024), everything is officially wrapping up!

To start off, here are the final links:

🎲 Play digitally through Tabletop Simulator here.

🃏 Physical version for sale on TheGameCrafter here.

🎮 Mini-digital demo of a few game modes on itchio here.

📄 Information & listing on BoardGameGeek here.

The ideal way this game is meant to be played is with the physical version on TheGameCrafter, but I wanted to make free digital alternatives that anyone could experience. So I'd recommend getting the next best experience by downloading the free digital version of the game on Steam Workshop, if you have Tabletop Simulator. That game's pretty cheap especially during Steam sales and is great for playing other board games digitally.

And lastly, I did make a mini-demo of 2 of the game modes that's available on itchio. I couldn't get it to upload and embed in the browser due to some plugins I was using, but it's available for free to download on itchio if you're interested!

So with this update, I did finally publish all of the pages above! Publishing on TheGameCrafter was surprisingly easier than I was expecting. Because I already bought 2 versions of the game physically, it was just a push of a button really to get it live and up for sale. I previously took precautions to split it out into different versions in case people wanted to buy cheaper and smaller alternatives to it. So that's all been implemented.

With those split out versions, I also bought a version of the game for myself. With the base set, I made a new small box to hold just the base set of cards, and it fits nicely into the bigger box.

And while the 3D printed Gek figures aren't included on TheGameCrafter, I do have the 3D print file available on Thingaverse. And I printed and painted 2 versions which I talked about in a previous post.

And finally, after sorting through everything and making sure it was all ready to go, I wrapped the present up to give to my brother for Christmas.

So overall, this was a really fun project! It was very different and involved a lot of moving parts, but I'm really happy with how it all turned out. I love having physical aspects to these kinds of projects, so this was really cool to have overall. And it's the first time I printed 2 versions of a physical gift so I could keep a copy for myself, so that's fun too.

While I didn't make quite as much progress on the digital version as I originally thought I would, I'm okay with that. It was an afterthought and not really the focus of this year. I still learned a lot about JavaScript and RPG Maker from it and I can use that in other projects, so I'm happy with where I ended up.

My favorite moments were seeing the physical game pieces with my art and characters on it. It just all felt so official! I haven't given the gift yet at the time of writing this, but I'm also really looking forward to giving the gift to my brother and playing it with him and my mom as well. I had a lot of fun playtesting with my friends the one time I did a couple of months ago, so I'm looking forward to playing it with others more.

And with that, I've had 15 devlogs about the process on this project. I'll leave you with some final photos I took of the final cards:

Thanks for sticking through these posts and reading about my process!