Justyna

Unity Input System vs Rewired

My brother and I spent another day trying to solve the issue with gamepads in Unity. To recap: if you start the game and plug in your gamepad while the Unity splash screen is displayed, the game will not recognize that a gamepad is connected.

We reported it as a bug to Unity but so far they haven’t approved the report. Even if they approve it, they might not fix it as there are plenty of more serious bugs reported. And even if they planned to fix it, it might take weeks before there’s a patch. The last release of Unity Input System was over two months ago, and it was just a preview version, meaning it’s most likely not ready to be used in final products.

We can’t wait for the fix, we need to solve it in Summer Paws somehow. It looks like we will use Rewired to handle gamepad input but in order to do that we need to do a few things:

Rewired is not compatible with the new Unity Input System, so we need to completely remove it from our game. It means huge changes in many places in our project.
We need to overhaul how we handle user input in user interfaces (menu, options, all other windows). Input System made handling user interfaces easy but we can’t use it anymore.
We used the Unity Collaborate tool to sync the project between my and my brother’s computers so that we could both work on it. If you want to make a very simple game, then Collaborate is fine. But at this point, we need to switch to Git.
Rewired fixes issues with gamepads but introduces other problems, e.g. it crashed a few times when we were testing it. But maybe it was because we were using a trial version only. Regardless, it will require a few days of testing to make sure it doesn’t break anything in our game.

Edit (June 6th, 2021) Rewired was easier to use than expected. Unity hasn’t fixed the bug yet, but at least they are tracking it now: [Input System] Gamepad is not recognized when it is connected during splash screen

Connecting gamepad during Unity splash screen bug

Three days ago I wrote that our Summer Paws game got rated by ESRB and it’s suitable for all players. We need an ESRB rating in order to receive a certification to have our game published on one of the platforms.

But just a day later we got a report that there’s a bug in Summer Paws.

The bug is reproducible in the following steps:

Make sure you don’t have a gamepad connected to your computer.
Start the game.
When the Unity splash screen is displayed, connect the gamepad.
The gamepad doesn’t work in the game.

Somehow connecting a gamepad when a game is starting causes Unity to not recognize that a device gets connected. The player needs to disconnect their gamepad and connect it again for it to start working. But we can’t force a user to have to do that, we need to fix this.

My brother and I have been trying to solve this issue for the past two days. No success so far.

It might be a bug in Unity, we will report it. But we would still like to find a way to solve it on our end somehow. We have been testing Rewired which is a third-party tool for managing input in Unity but it’s too early to say if it solves the issue.

Double earnings for masks in April

Last month Threadless doubled royalties for regular t-shirts sold in artist shops. This month they are doubling royalties for masks. If you haven’t enabled them in your store then you definitely should because they still sell very well.

Read the whole post that Threadless wrote about it, including an explanation of how to let Threadless manage your prices: Double Your Earnings with Face Masks in April!

I particularly like that they included example earnings when face masks are sold for full price, and when they are sold with discount:

I know artists are sometimes confused when there are site-wide sales and they don’t get paid in royalties as much as they expected.

Here are some of the face masks in my artist shop on Threadless:

No cats jumping off cliffs — it’s official!

My brother and I made a few games about cats. The latest one is Summer Paws. It recently received an “E” ESRB rating. ESRB stands for Entertainment Software Rating Board, and they provide ratings for games to indicate if a game can be played by kids, or teenagers, or if it should only be played by adults. Our game got “E”, which stands for “Everyone”.

As part of the process of having our game rated we had to show if there’s any violence, alcohol, or anyone jumping off cliffs. We didn’t have anything to show really. We intentionally didn’t include any elements that might not be suitable for kids when we worked on the game.

Now it’s official – Summer Paws, a game about cute cats, is a family friendly game and can be played by everyone 🙂

Black Sands

I turned my recent sketch made with reMarkable into a design.

Here’s the sketch that I made first:

Then I inverted the colors because I like while designs on black t-shirts more than white t-shirts with black designs. I took part of the design and places in on apparel:

But I put the whole patterns on home decor items, like: rugs, tapestries, blankets, and some accessories:

I titled it “Black Sands” because it was inspired by this photo I took in Iceland:

Black Beach in Iceland - Photo by Justyna Dorsz — Iceland

Welcome new people

My website statistics tell me that there’s been a 29% increase in traffic in March. That’s — wow — that’s a lot. Reader, what is the reason for your visit?

I wrote a few posts about creating designs for Threadless and other websites. If you are a new artist trying to make a living, then those might be useful to you:

7 websites that send me money
No sales? Read this.
Can you make money on Threadless?
Why haven’t you opened your TeePublic store yet?
TeePublic Resources for Artists
Threadless too has resources for artists, I just haven’t written a post about it yet. But I wrote about their new video series.

However, in real life, I am not often asked about details of my work or how I earn money, or anything like that. People are more interested in my story: how did it happen that I quit my job? weren’t I scared? is it really possible to earn money on your own? what if I fail? People tell me — and believe me, this surprises me every time — that my story/life is inspiring. That they too would like to be so independent. But, for various reasons, they can’t.

I like the idea of inspiring people to quit their jobs and do their own thing. If you read my blog then I hope you at least get that much out of it — an inspiration, a little push, to quit the job that you hate, that wastes your health and time, and to put effort into finding a creative work that you like, be your own boss. If work for others, then only until you learn enough to work for yourself.

Sales increasing

I am happy to report that the apparel market is going back to normal after the February and March slump. Whenever I visit Threadless I have new “You just had a sale on your Arists Shop!” notifications.

Other artists are hopefully seeing similar trends.

Dark Woods

When I draw something I never know if people are going to like it. There were designs that I thought were going to be popular and weren’t. And designs that I didn’t think were going to sell well but they surprised me.

My “Dark Woods” design is sort of in the middle. It’s just reached $400 in total earnings. So maybe it’s not a huge success. But it’s passive income — this design will continue to earn a small amount every month.

I’ve said it before — you never know how your design is going to be received. Don’t second guess yourself, publish all your designs, and let people decide if they like them.

Daily vs. Dailyish

It’s much easier to stick to a habit if you make it a daily habit.

For my whole adult life, I’ve been trying to make a habit out of going to the gym and exercising regularly. I had always assumed that exercising 3 or 4 times a week was enough, so I set rules for myself like: go to the gym at least 3 times a week, or go for a run once every two days. And sure, sometimes I managed to stick to it for a few weeks. But, inevitably, I would be too lazy to exercise on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday. And then I would have needed to go every day for the rest of the week — it seemed too much, it wasn’t the plan to have to exercise every day. I would get discouraged and abandon the whole idea. And then try again a few weeks later.

It wasn’t until I decided to go to the gym every day that I managed to make it a habit and stick to it. Only when a task is non-negotiable, a habit can be built.