Games

Summer Paws is on Switch

Over a year ago, my brother and I made a game titled Summer Paws and released it on Steam. Then a publisher reached out to us and offered to release our game on Switch. We agreed and so they prepared the build, tested it, submitted it to the Nintendo store. Our game got approved, and as of two days ago it’s finally for sale and can be played on Switch.

The publisher also prepared the cover image which is displayed in the store:

I am glad they made all the promotional assets, and we didn’t have to do much. That’s actually the reason why we agreed to work with a publisher instead of releasing our game on Switch ourselves — we simply don’t have time to deal with all that stuff since we are now working on other projects.

Here’s the link to Summer Paws on Switch.

And here is a link to Summer Paws on Steam.

Ooblets

I was having a bad day so, instead of working, I played Ooblets. It’s such a sweet and funny game, improved my mood at once. Even made me laugh out loud a few times!

If you are sad and want to cheer up, I very much recommend you play it 🙂

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.

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 🙂

Summer Paws

I already wrote about two of the games my brother and I made. Our first game was Hidden Paws. We started making it exactly 3 years ago and then published it 3 months later.

After that, we made Hidden Paws Mystery, which is our worst game yet.

The third one in the series is Summer Paws, which is also about kittens but takes place during — this will surprise you — summer.

After the many failures of Hidden Paws Mystery we sort of knew what not to do:

Don’t create too complicated graphics. Low poly art looks nice and pleasant, and there’s no reason to go for a realistic art style in a casual game about kittens.
Don’t create a confusing game. There were graveyards and tentacles and cute cats in Hidden Paws Mystery! That’s a weird combination.
Don’t make the levels too difficult. Again, it’s a game about kittens, so players don’t expect to have to look for a white cat in a mostly white level.

With that in mind, when we worked on Summer Paws, we made the game really pretty. It’s easier to market a game on Twitter when screenshots look nice.

Cats are hidden well, but not in a mean way. All the islands are places that you would want to visit.

If you like it you can get it on Steam 🙂

Our worst game

After the success of our first game, we decided to make a sequel. Making a second game should be easier, you are supposed to learn from your mistakes, right? Well, not only did we repeat a lot of mistakes from our first game, but we also added new ones.

black cat in a graveyard — Yes, this is a graveyard. In a game about kittens.

The game is Hidden Paws Mystery. Here are the 4 worst mistakes that we made:

1. Scope – As before we planned too big a game, way bigger than we could make in a reasonable time. And we made even more levels than previously.

2. Topic – Our first game was about winter, it looked lovely: islands covered in snow, pine trees, little houses. We decided that our second game would be Halloween themed. The problem is that it’s difficult to make Halloween cozy and beautiful and cheerful. What’s worse — we actually planned to make it all weird and scary. But this was still a game about finding little cats. It didn’t match up. Players didn’t know what to make of our game.

most unsettling! — Yes, that’s a comment about our game.

3. Promoting – since our game didn’t look as pretty as the first one it was more difficult to promote on Twitter and got fewer wishlists on Steam.

4. Art style – our first game had a cute low-poly look. Our second game has more real looking graphics. Not only does it take longer to make a game with this art style but it was completely unnecessary for such a simple game.

Not surprisingly it sold poorly. It has very positive reviews though so that’s good.

Hidden Paws

In December 2017, like every Christmas, I visited my mom. My brother was there too. Usually, we eat a lot, maybe watch some movies, do jigsaw puzzles, and play games. It should be relaxing, but it never is. Or maybe it is at first but we don’t like being unproductive for days.

So, we were there for yet another Christmas, and we knew how it would go and that we would feel tired after all the sitting around and eating. We came up with an idea of creating a small game. We wanted to make it in 3 days tops because we were delusional — most game developers are when they estimate how long it takes to make a game.

Cats in Love in Hidden Paws game — Love at first Meow

It was winter and it was snowing outside so all our ideas revolved around winter and we agreed that there would be an island and that little kittens would be hidden there and a player would need to find them. My brother knows 3D modeling so he made the cats and the island in Blender and I programmed it all in C# in Unity Engine. We had a small working prototype within a day. But there was still a lot of work to be done. And we kept adding isles and things. We kept making the game when we got back to our own apartments.

We titled it Hidden Paws. This is the description that we came up with: