Games

Co-op games research – Morkredd

I visited my brother yesterday, and we played a bunch of games. One of the games was Morkredd, a co-op game. Each player has a character and you have to work together to guide a giant light orb through corridors and terrains. You must be cautious because shadows kill you.

We played for half an hour and had fun, but we were also approaching it as research because we want our next game to be a co-op game. Nowadays, anytime we play co-op games, we pay attention to what works or what doesn’t, what makes a co-op game fun, what makes us keep playing.

Morkredd has some problems, like any game. For example, there’s really only minimal story. I know some people would consider it a plus, but I like games that have some plot, not just a string of puzzles to solve. If Morkredd was a single player game, I wouldn’t want to play it, but co-op makes everything more amusing. I remember that when I played Celeste, I was dying too often — every few seconds — and so I got fed up quickly and never went back to the game. But in a co-op game you have much more patience for dying, particularly if it’s dying in an absurd way. In Morkredd, you die when you step into shadows, even each other’s shadows. And we were constantly walking into each other shadows. It was actually ridiculous how often we were dying because we kept forgetting. However, we didn’t tire of it, we just kept trying again and again.

I checked Morkredd stats and unfortunately it looks like the game didn’t sell well. Actually, it sold poorly, and it’s sad because the game definitely has potential. It was released 8 months ago but has just 20 reviews on Steam. You can roughly estimate how many copies a game has sold by multiplying the number of reviews by 55. It won’t work for some games, but it works for most, as a general estimate. If you multiply 20 by 55, you get 1100. That means Morkredd sold around 1100 copies. That’s too bad. I don’t know how long the game was in development but it looks polished and is about 3 hours long. It’s devastating when you work on something for months, or maybe years, and then it gets completely ignored. I hope the studio survives this and makes more co-op games.

The best puzzle so far was when we had to row a boat, each of us controlling one oar. If you want to play Morkredd, make sure to play with a friend.

Breaking Grounded

Now that I have an assistant, I even have some free time.

Over the weekend I played Grounded with my brother. It’s the first game we played in months. We used to play a lot of Factorio and Borderlands, but we haven’t played those since January.

Grounded is a game where you play as a very shrunken teenager. Do you remember the movie, “Honey, I shrunk the kids”? It’s very much about that.

At first, we were running around trying not to get eaten by ants and spiders and failing every other minute. Soon, we got bored with that. And instead decided to build a stairway, as high as possible.

We could see the entire garden from above.

The game started glitching: stairway was disappearing and reappearing; we were seeing each other in different places than we were really occupying. We built the stairway so high that we could see far away, even beyond the fence. There’s nothing there.

Those far away building are floating in air. There is no ground there because the developers didn’t expect anyone to travel there. They will probably limit how high you can build in future versions.

It was fun for a few hours, particularly because we could play together. If I were to play on my own, I would have gotten bored sooner. The game seems unfinished, fighting was unsatisfying, and resources gathering felt clunky. Oh, and the game crashed two times. It’s still in Early Access though, so they will probably fix most of those issues.

Grounded on Steam

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

Google Report on Games

A friend sent me a link to Google’s Global Insights Report. There are some interesting takeaways.

First, searches for “competitive multiplayer” rose 70000%! Not that I plan to make a game that is a “competitive multiplayer” but it shocked me that that kind of game got so much more popular. It reminds me, I have been hearing good things about the “Escape from Tarkov” game. Maybe when I have time, I will check it out.

The second thing of note in the report is that people searched for “hard puzzle games”. Which, again, I find surprising. I assumed that people would rather play casual relaxing games, and in fact, the Android Play store is famous for relaxing games like Candy Crush Saga. I didn’t think there were even any hard puzzle games in there but I am going to check.

Overall the data that Google shared confirms what we already knew from Steam’s report: more people buy and play games than ever before. Check the full report here.

Steam – 2020 Year in Review

Steam shared their 2020 data, and it’s interesting.

The first thing to note is that each month there were 2.6 million new people who bought their first game on Steam. In 2018 it was just 1.6 million. That’s very good news for indie developers like my brother and me.

As soon as we released our first game, someone pirated it and made it available to download for free as a torrent. Anyone could play it without paying for it. And yet our sales are increasing because more people are joining Steam and buying games legally.

50.7% more hours played compared to 2019 — not surprising. People had to stay home due to the pandemic, they got bored, they played games. However, they not only played freely available games like Fortnite. They actually bought 21.4% more games.

I thought people would be buying games less and less. Not only are there so many free-to-play games, but you don’t even have to buy all the games that you want to play because Epic gives away a free game every week. It looks like it didn’t hurt the market after all.

You can read the whole Steam year review here.

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.