Welcome to Fantastic Weekly to follow our development process on our upcoming game: FANTASTIC ENERGY.
What a week! Our data-testing project was launched to Google Play beta track and it is basically a raw component that will be embedded in Fantastic Energy.
Super proud of Olle and Noora who made most of the heavy lifting on this one! Good job guys. <3
Here is a little story Energiaviisaat Kaupungit wrote about our game and the data project:
Read it here! (Finnish only)
Now let's get to it!
GAME DESIGN
This week a new topic was brought up that we are now going to explore from all angles.
How could the game utilize the local areas? What is the thing that would tie your backyard to the game? What kind of local area features could we provide so that every single area could have their “signature” thing to do?
We have already designed the Innovation Challenge feature that would enable cities to reach its inhabitants and citizens could participate in the development of their own urban area. Once this feature is developed a little further, we’re going to tell you all about it! :D
The store has been in the center of attention this week.
Eeva:
We had to rethink our monetization plans a bit during this week, but we were able to come to a conclusion that seems great in every possible way! You will hear more about this at a later time. ;) The store is coming along nicely, mainly thanks to the amazing Melissa. <3 We have decided to go with a very traditional approach to provide you all with something fun and easy to navigate. Hopefully, you get to see the store as soon as possible!
CODE:
Tipi:
Finished the client-side and uploaded Data-project to Google Play! Super Happy about the effort we made there. Lots to tweak obviously, but I’d say that it’s a lot easier to implement this ready-working component to Fantastic Energy now.
I also started re-developing the BASE. I want to have some dazzling little things going on there before our next update. :D I am thinking of redesigning the entire layout system.
Modifying crafted items is now possible and next up in development is camera-movement and some little tweaks. :)
Each crafted item will have a “mini-menu” where the player can Rotate, Recycle or Delete the item. I think that the “Upgrade” will be in this same menu, probably doing that next week.
Olle:
I finally solved the data project issue! ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ The issue was that reading the raw data CSV files took months, then I optimized it in all the ways I could think of, and it still took weeks. I had days. ಥ_ಥ But the solution was finally found; I just had to change the reading of the data to be by building instead of reading everything from each file.
This reduced the amount of incoming data substantially. Reading all the data for buildings takes just over 5 minutes! ლ(´ڡ`ლ) And it still has a lot of room for improvement, but ti works for now.
We got the data project finished on Tuesday. Now I can relax for a while and enjoy some personal projects at the summer cottage ~(˘▾˘~)
Melissa:
Almost done with the store's UI! Because FE is a mobile game and screen sizes vary a lot, I had to make sure everything scales correctly, which took a lot of time.
GRAPHICS:
Noora:
This week I’ve been redoing the resources and also created some new ones. There still needs to be more and I already played around with creating some bioplastic. I’m not quite happy with that yet though so I didn’t add it here. This project has really made me love Inkscape and vector art. I’ve also continued to work with the map UI but I’m a bit stuck with it. I plan on getting it done next week but we’ll see how that goes.
Joviaal:
Hot week. This week I wanted to make some simple and small designs.
I designed energy monsters and the “fire” was the winner. Maybe the warm weather influenced this vote. Random fact: 2019 was the second hottest year on record (since 1880 modern recordkeeping began).
I also like other ideas really much, I’m not sure do I make them also in the future or not.
And here is the 3D model. After this picture, Noora gave me great feedback, and I made little fixes for the model afterward.
And here is the final model.
Aapo:
Finished this collection of inflatable furniture! :) All the models are actually using the same texture, which saves us a bunch of memory.
Heini:
Rigging, weight painting, rigging weight painting, and oh, yes, finally! Animating! This week I’ve been working with the cloudy caterpillars from last week’s Fantastic Weekly and let me tell you - animating bouncing ribbons and swaying tails and caterpillar bodies is so much fun!
And these caterpillars are sooo cute too. I usually rig and animate the characters in Blender without their ‘skin’ on, because it can be a bit distracting to see their cute faces stare at me during the whole process, but looking at the small caterpillar’s skin now I’m kinda regretting it… just too cute!
Thanks for reading and cya next week!
With love,
Punnu Games team
