"Hide-n-Seek Winter" (Coming early February)

UPDATE: March 10th, 2014




Hey guys, I just created a webplayer version of the game. So now you can play the game directly in your web browser no download required. The webplayer version plays at the same resolution for everyone so now all gui text and gui objects are placed where they should be if any of you have been experiencing gui problems such as text out of place or gui objects cutting off the screen.

Play the webplayer version here: Hide-n-Seek Winter (Web version)

Once again, this is 100% free to play, no in game ads or anything. The link is just a dropbox link so it won't take you to third party sites like kongregate or anything to play the game on.

The webplayer version still saves your game progress so you can close it and open it to continue where you left off. The game automatically saves after completing a level.

Enjoy!

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UPDATE March 6th 2014
Game is finished and released!



You know what today is? (my birthday). The release of my newest game!
Just as promised yesterday, today I am finally releasing my first game of 2014. This is probably my most polished game yet. I put in a lot of hard work on this and it took me a lot of time but finally its complete and I am happy to add another game to my list of completed game projects. This one is my best game yet so far.

I just finished writing a giant blog post on my dev blog where I say all these things about my game and kind of brag about it then I have the downloads section for the game up. So if you wanna check out the full blog post for my newest game check out the release page for it here on my blog:

http://snowconesolidwho.blogspot.com/2014/03/hide-n-seek-winter-released-birthday.html


So anyway, just getting to the point. My game "Hide-n-Seek Winter" is out now and is available 100% free to download and play. Currently it is for windows, Mac and Linux platforms. I might make and android version of it sometime down the road and I will probably create a webplayer version to put here as well later on.

Release Trailer: (NEW)
Before you download you can check out the release trailer I made for this game to see what its about:

Download Links: (Dropbox)

Hide-n-Seek Winter - Windows version




Hide-n-Seek Winter - Mac Version





Hide-n-Seek Winter - Linux Version



Well thats it. Like always I had a lot of fun creating this game. I believe that this is a major step up compared to my previous games. It was a really big project for me and definitely one of my most serious attempts at making a good game. If you play it I would love to hear your feedback and critics. Enjoy the game everyone!




//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
1/28/2014




I literally just posted a huge thing about this on my dev blog a couple of minuets ago so I will try and keep this short. But as always I like to to share my progress here on the unity forums as well so I can get feedback. (whereas on my blog it always feels like I am just talking to myself )


Anyway, I am back again with another one of my game projects. As you can see by the title above I call this one "Hide-n-Seek Winter". I have been working on this (on and off) since mid November 2013. Those of you who check the "small works art thread" might have seen me there often posting "dev screenshots" from this project which I kept calling my "secret game project".

But anyway, today the skeleton is out of the closet (not that there was ever a skeleton in the closet)
I decided to hold off on starting a full thread for this project until I have finished a good amount of the game. At the moment I am pretty much half way done with it.

Teaser Trailer:

Story: Choco and his little sister Frosty are playing outside in the snow when suddenly an approaching car looses control of its breaks and crashes into the two kids. After being run over by the speeding vehicle, Choco suddenly finds himself standing in front of his house. Choco then receives a letter from his little sister Frosty. The letter asks Choco to search for his little sister because they are now playing "Hide and Seek", Frosty's favorite game.

This will be a short game that tells the story about a brother and his sister.

Genre: Action/Adventure/Puzzle/Platformer
(with a mystery)

Characters:

Choco: Main character



Frosty: Choco's younger sister. Her favorite game is "Hide and Seek"



In-game screenshots:













I plan on releasing this for windows, mac and linux sometime early Feburary (which is close! Time goes by really fast)
Might consider porting it over to android after I finish and release to the above platforms.

My goal with this project is to create an appealing "toon" graphic styled game. I am also trying to tell a story about a brother and his sister using very little dialog. Unlike my previous projects, I aim to deliver a much more polished, better quality game this time around as I am actually planning it out and not making it up randomly as I go. (Although, making up the game randomly as I go is more my thing and ill admit I enjoy it because you can come up with strange ideas and just put them in the game. But not for this project. I have a planned out story I want to create

As always, I am working on this project solo. I am using Unity playmaker to develop it, Blender3d to create all my artwork, etc (insert common things I say here)

Anyway, I am excited to finish this soon. Hopefully I can reach my deadline of sometime in early February. But I am not rushing through it.

Will have more updates soon!

Sidenote:
Here are some of the "Dev Screenshots" I posted in the small works art thread over time as I was creating this game project

 

Looking good! Like the style : )

 

Thanks Virror!

Here is Todays screenshot



more soon!

 

Todays Dev preview and notes:

Just recently finished quickly modeling my "Bad Dog" model. A low poly dog that you will find in one of the levels. His name is "Bad Dog" because he is a bad dog.

preview (in blender, Once I use the toon shading in unity he will be more well lit and match the style of the other props you see since I created his texture the same way)




Since he is a dog I couldnt just use the riggify add-on blender has. So I quickly came up with my own costume simple rig for "bad dog". Off course its not as good as the rig that riggify generates but for my purposes this will work fine for the simple animations I will began working on for the bad dog.




Dev notes:
I have been creating a ton of different assets for this game project because I don't want to over use to much of the same props. Its safe for me to say that you will find something new in each level

As a matter of fact, each level is unique in its own way and will play out differently than the last. I think changing the gameplay as the player progress through the story is a good way to keep it feeling fresh and interesting.

 

Dev screenshot of the day


yesterday I finished animating the bad dog and creating the AI for his in-game behavior. Today I plan on finishing up the current level I am working on and moving onto the next level.

more soon.

 

Hey everyone. Sorry for lack of updates. Trying to keep this thread updated at least once a day. Haven't posted anything in the past 4 days and I let this sink. I have been getting distracted and worked on other random 3d stuff. But I have been working on this project a little bit each day and as I mentioned earlier I am almost done. I have about half of it complete.

I can't believe we are already in February. I mentioned earlier that my goal was to finish this game sometime in February(hopefully early February, like around the 15th or so but if I need more time I will take it so I don't rush through the game) .

Anyway, here is a little "behind the scenes" look into this and how I am working through it. As I mentioned in my first post I am using playmaker to develop this game and really bring it to life. Its an excellent tool for unity and I have been using it for a good amount of time now.



on the left you see the FSM I built for my choco character. This is the controller I created for his bike, since there is a bike riding level I made. This is one of the many FSMs I made so far. Depending on what you want to do, some are simpler and some are more complex. I built a separate FSM for my choco character himself which is a bit more complex than this. I created a third person type controller for Choco and this controller for the bike. So they are two separate FSM's

This is how the FSM looks like for the character himself. It is a bit more complex because the character has more things I want to control. for example you check for when he is running, if he is idle because the player is not giving any input, if he is falling because the player fell off a cliff, etc. This is a pretty simple setup for my character compared to other characters. For example if you wanted to make a controller similar to a more complex character such as link from the zelda series it would require a lot more different states. In the end it depends on how complex you want your character to be, what are the things your character can do in the game and so on.



So yeah, that was just a little look into the controllers I made with playmaker. Of course that is just a small portion of what I am using playmaker for. I am using it to build the entire game. So things like the scene, props, music, sound effects, AI, advancing through levels, etc are all being done with playmaker. I build a lot of different FSMs for many different objects so I can make them behave the way I want them to in the game.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little behind the scenes look into how I use playmaker to create the game. I wanted to do this update a little differently than typical updates and give a little information on how I am making this game instead of coming here and " hey I just finished working on a level heres a screenshot, more soon!" type of thing.

I hope you enjoyed it, I might do other updates similar to this post where I explain a bit how I did a certain thing. And of course you can expect me to just post smaller updates such as "hey look at this screenshot"

anyway more soon. I will try and update this daily.

 

Dev screenshot of the day




Began working on one of the later levels of the game (obviously still needs lot of work and polish). As you see choco has a large fish on his back in this scene. The large frozen fish is an item you acquire later on in the game. Its used to smash and break frozen objects and other things.

 

Dev screenshot of today:


Here is a preview of the terrain I began working on for the scene I am currently working on. I hand modeled this terrain from scratch in blender instead of using unity's terrain system. I feel like I have more control when I hand model it. But anyway this is what its looking like so far. I know what your thinking right now but this will look better as I finalize it, ignore the toon outline for now, thats just there for me to preview. I am only working on modeling the forms of the terrain then I will texture it, add more props such as trees, rocks, etc and finalize it to make it really feel alive. When I am done I will have a nice looking snowy forest scene which leads to a pond (if you read the sign it says "pond"). I posted this early preview so I can show how it looks right now and then when I post a preview of the final scene we can see the major difference and how much better it looks for the final game.

More soon.

 

Took this screenshot a couple hours ago after doing more work on my snowy forest/ pond scene and forgot to post it.

but here is todays Dev screenshot



Scene is still not final but already you can see it looks much better than the first preview of the terrain I posted. As you can see, this scene takes place during the nighttime. The moonlight skybox unity comes with is perfect with this scene.

more updates soon.

Stay Tuna!

 

Here is a new batch of screenshots from my frozen pond scene. There is a lot of hidden things in this scene. It will be fun to explore it.







The game is almost finished. Just want to say that this is the final week of development for my game.

I will be releasing it sometime during the end of this week. My goal was to have it out early sometime this month. I look forward to releasing it soon. I have a couple more things to work on but I should be able to finish with in the time frame I originally planned on.

more soon!

 

Update of today:

Hmmm... maybe I won't be able to finish this week. I might need more time, maybe an extra week. Why? I have decided to recently make some very big changes to the storyline of the game. I have new ideas and I want to go with it. I will post an update about it soon. We will see how things go.

heres a little preview of a new character I am working on for this game. This will add in a third character that will be very important. (Originally only planned on two characters in game) Since I have decided to go a different direction with the storyline I will need this third character.

sculpt preview of new unnamed character


more soon. I think this will turn out great.

 

Keep it up! As always you have some weired stuff in your scenes (like big frozen fishes) : D

 

I certainly hope you can beat people with that fish on his back.

 

@Virror, Thanks! My games always do end up getting weird in one way or another haha. I guess you can say its part of my game making style? But yeah, this game will only get weirder

@CAKEeatsGIRL, I can confirm that the large frozen fish you obtain in game will be used to deliver beatings

UPDATE:
Big update and changes I am making to the game. I just posted this on my dev blog over here http://snowconesolidwho.blogspot.com/2014/02/hide-n-seek-winter-changes-new-character.html

I don't feel like typing a lot anymore so check out my blog post for the full long update if your interested. I will keep it short over here.

But basically, I created a new original character that will be the main villain of my game.

I call him the "Hiding Demon"


info:
The hiding demon is a very toony, stylized demon type character with a lot of personality. He is known as the king of the game hide and seek because he cleverly hides in various areas when playing. He doesn't like fish because he had a bad childhood experience while on a fishing trip with his father. He can perform various tricks such as grow or shrink his body parts such as his head or hands.The hiding demon lives in the "Infinite snow world" (where the game takes place) and is the main villain of "Hide-n-Seek Winter".

Recently finished setting him up in unity and in playmaker. Here is what my final FSM looks like for this new character of mine.


I created a ton of animations for this character, probably the most I have ever created for any of my characters. Although this FSM I made looks really complex big and messy its actual very simple. I created this with playmaker in a matter of minuets and all I am doing is controlling different animation states for this character.

Storyline changes:

I decided to go a different direction with my the storyline so I came up with a new storyline for my game.

The New Storyline of the game:
After playing a game of hide and seek, little sister Frosty compliments her big brother Choco by telling him that he is the greatest hide and seek player ever. After saying this, the "Hiding Demon" suddenly appears and refuses to believe that choco is the greatest hide and seek player ever. The hiding demon then kidnaps Choco's little sister and disappears. The hiding demon tells Choco to meet him at the frozen pond in the "Infinite Snow World", a strange alternate dimension world where it snows forever. In order for Choco to rescue his little sister, he must defeat the hiding demon in a game of hide and seek.

side notes:

I am having a lot of fun developing this game and like always I feel like it is a major step up for me compared to my previous games. It is definitely going to be my most polished and best looking game I have made yet. I look forward to finishing this and releasing it and hearing peoples feedback. I still plan on finishing and releasing this game before the end of February (this month) so expect it to be out soon.

More updates coming soon. Stay tuna!

 

Todays dev screen shot

big headed demon


as mentioned in the previous post, the hiding demon has the ability to grow or shrink various parts of his body including his head, hands and feet to add comedy to his personality.

more soon.
Stay tunafish!

 

Todays update:

In a previous update I introduced a new character, "the hiding demon", which will play the role as the main villain in the game. His ability is to cleverly hide in various areas.

A unique boss battle:
In the final level of the game I wanted to do something special. So instead of ending the game with a traditional boss battle like in most games, I decided that it would be cool to have the player battle the boss in a game of hide and seek.

So in the final level of the game, you play actual hide and seek with the "hiding demon".

The demon will hide in a random area. You have to find him a certain number of times within a time period to win the game.

He will hide in various places such as behind trees


or ice


and other areas that are much more clever and less common than the areas I mentioned above.
The cool thing is, that I made it so that the hiding demon hides in random areas each time. So he will never hide in the same area each time you play the level. This way, if you loose at this part of the game or want to replay it, it won't get boring because you can't predict where he will hide.

How it was done:
I was able to easily do this by creating a manager with playmaker which stores a number of different spawn points (or hiding spots in this case) around the map. Each time the "spawn random" event is called the manager will select a random spawn point and place the demon there and then have the demons appropriate expression match the spawn point he is sent to. So for example, if he is sent to a sign, he will crouch behind it, or if he is somewhere in the snow he will lay down, etc.



currently I created 20 different hiding spots. With my spawn point manager, I can easily add as much as I want.

The final level has a big open map with various random things scattered everywhere. There is a lot to check out and explore. so it will be a challenge to find the hiding demon but really fun as a unique boss battle I think. Because you get this feeling of excitement when you are looking around the map everywhere and then you see the hiding demons head or something peaking out from a distance you say to yourself "ahh there he is! I found you!". (well at least I felt that feeling when I was working on this gameplay and testing it out)

Although this is a short game, each level is unique in its own way. You will find something new in each level and notice that the gameplay is different for each level as well. I am really proud of the diverse levels I created for this project. Personally, for me, I feel like this hide and seek level will be the highlight of the games gameplay.


Closing thoughts:
I will be wrapping up this game project real soon and begin prepping it for release.There is a few more things I need to work on but I will finish on time. I promise to release this game before the end of this month.

More soon.

Stay tuna!

 

Solid progress and a very interesting "boss battle" idea!
Like how you are thinking out side of the box here : )

 

Thanks again Virror!

Screenshot of the day:




Thats a screenshot I took from the opening cutscene of the game. The gameplay parts of the game are pretty much complete at this point. I recently finished working on the final level where you play hide and seek with the boss. So right now, I am working on the games cutscenes. Theres only going to be 2-3 cutscenes.

The game is near complete! I look forward to releasing it.

 

Hey everyone. Since I am working on finalizing (working on the menus, ending, etc) the game and prepping it for release, there isn't much dev screenshots to show anymore.

So while I am working on the final parts of the game I am kind of fooling around and playing around with stuff.

Just for fun, heres what the game would look like without the toon shading. This is how it looks with unity's Specular shading and the game engines shadows (Set to highest quality resolution)

(In Game)


(Screenshot from the scene editor window. All of those red logos are because I have playmaker FSM's attached to those certain gameobjects.)


I know, it might look a bit too shiny. I really didn't spend anytime tweaking anything, just was a quick for fun thing. Now back to work!

So there you go. If you where wondering what the game would of looked like without toon shading there it is. More updates coming real soon.
(Off topic: I do plan on going for a more graphically realistic style for my next game project after finishing this one)

Stay tunafish!

 

Wow, I can't believe we are already in March! Sorry for the lack of updates here. There was nothing really else for me to show, or I guess I didn't really want to show any more screens or anything because I have been spending the rest of time since my last post finishing up the game, adding a little extra polish, working out some features I forgot to add like a save system, etc.

So I haven't updated in a couple days but I have been working on it non-stop. Or whenever I had a chance to.

As you might know from my previous updates and the title of this wip thread, I originally planned on releasing this game early February and then that eventually led to releasing it at the end of February, and I promised to release it before the end of February. But as usual, things never go as planned. I had run into some issues, I needed to add some extra features and I needed to work on the final game. Also, I haven't had as much free time to work on this project for the past couple days because of life and other non game dev stuff. So I decided I needed a little extra time, just a little, to really finalize my game because there is no point in releasing a broken or unfinished game right?

Anyway, I have good news. Finally, after taking the extra time I needed, I finally finished the game. It feels great! This has been probably my biggest and most serious game project yet and I ran into a lot of frustration while building it, for the most part it was smooth though. But finally, its done and I feel really good about it

you see? Preparing the final builds as we speak.


So its done, when are you going to release it?

Actually in a couple of hours. I will release the game March 6th (Tomorrow) sometime in the afternoon or so. Like my previous projects, I am releasing this 100% free. It will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Why don't you just release it now if its done?
Im going to do some final test to make sure everything is working right, (even though I know it is since I tested so many times in frustration) but I have to double check. Also, the main reason I decided to release it tomorrow is because tomorrow is also my birthday (going to be 21, starting to feel old mold). So I want to give you guys a present on my birthday.

Ok thats all I have for now. I am really excited and looking forward to finally releasing my new toon game. I will probably be updating this thread frequently with other stuff up until I release it tomorrow. So stay tuned.

 

Love the art style for your environment. Is that mostly the texture work or toon/outline shading?

 

Thanks! I would have to say its really the texture work that gives it more appeal. I was originally going to create the entire game using solid colors and toon shading only. It didn't look really good. After I posted some screens of this a while back on the small works art thread and hearing other peoples feedback about how it looked I had to agree that my approach to using solid colors only did not make the game look good. so I decided to texture everything. I still wanted the textures to look cartoony and not real so I came up with my own unique style.

See here are some screens I took of very early progress of the game when I was only going to use solid colors and toon shading






after going back and doing texture work for all the models I created I ended up with much nicer looking results for the overall game art style I was aiming for.






Screenshot from the final game:


When I said I had some frustration with this project is because I revisited areas over and over again such as going back and doing texture work for the 3d models I already created and completely throwing out some of the levels I already made and started from scratch and changing other stuff along the way. It was frustrating but finally it worked out and I am really satisfied with the final game I created and all the changes I decided to make during the the time I was creating it. All those changes I made where to make the final game better and I personally feel pretty proud of this one since I put a serious effort into it and making it polished.

 

Yeah I agree that the texturing really helped polish and give it a great touch. The original pics looks good, but feel lacking and the texture work is really visibly when placed beside those as a comparison. Excellent work on polishing that up for the end result. It does show quite well in the detail of the models and textures.

 

Thanks Foestar

Trailer coming soon and going to release the game in a couple of hours. While you wait, here is the app icon I created for the game!

 

You know what today is? (my birthday). The release of my newest game!
Just as promised yesterday, today I am finally releasing my first game of 2014. This is probably my most polished game yet. I put in a lot of hard work on this and it took me a lot of time but finally its complete and I am happy to add another game to my list of completed game projects. This one is my best game yet so far.

I just finished writing a giant blog post on my dev blog where I say all these things about my game and kind of brag about it then I have the downloads section for the game up. So if you wanna check out the full blog post for my newest game check out the release page for it here on my blog:

http://snowconesolidwho.blogspot.com/2014/03/hide-n-seek-winter-released-birthday.html


So anyway, just getting to the point. My game "Hide-n-Seek Winter" is out now and is available 100% free to download and play. Currently it is for windows, Mac and Linux platforms. I might make and android version of it sometime down the road and I will probably create a webplayer version to put here as well later on.

Release Trailer: (NEW)
Before you download you can check out the release trailer I made for this game to see what its about:

Download Links: (Dropbox)

Hide-n-Seek Winter - Windows version




Hide-n-Seek Winter - Mac Version





Hide-n-Seek Winter - Linux Version




Future Updates:
I will probably keep updating this thread for a bit more with other small updates down the road like new builds and so on.

Well thats it. Like always I had a lot of fun creating this game. I believe that this is a major step up compared to my previous games. It was a really big project for me and definitely one of my most serious attempts at making a good game. If you play it I would love to hear your feedback and critics. Enjoy the game everyone!

Off topic:

Since today is also my birthday I decided to make myself a new avatar picture
because sometimes a change in appearance is cool I think.

My original avatar featuring my official mascot for my games (it sounds cooler because I said official) that I have been using for some time here on the unity forums:



The new avatar I created featuring my official mascot for my games. I like it a lot!

 

Great work! Downloading the game while watching the trailer. Also, happy birthday!

 

Happy birthday (one day late : p)!
Will download and test for sure! Back with a report sometime this weekend : )

 

Played and finished. I had two problems with my playthrough.

First being that the text wasn't within the little textbox gui image. But I was at least still able to make out what it said even when the images border overlapped the text.

The second problem was in the last level I got stuck in the train track when running across it. This led me to having to restart. Other than that I enjoyed it. Very well done and original. Sound effects, music and art were great. Though I do feel like the camera could be enhanced if you added the ability for the q and e key to rotate the camera manually. Other than that awesome job! Did you do that camera style on your own? I liked it and wouldn't mind doing something similar in my next project.

 

Update:




Hey guys, I just created a webplayer version of the game. So now you can play the game directly in your web browser no download required. The webplayer version plays at the same resolution for everyone so now all gui text and gui objects are placed where they should be if any of you have been experiencing gui problems such as text out of place or gui objects cutting off the screen.

Play the webplayer version here: Hide-n-Seek Winter (Web version)

Once again, this is 100% free to play, no in game ads or anything. The link is just a dropbox link so it won't take you to third party sites like kongregate or anything to play the game on.

The webplayer version still saves your game progress so you can close it and open it to continue where you left off. The game automatically saves after completing a level.

Enjoy!

@Virror and Foestar, thank you both for the birthday wishes!

@Foestar, thanks for taking the time for playing my game and letting me know what you thought of it. I am aware of the gui text problems. That was the biggest problem I had with the game. The reason why the text is out of place is because of different screen resolutions. For some reason gui text and other gui objects act wonky and move out of place, change size or just mess up. This is actually a common problem I had in previous games I created and other unity games that use unity's built in gui system. There is a lot of different screen resolutions and I tried everything to create a universal screen resolution for the gui text but nothing was working. All the gui objects are placed where they should be at 1024 x 768. But I couldn't figure out a way to make gui objects automatically adjust themselves according to the screen resolution the player is using. Personally, I believe that this should be a feature thats already built in with unity's gui system. Unfortunately its not. I am looking into other solutions for gui for my next game projects such as NGUI or Daikon Forge GUI so stuff like messed up gui won't happen anymore.

On a side note, this is one of the reasons why I released a webplayer version of the game. So everyone plays it at the same resolution and gui is placed where it should be now.

For the train tracks level, I made it so the player wouldn't be able to run across it. It is not ment to run across, so actually there is invisible barriers blocking the train tracks if you try to run across them. You can only get past them when riding the train. I am not sure how you got stuck in it though. the character should of been able to fall between the separate tracks. This must be a bug, or maybe one of the train tracks is to close to another and that didn't let the character fall between them. Thanks for letting me know about it.

As for the camera, originally I was going to let the player control its rotation with the mouse but I didn't want to make it feel like complicated controls so I created a third person camera. I did create the camera on my own. It was pretty simple actually, but I used playmaker to create the camera functionality. I created an fsm for the main camera. In that fsm I created a variety of different camera modes such as "Follow Player" camera, or "Third person Camera", or "Top down Camera", etc. So I just created this one camera with a lot of different camera functionality once and then I prefabed it. I reused this camera throughout the entire game.