Rotorobot Update⌗

I’ve released Roto-Robot!

I also wrote up a long post-mortem on the game itself.

Fungus Tutorial⌗

We’re going to talk about Fungus at the meetup. Here’s some documentation on Fungus for more information:

Here are the portraits I’m going to use:

For the looping background:

There are some other great tools for making interactive novels. I’d like to explore these tools more.

  • Twine publishes right to html
  • Ink great tool for making stories, has support in Unity

I think that Fungus has some strengths and weaknesses. The biggest strength is that it’s very easy to setup and use. Unity’s UI is a chore to use without some kind of higher-level management tool. Showing or hiding dialogs and UI components, making text-writers, etc. is actually pretty hard to do from scratch. Fungus makes it easier. Much easier.

Fungus also has a very intuitive flowchart. They split things up into blocks, and each block has a sequence of actions. Properties on those actions let you do just about anything you want to control the flow of the story. It has very good support for text substitution and variables. Being able to drop-down and custom dialogs with literally any Unity object is great. The dialogs integrate very well with the rest of the Unity UI and canvas system.

Where does Fungus fall apart? I think that they could do more to expand on the Character types. For example, a character’s portrait is a single image. I wish I could extend this to use a simple animation loop, or even better have a generic Unity GameObject.

I’m using Unity right now for a variety of things, from looping music to ‘start’ and ‘pause’ menus. This has really opened the door to easily putting together narratives and dialogues, that I’m now curious about other UI toolkits that might be better suited to how I’m using Fungus.

Game Jams⌗

Latt participated in American McGee’s Pirate Jam 2020 Pre-Game Skirmish. The winning game was:

There were two game jams that I wanted to review from last month: