https://deadpossumgames.itch.io/ram-roll-and-move
Any feedback would be much appreciated!
Hello all!
We're Dead Possum Games, a husband and wife indie game development team. Our game Petunia's Purgatory, an idle farming game that you can play at the bottom of your screen while you do other things, is launching on July 16.
We didn't want to make a typical farming game, so we decided to introduce elements of Lovecraft and cosmic horror to the game. There's a tentacle Elder God that lurks in your barn and demands you deliver increasing number of crops to it. The crops you grow aren't the typical ones you'd expect, like eyeballs that grow on a stalk, or tentacles that grow out of the ground.
Your character Petunia will slowly lose her sanity as she interacts with all the strange crops which causes the game to invade the rest of your desktop.
Do you think we captured an element of cosmic horror in our game?
My wife and I are both game designers who used to work at Maxis on The Sims. A few years ago, we decided to start our own indie studio and we're currently working on our second game, Petunia's Purgatory.
I thought I would share some of our learnings going from a multi-hundred person team, to our tiny team of 2. Hopefully this can be useful for anyone else thinking about taking the leap from AAA to indie!
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Lesson #1: Who's Job is This? (it's yours now)
This should have been obvious, but it was pretty eye opening for me. On big teams, there are specialized people for every aspect of the project: graphics programmers, localization producers, automated build engineers, etc, etc. On that team, I could mentally offload everything that wasn't directly related to my job (game design).
On our indie team, there's just us. I quickly realized that I couldn't just do game design anymore. I had to learn (at least the basics) of every aspect of game development, like localization, build versioning, and performance testing. Reddit, the Unity forums, and bugging old coworkers was a lifesaver here.
It was overwhelming at first, but I think it's made me a lot more appreciative of all the work that goes into making and shipping a game.
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Lesson #2: Project Scope is Smaller (WAY smaller)
Again, maybe obvious, but the difference between the work that hundreds of people can do in a month and what 2 people can do is exponentially massive. Even seemingly small features take much longer if there's no dedicated sub-team to tackle them in parallel.
This forced us to be extremely careful about not biting off more than we can chew. We also are militant about setting priorities for new features and content, since even stuff that seems small can still use up 50% of our bandwidth for a week.
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Lesson #3: We Don't Have a Tools Team
At AAA studios, there are often multiple engineers whose job it is to support the rest of the team by making plugins for the engine, or, like the team at Maxis, make a whole custom engine and toolset. This is extremely helpful for designers like us, since we can focus on making great experiences and content.
Obviously, we don't have that now. I know some indie teams develop their own engines, and more power to them, but that is not something we have the skills to do. Our solution was to find as many tools as we could online (Unity asset store, github, etc).
On The Sims, we had brilliant engineers who made the extremely complex AI system for the characters. For our indie game, we used Playmaker to drive all of the character behavior.
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There are a lot of other things we've learned along the way, but this is getting long, so I'll stop here. I'd love to hear other devs experiences from going from AAA to indie, and any other lessons you've learned. It's been a wild ride, but I've loved it so far, and hope we can keep doing it far into the future.
Hi all! We're Dead Possum Games, a husband and wife indie game studio. Our second game, Petunia's Purgatory, a creepy-cute idle farming game is releasing soon!
We had a lot of fun creating creepy crops for our game, and we think they turned out pretty well. Here are a few of the crops in our game:
Howdy! We're a husband and wife team making Petunia's Purgatory, a desktop companion game where you run a creepy-cute farm and try not to go insane.
When we decided to make a game that runs on your desktop but doesn't take up the whole screen, we did a bunch of googling to figure out how to make that happen.
It turns out, it's not super complicated, but there were a lot of gotchas. I thought I'd share what we learned, in case anyone else was interested in making a game like this.
Anyways, here we go! Fair warning: this is fairly technical, so you should know the basics of C#. No need to really understand Windows programming, though (I certainly don't!)
-----------------------------------
SETUP
Version Info: This was developed in Unity 6.2 for Windows. I can't vouch for other versions and this won't work on Mac or Linux.
Concept: A desktop companion game is really just a normal windows app, but it doesn't have a border. Where it's transparent, the mouse can click through, so it can happily sit on your desktop and not interfere with other apps.
Project Setup:
GameObject - UI - EventSystem)Player - Resolution and Presentation and set the following:----------------------------------------
CODE
Concept: We are going to be using some Windows functions to control the presentation of the game window. ngl, I have no idea how these work internally, but they work!
Step #1: Basic Setup
Make a new MonoBehavior script (I called it "TransparentAppController") and attach it to a game object (like your Camera)
Step #2: Windows Functions
Add this line:
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
Declare the following variables in your script. Make sure these are written EXACTLY this way:
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
private static extern IntPtr GetActiveWindow();
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
private static extern int SetWindowLong(IntPtr hWnd, int nIndex, uint dwNewLong);
[DllImport("user32.dll", SetLastError = true)]
private static extern bool SetWindowPos(IntPtr hWnd, IntPtr hWndInsertAfter, int X, int Y, int cx, int cy, uint uFlags);
const int GWL_EXSTYLE = -20;
const uint WS_EX_LAYERED = 0x00080000;
const uint WS_EX_TRANSPARENT = 0x00000020;
static readonly IntPtr HWND_TOPMOST = new IntPtr(-1);
static readonly IntPtr HWND_NOTOPMOST = new IntPtr(-2);
private IntPtr hWnd;
Step #3: Unity Logic
Add this function (this will grab the Window id for your game when it gets focus)
private void OnApplicationFocus(bool hasFocus)
{
if (hasFocus)
{
hWnd = GetActiveWindow();
}
}
Add this chunk of code to your Update() function
PointerEventData pointerEventData = new PointerEventData(EventSystem.current);
pointerEventData.position = Input.mousePosition;
List<RaycastResult> raycastResultList = new List<RaycastResult>();
EventSystem.current.RaycastAll(pointerEventData, raycastResultList);
bool isOverUI = raycastResultList.Count > 0;
if(isOverUI)
{
SetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_EXSTYLE, WS_EX_LAYERED);
}
else
{
SetWindowLong(hWnd, GWL_EXSTYLE, WS_EX_LAYERED | WS_EX_TRANSPARENT);
}
If you're curious, this is doing a couple things:
Step #4 (Optional): Set Always On Top
This is optional, but if you want the game to always be on top of other windows, you can do that by adding this code where appropriate (you'll have to declare that bool and set it somewhere):
if(alwaysOnTop)
{
SetWindowPos(hWnd, HWND_TOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0);
}
else
{
SetWindowPos(hWnd, HWND_NOTOPMOST, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0);
}
Final Notes
#if !UNITY_EDITOR to prevent some weirdness in editor-----------------------------------
And that should do it! It's possible that I missed something, so please let me know if you have any trouble. Also, if you have any tips you've discovered, I'd love to hear them. I'm sure there's multiple ways to make this work. Thanks for reading!
Hey all, we're Dead Possum Games, a husband and wife team working on our second game, Petunia's Purgatory. We both come from a game design and programming background, and aren't very artistic at all.
We thought it would be fun to show a little before and after of what our game looked like before and after we replaced all the art in the game.
Before
When we were first prototyping the project, we used a combination of an itch.io asset pack and filled in the blanks with some sprites made with our (limited) art skills. We built almost the entire game this way until we felt like we were ready to hire and artist.
After
We found an awesome artist through the r/pixelart subreddit and hired him to work with us. In the end, it took about 6 months of a part-time artist to completely replace all the art in the game. We're super happy with how it turned out!
Our creepy-cute idle farming game (Petunia's Purgatory) has a mechanic where the game starts going nuts if you lose your sanity. Been playing around with shaders to create the effects and I think this one turned out pretty good!
I was playtesting my game Petunia's Purgatory and left the game running for a few minutes, only to come back and discover this fun bug where it goes crazy trying to harvest blood from a bunny.
When the sacrifice was supposed to end, the altar was trying to delete the bunny's GameObject, but it was null and couldn't be deleted, so it got stuck in an infinite loop. I've since refactored it so that the bunny's GameObject is deleted when it gets placed on the altar and that altar only references a ScriptableObject for the bunny.
My wife and I are working on a game called Petunia's Purgatory, a desktop idle farming game with a creepy twist. As your character, Petunia, starts to lose her mind, strange things start happening on your desktop (we've already tricked a few early play testers 😈)
We've got around 30 different effects so far and plan to add more! Would any of these fool you?
Hi all! We're a husband and wife indie game studio called Dead Possum Games. We're working on our second game, Petunia's Purgatory, a creepy-cute idle farming game that sits at the bottom of your screen while you do other things.
We're working on a Twitch integration for our game which would let your viewers add themselves to the game as an NPC that will automatically take care of tasks on the farm. The viewer's name will appear over the NPC.
Have you used a Twitch integration on your stream before? Did your audience enjoy using it?
Working on Petunia's Purgatory, I've been using shader graph to add some trippy effects to the game, like this subtle shimmer effect.
It's been fun, but I feel like my technique of just adding nodes randomly until something cool happens is not ideal 😅
Does anyone have any tips to making cool 2D shaders or do I just need to buckle down and learn the math?
Hey all,
We're Dead Possum Games, a husband and wife indie studio. Our second game Petunia's Purgatory is a creepy-cute idle farming game that uses pixel art. We both have backgrounds as game designers/programmers in AAA, and no art skills at all.
For Petunia's, we decided to outsource all of the art to a pixel artist. This is our first time working with an outsourcer, and overall, we had a very positive experience. Our pixel artist was really great to work with, a very good communicator, and did a great job with the art.
We wanted to share what worked well and what didn't in hopes that it can help others who might want to do the same. We'd also love to hear your experiences as well!
Here's what worked for us:
Here's what didn't work for us:
Things to try in the future:
Hey all,
We're Dead Possum Games, a husband and wife indie studio. Our second game Petunia's Purgatory is a creepy-cute idle farming game that uses pixel art. We both have backgrounds as game designers/programmers in AAA, and no art skills at all.
For Petunia's, we decided to outsource all of the art to a pixel artist. This is our first time working with an outsourcer, and overall, we had a very positive experience. Our pixel artist was really great to work with, a very good communicator, and did a great job with the art.
We wanted to share what worked well and what didn't in hopes that it can help others who might want to do the same. We'd also love to hear your experiences as well!
Here's what worked for us:
Here's what didn't work for us:
Things to try in the future:
Hey all,
We're Dead Possum Games, a husband and wife indie studio. Our second game Petunia's Purgatory is a creepy-cute idle farming game that uses pixel art. We both have backgrounds as game designers/programmers in AAA, and no art skills at all.
For Petunia's, we decided to outsource all of the art to a pixel artist. This is our first time working with an outsourcer, and overall, we had a very positive experience. Our pixel artist was really great to work with, a very good communicator, and did a great job with the art.
We wanted to share what worked well and what didn't in hopes that it can help others who might want to do the same. We'd also love to hear your experiences as well!
Here's what worked for us:
Here's what didn't work for us:
Things to try in the future:
Hey howdy! My wife and I are working on a creepy-cute idle farming game called Petunia's Purgatory and we just added some Twitch integration (viewers can spawn themselves as helpers in the game).
I thought it turned out pretty cool, but I realized I didn't know if people actually liked watching streamers play idle/incremental games on Twitch 😅
What do y'all think?
Hi all, we're Dead Possum Games, a husband and wife indie game team just trying to figure out the marketing grind!
Our game Petunia's Purgatory is a creepy-cute idle farming game, so we thought it would be perfect for the cozygamers subreddit, but sadly, they took down our post because the creepy parts aren't cozy enough for them. sad face :(
Do you have any suggestions on what subreddits would be more welcoming for us?
What do y'all think of these weirdos?
Our game is called Petunia's Purgatory and it's coming out soon. There's a demo on Steam if you wanna try it out!
We recently added a Twitch integration to our game Petunia's Purgatory, and I was trying to figure out what the cap on viewers should be. I tried out 300 and it looked so ridiculous that I just had to share.
Hi r/LowSodiumSimmers! We're Megan and Matt, husband and wife indie game developers who met while working on The Sims 3 Late Night, and later worked on The Sims 4 and many expansion packs. Our personal favorite packs we worked on are: Megan: The Sims 4 Vampires and Matt: The Sims 3: Island Paradise.
A few years ago, we both needed a change of pace and left EA to try working at other game studios. Unfortunately, we both ended getting laid off and decided to take the best of a bad situation, and try to start making indie games together.
We recently announced our second game, Petunia's Purgatory, a creepy-cute idle farming simulation that sits at the bottom of your desktop so you can play while you work or do other things.
Petunia has a secret that lives in her barn, and it's hungry. To keep the Elder God that lurks in the shadow well fed, you must grow and harvest horrifying crops. Summon adorable but cursed helpers to automate the farm and sacrifice critters to harvest the blood needed to plant strange crops. But beware: you must balance the horror by growing beautiful flowers to maintain Petunia’s sanity. If her mind breaks, the game will start to invade your desktop!
The demo is available on Steam now if you'd like to give it a try. We would love to hear your feedback!