The further we get into the development of Hermit, the more we realize how important bug reports are. I updated our bug reporting tool to include log messages and other useful information, and automatically report errors if the user allows it. Let’s see how it’s done.

We have been selected to be part of the Swiss Games Delegation at this years Game Developers Conference in San Francisco! GDC22 here we come!

I’ve been struggling with scroll rects in Unity for quite some time now, and thought I would give it some time and try to understand how they work. I need them to do two things: dynamically adapt to growing content, and scroll with navigation inputs, i.e. arrows or joystick, when going over content in the scroll rect. Here is a breakdown of how I made it work.

After 2 years of development, we are happy to announce that we finally have a Steam page for Hermit: an Underwater Tale!

The game is not released yet, but be sure to wishlist it 😄

One of the main goals we had in mind when designing Chro_M@tic R@cing was to involve the player in the creation of art. By enabling the visitors to virtually take possession of the exhibited sidecars, they become part of the creation process and can actively contribute to the generation of funny little pieces, which are then printed and posted to Twitter. This process took quite a bit of effort, and I am going to try to explain it here (sorry, it’s going to be technical again😅).

Early Coffee Games is participating in the exhibition À toute vitesse: Tinguely et le sport automobile presented at the Espace Jean Tinguely - Niki de Saint Phalle from September 24th 2021 to June 26th 2022. This is an opportunity to offer a digital and playful perspective on emblematic works by Jean Tinguely: Chro_M@tic R@cing.

Freely accessible at the exhibition, the interactive installation is suitable for both children and adults. You can also follow its operation via the dedicated Twitter account @ChroMaticRacing. The installation will then become part of the permanent exhibition and will be accessible until 2025.

As we approach our second milestone, I wanted to write this blogpost about some aspects and core ideas regarding the visuals of our game. In our workflow, we design everything together by bringing ideas and sketches and by discussing a lot. I then produce a first draft using the almighty superior pixel art software aseprite, and when everything seems OK I proceed with the animations before we implement them in Unity.

Managing bugs and getting bug reports for a game is really important in order to improve the player’s quality of gameplay. To manage the bugs I wanted to use Github’s nice issue tracker, and I wanted testers to be able to submit bugs directly from within the game. Instead of doing this just for me, I implemented a package. Let’s see how I did all of this.

Shells are at the core of Hermit’s gameplay, and how satisfying they are to use and how nice it feels to have different versions of them will determine how the player perceives the game. Today I want to address one of our earliest shell already present in the prototype, the Rocket shell.

End of November, we hit our first milestone “Basic gameplay, Enemy system, first boss, and storyline”. Dwell with us into the state of the prototype and how we approached this new, exciting task of building a complex game.

A little while ago, we wrote, with a lot of help from Jonathan Fellay, a successful pre-production grant application. What does this mean for us, what is Early Coffee Games, and why Hermit - an underwater tale?