Blog

Happy Papercraft Holidays!

Hello and welcome to this new Ghost of a Tale update featuring a unique papercraft gift for you! But first some news about the game’s development.

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been very busy transitioning to the latest version of Unity. A move which proved (at least at first) to be pretty much a catastrophic one and generated quite a lot of stress.

It is a transition I dreaded but unfortunately there was no choice; we needed the bug fixes and the new features. Long story short; after the upgrade almost all the game’s shaders broke, resulting in a “pink screen” (Unity’s way of letting you know in no uncertain terms that your shaders are broken).

So with the help of Joachim (the developer of Shader Forge, a great tool to create shaders in Unity) I had to manually fix each of the game’s shaders (and materials) one by one. After which everything (at least visually) was back to normal.

There were also a plethora of issues with other third-party assets but I only have praises for their developers who responded very quickly to my cries for help (a special mention to Stephan, the developer of TextMeshPro and Diogo & Ricardo from Amplify) and provided us with stellar support.

And I am indeed quite relieved to say the situation is now back under control! 🙂

As you may know Ghost of a Tale uses a couple of third-party assets (AI, C# tweening, etc…) but the way I picked them up is not just based on their intrinsic quality; it is the professionalism of their coders that makes them extremely valuable. And once again, without their help and the genuine concern and support of Unity people (thanks Chris!) that could have been an even more stressful event.

So we’re now back to work, toiling on things like integrating Unity’s new scene streaming system (Cyrille’s got a grip on that), fixing bugs, adding the remaining features and making tweaks. One such tweak included making the sliding door’s levers a little more readable (they used to be smaller and very dark before):

And now for our Christmas gift to you: how would you like to have your own papercraft Tilo to adorn your desk? 🙂

Well Paul lovingly prepared just the thing for you: if you possess a little patience and moderate finger coordination you’ll be able to create this little papercraft figurine of our favorite musical rodent! All you have to do is print out this PDF file and follow Paul’s instructions! Note that this is a revised and improved version of the one he did during Gamescom last year.

Finally all of you guys who backed up the game on Indiegogo (starting at 10 euros) should have received by now an email asking for your “credit name” information (that’s your name as you would like it to appear in the game’s credits). I did get a couple of undelivered emails bouncing back (maybe ten or so) but it would seem 99% of them reached their destination.

And that’s the end of this update. In closing, Paul and Cyrille join me to wish you all happy holidays! 🙂