Autumn Beach is a game Romano made for someone’s birthday last year.
You can download it for free from his blog.

Download Sprite Groups

Our characters and interactive objects in This is No Time for Games are made of multiple sprites, so to be able to prototype scene ideas as quickly as we’d like to in Unity, we have to be able to set the colour, sorting layers and sorting order of these groups of sprites in editor mode without having to select all of the sprites each time.

I’ve written a script called Sprite Groups that you can attach to a game object, and then the tooltips in the inspector will guide you through the rest! Get it here! 

And if you want to be informed when This is No Time for Games Kickstarter launches (so you can get stuck into the early backer rewards) please join our mailing list!

For more info about the script itself, read on…

The script also contains functions to let you edit sprite groups at runtime, for example if you want to change a multi-sprited player’s sorting layer depending on where they are on the y axis you can use SetSortingLayer() or SetSortingOrder() - useful for 3rd person point and click adventures.

Or you could put the SetColour() function in a coroutine to make a character gradually change colour.

It also contains code that removes the editor only functionality in build versions of the game so that it won’t slow it down.

The code is written in javascript but will work in a C# project as well. As always, if anyone translates it to C# I’d be glad to include it on the site.

Romano @notquitebw

Recent concept art for one of the game’s puzzles.

As a two-man gamedev team we often find ourselves bombarded with vastly different kinds of work. Between us we’re coding, animating, designing, script-writing, marketing, music-ing, sound mixing, businessing, tea-making and constantly tweeting about all of it… In the run up to our kickstarter for This is No Time for Games, we’re job-hopping more than usual and it can be knackering.

Switching gears from coding to script and puzzle writing, it can take a few days or sometimes as much as a week to get up to speed. It can be easy to forget why you’ve done something a certain way when there’s so much going on and sometimes the time spent switching from one job to the other is just rediscovering what you learned the last time.

When it comes to returning to coding after a break I frequently find myself thinking “Who the hell wrote this?” in either an impressed, confused or slightly scared way. I have an instruction manual for our engine (called NiCE: Nicola’s Cage Engine) in which I try to detail all the most forgettable aspects of how to use the engine. Usually the kinds of fiddly little things that break the entire game. I use Google Docs and a bunch of links inside it to keep it together:

When it comes to keeping a track of the story, last night I made up a little spreadsheet like this (the data in this one is made up and is nothing to do with our game, which has a female protagonist and a host of complex characters):

The hope is that this will give us a good overview of everyone so that if we have to change something in the story or the puzzles we can ensure it keeps in line with what we originally intended for those characters.

And when it all gets too much… just write a blog post. Feels like real work - is not real work.

(I didn’t really mention the work gearing up for the Kickstarter, coming up with rewards, making a video etc… if you want to be the first to get access to early backer rewards when it launches join our mailing list. Also friend us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.)

Romano