It has been another very productive weekend here at Smiling Cat. One of the biggest coding tasks left on Dehoarder 2 was integration with Steam, and that has been largely tackled over the past week. I now have functioning stats and achievements, and cloud-synced saves are all set up. On the artwork/assets side, Steam badges have been created, trading cards are defined and one of them is even complete. The game is mostly set up on Steam, to the point where I can upload builds and install and play them.
I made an attempt at creating emoticons, and it ended poorly, since pixel art is one of my weakest areas. Yup, I tried all of the tricks that I knew to make an 18×18 pixel alien head that looked decent, made several attempts at it, and it literally looked like crap – a nice two-toned floating greenie with two kernels of radioactive corn for eyes. (
) So I’ll need to do something about that. Like create and patent an algorithm that can resize any image down to 18×18 and still have it look beautiful. Or go back in time and prevent the invention of emoticons. Or hire a contractor. I have options.
Lack of pixel art talent aside, overall, the process of integrating with Steam has been pretty easy, especially for someone who has been to the app storefront integration rodeo several times before. Steamworks.Net kept me from having to get too low-level, where all the time-sinking rabbit holes exist. Pretty much everything worked as expected. The Steamworks.Net package should really be on the Unity Asset Store; I would give it six stars there. Well, maybe only five because it is leaking Hungarian variable notation into my code, which is very un-.Net-ish. At any rate, it’s much better than the most popular solution available on the asset store, Ludosity, which appears to be abandonware (no updates in 29 months) as of this writing.
Seeing the results of the whole process of getting integrated with Steam – Seeing my Steam status as “In Game: Dehoarder 2” (even though others can’t see that yet), seeing the game in my Steam library, being able to bring up the Steam overlay in game, seeing the too-familiar achievement toast pop up with achievements I created, viewing the preview of my first trading card – are a huge motivator, an affirmation that this is really happening and that I am progressing steadily toward a game release on Steam.
As promised, I have returned with a couple of screenshots of what I was doing last weekend. I’m kind of glad I had these screenies in reserve, because integration work is generally not very photogenic. In the first screenshot we see Pica; she is in the middle of jumping up and down to try to get Harry’s attention. The second screenshot is from the Eastman encounter, where the willpower that Eastman and Harry are putting off is rising up out of the surrounding land, Dragonball Z-style.