Dev Diary - Porting, Porting and Bug Fixing!
28 days ago – Thu, Mar 21, 2024 at 10:03:55 AM

Hi everyone, hope you're all well. We thought it was time to update everyone with what's going on with Camp Sunshine and when you can expect your games, keys and goodies!

The porting team have ONE bug left to fix in Camp Sunshine for consoles and it's being a royal pain at the moment. It's one that we can't pass up or think of a workaround for as it involves loading a game, which if the Sunshine Bear has anything to do with, you'll be needing! All development on other games etc has stopped so that we can focus on this when we get the builds and get them through QA as quickly as possible!

Our biggest issue is that the engine used for Camp Sunshine was never intended to be ran on things like the Nintendo Switch and as a result its caused a few headaches getting our perfect version of the game onto those consoles. Almost all of these have made the game a lot more fun to play as it's caused us to go back to our original ideas and focus the game on whats important ... which is getting stabbed by a bear in a camp obviously :)

The literal second we get the final build from the porting team we are using we will make an update with everything that's happening. The moment we have the keys they'll be with you with zero delays... we are itching to get the digital and physical versions in your hands! 

Dev Diary - Camp Sunshine Updates, News & What's Next ...
4 months ago – Tue, Dec 26, 2023 at 09:58:31 AM

First off, we hope everyone had a lovely holiday and with a few days to go in 2023 we wanted to let you know what's happening, how things are progressing and more importantly ... what's changed!

With Sunshine Manor now available for consoles worldwide, our attention has become laser-focused on Camp Sunshine and making it better for consoles in 2024. This has resulted in us re-visiting almost every single facet of the game in order to make the game smoother, more horrifying and even more tense.

The Camp Map

The biggest change you'll notice when you load up Camp Sunshine (if you've played Camp Sunshine on PC previously) is that we've opted to split the main camp map into four sections so we can keep the frame-rate smooth. Previously the camp map was absolutely enormous and resulted in huge processing times and fps dips on the Nintendo Switch. So here we have our new map ...

As you can see we have split the map into four sections so that we can keep things like lighting, missions and of course Sunshine Bear consistent across the entire game. During our testing we spent days and weeks trying to figure out why Sunshine Bear would drop the FPS to around 2 to 3 when he decided to chase us. This is because the scripts we were using for pathfinding and line-of-sight weren't that well optimised and resulted in us going back to the drawing board to make the game better. 

So now Sunshine Bear will lie in wait in a few different hiding spots per map section, and if he sees you he'll give chase. He's a lot more relentless now if he can see you so you'll have to use your cunning to escape him! 

Splitting the map into four also resulted in us changing a lot of runtimes where the map is used, now we're happy to tell you that you can keep track of your active quests with a lot more precision regardless of where you are wandering in the main camp. We're super happy with this as it means there's less chance of you missing something ... or maybe having a certain furry friend sneaking up on you when you're looking where to go!

Pathfinding

Who knew an engine released in 2015 would result in issues when porting games for devices it was never intended to release on!? Pathfinding was a huge issue in the game and ol' Sunshine Bear took up a huge amount of memory when he was keeping track of where you are. We've stripped this old pathfinding method completely and introduced a newer, quicker, leaner one that isn't your bare (shouldn't that be bear) bones A* system. Be warned, this means Sunshine Bear might find a quicker way than you when you're trying to outrun him.

Remastered Audio & Music

One thing that we receive lots of love for is the audio in Camp Sunshine, specifically the music and whilst we've been play-testing and waiting for new ported versions from our porting team. We've taken the time to completely re-master all music in the game! We hope you enjoy some of the new elements we've introduced and they don't put you on edge too much ...

So what's next?

We submitted what we hope is the final build of Camp Sunshine to the porting team for conversion on Christmas Day (we don't take days off, it keeps us out of our kids way) and have received a version back this afternoon which we are testing right now. If all is well, then we will submit to the consoles for checking and then off we go ... 

Thank you again for your support on Sunshine Manor and Camp Sunshine, we really can't wait for the final piece of the puzzle to land on your devices and when we're ready to go we'll post another update detailing how you can get your codes and how shipping is going to work for those with physical items.

Thank you! Now make sure you have a fantastic new years eve! 

Dev Diary - Sunshine Manor launches on Consoles!
7 months ago – Wed, Sep 27, 2023 at 06:35:03 AM

No, your eyes are not deceiving you ... Sunshine Manor launches on all consoles worldwide and will be available on October 6th 2023! 

We can't tell you exactly how this feels, but being two old miserable idiots - having a game you spent a good portion of your life on, and seeing it run on Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Playstation is just odd! 

We are waiting on the keys arriving from Nintendo, Microsoft and Playstation and the minute we have them we'll get them uploaded to Backerkit and hit the 'Send Email' button! We'll also make another update too so you don't miss it. 

So, what's next? Well ... if Sunshine Manor is done, what does that mean for Camp Sunshine!? Camp Sunshine is hot on the heels of it's prequel Sunshine Manor, and we're awaiting the final version from the porting team right now. This one has been a 'fun time' to port and we've really put the work to get Camp Sunshine running smoothly on all consoles... in fact one of the porting team recently commented that they'd never seen an RPG Maker game this big! 

Finally, thank you again for your support and patience, it's been a long road and the end is now definitely in sight ... here's to the next update! We'd really appreciate you giving us a follow over on Twitter (that's right, we still call it Twitter) too so we can share more stuff with you. 

Dev Diary - May/June/July
10 months ago – Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 05:00:43 AM

Hello everyone, hope you're all well ... this is a special update and we hope you like it ...

So we know that the porting of Sunshine Manor and Camp Sunshine have taken way longer than we hoped, and it's all still moving along. As we're not porting the game ourselves this left us with a little time on our hands and we wanted to do something special for everyone here that has supported us ... today we announced an early access title that'll be coming to Steam very soon...

This is something we've been working on for a little while now, and as a thank you to everyone here we will be giving keys for free to every backer of Camp Sunshine and Sunshine Manor. It'll appear in your Backerkit account when the game goes live and we'll send you an e-mail about it too! 

Here's some screenshots of what you can expect ...

I don't think I'm saying too much when I say that this is possibly the most unnerving game we've ever cooked up ... it might look simple but there's A LOT hidden in there and it gets weird! 

We hope you like this little surprise, and we're so thankful for you choosing to support us! We can't wait for you to play all three games ... 

You can wish list the game now on Steam too, it would help us massively to drive people to the page.  The link is ...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1813470/Abandonware__The_Horror_Collection/

Dev Diary - March/April '23
about 1 year ago – Wed, Apr 05, 2023 at 03:21:16 AM

Hey everyone, I thought it was time for another update letting you know how everything is going...

Freebies

First off, as a thank you for your continued support we've put together a bunch of downloads for both Camp Sunshine and Sunshine Manor. We noticed that a bunch of you beautiful humans didn't redeem the keys for the soundtracks so we're giving them away for free ... just head here ...

https://www.fossilgames.com/download/

These are all 320kbps MP3 files, so have at it - upload them wherever you like. Share them with friends and family and if you use them anywhere for your streaming, youtube videos etc just let us know so we can have a look. 

Sunshine Manor

At the moment we are waiting for the porting team to send over the final version of Sunshine Manor after our last round of testing. In the last testing session we spotted a few things that really shouldn't be happening and as such we chose to fix them rather than release something we weren't happy with. One of the issues was sound related, and as we do all of the audio ourselves too we couldn't let it slip. We hope that's ok but have been told that our final version (hopefully) is coming very soon. As a little sneak peek (and i'll probably get told off for sharing this) but here's a development shot of the game showing just how many things are in the manor ... you might be able to spot a few secrets too ...

Camp Sunshine

The team porting Camp Sunshine are also working on another title originally created in RPG Maker and have been told that we're approaching a point where that will be ready too. The original issue is taking the game from 30fps (a limit imposed by RPG Maker) and upping it to 60fps has been a challenge as the Camp Site map is huge and has well over 200 different events that can trigger at various points throughout the game. Did you know that we created nearly 620 sprite sheets for Camp Sunshine alone?

One of the funny things that happened during this is that we found a load of sprites that we included in the game for various scenarios that never made it to the final cut ... and we even found the original artwork for when Camp Sunshine was filled with zombies too!

So, there we have it. That's where we're at ... the moment we have the games back from the porting team we will push as hard as possible to get them onto the various platforms so we can send out the keys for Nintendo, Xbox and Playstation and don't forget to join our little discord too ... we're a friendly bunch! 

Whilst we're waiting for these to land in our inbox, we're already busy with our next game and we can't wait to share more details about it ... shock ... it isn't horror!