Our story
There’s strength in Unity
In September 2020, we created The Night Project to be the parent for all our beautiful little children that we call our games.
Dev A and Dev B have always loved creating. Dev A has been programming for longer than most of you have been on this planet and cut his teeth in web development before becoming a software engineer. Not that this isn’t a noble path, it just hasn’t got anything on game development! Now you can’t call yourself a computer nerd unless you’ve sunk countless hours in to WOW and although he’s now kicked his addiction, he still feels urge to raid and grind (wahey!) on the odd occasion.
Dev A currently playing: Eve online mobile.
Dev B has been an artist at birth but has never had a steady enough hand for a paint brush, so he chose to experience others art in the form of staying up until the sun came up gaming. That’s when he realised you don’t need a paint brush when you’ve go a computer mouse so got to learning programming and the Unity Engine.
Dev B currently playing: AC Origins.
THE PLAYER MUST COME FIRST.
We don’t do anything unless it’s to improve the player experience and make a better game. We even consider which software is going to make it so we can get a product out to our loyal fanbase sooner so we can get better and more rapid feedback from them on what is right and what doesn’t quite work.
Clicker Kings
Rule Clicktopia (patent pending)
“Power makes you a monarch, and all the fancy robes in the world won’t do the job without it, so get clicking king.”
Welcome!
Hello and welcome to what is most likely your first look at Clicker Kings! Here at The Night Project we’re super excited to show you what we’ve been working on, what we’ve achieved so far and what we’ve got planned for the future.
Clicker Kings! is an idle/clicker game. The objective is to gain gold to purchase chests which give you gear. Gear then gives you stats which you use to compare and maybe even battle other players in the future. The end goal is to become the wealthiest, buffest dude, or dudet, in all of Clicktopia (name subject to change!).
Click, click, clicking…
So what can you do so far? Well, click! Click to gain a piece of shiny gold. Click again for another. Then another, then another, then another (I think you see where this is going). So you’ve been clicking for a while and think: “hey, wouldn’t it be nice if I could click and get two pieces of that gorgeous glittery gold?”, well do I have news for you! Introducing a revolutionary mechanic to the idle/clicker genre...The Multiplier.
So time to spend some of that hard earned cash-ola on a multiplier which multiplies your gold intake by two, then buy another for a higher price to multiply by 2 again and so on.
Setactive(false);
So what’s left to come? Oh my sweet summer child, what you should be asking is what’s not left to come (Does this even make sense? Oh well, you get the point)! Not because our ambitions are too lofty (I mean they are but that’s not the point), it’s because we’re so excited about how far Clicker Kings can go that we see no limit to the amount we can add.
– Gear? In the works along with storage and upgrade.
– Character screen? Pretty much there already.
– Inventory system? Did you not see the bit about gear?!
– Skins? We’re looking at all sorts from vikings to prohabition era gangsters.
– Log in from google play store, apple store, facebook, email etc? Obviously!
Talk to me Goose
So why are you writing this? Because we’re super excited about Clicker Kings and would love to show you what we’ve got and to get your feedback. We dont just want to pump out a game and cash the cheque, we want to create a be part of a larger community.
We’re in the process of making places that you and other members of the community can gather (only virtually sadly, thanks COVID) like a Facebook page, Reddit threads etc. We’ll let you know once we’ve got these set up, it’s the next thing on my mile long TODO list!
Thanks for reading, from Harry and Steve. Founders of The Night Project and developers of Clicker Kings.
Welcome back!
Time for an update. Since the last log we created a build and sent it to our tester (yes, only one!) as well as playing with a version ourselves for a few days. Turns out there’s a lot of bugs that need squashing! Therefore, we’ve split in to two teams…of one…because there’s only two of us…
Team A: Bug squashing and advertising/social media.
Team B: The other 90% of game development.
We’ve now set up a twitter, facebook and reddit that you can all go and follow for more regular updates or to speak to other people in the community. The links are in the footer of the website.
Splat!
So, turns out when you’ve got your face inches away from the screen, constantly, all day every day, there’s a lot you miss. Ironic. It wasn’t until we looked at slightly smaller screen with less numbers and windows surrounding them that we found oh so many things. There’s:
– Double screen touches don’t register.
– Inventory animations don’t play when they should.
– Buttons are covering other buttons.
– Hit boxes are off. The list keeps on going, but don’t you worry. We’ve got our second-best programmer on the case, squashing bugs left, right and center.
The grass is always greener
Or in this case, darker. There are pros and cons to testing the latest version of your game. The pros are the excitement of playing something you’ve made and worked so hard on. The pay off of so many hours is such a rush. The cons are, well the same. Although it’s great seeing your hard work pay off, it’s also disheartening. When you see a huge list of oversights, errors, bugs or even things that you were excited for that you realise just aren’t good, it can knock you down a bit. Luckily for us we know that we can sole all of the issues we’re having meaning we know we can have a game with only the good stuff.
What’s next for Clicker Kings
This is where team B works his magic. So much has already been done since the last log behind the scenes. Tidying, compiling, expediting, hours of unseen work that will go miles in to the future of the game to make everyone lives so much easier. All this while still implementing and testing features as well as helping team A with any hurdles he’s struggling to overcome.
Keep and eye out for the next dev log where we’ll delve a bit deeper in to characters, gear and the stats/upgrades that come with them, as well as future ideas like changing elements in the scene.
Once again thanks for reading, from Harry and Steve. Founders of The Night Project and developers of Clicker Kings.
Hello there!
Boy have we been busy! In the last week there have been over 15 different builds to test out different functionalities from finger press events for mobiles to cloud server Javascript functions. Although this means we’re making good progress, there’s still a lot to do.
As with every new project there is a learning curve, and Dev A has been learning a whole lot about Playfab and cloud scripts. Turns out the way we were doing things made us very susceptible to cheaters, and we don’t play that way, no Sir! So to make the user experience fair on everyone and so that the best player wins (rather than the bigger computer nerd), Dev A has been wrapping his head around converting C# to Javascript and Typescript while also learning the API calls and other nuances of Playfab. Wouldn’t wanna be that guy!
Bug update
From our last proper build to test out functionalities we got a very long list of bugs. Now from that list of over 20 broken features only 2 remain, and rather than bugs they’re more features that we thought would improve quality of life (or play).
Now because of this we’re oh so close to getting another build out to our testers to pull apart all the hard work we’ve done (not bitter…much).
What was I saying?
In the last dev log I said this time I was going to dive into characters, gear and upgrades. After you’ve read through we’d love for you to get in touch on our socials to let us know what you think of this. Because this part of Clicker Kings is still in early development it’s better we catch anything that won’t resonate with the player now rather than later once we’ve sunk many sleepless hours into it.
You first open the game and are met with the majestic music and visuals of Clicker Kings. You’re presented with a choice of character. This will probably be basic to start with, like a viking, samurai, roman warrior etc. Now this isn’t so important as it’s only a skin and down the line we’ll add more interchangeable skins. We toyed with the idea of classes but were worried some people would miss out and get bored if they’d sunk hours into a class only to realise they would’ve preferred another. Anyway…
To start with we’re implementing 5 basic pieces of gear. Helmet, weapon, gloves, boots, chest (this could all change even by the time our testers get their hands on them). These start at tier 1 and as you get more gold/gems and open more chests you get more of the same t1 gear which stacks, then when you have x amount of say tier 1 helmets, they will turn in to tier 2 (probably at a cost to your gold/gems too). Now why would you want to go up the tiers of gear? As higher tiers mean greater perks…
What perks we’re implementing are still currently being brainstormed but they will be along the line of your helmet gives you x clicks per minute, then a tier 2 gives you double that and so on. Then the chestplate makes it so every fifth click acts as a double click, then tier 4 every fourth click is a double and so on…you get the picture!
Ring ring…
We’re hoping to get the socials a bit more active and are starting up a discord which you’ll find the link for in the footer of the website.
Once again thanks for reading, from Harry and Steve. Founders of The Night Project and developers of Clicker Kings.
