Huge Price Cut, Discounts coming. Hello all you wonderful gamers. I bet you are all wondering what this completely unrelated picture is all about? It's my current work in progress, that's what it is. I've been working on Immortal realm now for over 6 years now. You see, making video games is like a passion hobby for me, a rather expensive hobby because I am no artist (laugh track). Folkvang Studios is one person, me. A pretty small indie game dev studio.

Flashback moment

Then I ran out of money.

Still not satisfied

Current Day

The Call to Action

Buy this game

Major optimization update. Made a serious lighting and optimization update. In many cases frame rates went up 3-4 times. Fixed a few weird bugs. Fixed the super annoying stair climb jumping bug. Fixed massive frame rate drop when completing levels. This was caused by mixing cinemachine and normal cameras in the scene. Issues Optimizing and prerendering scenes had a consequence of wildly inflating the game size from 5 gigs to almost 15. After my move to a new location, I will go through this and see where I can reduce file sizes. There's a few more irritating bugs I need to handle but I only have limited time to get things done.

Fixed a few things with the config files and prices not updating for character purchases.

The upgrade to Unity 2022 was not as smooth as I had anticipated. It broke a lot of stuff that "just worked". The more I play the game, the more things I find that bacame broken. The most urgent was how the player reacts to hits and bounceback. The other area that has been long needing a fix is when the player stomps the monster. The detection has been adjusted for this. THe Achievement system is also a complete disaster. I have no clue how I had it working and then broke it. I'm trying my best to make this game great so people will buy it and I can make even better games. It's a terribly painful cycle.

I severely make a mistake when uploading Panda to Steam. It has been over a year since Panda's last Steam update and I had forgotten some process. I also corrected many other issues and rebuilt the app. I was trying to upload the Linux build and accidentally uploaded to the Windows depot. This broke the game for Windows users. There were also a few settings in the Steam Store I missed that coincidentally broke the Linux release. I'm new to multi-OS games. I really feel bad that I broke the game for paying customers for so long. I'm a one person game developer and working really hard to make everything work and give updates. Localization was a huge project. But I did this because I believe in making the game in the native languages of gamers. As I learn new things in the game dev world, I apply them to my release games as well as my current in development game. While this slows down development, it greatly improves everything I am doing.

I severely make a mistake when uploading Panda to Steam. It has been over a year since Panda's last Steam update and I had forgotten some process. I also corrected many other issues and rebuilt the app. I was trying to upload the Linux build and accidentally uploaded to the Windows depot. This broke the game for Windows users. There were also a few settings in the Steam Store I missed that coincidentally broke the Linux release. I'm new to multi-OS games. I really feel bad that I broke the game for paying customers for so long. I'm a one person game developer and working really hard to make everything work and give updates. Localization was a huge project. But I did this because I believe in making the game in the native languages of gamers. As I learn new things in the game dev world, I apply them to my release games as well as my current in development game. While this slows down development, it greatly improves everything I am doing.

I severely make a mistake when uploading Panda to Steam. I was trying to upload the Linux build and accidentally uploaded to the Windows depot. This broke the game for Windows users. There were also a few settings in the Steam Store I missed that coincidentally broke the Linux release. I'm new to multi-OS games. I really feel bad that I broke the game for paying customers for so long. I'm a one person game developer and working really hard to make everything work and give updates. Localization was a huge project. But I did this because I believe in making the game in the native languages of gamers. As I learn new things in the game dev world, I apply them to my release games as well as my current in development game. While this slows down development, it greatly improves everything I am doing.

Real small update. Added linux Support

Deleted a bunch of "Lighting" data and the install size lost 5 gigs of weight. Fixed some missing localization text. So sue me. Actually don't. I only have $6 and a cat named Potato. Add real time lighting to all the scenes. Unity removed this in some version of URP but added it back in. I'm still saddened that my amazing post process work was obsoleted. The game looked tons better back then. I'm rather exhausted from "getting in the groove" and pulling 16 hour days to get this release out. Also quite a few adult only beverages made this all possible. Once I post this, I'll probably wake up at 3am blinded by the monitor light, with a stiff neck and covered in my own drool in my compute chair. I'm struggling to stay awake just to complete this moment of greatness.

Full Localizations added. Updated to Unity 2022 for better lighting, performance and features. Occlusion and lightmap data updated for additional performance. Changed some background programming and more efficient way to store and load config files (unity scriptable objects). Other minor tweaks and adjustments. Added support for Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian. Unofficial Hindi and Belarusian support. As an one person independent game developer I find it important to get into as many markets as possible so I can continue to grow and make more, better games.

Major localization Patch. I finally localized this incredibly addictive and fun indie game to several languages. I do hope you can find enjoyment from this game in your own native language. I also did some other adjustments and code tweaks behind the scenes.

Hello everyone. I am pleased to finally have this update done and ready. I'm a team of 1 and this took considerable time because I also have a day job. See, this is a hobby and a passion of mine. I love gaming, I love learning and I live for programming. This was a complete learning experience. From the dreaded UI design all the way to AI and object interactions. What did I change? A lot. I pretty much rewrote the entire game. It's in the patch notes so I'll lightly cover what and why here. I was always displeased with the User Interface. It looked like a treasure goblin designed it after sneaking into daddy's magic cabinet and drinking all the happy juice. Not being an artist, I spent a lot of time browsing the Unity asset store for the perfect interface. After 15 purchases, I ran out of money and decided to keep what is now an integral part of the game. It looks great. I had to modify it a lot still, but the end result was consistency. I even had to learn Render Textures to get the 3D characters to display and animate. This also required an unlit shader. AI is my passion. I completely wrote the AI for this game. It was ported from my 2D game "Super Panda" and adapted to 3D. That was a challenge. Lot's of layer detecting and stuff. I had to also change the detection ranges and characteristics of the different sensors so the characters were aware of their environment. Break a block under a character and it will adapt and not blindly fall off the edge. Silly things like that. I dislike "Waypoints" very much. It's a cheap system and adds complexity to simply drag and drop of a prefab into the scene and having the creature work. In theory I could drop 100 characters from the sky and they'd land and wander their environment without assistance. I loved the challenge of environmentally aware AI. I cannot wait to start my next game and start from nothing. Boss fights were lacking and I totally reworked this. I added the ability for melee and ranged combat. Get too close they smack ya. Step away and they throw things. This was a step up. Monsters only have one attack form. Melee, ranged or contact. Bosses adapted a bit and this really enhanced their challenge. Also up was such a simple and stupid fix, but it really enhanced the experience. Bosses now turned around to face the player after a "reaction timer". Yes, it was that simple. If player is within a certain range and after a random time passes turn to face them. I tease myself, but this change really made boss battles better. The spider is still terrible, but maybe I'll fix it. Maybe I'll finally get the sales to hire someone to fix it. Who knows. This is my after work hobby for now. Graphics. Holy cow this was a ton of unexpected effort. This game is also on console and the unity default renderer was slow, horribly slow at 15-40 fps. It looked pretty but console just didn't work well. I changed to Unity URP and no kidding, I got 200fps out of the gate. This required me to go to every material for every object and update it. The auto updater didn't work. So I just had to do this. Then I changed my shader 3 more times. The original one was nice, but it hated consoles. It'd generate some 2 GB file that would cause the game load time to be minutes. Totally unacceptable. So I scoured the Unity Asset store again and found the perfect cartoon shader. The end results were pretty impressive. I then updated the lighting for each scene. This took an amazing amount of time to adjust. At one point the shadow maps made the game 30 Gigs in size. This was a big no. So I fixed that and the game is back down to 8 gigs in size. Unfortunately with Unity URP, the custom environment effects are gone. Procedural worlds had a fantastic asset called "Ambient Skies" that did post processing and the effects were stunning. I had to abandon that and I am still sad about it. Loot was a big thing. Diamonds and fruits were some mythical item earned by some weird reward system. I was like "this is too weird, I am changing this now". So you can loot most fruits and diamonds. It makes coin purses so much more exciting. Also blocks will give out a random reward as well. In all, the reward system got a fancy update and is more exciting. So my programming style wildly differs from the Udemy courses I've taken in the past. for me, each object is responsible for itself. The player whacks a brick, the brick feels this and does it's thing. A monster detects and does it's thing. Self aware objects as they would appear in the real world actually presented some curious issues. In the end everything worked well when each object only worried about itself. Anyway, I'm done chatting up this update. I put a metric ton of work into this and hope you enjoy it. I'm going to do something I haven't done in 3 years and that's play a darn video game. I'm a gamer 100%. This game was just released and I really want to play. Thank you all, and honestly. Please enjoy my game. I put a lot of time into this because I love doing it.

What started out as a 4 week project to overhaul the User Interface and User Experience turned into almost a year of completely reworking the game. I went full OCD on this. Let's get on with this then. Your save wont work. Sorry. I overhauled everything in this game. It should be a sequel.

Graphical Overhaul

Game World

AI

Other Stuff

So I was doing a playthrough video series, a year late I know. I noticed some sounds were missing so I went on a quest to find them. A fortunate project backup had the missing sounds and I added them back in. But the project was bugged and I spent 4 days trying to fix an issue. During that time I decided to also update the UI. I stumbled on an exceptional cartoon cell shader as well and decided to add that to the game. The results are amazing. The game is as colorful and cartoonish as I had originally desired. Trees and objects now pop out more and have vibrant coloring. This is how I imagined the game. User interfaces are simply not my thing. But I learned some tricks over the past year. I'm hoping to upgrade the entire User Interface with a more modern yet cartoonish look. This will free the project of NGUI and use the standard UI. Buttons will look significantly better as well. Overall even if I fail, it will be a great learning experience. I'm still supporting this game best I can. I'm also working on another project and rely on sales to fund a much better and bigger game. So share this out to your friends who support extremely small Indie Dev Studios.

Hello everyone! It has been an enormous span of time since I updated Animal Friends Adventure. Trust me, there has been a lot going on since release. I love this game a lot, and really want to expand on the story and spirit guardians (pets). There's so much background that hasn't manifested yet. I'm a solo dev, so time is a bit rare. Anyway let's get to those patch notes shall we?

The Patch notes you want

• I have not abandoned this game at all.
• I updated stuff, like lots, and it's pretty cool.
• Updated Unity version to 2019.4 branch and cried for a few months. There was this bug with Visual Studio 2019 that all PC games would crash right after the splash screen. The guy who made Rewired helped me and I am eternally grateful.
• Mesh merge was used to optimize stuff. Unity uses lots of drawcalls and the less the better. Mesh merge reduced this by 80% making super amazing frame rates on weak hardware. Not that your rig is weak or anything.
• I cleaned up a lot of the source code, optimized the heck out of it. removed the chain function calls. You can't see this in game, but heck it made managing code so much easier. You get some extra FPS, I get less sleepless nights. Win win.
• I reworked a TON of levels, like all of them. I took out a lot of stupid stuff. Added in lots of cool stuff. What am I talking about?
• Reworked the sliding mechanism to be, well, less dumb. It was annoying me a lot too.
• Reworked levels where you'd slide and bounce mindlessly. Now you actually have to play the game in these areas. More jump puzzles. Nothing too difficult.
• New story line!
• Lots of bug fixes, optimizations and future plans. The last part sort of relies on you.
• Our new community manager (my BFF) will be assisting where I cannot.

The Patch notes you really didn't want

Hello everyone. I am so sorry it's been a long time since the last update. Been working with an actual publisher for console and have neglected the PC side too long.

• Fixed the Save file. I misplaced a variable and it never loaded your saved game file. This is a huge blunder. Sorry it took so long to get this one.
• Lots of levels were redesigned to be less annoying.
• The Sliding mechanism works a whole lot better now. Instead of guessing how long the slide takes I just put a trigger where it should end.
• I took out almost all of the sliding and bouncing over water. Now there's some challenging jump puzzles instead.
• Interface is more uniform. Fonts should all be the same now.
• Lots of other things have been added and fixed. I just cannot remember them all.

Hello fellow and valued Gamers!

List of major fixes

• Major playability pass World 1 through 7.
• Personal light in overly dark areas like "Creepy caverns" now works as intended. It lights objects and casts frightening shadows.
• I botched the "Steam AppID" and it was building for the wrong game. I took steps to prevent it from defaulting to original number.
• Honestly, I am tired of the "skipping over water like a stone" portions of the game and am making these areas more engaging, and dangerous. This will take some more time.
• Removed excess creatures. With the new combat system, they became seriously problematic.
• Tuned damage of all the player characters. Ape and Bear obviously do the most damage.
• Thrown weapons also do various damage amounts. Again, Bear and Ape.. They can break the metal bricks...
• Double jump has been mostly fixed. Sometimes you can still pull 3 or 4 jumps. That is not how things should work.
• Fixing Double jump also made midair weapon attacks tricky. They're cuddly animals not Ninjas, so there's that :-p
• Water damage types is tuned. Green is highly toxic and kills no matter how much life. The more clear water is only 1 damage. Lava, well we all know what lava should do.
• Water looks a lot better now.
• Fixed falling through world in many areas.
• Added crushing to the falling blocks.
• Added a nasty spike trap.
• Fixed animations and weapons on several monsters. (I left gravity on the treent club and it fell out of his hands, oops)
• Disabled timed levels. It was a silly feature that just didn't get implemented as well as I'd like.
• All the boss fights are relatively fixed now. (they're all beatable)
• The desert has falling blocks now. More to come.

Known Issues

• SPIDERS! I hate these things. Unity is so strange with colliders. I did a frame by frame view and the shovel does hit them. But sometimes they ignore the shovel and continue being creepy. I may have to switch weapon damage to raycast. But I like the fun of whacking boxes and barrels. I could do an add force, but physics is way more fun. So many choices.
• Boss battles are annoying. Except that one dude, he's scary and fun.
• The shovel, it's a silly weapon. I'm adding more.
• The shovel again, it sometimes wanders from your hand. It's a mildly annoying bug.
• Sometimes creatures that resurrect won't.
• Sometimes Creatures will register two hits despite that they were hit once.
• Some creatures will die while their "damage flash" is going on. They shouldn't.
• Player controller needs a complete rewrite.
• In some weird instances Panda and characters will "Float" after resurrection. It also happens after hitting some monsters. I have theories, like maybe an alien mothership is trying to kidnap them.
• I took out some blocks in the Desert level and forgot to fix the hanging vines and foliage.
• Me.

Fixed a crash error with the Post processing filter. Turned off two pesky features, and got a nice frame rate boost as a bonus. Initial Game loading significantly increased. Everything was moved out of Unity's "Resources" folder, which globbed everything into a 5 gig file. Pets: lots of fixes. This really got a decent looking into and a framework updated to expand pets. Rockster needs a new talent. Currently he's borrowing Impy's. Give us ideas. I'd like to make them chatty. The Seas turtles were absolutely annoying. Fixed them to be less annoying. The Scorpion had a wrong animation playing on first death. Also for creatures that resurrect, colliders are left on. This is a temporary work around for weird behaviors. Initial rewrite of the player is happening. Fixed the jumping mechanic and other annoyances. Planning on adding more variety to the player's abilities. No crashes through world 4 confirmed. More updates later. Adjusting the AI. they get less confused on slopes. The Golems will no longer ponder the meaning of life at edges. Adjusted a lot of annoying things with The desert levels. One pushable springboard was too heavy. Made it lose weight. The mystery block in the desert was removed. In the desert, level 4, There was a switch to open a door. But it's dark in that room and it was behind a bush. I had the gardener remove the bush and added a light to brighten your day. Not done fixing things. Will try to update more often. Thank you for your patience.

Just some fixes added for improvements.

• Fixed the pet store interface. It was neglected for too long.
• Game no longer crashes when playing as Lenny the Lemur.
• Optimized load time, especially for console. (was loading 1.5 gigs of audio data into memory)
• Reduced memory demands by not preloading so many audio files at once.
• Level end menu now has option to go straight to next level, or back to character select. This keeps the fun going.
• Clicking the gift box should no longer bring you back to the home screen.
• Updated some more graphical items to give UI a better look.

Fixed a major issue with a full screen white glare blocking the view. This was cause with our Post Processor conflicting with a shader. The Shader was replaced with one that won't argue as much. Fixed the last boss' fireball. It'll no longer set the character on fire causing childhood trauma. Fixed the final boss to throw his fireball a lot slower. Fixed the final boss so you can actually whack him with your shovel. After mission complete and character select, the game will go to level select instead of straight to next level. We may later add a button to give the choice for this behavior. Mission select scrolls properly to the oldest level. No more scrolling forever to find your level. Some monsters that were not stompable got stomped anyway. Fixed this with a bool, how cool. The shovel will go away as intended if you decide to throw something while swinging. Gamepad controls have been significantly improved. We'll be working towards making this 100% gamepad enabled so you can play your way. Phase 1 of performance optimizations have gone through. We're working on making sure the game is consistently above 60fps. Thank you to everyone who's supported this game from the beginning. Thank you new customers for sticking around while the game gets patched and improved.

Good morning Gamers. After a few tweaks and final touches I made the call to make the update go live. This is a massive and exciting update. Please send email for support. I cannot always answer questions on the Steam Community forums. So what's new? Pretty much everything. It's like a new game.

Graphics

• All new high res models. Trees, landscapes, statues... the list goes on, have all been replaced with higher detailed models.
• Almost all billboarding and flat models were replaced with the real thing.
• High res textures and bump maps. This "simple" change really improved the overall game look and feel.
• Water. This too was updated. waterfalls look more real and natural. Lakes have waves and reflection. Ice lakes are frozen over. (I know sounds obvious, but this had to all be added in)
• Wind zones. Thanks to the use of real tree and grass models, wind affects them naturally.
• Post Processing. This one gives the game that AAA look. Lighting is amazing and dramatic now. Serious, see for yourself. Caves are dark and eery. Water has the green glow of contamination and radioactivity...
• Lots of other exciting additions.

AI

• The AI was completely rewritten from the ground up. Admittedly the original monsters were dumber than rocks.
• Monsters are aware of their environment. They're full of senses that allow them to react to changes.
• Some monsters will use projectiles.
• Some will punch you.
• Beware of the Treasure goblin. They're extra stabby. They're also a real fun fountain of gold coin.
• Bees are annoying as they should bee.
• Some are pretty angry and will attack barrels and other destructible objects. This is not a bug.

Lots of new Monsters

• Thanks to the new AI and Combat system I was able to add in a plethora of new monsters.
• Monsters have been moved to their proper environment.

Combat System

• The new combat system allows a greater variety
• Monster attack timing, reflexes and hitpoints.
• The Gorilla and Bear player characters do more damage than the rest.
• Player can engage in Melee. For now there's only a shovel.
• More weapons will be added and an RPG style in-game store opened for weapons and upgrades.
• Monsters attack with range and melee.
• Some monsters resurrect.
• Many monsters cannot be headstomped.
• Not all monsters will bump hurt anymore. Mostly this is melee monsters.

Bug Fixes

• A lot.
• Like tons of bugs.
• I must have ripped out all my hair tracking some down.

My apologies for not being overly active within the community. There's a lot that needs to be done for this massive update. Animal Friends Adventure is like an entirely new game now. :) I'm really hoping by the end of the week the game will be re-released. Bigger, prettier and a ton of improvements with more on the way.

Since release We have been hard at work improving our beloved game. Some of improvements in the next update are: AI Overhaul. Monsters are now much smarter. Some also have ranged attacks to make your life tougher. :) Graphical updates. Trees, grass, shrubbery and a texture overhaul is underway. The first phase is almost complete and other updates will be coming as we manage to grow our team. We will continue to update the game and make it better.

Stats, Leaderboards and more Achievements! There is nothing cooler than knowing how many Mushroom Monsters, Forest Golems and other monsters you've taken out over the course of the game. It's even more fun when you see exactly where you stand with the rest of the world. Now that I've figured out this mystical Steam interface all this will be added and soon. I can't wait this will be fun!

It's Friday and some exciting changes have made their way into this adorable little game.

What's coming?

• While still a lot of fun, the current AI is dumb as a rock. The next update will fix this, add in new monsters and things will shoot at you. Why wait? Buy now. Tell your friends and help support this and future projects.

What's updated?

• Daria Deer no longer has that weird "double feint" thing. It was caused by a leftover animation event triggering and causing the level restart menu to pop back up after respawning. I stopped using animation events because of these hard to track bugs.
• Particle textures had the wrong transparency setting. They look how they should now.
• Coin Bags stopped dropping early, littering the landscape with rogue coins.
• What rogue coins? Good one, I also fixed spawned coins from falling through the terrain which created rogue coins which is now mostly all fixed.
• Treasure Goblins are bursting with coin now. It's a literal money fountain and so much fun to watch.
• More monsters spawn coins.
• In game prices for things across the board have been dramatically lowered. This coincides with the game having zero InApp purchases. You can now buy characters and pets earlier in the game for a less grindy, more fun experience.
• Some clever animals managed to escape the level bounds. That's been fixed.

What's Confusing

• Some water zones are bouncy. Some hurt and others mercilessly make you restart no matter how many hearts you have.

Now that the major hurdles have been overcome (getting the game publish ready/published) I can focus on gameplay tweaks and making Animal Adventures way more fun than it already is.

Patch Notes

• Slight adjustment to the animation system fixed character "throws". They are more responsive, can throw in the air and do what they were supposed to do.
• Springboards have more springiness in world 3.
• Some game breaking issues were fixed in world 3.
• Gradual updates to how the characters use their throwing items.

It was bound to happen, weird things found, bug, and ancient interfaces hidden away only to be found by avid streamers. So I worked and stuff to get these awesome fixes out.

Quality of Life

• Placeholder popup was fixed with correct information and much better grammar.
• Super Panda's throw speed is fast and responsive. He's throwing with purpose now!
• Starting the level takes far less time now that I adjusted the animation trigger on all characters.
• Steam Cloud Saves! Moved the save file to the standard Steam location for happy cloud pickup. This took way longer than it should have.
• Did another pass over all the UI interfaces. Some places with popup windows, buttons would lose focus when exclusively using the gamepad. Hopefully this is fixed for good.
• Bad Panda is still bad but we love him for it.
• The Acorn in level one is back where it belongs.

Other stuff