Blog

This blog is about games made using Fungus and other related news. You can also check out our old Tumblr blog to find many great games that use Fungus.

Fungus talk at Unite 2015

The lovely folks at Unity invited me to talk about Fungus at Unite 2015 in Amsterdam last month - and here it is!

Unite was just a fantastic experience. There were very informative talks and it was a great opportunity to meet the Unity team and other developers. Some highlights for me were "Games? Girls? Palestine?!" by Nevin Erönde, and the Roadmap / Wishlist session. The Meet the Experts area was incredibly helpful (we got UnityEvents working in Fungus - yay!). The talk on SVG Importer was really interesting, looks like a hugely useful asset.

Will definitely be returning!




GDG Dublin, Women Techmakers & Coding Grace - oh my!

Huge thanks to GDG Dublin, Coding Grace & Women Techmakers for organising last weekends Fungus workshop at Google HQ in Dublin!

We had a great time running the workshop and it was inspiring to see everybody getting to grips with Unity & Fungus so quickly. Most people had never used Unity before! The teacher's pet award goes to Gavin Fitzgerald for adding a cool new mouse hover pointer feature to Fungus while doing the workshop ;)

You can find more info and photos over on Coding Grace's blog, and you can still grab the assets from the workshop over on Paul Mc Grath's website.

Looking forward to the next one!


Live at Udemy - Make Interactive Games with Fungus & Unity 3D - no coding required

We said it before and we'll say it again, June has been one of the most exciting months for the Fungus team so far.
To add to our massive update now live in the Unity Asset Store, our involvement with the fantastic Write-A-Game jam and the release of our official tutorial videos+documentation, we have now a new member in the Learn Fungus family.

With the Make Interactive Games with Fungus & Unity 3D - no coding Udemy course we want to accelerate even more the process of creating compelling narrative games for animator, storytellers, writers, artists with no code necessary. 

While our free tutorial videos guide you through the basics of using Fungus, we've made sure that our Udemy course is worth every penny. Paul McGrath (an artist himself) has put a huge amount of work into this in-depth course that will have you on your way to make your own point-and-click game in no time and I'm confident this is up there with the highest-quality online courses you can find. 

It covers the branching-narrative aspect of Fungus, Mecanim, clickable objects and more. But I think the best part of taking this course is direct support from your instructors - an invaluable part of the Udemy experience- and having access to any future updates as Fungus changes at no extra cost.

Special Price

The course will normally be offered at €50 but you can grab it right now as part of an Udemy sale at a discounted  price of €22Grab it while it lasts!

Upcoming Fungus talks

We're doing some presentations in the next few days to talk about Fungus and our plans for the future.

On Mon 22nd June, Chris Gregan is doing an online talk with UC Santa Cruz hosted by the wonderful Brenda Romero. Places are limited so register here for free if you want to join in.

Chris will also be speaking about Fungus at Unite 2015 in Amsterdam on June 25th (Track 4, 6pm), so if you're attending we'd love to see you there!

 

 

Fungus documentation now available!

- This is a guest post by Dr. Matt Smith

Great software deserves great documentation! The new Fungus documentation provides step-by-step recipes, reference documentation for all commands & event handlers and a handy glossary. Take a look by visiting the Learn section.

I wanted to get involved in some Open Source projects, and Fungus looked like a fun project that would benefit from how-to documentation, which is what I write all the time for all the topics I teach at ITB. I had some time on my hands since I've finished all the first drafts of my updated Unity 5.x Cookbook (coming out in the next month or so).

I wanted to learn more about custom Unity interfaces, and I am learning lots about Unity coding by looking behind the scenes at the Fungus code. What I think is great about Fungus is how it lets people do so much without having to get down to the level of Csharp programming (but offers ways to to 'talk' to code if really complicated things are needed for a big game project).

More pages will be added over time, and feel free to suggest on the forum what pages / recipes you'd like to see added to help you on your Fungus games journey

Happy Fungusing :-)

- Matt Smith

Fungus is now officially supporting the IGDA Write-A-Game Challenge!


 

 

The WAG challenge is upon us.  

<<The WHAT challenge?>> you ask?

WAG

Write-A-Game Challenge!
 

There are many reasons why we’re excited about this but mainly because it’s a game jam (1) organized by the IGDA (2) - Game Writing SIG* with a focus on the quality of the game’s writing (3) that requires no programming experience (4).

As soon as we heard about WAG it was obvious to us that the event and Fungus are a match made in heaven, and so we went ahead and after getting in touch with our friends at IGDA we agreed to officially support this fantastic jam.

We started developing Fungus as an  accessible tool for everyone who wanted to create or learn how to make narrative games but who lack coding skills or were scared of the process. Hence its low learning curve, its cross-platform compatibility as a Unity plugin and why it’s free and open-source.

And we're sticking to that credo! Because here's the thing, making games can be hard. We know what it feels like to have so many ideas and struggling to take them from your head and turn that into a playable thing. This is pity because we're missing so many different and quirky stories from awesome people that don't want to deal with technicalities. So we keep improving Fungus and try to have it to do most of the dirty work for you, offering a friendly visual programming environment that makes creating interactive stories a breeze. 

We’d like to invite you to join this fantastic and unique challenge that moves the spotlight onto one of the most underestimated yet highly valuable aspects of games, namely writing.  Whatever tool you use, be a part of it.

Having said that, we’re seriously proud of Fungus and, as game developers ourselves, we believe you'll find it very easy to use and very convenient for narrative games. Things like branched dialogue can be mastered and visualized in no time. Hopefully just what you need for WAG!

To encourage participants to create a game using Fungus for the jam we’re offering:

  • Great Fungus support both during and after the jam from the folks who wrote the software. Get in touch with us on our forum and we’ll do our level best to help you.
  • Free game hosting and profile page at Fungusgames.com for anyone who enters a game that uses Fungus. Our website is still small but we have BIG plans for it and with the imminent release of Fungus on the Unity asset store as a free asset, there’s much more to come.
  • Highlight spots for special mentions and finalists. You deserve it!
  • The top ranked Fungus game will also get one of our lovely Fungus hats as a small reward for their great work! 

So, don’t waste any time! Join the WAG challenge and get ready by watching our helpful tutorial videos that will have you set up in no time.  

We can't wait to see what you'll come up with and are looking forward to hear your feedback. There's still a lot of room for improvement and we'd appreciate if you can help us improve Fungus along the way. 

Let the WAG games begin!

 

Fungus Beta 8 (RC) available

Update: We've just released Fungus Beta 9 to address some minor issues. Details here.

This release fixes some bugs reported by users and adds a few handy minor features. You can grab it from the download section. Full release notes are available here.

We’ve added some new commands to interact with Unity scenes. You can now use the Spawn Object command to instantiate a prefab, and the Call Method command calls a script method by name on a GameObject. The Set Text and Get Text commands can be used to read and write text from any UI text object (e.g. from an Input Field).

There’s a new Fungus Town example scene which shows how to use Parallax Sprite objects to achieve easy parallax scrolling effects. Thanks a million to Denman Rooke for the fantastic background artwork in this scene!

For drag and drop gameplay, there’s a new Set Collider command which allows you to enable / disable groups of clickable and draggable objects with one command.

There’s also a new property to control the writing sound volume on Say Dialogs, and we’ve made some display improvements to Event Handler blocks and Views.

Unless something major turn up this is the version we’re submitting to the Unity Asset Store (as a free asset) so if you spot a bug let us know!

Fungus Beta 7 released!

We're delighted to announce the availability of Fungus beta 7! This will be the last beta release before we submit Fungus to the Unity Asset Store as a free asset, so if you spot any issues please let us know on the forum or open an issue on github.

Sherlock: The Game is On! (Playable demo)

Sherlock: The Game is On! (Playable demo)

This release contains some amazing new Visual Novel storytelling features contributed by our friends at Improbable Studios, including a short demo from the game they're developing 'Sherlock: The Game is On'. Many thanks to Sara Mena for helping us with additional character artwork for the demo.

We've added dozens of productivity enhancements to make it faster to create your stories with Fungus. Powerful new flow control commands allow you to easily direct the flow of execution in your command lists, blocks and flowcharts. We've redesigned the variable save/load system to give you full control over saving game state.

The new localization system provides an easy multi-language workflow that works with any spreadsheet editing software. Writers can now export all the text in a Fungus scene to a text file, work on the story in the editor of their choice and then easily re-import the text back into the game. There's also new command reference documentation so you can find out exactly what the parameters for each command do.

Finally, huge thanks to Paul Mc Grath for putting together a comprehensive new set of tutorial videos which cover every feature of Fungus.

You can download Fungus Beta 7 now and the full list of changes for this release is available here.

New site, new blog

Hello!

Well I finally got around to adding a blog section to our shiny new site. Hope you like what we've done with the place and if you have suggestions for improvements just let us know on the forums. Note that you can still find the old Fungus forums over here.

It seems like there's some cool new thing happening with Fungus nearly every day of the week at this point, so the plan is to use this blog to share all that juicy info with you. Check back regularly!

Chris