Unity Making a Phone game engine

[thealiengunner]

Hello all,

Not new to the forums but this is my first time posting as a developer. I'm making a phone game engine for VNs much like the ones you've seen on this very website. The thing that sets it apart is absolutely 0 use of any external packages or assets while maintaining the same quality you've seen from some of the best-quality games on here. It's built with schemas designed for ease of use and editing, and I'm even currently working on a tree structure schema editor to build out the JSON files it'll use for the story. I tried making it so that those out there with little to no coding experience can use it comfortably. It's fairly feature-rich at the moment with more to come, currently, it handles:
- Sending text/image/emoji messages through choice buttons
- Automated message receiving from the correct contact along with notification indicators if not viewing the contacts page.
- Receiving text/image/emoji messages
- Full sound effects for all clicking and messages being received
- Delayed time of contact messages pushing to the screen for suspense-building and realism
- Full persistence of all information for saving/loading the game with manual and auto-save systems
- Social media pages with a pretty layout similar to Instagram
- Fully functional Gallary that persists between playthroughs
- Chapter selection with all but the messages themselves and social media posts persisting when used
- Allows for midrolls with the choice to the developer after each chapter on whether to show some of them or not
- Full schema breakdown in the README file for ease of story writing
- Fluid transition animations for all screens and objects on the screen

All the aspects mentioned above are fully customisable through simple editing of JSON files.
Obviously, with no visual of the game, it's hard to verify my claims. Still, for now, I wanted to sort of throw a feeler out there and see if anyone else would be interested in using it if I put it up on Patreon or made it available for sale. I'm open to other suggestions as well. I made the engine to build out my own game but my dev skills are way better than my story writing skills so it's taking me a while and I figured I'd see if I can both help people out there who are better at writing stories than coding, and in the process help make some money so I have more money to work on the actual game or keep adding features to the engine.

 

[hiya02]

I have never really understood why so many devs feel the need to have a phone simulator in their Vns ??
I have a real phone and I dont need or want to be forced to fiddle with a clumsy phone sim in a game - very tedious! Games should be fun and clicking a phone is about as uncool as it gets imo...

 

[thealiengunner]

I have never really understood why so many devs feel the need to have a phone simulator in their Vns ??
I have a real phone and I dont need or want to be forced to fiddle with a clumsy phone sim in a game - very tedious! Games should be fun and clicking a phone is about as uncool as it gets imo...

Just like every game genre out there it's definitely not for everyone, but to some I think it gives them a connection to the game and characters and helps them feel like they're actually interacting with the person they're talking provided the choice trees are setup correctly so that the interactions can lead to meaningful results (being railroaded in any VN sucks, especially when the dev gives you the choice to opt out of something only to be "convinced" by the character you're interacting with). The "clumsy" aspect is what I set out to solve with the project, Phone simulators in Renpy and many others I've seen on here almost never get past the image-on-image feel. They feel too flat and aren't interactive enough, or have too many bugs and glitches to be believable and enjoyable. I'm a software engineer so I saw the issues and wanted to make something as airtight as possible to help with the immersion for the player and the ease of use for the dev so we can have better quality phone sim games for those who enjoy them.

 

[papel]

So, is this like a completely separate game engine, or a plugin to unity? Asking because of the flavor/tag

If you have nothing to show, not even with ipsum lorem and stock images, it's very hard to see if anyone will want it, especially anyone that could glance at it and think "holy shit, I actually want that"

Whether you'll be able to get money with it is anyone's guess, mainly due to the point above, but also because people already have renpy, rpg maker, unity and a shitload of other engines.

Always keep in mind that no engine ever takes off unless it has plenty of teaching content.

but to some I think it gives them a connection to the game and characters and helps them feel like they're actually interacting with the person they're talking provided the choice trees are setup correctly so that the interactions can lead to meaningful results (being railroaded in any VN sucks, especially when the dev gives you the choice to opt out of something only to be "convinced" by the character you're interacting with).

Take a guess why it's called visual novel and not roleplaying game.

 

[thealiengunner]

So, is this like a completely separate game engine, or a plugin to unity? Asking because of the flavor/tag

If you have nothing to show, not even with ipsum lorem and stock images, it's very hard to see if anyone will want it, especially anyone that could glance at it and think "holy shit, I actually want that"

Whether you'll be able to get money with it is anyone's guess, mainly due to the point above, but also because people already have renpy, rpg maker, unity and a shitload of other engines.

Always keep in mind that no engine ever takes off unless it has plenty of teaching content.


Take a guess why it's called visual novel and not roleplaying game.

Basically a fully built game within Unity where you can plug dialogue/images and compile, I understand the point of needing to show visuals first before anyone would commit to a yes or no. I just needed a general idea of if that's even something anyone would be interested in having access to since I haven't seen anything like it publically released for people to make their own games out of. I've seen some games on here that use DreamOS and other products by that group, but a TONNE of configuration and changes need to be made to both code and actual prefabs before it can even look like a phone nevermind working with someone else's code that's not designed as of 2024 to even handle images being "sent" from the player and having to customise all of that yourself would be a hassle for someone less technically inclined but maybe has a great idea for a story. I've also seen how buggy those games can get with time as the engines (idk what to call it otherwise, I don't mean unity) they're using are not designed to handle that volume of content being dropped into them in some cases.

I do have a fully functional tech demo for CI/CD purposes, and I'm currently in the process of writing my own story that uses the game engine I built. But most of my time it taken up between college classes/job/and developing a node based constructor for the story elements of the game.

I'll have a little bit more on it out eventually once I feel ready to release a visual of it and I'm fully happy with how everything looks and functions.

On the note of teaching content. I'm building out a very comprehensive README to go with the assets and code, all code is fully documented, and it's all pretty streamlined for the sake of anyone wanting to make modifications, plus I'd make an open line of communications avaliable for anyone who buys it so I can help them debug anything they're trying to implment through my code or prefabs.

This all spawned out of trying to use other asset store products to build out my own game and finding they either don't provide everything I need, or a huge need to get a bunch of different assets to cover different aspects of the game (saving, ui, etc.) That's why I made it a point to mention the fact that it doesn't use any outside assets meaning anyone using it doesn't have to buy anything else to make it functional. Final part would be chapter constructor I'm working on right now.

 

[aromatease]

Hi, sorry, I made a response here but am completely useless at this site.

Summary: I think this has value for many devs, and I'd personally happily pay a $10 one off for something like this. I'd be interested to know how flexible the framework is - if I wanted to change the GUI, remove chapters (to make it feel and look much more like an actual phone for immersion), or make a dating app, how possible would this be? I think that dictates the value.

I think it would be great if this was open source but understand that this affects how much money you can make. A model like aseprite (having an uncompiled version on github for people to hack and mess with) could be good? It just means that people can collaborate and add features and reduce workload on you.

I'm super interested in this though, been looking for something like this for years. Would be so happy to pay to give it a spin.

 

[thealiengunner]

Hi, sorry, I made a response here but am completely useless at this site.

Summary: I think this has value for many devs, and I'd personally happily pay a $10 one off for something like this. I'd be interested to know how flexible the framework is - if I wanted to change the GUI, remove chapters (to make it feel and look much more like an actual phone for immersion), or make a dating app, how possible would this be? I think that dictates the value.

I think it would be great if this was open source but understand that this affects how much money you can make. A model like aseprite (having an uncompiled version on github for people to hack and mess with) could be good? It just means that people can collaborate and add features and reduce workload on you.

I'm super interested in this though, been looking for something like this for years. Would be so happy to pay to give it a spin.

I've considered open sourcing honestly? Biggest issue is if I do then I'm less inclined to continue support for the engine over time as I'm in school full time and I have a full time demanding job.

As far as removing apps or adding apps, it's completely possible and the way the script is put together, objects are generated on click of the app icon so there would be 0 performance hit to doing so. Simply remove the app icon from the object list in unity and remove the app itself from there.

There are plenty of example animations to use and I'm working on a way of automating the animation in a way that allows people to just add a screen open animation without having to create a custom animation for each app opening and closing.

There's a prefab for the apps so you can always create more and just use a prefab of the app button and customise both to fit your needs. Though if you're going that far you'd need to write custom code as I don't have code for apps I don't have implemented.

Hope I answered everything. If you have any more questions I'd be more than happy to answer them. I'll be releasing a generalised video of it's operation on here once I have the chapter builder working (it's kicking my ass lmao) but it's because I want it to be as user friendly as possible as writing json files with multiple routes can be a pain in the ass and want a visual tree like method of building it to ease multi pathing on people writing for it.

 

[aromatease]

I've considered open sourcing honestly? Biggest issue is if I do then I'm less inclined to continue support for the engine over time as I'm in school full time and I have a full time demanding job.

As far as removing apps or adding apps, it's completely possible and the way the script is put together, objects are generated on click of the app icon so there would be 0 performance hit to doing so. Simply remove the app icon from the object list in unity and remove the app itself from there.

There are plenty of example animations to use and I'm working on a way of automating the animation in a way that allows people to just add a screen open animation without having to create a custom animation for each app opening and closing.

There's a prefab for the apps so you can always create more and just use a prefab of the app button and customise both to fit your needs. Though if you're going that far you'd need to write custom code as I don't have code for apps I don't have implemented.

Hope I answered everything. If you have any more questions I'd be more than happy to answer them. I'll be releasing a generalised video of it's operation on here once I have the chapter builder working (it's kicking my ass lmao) but it's because I want it to be as user friendly as possible as writing json files with multiple routes can be a pain in the ass and want a visual tree like method of building it to ease multi pathing on people writing for it.

Completely understand that RE the open sourcing! The best I can say is - if the whole project gets too much and you can't keep going, please do open source it! It would be a shame for this work to go to waste.

Would there be a way to implement custom code for new apps etc? Like anywhere we can do custom coding in the interface?

Also, is there anywhere I can follow you to hear more about the project??

 

[thealiengunner]

Completely understand that RE the open sourcing! The best I can say is - if the whole project gets too much and you can't keep going, please do open source it! It would be a shame for this work to go to waste.

Would there be a way to implement custom code for new apps etc? Like anywhere we can do custom coding in the interface?

Also, is there anywhere I can follow you to hear more about the project??

I'll definitely keep an open mind to open sourcing for all interested if it ever gets to be too much.

As far as implementing custom code for apps, it would be directly into a c# script, basically the regular way unity does things already. Following the example of how I have the button click generate the material needed on the screen for the specific app would be enough to integrate anything specific you have in mind.

As of right now I have no accounts or posts anywhere but here. I'll get on that though. I didn't honestly expect anyone to ask that. I might make a free patreon for posting updates for the time being.