Company News

Big news for Animal Friends Adventure fans! We're embarking on an ambitious project to completely rewrite and redesign Animal Friends Adventure. This isn't just a patch or an update—this is a full ground-up rebuild of the game using everything we've learned over the past several years.

Why a Complete Rewrite?

When Animal Friends Adventure first launched, it was built on a foundation that served us well but has shown its age. The player controller, in particular, has been a source of ongoing challenges. Double-jump inconsistencies, occasional performance hiccups, and code complexity made it difficult to implement the improvements players deserve.

Rather than continue patching an aging codebase, we've decided to do what we should have done from the start: rebuild it properly. This rewrite will address every technical debt issue we've accumulated and give players the smooth, responsive experience they've been asking for.

What's Being Improved?

• Complete Player Controller Rewrite: Say goodbye to double-jump issues and control inconsistencies. The new controller will be responsive, predictable, and buttery smooth.
• Performance Optimization: Targeted 60 FPS across all platforms with significantly reduced load times and zero crash bugs.
• Enhanced Visuals: Updated graphics, particle effects, and animations while maintaining the charming art style players love.
• Refined Level Design: Incorporating years of player feedback to improve pacing, difficulty curves, and overall flow.
• Modern Codebase: Clean, maintainable code that will make future updates and expansions much easier to deliver.
• Better AI: Improved enemy behaviors and companion pet intelligence.

What Stays the Same?

Don't worry—we're keeping everything players love! The adorable animal characters, the colorful worlds, the puzzle-platformer gameplay, and that special charm that makes Animal Friends Adventure unique. Your achievements and progress will carry over to the new version.

Development Timeline

We're committed to doing this right, which means taking the time necessary to deliver quality. We're currently in the early stages of the rewrite and will be sharing development updates, behind-the-scenes looks, and even some playable beta builds as we progress.

This is a labor of love, and we're incredibly excited to bring Animal Friends Adventure to its full potential. Thank you to everyone who's played, provided feedback, and supported us through the years. This rewrite is for you.

Stay tuned for more updates as development progresses!

Welcome to the all-new Folkvang Studios website! We've completely rebuilt our online presence from scratch, moving away from our old WordPress platform to a modern, lightning-fast static website.

What's New?

• 10x Faster Performance: Pages now load in under 1 second (previously 3-5+ seconds)
• Modern Design: Clean, professional interface that works beautifully on all devices
• Better Security: Static files mean no database vulnerabilities
• Improved SEO: Faster sites rank higher in search results
• Lower Hosting Costs: More efficient infrastructure

Why the Change?

As game developers, we know the importance of performance and user experience. Our old WordPress site had become bloated and slow over the years. This rebuild reflects our commitment to quality - the same attention to detail we bring to our games.

We've preserved all the important content while streamlining the experience. You'll find information about our games, company news, and ways to connect with us - all delivered faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Thank you for your continued support as we evolve and improve!

It's Sunday Evening. I just had dinner and pushed the "Build" button on Unity. I've been up since 7am working on the "Animal Friends Adventure" project and have made some great progress. I adjusted some enemies. I fixed a lot of weird bugs and just made some overall enhancements. Steam tells me the last release was December 29 of 2020. Despite the busy few weeks I did manage to get an hour of yoga in with my Russian girlfriend of several years. Though I was too busy and forgot to get my weekly COVID test so she kept me socially distanced and outside on her patio. COVID pandemic really messed with her head and she is amazingly paranoid despite me having gotten the Pfizer shot. But when you care about someone these things are trivial. Ok so why this personal tidbit? At lest you know I am human behind the "all work and no play".

My mind is a bit burned out at this point of the day. So I am working slower but steady. As you see, I am also forcing myself to update this site more than once a year. Let's see how long this lasts. As game design and programming goes, every time you think it's "perfect" a million bugs crawl out of hiding to ruin your weekend.

Today I discovered an interesting bug, but it was quick to catch. Leaving the pause menu to return to the home screen muted the audio. Weird right? Nothing in the path from the button click to the home panel touched audio. So I go to the property in Visual Studio and right click to see references. The call is only in 4 places. The settings screen for on/off and weirdly, the player controller. I don't remember my logic for setting mute for OnEnable and OnDisable but sure enough it was there. After removing the two function calls it worked as intended.

The snow Fairies got a slight update. Their attack was a bit weird looking. I had a glowing particle for magical snow, but it was hidden under a rock object. I put the rock in because the particle alone was difficult to see. Now it glows around the rock and is very visible to the player and has a cool particle trail as it flies into your face. It took a few hours of play, adjust, play, adjust… but the effect is finally where I wanted it to be in the first place. The plant monster is next.

ADHD moment: I am still proud of myself for writing the AI to the characters (except bosses, they suck). When I started with ugh "The Incredible Adventures of Super Panda" (I named it not knowing there was a similar title) I had a specific need. Level design is challenging as it is. Now imagine having to place waypoints for 3,000+ characters… Even with a prefab and drop, they would still need adjusting. So I used raycasts at various angles to "feel" the environment. They'd also have a "home" position and a setting to wander only so far or until there was an edge detected. This resulted in the ability to simply drag a character prefab and be done with it. Some levels I increased the distance from home but it was all pretty much drag and drop. I converted this AI into 3D and it still worked amazingly well. The ranged enemies are sneaky. They use a series of calls to track the player and shoot. I personally love this aspect because I've been shot while jumping over an enemy.

So it's pushing 6pm and I'm pushing myself to update everyone on the game progress. It really is an exciting moment. I'll also be moving to the Xbox GDK, having signed a new contract with Microsoft. The UI revamp has gone great, because I learned so much more. My next project will be even better because of all I learned.

Quick note: I've been doing a terrible job updating this page, but have been consistently updating the Facebook Page. It's a lot of work to maintain and update the games, social media and websites. Not complaining, just saying how things are. I do my best to maintain everything possible.

The below code looks deceptively simple but is the result of too many hours of refining. The end result is clean code that is simple, elegant and gets the job done. Granted I could have also put in an "if null" after instantiate. But if that fails, there are bigger issues and I'd prefer an exception error.

This code started out as a switch statement to pick the "Pet prefab" for the level of the pet that follows the player. The switch took up 4 lines per Pet Level and was just too many hardcoded items. Also as I work on the game and tweaked things, the structure changed. Originally this was built from an array of each individual pet level object. Imagine dragging in 8*3 objects into each main player character… UGH no. It was brutal.

The pet gameObject contains an empty parent transform, then 3 tiers of different pet looks. Originally I used "transform.Find("level" + petLevel). But this threw nasty exceptions my way because I had not instantiated the main object to get the child object. Now I first instantiate the main pet object, then run a "for loop" on the transform.childcount. It's mostly future proofing just in case 10 more pet levels are added…

The flip is just a Boolean test "is this child object the level we want?". All others of flipped off except the match. While I try to avoid for loops in most of my programming, this most likely has a 0.1ms performance hit.

One of the beauties of Unity3D is the ability to access child gameObjects directly via an array style index. If I'm working with prefabs I can just access what I am looking for down the chain. I have something exactly like this that traverses 7 layers or so down. Thanks to prefabs, the structure never changes.

Sorry for the lack of updates on the main website. I've been busy bug smashing and achievement tuning. I took time off on Saturday to celebrate Chinese New Year with my Asian friends. I respect all cultures.

I found the major crash bug with World 2, level 1. I'll need some more testing, but I believe it's resolved. I went through and redid several monsters because they too caused a crash. Wintah Beer on 2-1 didn't even produce a dump. Just straight quit the game. This was a major pain.

I also think I fixed those annoying spiders! yeah finally, they've been a bane forever. For some reason their colliders never registered a hit. I believe it was due to a remnant "Rigid Body" buried in the character tree that didn't register it as a proper hit. I removed this and could in fact melee the crap out of the spiders.

Achievements have been greatly tuned to be, well, more achievable.

I've also made an initial performance pass on the game. There's some tweaks that need to be incorporated into the build. It shouldn't take long as the optimizer is extremely easy to use. Finally a Unity tool that's easy :-p

Anyway. After some testing and I'm satisfied that the blocking bugs are fixed, I'll push to Microsoft for Certification and release.

I don't put silk hats on pigs. But I can turn it into bacon. Animal Friends Adventure released a few days ago to mixed feelings of the community. The feedback I have received has been fantastic. Thank you to everyone involved.

What we're facing is some crash bugs that slipped through the extensive playtesting I and Microsoft had done. Seriously. 6 certification rejections for various bugs and level issues. One player reported the game would almost always crash when having a pet in tow. I mostly used the Rabbit because i think he's cool. But I need to test ALL pets. That's my job. But being a one person indie dev, things do slip by. But they don't get ignored.

Control issues

This has been an ongoing battle. The player controller needs a rewrite. It's a tangled mess. There's just too much stuff going on in the "Update" thread. Double jump sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. There are times you can get in a 3rd jump. But there's that issue of time. I had so many more important things to concern me.

Achievements

Not sure if these are allowed to be adjusted on the MS side after release. What I can do, is make adjustments in game on the scores are tallied. Collecting coin/diamond is currently very specific to the player directly collecting. Awards and treasure boxes technically don't count. So I fixed this. Gold coins count as 2 now. Since most coins in game are gold, your score will go up faster. Note, awards are still a 1 to 1 ratio.

Achievements - Pacifist

This one is admittedly confusing. I left the description vague on purpose. But a lot of people didn't like that. Bottom line, Don't intentionally kill monsters and beat all non-boss levels. If monsters blow themselves up, or get run over by a boulder no worries. Progress will reset if you do kill a monster. I was told this is "way too tough". Next update will address this. Once you beat a level, it will mark you as a "Pacifist" or not. get a "P" on all levels and you unlock the achievement. Once the "P" is gained it will not be undone if you replay the level.

Crash bugs

I'm mad about this. I thought I addressed them all, and failed this. These bugs are also very challenging to fix because I never get a good Core dump, or the debugger doesn't catch it. I'm working on this now.

Wrapping up

I expect the next month, maybe two months these updates and fixes will go in. The Character controller rewrite will take a bit longer.

Thank you for your patience.

I spent the best part of the past 4 months Polishing up "Animal Friends Adventure". I want/need to make this game as awesome as possible. It's no longer a "Creators" game (self published) on the Microsoft store. It's an official XBOX title and now going through a lengthy and rigid certification process. This is fantastic news for Folkvang as we've gone from small self published Indie to a small Publisher published indie. Well that was a mouthful.

I sacrificed everything to get to this point. To arrive at this moment. An empty house, filled with silence. The only noises are the humming of electronics, my roomba and cat. I've watched the sun rise so many times from my East facing office window as I worked fixing bugs, making more bugs and tracking down weird issues. I polished up Animal Friends Adventure the best I ever could. I redid all the marketing, branding and achievement art.

This past Friday I finally pushed the "Submit for certification" button. Just like that my soul was swept clean of all it's burdens. I had something I had not seen in a long time… Spare time. But that time was fleeting as well. I had a plethora of "half-assed" websites to refine and make better. This site, Super Panda's site and the gaming website. All needed to be tweaked and made to look professionally done. I was just not happy with the current "Applay" wordpress theme. I did a search and found "Avada". My weekend was gone again. But that's not bad. Appearance is everything and the web presence is the first thing you see when discovering this small corner of the world.

So here I am. Finally able to write an update. First thing in the morning, coffee gone cold. Don't take any of the above as a complaint. I chose this path. I willingly sacrificed summer, outdoors, time with friends and family to make this game happen. This is my passion and what I enjoy most in life. I want to make games enjoyable, bring back an old design philosophy that was lost in corporate. That was lost in the endless shuffle of "Self published".

I'll stop here and turn the above into an article on it's own. I've fallen off topic, there's just so much to say.

Thank you!

Welcome everyone. Here is the Grand launch to our main corporate page. After months of planning, we have finally decided the layout of how things will become. This replaces the "Chaos Rift Games" page for the corporate Front end. That page is just a huge mess, to clean up would erase years of work.

Deverydoo.com will take over the YouTube side of things. Gaming Entertainment and Videos.

Chaosrift.com (Est: June 1999) the first site that started it all will, well let's say it's special. It'll continue being geared towards fictional writing and dark humor. I spent some good time cleaning it up and deleting crap content. Over 500 junk articles gone. I honestly don't remember why "Chaos Rift" was chosen as a name. The domain was originally registered to build up my skillset in running email, web and dns servers to design and build network infrastructure. This kickstarted my career. It's more nostalgic than anything. I may even sell it all for a good price.

Chaosriftgames.com will continue being the Gaming Blog site until we get to a point where it's becoming a conflict of interest to write about games. Being gamers at heart, this is what we love, writing about games and playing games.

Finally, each game will have it's own subsite. Either as a subdomain or it's own. Depending on the importance of the project.

Thank you everyone, new and old who've been here through our constant metamorphosis.