Pumpkin Jack News

Spooky scary greetings, friends!

It really happened: Pumpkin Jack is available! ːsteamhappyː You have no idea how I feel! (Spoiler: happy, stressed, grateful, stressed, proud, stressed, tired, stressed, anxious, stressed, ...)

This game has been such a huge adventure for me! 5 years ago, I opened the Unreal Engine for the first time and now look where I am... that's incredible. Simply incredible!

I truly hope you'll like the game! I'll spend the next days doing two things : Thanking everyone for all the support I've got (so, THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR YOUR LOVE AND SUPPORT ❤️), also fixing and tweaking in order to make the game the best experience you all deserve out there!

If you want to whisper me a word, gimme your feedback or just want to chat about your Pumpkin Jack experience, please join me on the Pumpkin Jack Discord channel, I'll be there all weekend to support you!

I hope you all will have as much fun playing Pumpkin Jack as I had developing the game!



See you all in the great Arc-En-Ciel Kingdom very soon!
Nicolas


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1186640

Spooky scary greetings, friends!

When I was younger, I played a lot of games on my computer and very often saw a green logo a lot of you might know already: "Nvidia, the way it's meant to be played". Nvidia. For me, it was just a big brand producing graphic cards for gamers and doing some programming stuff, but I didn't know exactly what that was. I just knew it was BIG! For me it was not even possible to think about working with Nvidia. A big dream for an 18 year old boy…

But that's the thing with dreams, sometimes they come true: A few month ago, thanks to Pumpkin Jack, I received a request: "Would you like to add Nvidia RTX to Pumpkin Jack?". At this moment I couldn't believe it... Who could have imagined that? Such a big company was interested in my game?!? I said "yes" of course, and so started the process of adding this new technology to my game.

At first, when I received the files I was supposed to use, I couldn't understand anything and almost decided to give it up. But a few weeks later, I had some free time and decided to get my hands REALLY dirty this time. And so, I started to read the full documentation, trying to understand how things work - or don't work.

So, what is ray tracing anyway?
"Ray tracing is the holy grail of gaming graphics, simulating the physical behavior of light to bring real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to even the most visually intense games." (NVIDIA official website)

I first started with adding RTX shadows to Pumpkin Jack. This was the easiest part, and it took me only a few days. The work was mainly using commands to enable/disable features or tweak some others. I did not have to write any code myself. But the results were pretty nice:



Now that RTX shadows were working, I moved forward to RTX reflections - for water for example. And this one was hard! I mean VERY HARD! It actually took me a whole month, just for this alone. It was tricky as translucency was not very well supported at the moment. I tried my best, but finally I decided to make opaque water, which at least worked:



But it was looking strange, a bit flat. And I was simply not satisfied with the result. So, I emailed Nvidia and asked them how to fix that. They told me that they worked on something very, very new recently and it could make my translucent water work; called Hybrid-Translucency. A few emails later, I got the files and could start working... and... WOW! It was working just fine! And it is looking damn perfect:



So that's how I implemented Nvidia RTX to Pumpkin Jack in a nutshell. It was a lot of research work, lot of confusion and trying to make things that are not supposed to work. But with the help of the folks over at Nvidia, I was able to make it. Thank you very much for your support!

I'm very happy to have RTX working in Pumpkin Jack, especially since it's one of the first cartoon games that uses this technology! I guess it makes Pumpkin Jack a pioneer in some way. And me as a young developer (23 years is still young, right?) really very proud of my work.

At first, I was afraid and skeptical that the RTX features would not work with the style of Pumpkin Jack, but I think the result speaks for itself:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1186640

Spooky scary greetings, friends!

The MIX Next event will take place very soon (only online of course) - and we are really happy to announce that Pumpkin Jack is a part of it! There will be live gameplay footage in the show - commented by us. So, you should definitely take a look on Twitch or the Steam feature page!

Celebrating The MIX Next there is also a demo available for the upcoming days! It features the beginning of Pumpkin Jack, in its near-to-final launch quality! The demo gives you a taste of the platforming and combat system: Meet some of the monsters and try to defeat the first boss of the game!

We hope you enjoy it! If you have any questions or feedback please drop everything on our Discord channel or the Steam community here!

Oh, and don't forget to tell your friends and add Pumpkin Jack on your Wishlist! 🎃

All the best and stay healthy!
Nicolas


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1186640

Once upon a time in a far away kingdom... I was looking for a game on Steam. Something that would be colourful as well as a single player experience offering a great adventure. Even after weeks of searching I was not able to find what I was looking for.

I am pretty sure that happened because I was unconsciously looking for something being exact like my favorite game of my childhood, Jak & Daxter, which was unfortunately never ported to the PC.



That was when an idea came to my mind: If the one I am searching for is not available, why not create my own game? I had no idea how easy or hard this would be, I just wanted to do this. So everything started with a simple search on Google: "How to make games". Yeah, it sounds like a cheap cliché, but it was the beginning of a (felt) endlessly long learning process.

At first, I wanted to make a scarecrow that could control crows. True, it's a stereotype. But hey, that’s the way everything began. I learned to create 3D models, made my first scarecrow, taught myself how to animate it and learned how to integrate it into the Unreal Engine. Thanks to modern software we have nowadays, those steps only took me one week! Following that, I created more animations to let the scarecrow attack, and made some monsters to have something for it to attack.



A few months later I canceled the project because it felt not good enough. I started all over again with my newly learned skills, and it worked way better! But I canceled it again, remade it, canceled it again, and again, and again... I believe I started and stopped the project six times in total until I was satisfied with what finally laid the foundation for 'Curse of the Scarecrow', what the project was called then!

Two years later I released a first demo on Itch.io. It had gone wild and was much, much more successful than I expected! At this point I started to realize that my little project might have the potential to become something way bigger than what I aimed for initially. I received emails from YouTubers, streamers and even publishers who wanted to help me with the game. This was insane, I just couldn't realize what was happening. But believe me, I was incredibly happy!



Finally I decided to quit my job (I worked for a French game development studio) and started to work full time on Curse of The Scarecrow. People seemed to like my game, and so did I and wanted to spend more time on it.

I was looking for a publisher and so I wanted to deliver the best game I could, and I decided to cancel the game once again and (you guessed it) re-built it once more. Why again? Because I want to deliver the best possible experience to you players out there! And so, Curse of The Scarecrow died, and Pumpkin Jack emerged.



From that point onwards I had the chance to work with the guys from the German-based publisher Headup, who helped me out and made this game possible. Today it is a huge pleasure and a very huge honor to see my own game, my childhood dream game, on its way to be available very soon on PC and consoles!

I have learned so much on this long journey - professionally, but also personally. Finally, what is the moral of this story with a happy ending? You yourself are responsible for making your dreams come true! Yeah, and that's definitely a good ending, too.




https://store.steampowered.com/app/1186640

Hey folks! Nicolas here, I'm the creator of Pumpkin Jack. I have been working on the game as a solo dev since 2016. At that time, I was looking for a new game: Something colorful offering a great adventurous single player experience. Unfortunately, there was nothing suitable for me and so I decided to develop my own game. That's it! ːsteamhappyː

And now I am very close to the launch of Pumpkin Jack on October 23rd - and I couldn't be happier about this! And more nervous as well... The demo of the Steam Game Festival Autumn Edition gives you a taste of the platforming and combat system. Meet some of the monsters and try to defeat the first boss of the game!

I hope you all enjoy the demo! Please share your feedback on the Pumpkin Jack Discord channel or here in the Steam community. Looking forward to see you all there! Oh, and don't forget to put Pumpkin Jack on your Wishlist!

See you all in the great Arc-En-Ciel Kingdom very soon!
Nicolas


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1186640