Hey Hangry Fam, hope all is well out there in human land?
A warm and Hangry welcome to all our new subscribers! It's great to have you on board, following the adventure whilst we build out this project, mostly with you by our sides. Just how we like it! So settle in, we've got some hangryness to share.

Our H.A.M (Hangry Animals Magazine) newsletter covers a series of topics weekly, from project development (The visual stuff), game development (The codey stuff), partnerships (Ways to accelerate growth), business growth (the nessasary stuff) and traction (the fruits of our labour) as well as the behind-the-scenes of building something with purpose (the honest stuff). As the project evolves and we find our paws/feet, you will experience the adventure alongside us, warts and all. Insights from our COO in Ceri's Cwtch, early access to artwork, game and animation footage and merch regularly, all in active development from the attic studios of South Wales UK. exciting eh!

It’s a scorcher in the UK this week, and finding somewhere cool to write this week's news was a bit of a muggy task, to say the least. I’ve been tempted to sit in the freezer to write this latest instalment haha! So pull up an iced tea or twister lolly (look 'em up, they're amazing) to cool you down and enjoy some further insight into the business of building.

Let’s be honest, not every week needs, or has, shiny new features and flashy teasers. Some weeks are just about the grunt work. The boring but crucial stuff that makes a gaming experience stable, scalable, and shippable. Bigger scope projects go through these lulls in development as the months roll on, fatigue sets in, and the allure of shiny features teases you each day, trust me, this happens on a daily basis rn. But these dips in productivity and energy are also a natural occurrence. We're human after all, and as the ebb and flow of crafting gaming experiences evolves, especially concerning features, production plans, and timelines, we also need to adapt.

This week? We’ve been knee-deep in refactoring and scene clean-up of the core game loop in Unity. And yep… that means a lot of behind-the-scenes sweat, with very little visual fireworks. Inside some of our scenes are helper scripts to quickly check different weather conditions and lighting, a plethora of surface scripts to test how the modes of transport will be affected by those surface properties, as well as way out of proportion food items, mountains, buildings and enemies, so it all needs a tidy up, to get us on track for preparation of our vertical slice.

One of our big tasks has been moving models and meshes into Prefabs; Unity’s magical, reusable building blocks for scene assets.

If you’re new to game dev, think of a Prefab as a templated object. You create one, reuse it a hundred times, and if you update the original, every version updates automatically. Magic, right? It’s pretty cool.

Except... once your project’s halfway built and you’re converting things into Prefabs, that’s when gremlins come out to play.

• Objects that used to behave nicely? Broken.

• Scripts suddenly missing their connections? Gone.

• Whole scenes behaving weirdly? You guessed it, unintended consequences of refactoring in progress.

But this is the stuff that needs doing. It’s what makes future work faster, more efficient, and more reliable.

We’re setting things up to scale… so that every level we build, every character we drop in, and every feature we test can plug and play without headaches. This is the foundation stage. And while it's not glamorous, it's vital. Especially considering the ability to drop in new character avatars that we detect in players' profiles from the digital collectables they own. Prefabs, with automatic asset detection, will feel like magic when they’re completed.

Refactoring doesn’t just stop at visuals. We've also been cleaning up and consolidating legacy code, removing duplication, fixing odd behaviours, and reorganising folders and file naming conventions so our future selves don’t cry into their coffee. I’ve always been a fan of clean semantic folder structure for projects, but when you start a new project, sometimes, well most of the time... it doesn’t begin in an organised fashion. It starts with chaos as you experiment and try new features without thinking where the script needs to live. As you focus on the feature, how it works is more important than where it lives at the time.

But here's the truth: refactoring is risky.

Every change comes with a ripple effect. A single misplaced script reference can trigger bugs five scenes deep. And sometimes, progress means stepping back before you can step forward.

This week has been about doing just that! getting the foundations right, removing technical debt, and prepping the path for the exciting stuff to come.

A hangry newsletter would not be complete without a glorious pic or two of progress in the world of development. As the style evolves, or Look Dev as the industry calls it, we love sharing how this is shaping our strategy for consistency from Comics, Games, Animation, Website and Merch. With the assistance of the amazing Chris McFall, the guru of rigging in Blender and beyond, we're evolving this into a toon shader extravaganza for the eyes. Sketchy outlines, hatched shading, rim lighting that feels nostalgic but fresh, and a colour palette that works both on screen and in print. It's important for us that the brand comes alive wherever it's displayed, and the inspiration of artsists and creators such as Oscar Martin - Creator of Solo, Daniel Warren Johnson (God) - creator of Murder Falcon, The Moon is Following Us and writer/cover artists of Transformers - Energon Universe. My go to franchise has always been TMNT and Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the art style of Into the Spiderverse, naturally, all feeds the creative beast of influence for this brand. Here's Marv getting a first outing as a toon-shaded model. Feast your eyes on how we're bringing my 2D illustrations and the elasticity of a drawing into the world of 3D, I'm loving it.

We also shared that we weren’t successful in this round of the UK Games Development Fund. The feedback was general and not tailored to individual projects, which makes it tricky to pinpoint exactly where we could have improved, but that’s the game, right? We press on, there are other funds to explore and refine the presentable game loop for an even greater chance of success.

We’re still learning, still building, and still 100% committed to bringing our vision to life.

Sometimes it's a win, sometimes it’s an unexpected setback, but either way, we keep moving. And we’ll keep finding the partners and platforms that get what we’re trying to do with Hangry Animals, a world of games and entertainment that’s fun, fast paced, and full of purpose.

We're preparing to reach out to our budding interviewees over the coming month. Over 30 people have opted to be interviewed in a follow-up conversation about gaming, donation habits and how games play a role in households in 2025 and beyond. We're grateful for the enthusiasm and appetite to participate in our research! It makes this 100% worthwhile to be crafting a new kind of experience. Everyone we've spoken to, even those who know nothing about the products or game development, says that this feels unique and very innovative. Our objective now is to validate and iterate this sentiment, in readiness for a clearer product-market fit. To those keen to be more involved, we wil be in touch with dates very soon.

That’s it for this week. Not the flashiest update… but probably one of the most important ones.

Prefabs
Cleaner code
Stronger foundations
Purpose, always

Thanks for following our journey, I hope you enjoyed your Iced Tea or Lolly! And as always, if you’ve got questions, ideas or want to share some encouragement, come chat with us on Discord or socials.

We are a fledgling early startup brand and are always open to community input and feedback! It's what makes this journey worthwhile, and a major reason for its existence in the first place. So, if you have any suggestions, feature enhancements or wish to connect and support the adventure in meaningful ways, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach out on our socials or join the Discord for an in-depth chat on how things are progressing. If you've just joined us, you can catch up on previous newsletters by visiting our newsletter homepage at https://paragraph.xyz/@hangryanimals to see how far we've come. Be sure to tune in next week for another mailer and also look out for Ceris Cwtch feature each month for a deeper behind-the-scenes write-up too! Stay Hangry, folks!

Until next time: stay kind, stay curious, stay Hangry.

Hangry Andy

*Cover photo courtesy of Lucie Liz: https://www.pexels.com/photo/flatlay-of-gaming-equipments-3165335/