We are pleased to announce that we will be demoing Eight Hours - our paranormal horror investigation game - at Midwest Gaming Classic 2022 in Milwaukee, WI on April 30, 2022 @ 10 AM.

We have a wonderful new UI focused update for this game. After some feedback from our wonderful community we implemented some changes to our Game Settings UI. These fixes address a few issues

Eight Hours has just been released version 3.2! This is an exciting time because it brings us one step closer to a full game! Eight Hours has been under development since 2016. If you want the full story, take a look at The Story of Eight Hours. Long story short, we have a lot of graphical updates, better AI, a whole ton of more gameplay, and enough challenges to push you towards the end of the game. Eight Hours really is starting to look like something special! Hey, just like you! Read on to see the details on the updates. Not patient, immediately below are links to the game.

Important Announcement

Whoa! Where have we been? Hiding in a cave? Maybe, but that doesn’t matter. Because in that time our little trollkins have been up to a lot of mischief. Take a gander further in to see what we have in store for 2020!

Can you hear it? The slight creak in your office chair, the pop inside the walls of your room, the bones in the house stretching. Are your lights off? Do you still see flickers of shadows out of the corners of your eyes then? Who was that knocking on your door - or, was that just the wind?

Troll Purse was started as a means to distribute games under a common title. Today, we will discuss our first distributed game, Eight Hours. Taking on a different model, rather than selling early access games, Troll Purse wants to create games to garner interest in them. If enough interest is found in a game, we continue to develop it at a commercial level. Our first game, Eight Hours is our first attempt at such a model.

Unreal Engine 4 is an awesome game engine and the Editor is just as good. There are a lot of built in tools for a game (especially shooters) and some excellent tutorials out there for it. So, here is one more. Today the topic to discuss is different methods to program player world interaction in Unreal Engine 4 in C++. While the context is specific to UE4, it can also easily translate to any game with a similar architecture.

Recently, Troll Purse setup a public invite for the Troll Purse Discord Server. And, as with all things, we decided to test out using Discord Webhooks to push updates to our members in realtime. This is by far the most effective realtime pushing we have conceived yet. It was so easy, sharing it will be just as easy.

Yes! Troll Purse has done it again! Looking at all the great social platforms out there, we were missing one that needed our posting! Tumblr has now been integrated into our automation platform. Following our desire to automate a lot of our processes, our foray into blog sharing automation has brought us upon the beaches of Tumblr’s API. Today, we again, share with you our implementation.

So many of these posts have been about process automation, so why stop! Troll Purse is at it again. This time, we are leveraging AWS Lambdas to submit dev blog updates to the Troll Purse Subreddit. There is also an exciting twist: .NET Core was not the platform of choice, rather, NodeJS was used.

If you are a follower of Troll Purse, then you well know that our current game Eight Hours is built using Epic Game’s Unreal Engine 4. Today, we will discuss doors. Yes, doors and how our AI opens them - or rather, doesn’t.

Recently, Troll Purse had issues with the Auto Tweet Lambda. While not our fault in the end, it took local debugging and tests to verify. Sharing is caring, here is one way to locally test and debug .Net Core AWS Lambda.

As mentioned before, Troll Purse loves automation. One process at Troll Purse that was not automated was the Tweeting of Blog updates to the Troll Purse Twitter account. Orignally, Troll Purse used Hoot Suite to send out updates to multiple social channels at once. This was still a manual process that took time for something so repetitive.

Since the migration to AWS, Troll Purse has been hard at work to automate developer processes. Today, you will read about examples on how to automate the build of a static website using node, gulp, AWS CodeBuild, S3 static websites, and Lambda.

After our migration to AWS, Troll Purse removed the old forums running in Digital Ocean. Troll Purse decided to start with a clean slate. Which was easy - as nobody registered (no migrations needed, just nuclear destruction of the service)! A curse that turned into a blessing. Troll Purse can now scale the forums based on usage and save some money on infrastructure. This will allow us to put more effort into our games!

Recently, Troll Purse made the decision to migrate from the cloud in Digital Ocean to Amazon Web Services for cloud and website services. There were several reasons behind this critical decision. These reasons are infrastructure, flexibility, and future plans.

We are good to go