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Who shall win the Community Choice Award?! This poll is closed. |
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| Zero-Grab Kitty |
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13 | 10.57% |
| Go Fish! |
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4 | 3.25% |
| Sub Optimal |
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1 | 0.81% |
| All Senior Citizens Should Have Life Alert |
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15 | 12.20% |
| PZZL |
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8 | 6.50% |
| Coinless |
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1 | 0.81% |
| Conservation of Momentum |
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2 | 1.63% |
| Echo |
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4 | 3.25% |
| Critical Admission |
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4 | 3.25% |
| VectoRocket |
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9 | 7.32% |
| Impulse |
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34 | 27.64% |
| Sandlot Basenoball |
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1 | 0.81% |
| Slam Fighter II |
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27 | 21.95% |
| Total: | 123 votes | ||
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TheOrange posted:Yeah, I was being dense there, my bad. Looking forward to doing another game jam though, Ludum Dare might be fun but I'm not sure I want to stress myself out with a 72-hour jam before a bunch of travel. Octo-jam is in October! Perfect small ~byte-sized~ game jam! :V https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo Calipark fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 02:03
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I was having some trouble with the Impulse OSX build earlier, apparently the enemy sprites were showing up as white blobs instead of their actual sprites. I saw it on one of my Windows builds before too but not on the current one. Can someone try this OSX build for me and see if the enemies show up correctly and the game runs fine: http://www.ironpencil.com/impulse/standalone/Impulse_OSX.zip Edit: Also if anyone has seen this issue before and has any idea what causes it let me know. I've never seen it in the editor but it was definitely in my Windows build. And it was only the enemy sprites, not the player sprites or anything else. I think I might've used Unity's sprite packer at one point for the enemies, maybe that has something to do with it? sighnoceros fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 02:54
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GOONS ARE MEAN
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JonTerp posted:Octo-jam is in October! Perfect small ~byte-sized~ game jam! :V Trucksimul8or 2 will be amazing. (Actually, I'm probably more likely to make a proper game out of the danm8ku engine: http://johnearnest.github.io/Octo/index.html?gist=364431640b0206cae818 ) Buffis fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 07:48
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blinkeve1826 posted:If you can write them out phonetically, I will TOTALLY rerecord the receptionist lines in Chinese. Haha that'd be really cute. I'll get the rest of it working and get back to you  sighnoceros posted:I was having some trouble with the Impulse OSX build earlier, apparently the enemy sprites were showing up as white blobs instead of their actual sprites. I saw it on one of my Windows builds before too but not on the current one. Seems to work fine for me. But then the old build worked fine for me too... Heisenberg1276 fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 08:15
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If there's a winter game jam I'd argue that it should just replace the summer game jam. This game jam always gets like 1/4 the attention it rightfully should because a lot of poo poo is always going on in the summer. By this point in 2015 there are like 20 active users on the something awful forums and I'm not sure if that audience can sustain two yearly game jams.
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Aug 12, 2015 14:15
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I will do a jam every month if SA demands it!
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Aug 12, 2015 14:25
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Hey everyone, I'm still offering a   $20 Steam Gift Card Bounty for the Best Game Made in Two Weeks or Less (i.e. best game with active development started on, or after, July 17th) This includes people who started working on something before then, but restarted development on something new in the last two weeks.Here is the current list of games that I know are eligible: Ches Coinless Dark Matter Deliverer PZZL Super Turbo Voynich Manuscript VectoRocket If you are not on this list and want to be added to this list, or vice versa, please let me know. I'm going to finalize this list on the 14th, and try to judge and award the bounty ASAP after that. Takanago fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 14:28
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Heisenberg1276 posted:Seems to work fine for me. But then the old build worked fine for me too... Thanks for trying it out for me! Yeah I hadn't had any complaints then someone sent me a screenshot showing the white blobs instead of actual sprites. All I did to fix the Windows version before was rebuild, and I still don't know if it's something that would affect all machines or what. Anyway, seems to be fixed now, so the Impulse OSX build is back up live on the site again. There's also a Linux build that I would love for someone to confirm works at some point too.
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Aug 12, 2015 14:40
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Takanago posted:Hey everyone, I'm still offering a Coinless fits.
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Aug 12, 2015 15:01
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Takanago posted:Hey everyone, I'm still offering a PZZL fits, my grand RPG without words idea died in a time death hole.
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Aug 12, 2015 15:05
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Speaking of bounties, Afal, I'm not sure if you ever finished doing your reviews, but I never saw a review of Impulse. And we definitely have screenshake - it's even customizable in the menu, from no screenshake all the way up to Vlambeer-level.
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Aug 12, 2015 16:37
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sighnoceros posted:Speaking of bounties, Afal, I'm not sure if you ever finished doing your reviews, but I never saw a review of Impulse. And we definitely have screenshake - it's even customizable in the menu, from no screenshake all the way up to Vlambeer-level. Oh yeah, Afal, you didn't get to Slam Fighter II either!
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Aug 12, 2015 17:33
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I'm working on the reviews... I'm not even half way through the list yet jeez Anwyay I have a document of the ones I've looked at since my last review post and I might as well post what I've done so far here: All Senior Citizens Should Have Life Alert Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:
Stars Awarded For:
Final Score: 2.5 out of 5 stars Echo Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:
Stars Awarded For:
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5 stars Pzzl Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:
Stars Awarded For:
Final Score: 4 out of 5 stars Bare Asphalt Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:
Stars Awarded For:
Final Score: 2.5 out of 5 stars Broken Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:
Stars Awarded For:
Final Score: 1 out of 5 stars Düm Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:
Stars Awarded For:
Final Score: 2 out of 5 stars Critical Admission Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:
Stars Awarded For:
Final Score: 4 out of 5 stars Slam Fighter II Things I liked:
Things I didn't like:
Stars Awarded For:
Final Score: 3 out of 5 stars Ok that's like... how many left? 19 I think? Yeah that's probably it. 
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Aug 12, 2015 21:51
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sighnoceros posted:Haha, glad you liked the shotgun! I would honestly estimate about 25% of the total dev time in Impulse was spent on tweaking the look and feel of the weapons to get them where I wanted them, so I'm happy it seems like my effort paid off! Shotgun is mad OP, plz nerf. You got my vote too, seemed like the most polished game and I loved the graphics and animation. I had so much fun getting up close to the nests and one-shotting them with the shotty, I totally forgot to try out the grappling hook. Will have to go back and try it. It probably just needs some difficulty tweaking to release to a wider audience. Really impressive what you accomplished in one month though!
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Aug 12, 2015 22:00
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Afal posted:
Thanks, dude! I agree on all of your points. Actually on my computer I'm not that great at Slam Fighter either -- talked to my dev about it and he's working on adding a feature to options in which you can adjust the latency. We found that on his specific rig, the rhythm is totally perfect and the game is really intuitive, but once you start using other rigs/keyboards things can get kinda off, so once you can adjust the timing I think you'll have a much better experience. As for the UI, I was so swamped with spritework that I did not create a single UI element - as a result, they were all made by Ziggy Starfucker, who is not an artist and who did a loving fantastic job considering the circumstances. UI elements will be sexified in future builds. E: quote:Style (Does the game look good?): Nice sprites, backgrounds, music. The rhythm UI looks a bit basic but judging by the rest of the game But judging by the rest of the game...? Don't leave me hanging, man!! Xibanya fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 22:17
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I was going to say that judging by the rest of the game that nitpicking on the rhythm circles ui area would be a bit silly considering the work you put in a month for EVERYTHING ELSE I need to stop leaving a sentence halfway thinking I could finish it later. I've done it twice now 
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Aug 12, 2015 22:28
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That was the main issue I had with Slam Fighter myself, I'm sure a latency timer (or a practice mode) would be a huge help. I also think you guys should add a window scaling option, there's some really gorgeous sprite work but it didn't want to work full-screen for me (DPI scaling on Windows is probably the cause), leading to playing in a tiny window where I couldn't see all the details in their full glory. JonTerp posted:Octo-jam is in October! Perfect small ~byte-sized~ game jam! :V This sounds really interesting, I might have to check it out, thanks!
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Aug 12, 2015 22:55
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No problem on the reviews taking time! I just know I had seen you post a lot, but yeah I guess there are a lot more games than I realized, haha. Great work everyone!Adhemar posted:Shotgun is mad OP, plz nerf. Glad you liked it! Yeah the shotgun is definitely a bit OP but I think only if you have good control of your movement. Really new players tend to get stuck in a corner and just shoot at enemies coming at them. Then they learn about the grapple hook and hook onto nests and shoot them with the machine gun. Then once you get good at moving around you can zip from nest to nest, slide right up close and blast it once with the shotgun at point black and move on to the next while barely stopping at all. I tried to balance the game in such a way that even the first two groups of people would be able to last a while and not feel too frustrated, but when I go back to it I definitely want to start rewarding more of the advanced gameplay as well.
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Aug 12, 2015 22:56
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sighnoceros posted:Glad you liked it! Yeah the shotgun is definitely a bit OP but I think only if you have good control of your movement. Really new players tend to get stuck in a corner and just shoot at enemies coming at them. Then they learn about the grapple hook and hook onto nests and shoot them with the machine gun. Then once you get good at moving around you can zip from nest to nest, slide right up close and blast it once with the shotgun at point black and move on to the next while barely stopping at all. I tried to balance the game in such a way that even the first two groups of people would be able to last a while and not feel too frustrated, but when I go back to it I definitely want to start rewarding more of the advanced gameplay as well. Out of curiosity is there ever an end point to Impulse or just once you die? I think I got up to Wave 9 myself before having to step away for other things but I've been meaning to go back to it. Just curious if you went procedural on it and if that helped you guys out or caused any difficulties.
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Aug 12, 2015 23:04
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TheOrange posted:That was the main issue I had with Slam Fighter myself, I'm sure a latency timer (or a practice mode) would be a huge help. I also think you guys should add a window scaling option, there's some really gorgeous sprite work but it didn't want to work full-screen for me (DPI scaling on Windows is probably the cause), leading to playing in a tiny window where I couldn't see all the details in their full glory. Thank you!! A lot of love went into those little piles of pixels even if the results ended up teeny.  turns into...  ...only like 115px tall... Of course the game's resolution was always intended to be 640 x 480, just like the classics. Can you give me more info on your setup? Fullscreen has worked on all four of the computers on which I've play-tested the game. As for a practice mode, did you try the tutorial? Barring that, I know I used hotseat vs. mode to practice myself. I would say I'll mention the window scaling to my dev but I know he lurks this thread so he probably already knows. But yeah the latency thing and maybe some kind of setup wizard I think will win over anybody who isn't already. This weekend I had a huge shock when I tried to play the game on a bluetooth keyboard and uh...well, the results weren't pretty, I'll leave it at that. Speaking of this weekend, we showed some non-goons several of the entries in the contest. It was interesting seeing what our friends thought were the funniest entries vs. what Ziggy Starfucker and I thought were the funniest, particularly since a lot of the games were deliberately made to appeal to ...local flavor? I'll put some observations - not as actual critique since I know everybody was quite aware of their target audience. Was a little bummed out that our pals were not suuuuper amused by Cinder. They did think it was funny -- they liked the skeleton DDR, Cosby joke, golddigger jokes among others, but while Ziggy and I were in stitches over "This cat is horseshit," our friends' reactions were a bit more subdued. Fired up what.exe -- honestly I didn't think that our non-goon friends would find this game that appealing since it's so aggressively inscrutable, but they ended up playing through it multiple times and really enjoying it! Out of the games we saw that night, I think this one got played the longest, and that's counting Slam Fighter II! Our "normal" friends LOVED Sub-Optimal and I think they will add it to their regular rotation of games. They also liked No Chute, I'm sure they will revisit it. I think one of my friends remarked that the birds in the game are secretly coordinating to kill the player character - not because they're in league with the witch, they're coordinating to kill you just because birds are assholes. Everyone loved Zero Grab-Kitty for its aesthetics but our friends didn't stick with it as long as I thought they would because they got kind of frustrated. But I'm pretty sure it's not a flaw with the game, my friends just need to git gud. Ziggy Starfucker fired up An Video Game to a different group of non-goon friends on a different night and I was giving him sideways eyes because I thought our friends wouldn't really get it but they ended up loving it so much that I think we did 2 playthroughs and we ended up discussing the game, it's characters, it's narrative, for at least 20 mins afterward. E: how could I forget! Our friends also went through a few levels of Critical Admission which leads me to what might be a useful comment for the team that made it! Our friends really enjoyed it and got a big kick out of how irreverent and shamelessly gross it is, but the friend who was actually playing the game got frustrated because it looks like they left the scalpel either in a patient who was sent away or buried it under the pile of stuff. They said they'd like some sort of means of getting a new one easily if they lose the old one since it's such an key component of gameplay. Xibanya fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 00:01
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Afal posted:All Senior Citizens Should Have Life Alert You like this game because it reminds you of your grandma's utter demise?  To each their own I guess. 
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Aug 13, 2015 00:15
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Afal posted:Critical Admission Thanks for playing  The messy table was definitely a feature rather than a bug - but we did consider the addition of a bin or something to tidy it up as in the later levels it can get more frustrating rather than just frantic and challenging. I'll keep playing with it and see what can be done. And yeah the omission was enough correct body parts.Xibanya posted:E: how could I forget! Our friends also went through a few levels of Critical Admission which leads me to what might be a useful comment for the team that made it! Our friends really enjoyed it and got a big kick out of how irreverent and shamelessly gross it is, but the friend who was actually playing the game got frustrated because it looks like they left the scalpel either in a patient who was sent away or buried it under the pile of stuff. They said they'd like some sort of means of getting a new one easily if they lose the old one since it's such an key component of gameplay. Almost everything in the game is an instance of "Interactable" which means it has values inside the body, can be dragged into all the different slots, etc. We did this because 1) It made it easier to code since everything is treated the same and 2) it's kind of cool/funny when you first discover that you can place the reputation gauge instead of a heart or whatever. But if you lose the next button, clipboard, or scalpel it can be a very frustrating experience. We're playing with adding some sort of market between levels where you can purchase upgrades (or replacements for the stuff you put in bodies). Hopefully that'll sort that issue out. Thanks for the feedback
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Aug 13, 2015 00:18
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Heisenberg1276 posted:Thanks for playing Actually, I don't think you have to have a bin. What I found very useful was that you just keep all rubbish on top of each other in one corner of the table. Of course, keeping the same organ in the same place would help as well, like this: 
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Aug 13, 2015 00:23
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Xibanya posted:Thank you!! A lot of love went into those little piles of pixels even if the results ended up teeny. I had to go back to it, it's not so much that it breaks in fullscreen just that all the windows on my monitor lose their scaling until I log out and back in, there is some blurriness and stretching in the fullscreen mode as well but I assume that's pretty much unavoidable. I'm using a dual monitor setup (4k on one, 1080 on the other) with Windows 10 which is why I have the scaling turned on and a number of other programs that go full screen cause all kinds of issues with it. That's really interesting about the art though, does that mean that the animation is preserved in a vector format as well if you really wanted to go back to it? I assume there's a bunch of cleanup and lighting you have to do on the pixel art though that might not be present. I did try the tutorial and I had issues there as well, for what it's worth when I tried turning off the sound and tried hitting it based on visual cues I did a little better but I could never get the first letter in a set, it kind of kills the rest of the game to play it that way though. A time adjustment might help, I don't really have another game like it that I could test to see if it that's an issue with my setup or not though. To some extent being able to see the pattern as it comes up on the UI might help a ton as well, just following the black circle seems to work sometimes but never felt entirely consistent.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:30
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Yeah I don't see a need to prime the player to consider sorting - I think that's something they should figure out for themselves.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:33
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Takanago posted:Hey everyone, I'm still offering a
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Aug 13, 2015 00:37
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Whoops, looks like I missed TheOrange's post!TheOrange posted:I had to go back to it, it's not so much that it breaks in fullscreen just that all the windows on my monitor lose their scaling until I log out and back in, there is some blurriness and stretching in the fullscreen mode as well but I assume that's pretty much unavoidable. I'm using a dual monitor setup (4k on one, 1080 on the other) with Windows 10 which is why I have the scaling turned on and a number of other programs that go full screen cause all kinds of issues with it. Have you recently upgraded to Windows 10? I noticed that I was having fuzziness issues (chiefly in Photoshop) immediately afterward that weren't fixed until I redownloaded the latest video card drivers for my machine. If that's not the case, I definitely will investigate this further with my dev. quote:That's really interesting about the art though, does that mean that the animation is preserved in a vector format as well if you really wanted to go back to it? I assume there's a bunch of cleanup and lighting you have to do on the pixel art though that might not be present. Most of the art I did in the beginning is indeed preserved in vector format since I knew I would probably end up wanting to adjust the size. For the first three weeks my technique was 1. draw the pose and scan it in/draw the pose in photoshop 2. make vector of drawing in illustrator and lay down flat (solid) colors 3. import image to photoshop, scale down, do highlights/tints, and cleanup (particularly the outlines, since those pretty much HAVE to be done by hand) So that left me with a week to go and Fumi, Bunny, and Serghei complete. This method is rather time-intensive as you may have gathered, so during the last week my animation technique shifted to this:  Make a rough of what I want to see, then cleanup. Still, in one week I managed to get done what had previously taken me three, which means I really managed to improve! B. Stag was the last sprite to get done and all of his stuff was done in two days (although you can kind of tell it was a rush job.) quote:I did try the tutorial and I had issues there as well, for what it's worth when I tried turning off the sound and tried hitting it based on visual cues I did a little better but I could never get the first letter in a set, it kind of kills the rest of the game to play it that way though. A time adjustment might help, I don't really have another game like it that I could test to see if it that's an issue with my setup or not though. To some extent being able to see the pattern as it comes up on the UI might help a ton as well, just following the black circle seems to work sometimes but never felt entirely consistent. I see what you mean, I think the latency adjustment will really help. That and we might want to look at other libraries/means of synching the music with the video. Ziggy Starfucker had some impressive skills growth on this game too, since he had never before made a rhythm game or had to deal with syncing audio before, so given the fact that this is the first game of its kind for him, he deserves mad props.
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Aug 13, 2015 00:47
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Xibanya posted:Whoops, looks like I missed TheOrange's post! Yep, Windows 10, if it's locking to 640x480 then it might be a graphics card scaling thing. Sounds like one hell of a process for making the art, at least it sounds like it sped up as you got more used to it. The thought of using Illustrator to help make pixel art is kind of intriguing though since you get the fallback if you need it. I want to try my hand at making a rhythm game one of these days but it sounds like there are a number of technical hurdles. Personally I'd suggest that maybe having the circle go behind each letter on a smooth scroll rather than the blips.
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Aug 13, 2015 01:08
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TheOrange posted:Out of curiosity is there ever an end point to Impulse or just once you die? I think I got up to Wave 9 myself before having to step away for other things but I've been meaning to go back to it. Just curious if you went procedural on it and if that helped you guys out or caused any difficulties. Impulse has no final win condition, no. There was a long period during development where we wanted to do a campaign mode and also an arena wave-based mode. That inability for us to make up our minds ended up hurting us in the long run because I held off on working on levels and some other pieces that were dependent upon that decision. I also built a lot of things with an eye towards "well how is this going to work if we do it one way vs another", and I know our artist developed a whole slew of assets that we didn't end up using because we never implemented a proper campaign. But basically what happened was we were down to about 10 days left and we still hadn't decided, so I made an executive decision during a period of development where I just said "I'm not going to have time to make a bunch of different campaign levels, so it's an arena shooter now". It was actually really liberating making that decision, because it focused down what I had to work on. So what I ended up doing was deciding (with a suggestion from Tann) that the objective would be to destroy the nests that constantly spawn the enemies, and each new level/wave would mutate in some way. So I got the enemies and nests spawning in an arena format and then started implementing ways to mutate the waves and randomly generate incremental mutations based on weighted values and maximum increment limits and stuff. A big influence on this system were the Idols and Limiters from Bastion and Transistor. Actually, originally we wanted the weapons to work similarly to Transistor in that not only would they be different if placed in different weapon slots, but also we wanted you to be able to load up modifications to the weapons much like the programs in Transistor, so you could shoot a shotgun spread of rockets, for instance. That's a system I still want to implement. We ended up with 9 different wave mutations, most of them having incremental effects that can be applied multiple times up to a maximum. Each time you start a wave, a new set of mutations (called anomalies in game) is generated, one mutation for each wave you've completed. Each mutation has a weighting for random selection, then a decreased weighting once it has already been selected for that wave. This makes it more likely that you see multiple weaker mutations before you start seeing single stacked mutations, because each time a mutation is selected, it increases the strength of its effect (up to a certain specified point). Spawn Time Reduction (Relentless) - Reduces the global enemy spawn timer, which starts at 15 seconds, by 2 seconds each time it is selected, up to 10 second reduction total. Enemy Speed (Accelerated) - Increases enemy speed by 25% each time it is selected, up to 50% total. Enemy HP (Resilient) - Increases enemy health by 25% each time it is selected, up to 100% total. Enemy Damage (Barbed) - Increases enemy damage by 25% each time it is selected, up to 100% total. Enemy Regen (Adaptive) - Enemies regen 2.5 hp/sec each time it is selected, up to 10 hp/sec total. Enemies Split (Alien) - Enemies have a 15% chance to spawn 2 new enemies on death, up to 30% chance if selected again. Enemies Explode (Volatile) - Enemies have a 25% chance to explode violently on death, up to 50% chance if selected again. Spin Camera (Dizzy) - Causes the camera to constantly rotate 15 deg/sec, up to 45 deg/sec total. [This can be turned off in the menu by unchecking Spin To Win if it makes you nauseous!] Unstable Terrain (??????) - Causes the level tileset to switch randomly every 5-10 seconds or so. I actually spent a decent amount of time building a system that would allow us to load a single Tiled level into the game, then have it apply a randomly selected tileset to it. We have 5 tileset variants (Bricks, Grass, Metal, Rocks, and Sand), each with multiple color variations, that we switch between on each level to kind of make it feel less samey even if you are only cycling between a couple levels. As you can see, the easiest thing for us to hook on without much additional work were the enemy stats, and they allowed us to give the wave mode a sense of progression of difficulty, even if some of them are mostly just for fun. We had lots of other ideas for mutators, but we finalized these a couple days before the end and decided to work on polishing up some other pieces (like the little bubble particles you see when you shoot and enemies move around), and generate a couple levels to randomly switch between in the arena (there are currently 3). In the end I think a campaign mode would've been great, and I still want to put one in. But for the scope of the game jam I had to settle on simplicity and what I could accomplish when I had spent so much time on the weapons, the player and enemy movement, the UI, and everything else I had to do. It does end up putting you in a situation where, as GlyphGryph mentioned, the player may feel that they've seen everything the game has to offer after only one level. While I think that's not strictly true due to the way the mutators and difficulty ramp up and we have a few different level layouts, the basic gameplay concept (destroy the nests while avoiding damage from enemies) does stay essentially the same. Ultimately I would consider my greatest disappointment is that you aren't really incentivized to kill the enemies. I built the points system where they give you points and if you kill so many you gain a multiplier, but as we've all known for a long time, points don't REALLY matter in the grand scheme of things to most gamers if they don't do anything. So your best course of action to progress is to simply avoid enemies and kill the nests as fast as possible, then clean up the living enemies. And a note on the enemies - some of the (perfectly valid) criticism the game has received is that the enemies don't really do anything other than move toward you. Yeah, some of them have different movement patterns, like the jellyfish move in small bursts in a random direction (but mostly towards you), and the chomping fish swim in a wave pattern until they're close, then they dash quickly at you. I would've liked to have had different enemy behaviors, but part of the problem is the actual main concept of the game. Since your weapons push you away, it was really hard to actually deal with mostly stationary enemies, because as people have noticed with the nests, when you start shooting them you get pushed away from them. And I didn't want people to feel like they had to shoot really slow and aim every shot to make them count or they'd have to turn around and move closer again. So that's why most of the enemies ended up just chasing you, and part of the reason that they move so fast -- so you don't just leave them in the dust as you're flying around spraying double shotguns wildly. I do have plans for how to alleviate this a bit in the future though, and as always, I really appreciate the feedback and criticism. What I hope to add in a future release is a full campaign mode with exploration/puzzley sections in between combat sections, a bunch more weapons that we already have art for with actual weapon progression (so you gain access to new weapons as you play instead of just having them all at the start), weapon combinations/upgrades as mentioned above, temporary power-ups and collectibles like shields and bombs and teleports, new enemies and behaviors (so they don't all just come after you), and bosses, which we wanted to get in but just didn't have time. Edit:  I didn't mean to write that much. Guess I have some stuff ready for the site when the post-mortems are added.
sighnoceros fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 01:25
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TheOrange posted:Sounds like one hell of a process for making the art, at least it sounds like it sped up as you got more used to it. The thought of using Illustrator to help make pixel art is kind of intriguing though since you get the fallback if you need it. TheOrange posted:I want to try my hand at making a rhythm game one of these days but it sounds like there are a number of technical hurdles. Personally I'd suggest that maybe having the circle go behind each letter on a smooth scroll rather than the blips. That's a really good idea -- I think Ziggy mentioned trying a combined approach - the pulsing beat-balls (or whatever they are) along with a scrolling indicator. We're totally swamped just improving what we have right now because blinkeve1826 is going to show off the game  in public this weekend and we want to get her the best build possible before then, but once we finally have a chance to breathe, we can start looking at more in-depth revamps. (For my part, I'd love to redo a ton of the sprites from the ground up!) In the week and a half since the contest ended we've still been working almost as hard on Slam Fighter II as we were during the contest (with more food and sleep time allocated, of course)! This game is getting a life of it's own and I'm completely obsessed now. Oh yeah, I should add, while Slam Fighter II is the first video game I have ever worked on, it's just one of very many for Ziggy Starfucker. In fact, you all may have seen his work before - in Game Jam VI he competed with the game Deadweed and did rather well for himself. E: hmm, reading old thread Ziggy Starfucker on July 31st, 2011 posted:Which version of XNA exactly are you using? The more things change... Xibanya fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 01:47
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sighnoceros posted:Edit: Hah, no problem, was a really interesting read. If it's any consolation I think the arena shooter aspect worked in the games favor as part of the jam. Campaigns can work but they often feel unbalanced or super short given the amount of time you have, it's something I regret doing with my game but I'm not sure how we could of made it work otherwise. Polo-Rican posted:If there's a winter game jam I'd argue that it should just replace the summer game jam. This game jam always gets like 1/4 the attention it rightfully should because a lot of poo poo is always going on in the summer. By this point in 2015 there are like 20 active users on the something awful forums and I'm not sure if that audience can sustain two yearly game jams. I kind of get this sentiment but if anything I think the jam itself should just be less attached from the forums, the person that did our art (Larry) isn't a forums member or has any real interest but I got him to join on just by the fact that it was a month long thing and lower pressure than something like a Ludum Dare. At the same time opening it up further could bring in more people and thus more games to judge as well. Was actually a bit surprised when someone I talked to at a random meetup had heard about this game jam in particular though. Xibanya posted:That's a really good idea -- I think Ziggy mentioned trying a combined approach - the pulsing beat-balls (or whatever they are) along with a scrolling indicator. We're totally swamped just improving what we have right now because blinkeve1826 is going to show off the game That's cool, looking forward to seeing where you go with the game. Even though people in the thread have generally been pretty kind I feel like the online feedback has been more valuable in it's criticism than some of the stuff I've got from showing off in-person. Nanomachine Son fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 02:38
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 It's reviews like this that make me happy that I pushed myself to get something done. Thanks for playing! 
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Aug 13, 2015 03:37
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To those that have played Basenoball, could I do some brain picking? I'm working on figuring out how to redo the numbers, and while I don't want do think too deeply before getting the final review, I have some notions: * I agree with the Gong Show that the numbers being run need to be more transparent, although I don't know by how much (I don't view the players seeing it as a dice thing). How much would you like to know about how the calculations work? * Viewing the math as die rolls instead of trying to figure out an algorithm to turn stat values into a probability roll will likely be easier. Would also be easier to communicate to the player. With that in mind: 1) Roughly stay the course with the current system, just fine-tune the numbers and math. Add a visual indicator to show what's happening, something like a bar that shows the base chances for each player, and how different actions will affect it. 2) Something involving a bunch of d6s. Perhaps something like each player gets X die (where X is their skill value), rolls, then picks the top Y die (where Y is the number of die the least-skilled player has) to do math with. Success is summing up the rolls, +/- modifiers. 3) Use dice, but a system like Quarriors or Dice Masters, where the faces are a combination of numbers and symbols, and the symbols have some special meaning beyond simple crunching numbers. Not entirely sure how this would work out, but maybe something like some faces are numbers and you sum your numbers, and any symbols you roll have special effects. This may be too systematic, though, making it a dice game involving baseball rather than a baseball game using dice. Does any of that sound particularly compelling?
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Aug 13, 2015 04:05
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Generally I would say that if you're going to make the math more visible to the player, you should also make it as comprehensible as possible so they can actually make informed decisions. It's up to you whether your complicated calculations need to be preserved or not, but being able to look at "base chance + player skill - situational modifier = need a 9 on 2d6" is probably going to make things seem a lot more understandable for players.
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Aug 13, 2015 04:14
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dupersaurus posted:To those that have played Basenoball, could I do some brain picking? I'm working on figuring out how to redo the numbers, and while I don't want do think too deeply before getting the final review, I have some notions: I know it's not the most direct comparison but if you could provide a percent like some poker games then that might help a little? If it's something I can directly relate to some kind of resource I'm spending as well then that might help as well. 2d6 isn't that confusing but if I'm comparing it across a list it might make it a bit more tedious. In general the only problem I ever have with a game displaying too much info is if it feels like it's making the decision for me or if it's a very occasional choice in the vein of an FTL. For what it's worth I only briefly played through Baseonball and it was before you had the final graphics in so my opinion isn't the most valuable.
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Aug 13, 2015 04:48
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I'd go with displaying percentages for probability. Implementing a dice based system properly would be a lot of work, as you'd probably have to get rid of the current imagination bar and represent it as a dice pool or something. percentages would let you keep the game as it is, just with more information given to the player.
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Aug 13, 2015 04:52
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Would anyone be interested in seeing more work put into Broken, or is it more of a "played it, got the gimmick, game was frustrating gimmick was neat but wouldn't play again" sort of thing?
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Aug 13, 2015 05:05
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GlyphGryph posted:Would anyone be interested in seeing more work put into Broken, or is it more of a "played it, got the gimmick, game was frustrating gimmick was neat but wouldn't play again" sort of thing? I still think the basic mechanic of having the game world be paused but come alive as you activate it is good, I think you really just need to work on the general platforming physics and do something about the knockback. I was able to play it up until the 2nd level but I honestly couldn't see what I was supposed to do in order to progress (series of platforms you activate with a switch), my best thought was I needed to time something with the knockback and the enemy but that seemed way to finicky to be pulled off reliably. I think it's a problem I've had with puzzle platformers in general though where they eventually ask you to pull off something more mechanically complex than it seems to be the 'right' solution. Things like having to start back from a far away checkpoint or wait for a slow moving platform can get really tedious, especially when the basic gameplay feels more stiff. That part though might be my own personal gripe with games like Braid and Limbo however so take that for what you will. Nanomachine Son fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 05:25
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JonTerp will probably get mad at me... but, I wanted to show off the prototype of the winners page. Nothing fancy thus far... everything on the site is beta, after all. Hopefully I don't get into too much trouble for spoiling the winners a couple days early... but, who cares, really? I'm just excited to have had such a successful jam! Everyone is a winner who participated, but there were a few who stood above the rest.
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Aug 13, 2015 06:29
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SharpenedSpoonv2 posted:JonTerp will probably get mad at me... but, I wanted to show off the prototype of the winners page. Nothing fancy thus far... everything on the site is beta, after all. Hopefully I don't get into too much trouble for spoiling the winners a couple days early... but, who cares, really? I'm just excited to have had such a successful jam! Everyone is a winner who participated, but there were a few who stood above the rest. I'm pretty sure this is not actually a prototype but the actual page
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Aug 13, 2015 06:46
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goku i won't do what u tell me