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Going to do the same thing as last jam, time permitting. That's playing the games in order by "finished" posts in the thread (apologies if I miss some), then judge's top picks if I take too long, and then throwing other submissions from the website into random.org until I finish or burn out. Apologies in advance for my gross, unabashed subjectivity. Time to get to it!Hammer Bro. posted:The Oregon Trailblazer by Teamsomnia  Sedgr posted:UFO Cattle Battle by Team Sedgr TomR posted:Night of the Surfing Dead by Tom and Larissa  Jo posted:Debate Simulator 2016 by Team Adorable Animals Wow, what'd I say to Vermont?  netcat posted:USX-1944 by Skellyware  NeekBerm posted:New World Monster Mash by Team Badteam I laughed when I lost, I laughed when I won. What more could I ask for? Myron posted:A History of Videogames by Team Team  ShredsYouSay posted:1937 by Stummy Beige 
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Jan 23, 2018 16:13
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Doom Goon posted:Game Playings Thanks for playing it! The controls are a bit finnicky and heavily rely on the brakes. And yep that ends up being a whole lot of cows. I had more plans in store, but of course its a jam and just didnt have the time to implement more stuff without breaking everything. Thanks again.
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Jan 23, 2018 17:25
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Doom Goon posted:Kind of like a Mega Man 1 romhack where you kind of play as the Zero from the GBA games! Overall I ended up liking it a fair bit! There's a lot that I feel could use tweaking in both mechanics (sliding/air falling and bouncing off enemies, some hitboxes and placement) that I felt made it more difficult than it should have been along with some graphics stuff (not the best mix, although it did remind me Stinkoman), but it's good for its shortened development time! I mean, it's not runnable in the NES but you just can't do that every jam (or any jam, for anyone else). Thanks for playing  Yeah the mechanics are a bit iffy and takes some getting used to. I'm going to add a few tweaks after feedback in the discord like letting you cancel the slide with a jump (resulting in a long jump) and make it so the "bullet" comes out earlier when you attack. The spin attack is also pretty janky but I'm not sure what to do with it.It'd be cool to give it a graphical touch up at some point and get a better variation in tiles and so on.
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Jan 23, 2018 17:33
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Wall of Shame for me, too. Life intervened.
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Jan 23, 2018 18:10
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Doom Goon posted:I chuckled at a few of the question and those portraits are good. VALIDATION!
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Jan 23, 2018 18:18
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I kind of wish Debate Simulator secretly sent your responses to Jo, so he could post all the weirdest and best ones. I wrote some that I thought were pretty amusing, but they were just fed into a parser and lost like a fart in the wind.
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Jan 23, 2018 18:55
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I've updated my game for anyone who's interested.code:https://skellyware.itch.io/usx-1944
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Jan 23, 2018 23:39
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Aw heck, it's time for me to play all the games and write some hopefully helpful feedback. Woo woo, get on the train. Train? Gametrain™ FENRIR There are a few flaws: It’s very short, it doesn’t feel great, the camera is a bit wonky, and it lacks variety. That being said though, for your first jam and solo to boot, I think you did a pretty good job. I think this game could be more fleshed out, there’s material to build off of, for sure. The atmosphere is pretty nice, the lighting adds to it, and as someone who’s been watching the show Vikings, I’m familiar with Angrboda(e: et al), at least by name and general role in the mythology. The music was well chosen, and I was interested in exploring the area. I really wanted to get to the top of the mountains but unfortunately the clipping issues you mentioned in your post-mortem cause lil’ Fenrir to fall through the terrain. Fortunately this doesn’t mean the game is locked as you can still reach the exit presuming you gained enough points before clipping. On that note, I think it's probably possible to either push enough of the destructible buildings off the map(which I did, because it was fun) or stand in the fire too long and make it impossible to proceed. I don’t actually know if it’s possible, but I was worried it might be. If so, I think this is definitely something that you should not allow in a game in future. I’m guessing from what you’ve said that there isn’t another ending, but that take on the theme was well fitting. Be proud you submitted a game. For real. Your next one will be better and this one wasn’t lousy!   I found this little guy!1937 1360x1024 is a very odd screen resolution. Wonderful voice acting from Xibanya and Mihai_Zetta. I’m guessing Mihai isn’t Scottish, but the accent was pretty impressive I must say. I mean, I’m not Scottish, but I’ve seen BOTH Trainspotting movies, so. Some of the audio was a little inconsistent. Earhart and Randall didn’t sound as though they were in the same space at the beginning for some reason. One of Earhart’s lines where she says “Well I guess that was to be expected” devolves into a sort of tone halfway through the word “expected” because of the bit crushing which is unfortunate. The same happens with “Aw jeez” where it comes out as “Aw j [beeeeeep] zz” I would have liked being able to move all the way down to the bottom of the window, but I noticed that the path that enemy planes fly runs along it, so I’m guessing it was a choice not to allow the player down there? If so, I get it. The movement speed could also been a touch faster, I felt a little confined by it, and the pathing of some of the bursts of enemies felt a little too random. I don’t play many shmups but I feel a recognizable pattern is the standard for enemy movement. The plot is good. Really good. I very much like the enemy character and the associated insanity thereof. Oh boy. There’s a line in there that was purposefully horrible and I loved it. Also the associated character icon during that exchange is really very well done. Kudos to you for that. The use of CGA graphics definitely helped as you said cover/move past the generic art style the game had earlier in dev, and the dials on the sides to represent stuff is a very good idea. How did you find out about Randall? Like, did you google “RAF GUY MAYBE A DRUNK?” or what? A solid game throughout, with a few little snags. Good and fun!  Crazy Motorcade I will save your post mortem in a text file somewhere in case I ever get around to learning Unity. Also, more odd screen resolutions. Is it a Unity thing? That intro splash screen is very good and I like it a lot. The first level was a little boring, I didn’t have to do anything but drive normally to beat it, though I was loving it because of the MIDI cover. (The music video for that song... It's terrible.) It could have used some boost or basic cover mechanics where obstacles were available to block a sniper’s line of sight during straight stretches of road or something to break it up or induce tension, though at times there were so many lines that it accomplished the same task. The second level though was frustrating. I feel like sometimes I died after two hits, sometimes after one hit. I died a bunch of times, even after learning to game the boss a bit. I very much enjoyed that the boost tanks were physical objects that sometimes flipped around weird into the world, though many tanks were dropped outside of the fence which felt a bit like a bummer. I got the impression that you can kind of get the thing to drop them over the road with your positioning, but sometimes it just wouldn't drop them in a useful place. It also felt like boosting made it more likely to get hit. Alright, so I left what I wrote above in because I only realized after writing it down that the clue at the start of the game was very important and I was being dense not noticing the obvious. A line at the start of the second bit would have been helpful instead of only the one if you don’t do the right thing. I'm trying to be vague to not spoil stuff. I should have clued in earlier, but it also could have been a bit more straightforward. With that in mind, the second level is much simpler and more acceptable. The ending is fantastic. The use of MIDI is somehow really appropriate? The models are hilarious as are the cutscenes. It’s a very good use of the theme and it’s funny and silly and weird. Very well done.  Glory Simulator 480 BC Super polished, very clean, a bunch of nice little flourishes. The audio is nicely mixed, the sound effects are all flashy and satisfying. There are some slight blemishes. The enemy arrangement doesn’t feel like it’s aligned with the 3 Spartans, so moving around to throw them feels like it isn’t set up to be clean, or easily lined up. I haven’t managed to kill all three Immortals in a single wave because their movement is just too erratic for the slow spear/Spartan speed. I managed to make it into the high 20s but haven’t passed that to see if there’s an ending yet. The art style is really nice too, it’s clean and pretty. The lighting effects add a lot to the presentation. Team Phlargenarffen makes another solid game with very good presentation. Nice!  Hyperturbo Great Emu War 1932 This is a really good use of theme, basing a game off something real and so ridiculous. I liked the little text pop ups, the health indicator and emu squawks. Emus are a great bird to make noises of or for, even when they’re ostriches. It’s a shame you didn’t have more time to work on the jam this go around, but it’s still really fun to slow all the way down, creep behind an unsuspecting drongo and bam. Emu vengeance. It's got a good feel to it. I left the game running while I wrote this and the fps dropped to 16 because of the continuing blood spurting. Heck yeah. 
Giggs fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 04:34
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I've updated the post-mortem on Crazy Motorcade to be more than just a few, tossed-off notes about mistakes.Giggs posted:Crazy Motorcade I know the first level is boring, which is a bummer. We had a road design system in place for most of the jam, but realized very late we couldn't really work with it the way we wanted, so we ripped it out at the eleventh hour and tried to make do with a modular road model asset we found on the Unity Asset Store. Little thought was able to be put into the layout, other than "this is at least a LITTLE varied, and it works before the deadline." Again, that's novice game-designer stuff. We had trouble finding a way to make the snipers seem not robotic, so we banked on the randomized traffic throwing enough curveballs at you to make you at least occasionally in danger. I don't think it quite works, though. On the second level, it can be frustrating, and yes, the shots are far more lethal if you're boosting, which I'm not sure I understand (but I didn't code the behavior, so) I'm glad you pieced together the win condition, as that sort-of-puzzle ends up being the most legitimately challenging part of the game. We need to do better with informing and teaching the player about new mechanics. We wanted to make the boss throw the nitro cans towards the road, regardless of his position, but didn't have time to get that in. As a compromise, because he tends to throw about 60% of them out of bounds, we doubled the boost amount per tank right before final build. It used to take 4 or 5 tanks to reach the necessary speed, and that could have taken a looong time with him throwing them willy-nilly. Thanks so much for playing and giving feedback! It's gratifying to see so many kind words about our work.
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Jan 24, 2018 06:39
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Doom Goon posted:Cute ROM mash-up! I liked how the different styles didn't just change the character, but the level as well. Some were better than others (blast you Thanks for playing and giving feedback. I doubt anyone's gonna complete the Pac-Man stage with a spaceship. I removed a bunch of dots, but it still drags on for too long. Protip: It doesn't matter if you win or lose and there's only one ending  . Originally I wanted to create different endings based on your choices and how well you do in the games, but I ran out of time (also the reason why there's no music).I'll play as many games as I can and try to give helpful feedback. Let's see how long that lasts. I've gone through the first few rows of games, but only played the ones that had a link to their game on their awful jams page (no too many for some reason). 1937 A solid shooter. I'm probably not the only one who died immediately, because by the time I realized I couldn't shoot yet, the screen was already filled with enemies. The last boss was good, though took a little too long when you lost your weapons. Also liked the dials. I like using a CGA palette in theory, but the graphics are too good and too fluid for it to really work here, I think. The voice acting was pretty good, especially considering how easy it is to go over the top when doing intentionally cheese stuff. Overall pretty good in just about every way. (My rating was shite, but that's no surprise.) Try Something New Love the aesthetics. There's not a lot of art, but what is there looks right. The buying animation is cute and the music fits nicely. Most of the time I found it easy to figure out why I was or wasn't selling well, so that's good. I didn't get far in so I don't know if there's more content from what you see the first week or so. I played it four times, two times I accidentally pressed ESC and ended the game, one time it crashed and on my best attempt I bet everything on the popularity of the Hoff and was sorely dissappointed when I only sold half my stuff. Super Gaelic Dodgeball The art, style and overall presentation (with proper menus) is awesome as always. Gameplay is fun and chaotic, though I find it hard to judge which strategy will do well. It seems like the opponents sometimes catch balls at will, while I find it difficult to determine when it's safe to catch a ball myself. That may well be because I haven't played the game enough, though. Overalll a very good-looking an fun game. The Incredible Story of Pizza This is an odd one. I guess it's more about you trying stuff out than about making a complete, well-rounded game. The graphics are nice, seeing randomly generated islands is fun and I love the zoom in to your pizzeria in the beginning. Baking pizzas is intuitive and easy to pick up. I couldn't figure out what to do with the orders at first, since you interact with most things by pressing E, but have to left click on the order. Driving around is fun, though it's easy to get your moped stuck upside down in the ground when picking it up. This happened to me like 2 out of 8 times I tried to drive. (I think it happens more often if you push it around first). Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to actually deliver the pizzas yet. Driving into or stopping within the circle doesn't work, pressing buttons does nothing and I couldn't see a way to enter houses. Hyperturbo Great Emu War 1932 Can't add much to what has already been said/you already know. It's short and simple but fun for what it is. Aesthetics, graphics, music, sounds and juiciness are good as always. Y2Kthulu This would really benefit from being a little longer, obviously. There's the groundwork for a decent JRPG-style battle system, but the game ends just when you start having to get a little tactical. There are more special attacks than total encounters, I think. I did only play through once and immediately chose the "right" path (if that's how the endgame actually works), so I probably haven't seen everything. The special attacks are interesting in theory, though there's little reason to not choose high damage spells most of the time. Naturally, this is your typical jam-game criticism, and the battle system would improve a lot in a more fleshed out game with more diverse enemies. The Purging of Darkstorm Cave This is really good! I guess some people would prefer WASD + mouse controls (which is what most action roguelites seem to be using), but I never feel 100% comfortable with those in a topdown game, so I actually prefer this control scheme. The only thing that took some getting used to was using the skills effectively, but a gamepad would easily fix that. Still, controls were easy enough that I didn't even bother hooking one up. The combat feels good, overall, though more detailed animations or some other type of feedback when hitting enemies would be nice. I like the way the healing spell works and I can see how doing similar things with other spells could make combat quite interesting. The difficulty seems right for a jam game, but in a full game there should probably be some kind of downside to too much grinding (other than the "rating" at the end). The Beholders killed me a few times before I got the hang of them and I think I got one-shotted by the enemies during the boss-fight when I was already overpowered for the dungeon. The dungeon generation seems good as far as I can tell. I didn't notice anything distracingly off or even gamebreaking, nor did the layouts seem too similar to each other. One dungeon had almost all enemies crammed into the right side with almost nothing on the left, but that's no big deal. I like the ability to switch characters on the fly, though I didn't explore it much. I would definitely pay money for this if you only made a shitton more content, more spells and skills, more enemies and an entire loving game 
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Jan 24, 2018 15:17
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I hope nobody minds me destroying this threads with replies about replies. I usually tend to just not check it until I'm done playing games, and I kind of hate that. And thanks for the nice replies so far, it's actually kind of odd leaving impressions! Oh, if anyone is taking requests for public builds, 1937 needs a dialogue skip to it. Just make it a NG+ or something because that part's great, but maybe not after the first couple times through! Sedgr posted:Thanks for playing it! The controls are a bit finnicky and heavily rely on the brakes. And yep that ends up being a whole lot of cows. I had more plans in store, but of course its a jam and just didnt have the time to implement more stuff without breaking everything. Thanks again. ALFbrot posted:I kind of wish Debate Simulator secretly sent your responses to Jo, so he could post all the weirdest and best ones. I wrote some that I thought were pretty amusing, but they were just fed into a parser and lost like a fart in the wind. netcat posted:I've updated my game for anyone who's interested. Myron posted:Protip: It doesn't matter if you win or lose and there's only one ending Doom Goon fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 15:52
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Thanks for the review! I'm glad you like it. Hopefully I can move on from bouncing balls now.
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Jan 24, 2018 16:08
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Doom Goon posted:Definitely will go back to this one, and those are some very good changes! I kind of liked the bounce but at least I couldn't figure a good way for it (though it is neat using it on the last boss to get back on that platform!). And I didn't mention the slash projectile because I do think doing it that way with a delay can be a choice to make positioning more deliberate. The dash cancel is probably wholly a good idea, though! Most of the Mega Man games that use dash or sliding have a way out of it. You can actually cancel it already by pressing in the opposite direction (like in Mega Man). After changing the projectile I think the game flows better and feels more fun. I liked the bounce too  but it was kinda hard to use in a good way and it often just ends up killing you in my experience. I have a few more tweaks to put in and I'll probably remove the "slide gaps" (except maybe for some bonus stuff) since everyone seems to have troubles with them.I'll have to play some games too soon and post my impressions.
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Jan 24, 2018 16:11
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That's what it was, you couldn't jump (or attack?) out of it unless it was at the end of it until that change. Not that everything has to be Mega Man, of course! I actually had some fun trying to jump out of a quickly reversed one, and also luring enemies to bounce off of so I could try to get 1ups if I couldn't figure out the right way to do it. And here's the second batch of impressions! Dieting Hippo posted:Try Something New by Team Not Sure  I did have some issues with this one (UI, mostly in having to type things every time. Also, I think you understated how bad rain was even during events!) but I don't want to focus on that because there's just no point in it. Honestly there's little point in it regularly, anyway. So the positives: weirdly satisfying low-res graphics. Funky "99 Red Balloons" chiptune cover that I'm positive will come back into my head as soon as I try to go to bed. I got to name a shop "IchBinEinPfannkuchen," which made me giggle. You also had a very nice Post Mortem, just like last time!A really neat little "top-down" action-adventure/roguelite game! I loved a lot about this one, the atmospheric, odd start, the kickin' soundtrack (maybe it's no Alien Alchemy but it's adventurious high energy main track and tense boss track works. If I didn't have 99 Red Balloons in my head now you could count on that instead), the pretty fun action with multiple character classes. The battle animations might not be team quailty (though many of the other ones are great!) or feel a little unimpactful and a couple things like the ending screen make me wonder what was dropped (maybe the score included how many dungeons you optionally took?) but those are small potatoes. Also, after you play you get to read another Giggs post-mortem which is super indepth! I, um, also totally rushed to the boss after I beat the game once.  KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:Hyperturbo Great Emu War 1932 by bonerman's boner jam  Atoramos posted:Peasants! Build Me A Castle! by Flatbox Studios SystemLogoff posted:Y2Kthulhu by Team Retro Leaf
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Jan 24, 2018 17:14
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Finally had the time to fill out our game's page a bit more. Will probably take a second pass at making it look nicer, but did our post mortem including discussing the tech tree and some of the game's rougher edges.  edit: oh boy found a bug preventing access to magic I just fixed. Atoramos fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jan 24, 2018 |
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Jan 24, 2018 17:15
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Heads up to anyone that downloaded Oligocene Snapshot that I updated the game to fix a couple small issues, so you might want to grab a new version of it. I also was able to add a MEGA mirror for it. https://twitter.com/EntranceJew/status/956193985151881221
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Jan 24, 2018 19:13
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responses to feedback  Myron posted:Try Something New i'm glad you got a hang of what to sell, and and thanks for the kind words on the style! when i do eventually get a v1.1 out it'll have an escape guard that'll ask if you really want to quit when you hit escape. i did it to myself too during testing a few times. as far as late game, that's unfortunately something that i couldn't get in on time. also, can you PM me (on here or Discord) with where you remember it crashing? it happened to one person during testing and didn't happen again after that, so i want to get that nipped in the bud. Doom Goon posted:Tear down this wall, and build up this Lemonade Stand! I was heartbroken to hear about Snail Knight having to be scrapped so late in the game one day the snail will get his due. just not with a time constraint i am weirdly proud of how cumbersome the UI is. even when i was testing i found it annoying, which completely meshed with the bad alphabet-based menu selection of apple II games. i think i might try to save what was entered the previous day for sale prices if you rebuy any of the same items, that would ease some pain. glad you liked the music! i always have a blast toying around in famitracker making tracks and this was a fun game to experiment with. also my favorite test name to use during development was The Butt Hutt.
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Jan 24, 2018 20:00
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Doom Goon posted:A really neat little "top-down" action-adventure/roguelite game! I loved a lot about this one, the atmospheric, odd start, the kickin' soundtrack (maybe it's no Alien Alchemy but it's adventurious high energy main track and tense boss track works. If I didn't have 99 Red Balloons in my head now you could count on that instead), the pretty fun action with multiple character classes. The battle animations might not be team quailty (though many of the other ones are great!) or feel a little unimpactful and a couple things like the ending screen make me wonder what was dropped (maybe the score included how many dungeons you optionally took?) but those are small potatoes. Also, after you play you get to read another Giggs post-mortem which is super indepth! I, um, also totally rushed to the boss after I beat the game once. Awesome! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I have many ideas that I thought could work but knew I wouldn't have time for many of them. I'm hoping to add to it at some point. Myron posted:The Purging of Darkstorm Cave That's a good point about the grinding. The original concept for the game would have something akin to a timer to threaten the player or punish them, but it fell to the wayside when I was shifting things around. I'll have to think about how to effectively deal with that. Hopefully I can get a shitton of content out! It's not a particularly special game mechanically or anything, but I'd like to see what I can do with more time and actual ~planning~. Thanks for the feedback!
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Jan 25, 2018 02:09
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Big thanks to everyone playing the games and writing reviews, it means a lot to the organizers and participants to have the games reviewed!
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Jan 25, 2018 02:45
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Oh man, I totally forgot to post my game in the thread! For this jam, I had the unusual experience of not really having anyone to team up with - so I went solo and made Unearth!  It was a development time fraught with stress and difficulty, but in the end I worked my rear end off and I'm really proud of the result.
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Jan 25, 2018 03:59
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 A bunch of us put together a team and made A Machine to End War, a game about noble genius Nikola Tesla and his evil nemesis Thomas Alva Edison. This was a fun jam; I know I learned a ton about Love2D and Lua and such. Tragically the judge copy has a crash bug but we've fixed that now 
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Jan 25, 2018 04:20
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Ultigonio posted:Oh man, I totally forgot to post my game in the thread! Neat game! It feels extremely polished, and I liked the lo-fi soundtrack. Beat normal mode in 17 minutes after having some issues with the tutorial, it could use some text or an indicator for which controls require a button press or a button hold. Beat hard mode in 12 minutes with 2-3 gold, and I would love to see procedural level generation a la Spelunky!
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Jan 25, 2018 05:43
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I played more games than I thought I would tonight. Woo. Try Something New I know you’re already aware of the issue I’m about to raise, but I’m one of those people that instinctively hits escape constantly, so I kept jumping out of the buy screen to the main menu over and over again. I should have learned by the fifth or sixth time, but I didn’t. Ah well. I waited to write this until you posted your post-mortem, it was a good read. The music is really nice. It feels appropriate and fits well, including the 99 Balloons cover. It’s ludicrous to me that anyone would not be so depressed by having to change the game you’re making for the jam halfway through as to just give up entirely. It’s really cool that you managed to put something together and that it doesn’t feel really shallow. I wasn’t aware of Lemonade Stand until relatively recently when Giant Bomb did their video about educational games. This is a really nice, simple homage with a neat twist to nicely conform to the theme. The Apple II look is really nice. My keyboard sounds old so I was kinda thrilled to have the opportunity to emulate the Apple II experience in that way. It’s satisfying what with click clacking. I understand the lack of an ending both in terms of theme and also because I refuse to believe you’d have enough time on top of making a new game from scratch effectively, but a definite end goal I think gives a much better sense of drive or determination to reach it. The game I played today was by far my worst attempt where I was nearly bankrupt after 8 days because of my poor choices, but sometimes you get on a roll and it doesn’t feel like there’s too much to keep you going. It’s a minor complaint. The biggest problem with this game is that I used up my only good joke name for a store while playtesting before submission. It was “NOT POTATO BUT STILL OK”. It wasn’t even that good. Picture is my second best effort, unfortunately. Seriously, if I were in your position I probably would have given up because I’m a baby. Nicely done, Hippo!  New World Monster Mash I like the idea behind this game. The mechanics however are really playing against the … player. The character slides for too long, so you keep running into the monster, and the collision is very unforgiving. The bounding box I think is quite a bit larger than the sprite of the player. I liked the style and the concept, and the music fit pretty well, [[**but I can’t make it past Stompy. The best I’ve done is that I managed to hit Stompy 31 times, which only took a little over half its health away. The gun doesn’t work, unfortunately, so the only strategy I’ve found so far is to hope Stompy plops down beside you but facing away, otherwise it’s just not going to happen. If you end up updating this I’d like to give it another shot. Like I said, the idea is really nice and fits the theme, and I’m curious about the other New World Monsters but Stompy is really giving me the business, and I don’t like business.**]] I’m leaving in the above because I couldn’t tell that reloading wasn’t a one-button process, and only figured that out after trying the game a second time. I managed to beat Stompy, though I invented a particularly devious strategy of simultaneously reloading, spamming the shoot button, and the slash attack so as to maximize damage like some kind of hacker mastermind. Because of this I was a little annoyed when I got the success screen because it was funny and silly but I went through some unnecessary frustration before I managed to realize what the game wanted from me. It would be a huge boon to be a little more helpful and clear to the player. There isn’t a post mortem posted, so I’ll have to guess, but as a solo entrant I’m going to assume you ran out of time and stuff kinda fell to the side, which I get. I’m bummed that killing Stompy doesn’t seem to unlock any of the other monsters. Like I said before, I’m curious and wanted a little more from this game. Let me know if I’m missing something and I’ll give it another go.  Y2Kthulhu This game has such nice visuals, jeez. It’s so neat. I’m getting some real strong anime vibes from the special abilities text, but I also don’t watch anime so I don’t know what that means if anything. I guess it reminds me of Persona 4? I didn’t play it, but it reminds me of it. What a good bit of feedback this is turning into. The writing is cute and smart, I enjoyed the music, the text and its effects are nice and polished. Xibanya once again does a great job with VO. I didn’t manage to find the easter egg, I might try again to see if I missed anything, but it’s possible I just didn’t get it when I found it. I’m not sure? The writing on the ending screen is a little misleading or confusing because of how it’s formatted. What it says under “The End” seems like it fits after the ellipsis above it and so I didn’t get that the sentiment continued to the next screen. After I beat it a second time I realized it was part of the same thought. The only negative I have about the game is that the combat system is rote if that’s the right word. It’s cool that the special is earned after 3 attacks, but since you only face one enemy at a time and there isn’t anything else to do, it feels less like strategy and more like passing the time. Having so many abilities is also pretty cool, but because of the above, some of them don’t really seem useful. I did make sure I tried all of them though, because they were cool in design at least, I guess I just wish there was more of a necessity to drive me to use them in specific situations. Small gripes aside though, a concise, well crafted game from some talented people. Those effects! Come on.  Debate Simulator 2016 I remember reading the Discord when you asked about that Seinfeld but now I can’t find or remember who made it in the first place. It’s still great and automatically helps make this game more fun. Not that it needed it. I took screenshots of almost every answer I gave, because it was fun. Not being an improv person basically doing very slow-form improv trying to guess what keywords or whatever will score points is a good time. I also had my brother with me to make suggestions and laugh at my ridiculous idiot garbage. I got a clean blue slate across the nation. It probably isn’t that hard to get, but I’m pleased with it. I’m not American. Hilary is a blue, right? If not, well gently caress me, haha. I lost the whole loving country, didn’t I? It was a short jam but I would have loved a little polish. Some short boops or bwahs as the text crawls out, some nice background music. Fuckin dogs eh, just always got my back and yet they never responded to when I tried to cater to them. That’s because they don’t need it. Loyalty and dignity. (It's not necessary but I will mention I do not feel this way about real dogs.) The questions were funny, and the opponent’s responses were appropriately useless. I tried my best and had fun doing it. It was brave of you to try something so outside of the norm for such a short jam. Kudos and good job Jo. Also kudos to the artist who posted in the thread earlier   Trying to feel around for buzzwords makes me type like an utter psychopath, holy moly. The Incredible Story of Pizza In case you didn’t know, China invented pizza. Wait, wrong thread, sorry. Bad joke. The randomly generated levels is a cool idea, but a number of them lack density (and often roads) because of the space taken up by the water and/or hills. I know the road doesn’t really matter, but … I want roads if I get the option. For theme adherence I think it may have been better to just set it in like, ancient pizza times (???) and yet still have a scooter. It would certainly be dumb, but you’d still retain the mechanics and fun aspects of the game. You could even replace the audio of the scooter motor with feet slapping sounds ooooh… now I’m just getting myself excited. Speaking of which, making the pizzas is fun. It’s silly, and you can make stupid Football shaped face-pizzas. I’m all in on that. The mechanics of the pizza manipulation were satisfying and felt intuitive after I read the UI which was a tad clunky. The scooter did not handle well, which I was pretty okay with to be honest. The one thing that maybe should be fixed is that when it sets itself right-side-up, it can do it upside down. I definitely took a screenshot of that. I also tried to use the mountains as sick jump ramps which kinda worked. Overall it’s a nice little experience with fun mechanics that get a little bogged down by the packaging.   Super Gaelic Dodgeball Guess what? Shoehead’s game looks great. Who could have predicted? I’m particularly fond of the trailing run effect. I’m a little disappointed there wasn’t any music. The sounds that exist are nice, however, so that’s a consolation. I managed to run into a couple little bugs that you posted about before, but nothing significant. It’s a juicy game with plenty of silly little moments that caused several awkward “HAW”s to fly through the air. The AI isn’t great, it isn’t bad though by any means, it’s just a little slow and plodding. Sometimes this works out and it seems like the Vikings are trying to set up some strategy only to throw the ball and manage to hit everyone on their own team at least once. Other times it just serves as a 3-5 second break in the excitement. The game I think defaults to 10 minutes per match, which I presumed on starting it would be like, a Nintendo 10 minutes or something where every second is actually half a second. It got a little thin by the end of that. That being said, I think this could really be expanded upon. Some more advanced AI, music and most importantly two-player functionality could make this a sellable (not a word, I’m sorry) product maybe. It’s beautiful, it has a lot of the foundation of a bigger game, it’s just lacking a little depth, but that could be fixed. It was a fun and slightly chaotic 10 minutes. Also, the use of the theme was interesting. My brother was telling me about it while I played but I don't remember what he said. I was playing a video game. 
Giggs fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 06:05
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Giggs posted:Glory Simulator 480 BC Thanks for the feedback! We didn't quite make it to having a ton of story in the game, so we  " Most of the waves were made with this logic, but thinking about it now it probably would have been better to do that and then just stack tons of units for tons of points. All this stuff is pretty easily tweakable, so I may go back and adjust (we're also missing some enemy types that we have the art for, so I want to add those).It was also our first foray into Unreal Engine, so there was much learning to be had. I'll definitely be putting up a post mortem for this one.
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Jan 25, 2018 07:00
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Thermal Anomaly posted:it could use some text or an indicator for which controls require a button press or a button hold. The button prompts are actually different between tap and hold, but it somehow never occurred to me that I could put the words "tap" and "hold" in plain text next to those prompts. My experience was that people always figured it out anyway, but it really should be obvious. I guess I just felt that there was no middle ground between a full-on text pop-up and the simplistic button prompts you see now. I'm thinkin' about gettin' a patch for the game out pretty soon that'll include that and some other small adjustments. At any rate, I'm glad you enjoyed it enough to give it a second go-through! I personally think the game's at its best when you're going for all gold in Hard, but I'm really happy that it can support a variety of playstyles other than that.
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Jan 25, 2018 07:16
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Doom Goon posted:
Thanks. I agree the missiles are annoying, in hindsight I should have had two colliders for them, since they're either difficult to hit or they collide with you too early. It probably wasn't the best idea to have them constantly accelerate either. I'll see if I can get a cutscene skip button to work without breaking everything for the public build. Unity's Timeline feature is very new and has serious issues, like crashes if you stop the game during a cutscene in the editor, or applying changes made in the timeline to the actual scene sometimes. Giggs posted:
The ratio is meant to be 4:3 because for a portrait shaped playfield, 16:9 had even more wasted space. Also 4:3 because it's ye olde ratio. It was actually me playing Randall. The bitcrushing is definitely inconsistent. I started off with extreme bitcrushing like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJNfMqEK7VI for the in-game power-ups and death v/o, but when I came to the cutscenes, it became a garbled mess, and a waste of Xibanya's and Mihai's excellent performances so I toned down the quantization. As for Randall, I just googled "Scottish WW1 Fighter Aces", there weren't many, and when I saw he had been court-martialled and dismissed, then emigrated to Dominica and would have been there in 1937, it all clicked. It's not entirely clear what he was court-martialled for (the records are no longer sealed, but they aren't publicly available on the web), so a cocaine habit seemed reasonable for this fictionalized version.
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Jan 25, 2018 13:37
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Awesome, thanks for that! And here's the next batch! I've only got a couple here that I've played and haven't written anything up yet, so if there are any stragglers please post about your game so I can prioritize it! Thermal Anomaly posted:Clock Jammers by Team Chryssalid Shoehead posted:Super Gaelic Dodgeball by Team Park World EntranceJew posted:Oligocene Snapshot by Beeconomic Advisors ALFbrot posted:Crazy Motorcade by FloTeam  I can't wait to see this one pop up on the stream and hope you get someone good! And a really nice down-to-earth postmortem, too!Unbelievably White posted:I might edit some gifs into this post later, after I get some sleep. Doom Goon fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 16:59
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Clock Jammers First of all, I love these types of turn-based strategy games. I also hate them. I think that’s the only reasonable configuration someone can have for this genre without being just apathetic or fully against it. There’s a lot of work put into this game for such a short jam, it’s impressive how much stuff there is. When I started playing, I was playing what was public on the day of submission, I found some bugs, so I remembered that you had posted a version with some bugfixes. Unfortunately the most common bug of enemies firing through walls still happened. I once got the benefit of this bug, and I’m not talking about what can be understood as shooting around the corner while up against it or whatever, just like straight through. Also, on top of the Pyramid, there’s an enemy that can’t move and can’t be hit except by the rocket launcher, but because of the wall-banging bug he can sometimes hit you if you’re close enough. I didn’t know I had to equip earned upgrades (Rocket Launcher / Pulse Laser). I think it’s because the sprites are so small that I didn’t notice when they popped under the characters when I unlocked them. There’s so much in this game, and each mission takes so long. For a jam game, that's kind of a knock against it, but for a game that you want to maybe expand, it isn't. I think even still though maybe the missions could be more concise. I keep mentioning bugs (there’s a bug with the DOOMSTATION mission text where the second line of the objective writes on top of the first) not because I’m trying to poo poo on your work, but because A) If fixed, this game will be elevated B) I want it to be elevated, and C) The amount of content in this game is great and only because of that are there so many tiny little things that can go wrong. I’ve been playing this game for over an hour. A jam game. Christ. I have to move on or I’ll never finish giving feedback to all the teams. The music is really nice, though the lack of consistency with other sound effects is unfortunate. If the music is all made in Famitracker, I’d suggest using it for the sound effects too. The UI and stuff, ignoring little bugs, is really nice and works well. I was pleasantly surprised when after finally beating the first mission that my level-ups stacked. The spaceship mission (Are you kidding me, there’s a spaceship mission, come on) could really benefit from a minimap. It’s got so much in it that I just don’t have time to keep playing it right now. I’m assuming the different maps lead to some narrative being completed, though I’m confused as to why the second mission sort of implies being the final mission in the description. Good music, good visuals (though a little small), nice systems/mechanics (with a few bugs), and way too much game to get through. It doesn’t feel like a jam game. Congrats. I have to stop now. I just beat the spaceship mission and then there’s a second part why are you doing this to me. Thank god it saves. I have to take a break from playing any games for a bit now.   
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Jan 25, 2018 19:39
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I played a few games. I only spent a couple of minutes on each so this will be very shallow reviews. 1937 A decent shmup, but the enemy spawns seem either random or could be telegraphed better. I started the game almost on top of a plane and sometimes when flying around the edges dodging something else a plane would enter from the side and kill me. Also I kinda wish the cutscenes could be skipped. The game crashed when I closed it for some reason. Hyperturbo Great Emu War 1932 This is my favorite game so far. Quick and easy to get into and it feels good to play. Harry Houdini and the Mummified Meanies It's a nice looking game and it felt alright to play. I didn't feel like there were much of a challenge to it though and many of the enemies seemed to just be decorations rather than obstacles. It was short enough that I beat it though, and I think there could be a better progression of challenge to the levels, as is they all seem pretty samey. A Machine to End War This games seems good but I got stuck in a room I think. I killed all the enemies but no transition thing appeared.. maybe it was the end?  Night of the surfing dead I like this and it's got probably my favorite art this jam, but I think it could use better feedback on when you take damage and lose lives. CLock Jammers This game seems -very- cool and ambitious (especially for a 2 week jam game). The first stage is way too long and difficult however for an introductory stage. I thought there would be 4-5 enemies but then there's a whole other screen to the right with a bunch more.
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Jan 25, 2018 22:30
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Yay, someone liked the game, thanks! I had a blast working on this, shoutout to Thermal Anomaly for the game idea + stellar programming (I was able to follow his uncommented code, tweak it, fix bugs and implement stuff relating to levels/music/balancing despite having never worked with MonoGame before) and MShadowy for adorable sprite work. In retrospect we probably could have gone with a little more polish and a little less content. We're aware of most of what you pointed out but we had probably overscoped this a bit so we kept adding content and features up until 3 hours before submission (when the bug hunting started) so we're just happy there are not more bugs. The plan was to have a roguelike style game loop where you play through the historical levels (you got one try on each) and if you completed them all the DOOMSTATION level (+Asteroid spaceship level before it) would unlock. If you didn't complete all levels you would get a bad ending (Oh no you failed the world and now XXX happened) depending on which missions you failed, and you got to start over again, but with your characters a bit more leveled up. We had to cut that part and just go with a level select where you could play all the stages in no particular order. We currently have some tweaks in the works that haven't made it to a build yet (Destructible walls!), and some art assets (customizable player sprites, level +UI icons) that aren't implemented, we'll see what we can do about it!
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Jan 25, 2018 22:36
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Back with a few more. Molasses! I found the writing to be nice and short and sweet. It was funny, unforced and had plenty of good little jokes, including the sponge joke posted earlier in Discord or in here. It’s good stuff. The mechanics of the game work together nicely, considering there’s a sense of panic and danger with trying to deal with the mono, di, tri, tetra, penta and I think even a hexamino. I came up with what is probably a common strategy of trying to buy the people time to get closer together then closing them in when it was easier. It worked pretty well but once or twice a person would ruin my perfect run. The talking noises, the artstyle, the communication to the player through visual language were all great. Some music during the game would have been nice. I’m not familiar with TIC-80 but I’m guessing there’s some limitation in regards to playing music and sound effects together like old consoles. Or not. I don’t know. It was cool though. A relatively simple puzzle game without set solutions, and a nice connection to the theme makes this game feel really very consistent and cogent in its design. Well done, alligator.  Unidentified Falling Objects I read someone say something about this game earlier in the thread or on Discord, and I was excited to find out what it was like. This is really a tight little package. It’s got the most minimalistic controls, most intuitive mechanic, a tie-in to the theme, and some really nice background music. The visuals are nice and clean, though flat rectangles with textures will always weird me out, even though it’s obviously necessary for this game. I spent so much time just having fun with this. Infinite mode is a great idea, but there’s a little lack of stability, leading to my only complaint of the game. Well, besides more levels. The blocks aren’t perfectly stable, and this inconsistency adds up with the more blocks that are placed. A couple times I had the nice solid foundations for a very high score in infinite mode but inexplicably the tower would slowly jitter and rumble until it got enough momentum to fall forwards or backwards. It requires some careful placement and excellent timing (dropping blocks so that they fell and were effectively touching was so drat satisfying), but it feels like if you’re even the teensiest non-solid then it’ll get you in no time. Also there’s no reason not to restart if something doesn’t go as perfectly as you want. The system for handling missed blocks also isn’t great, leading to the fatalism of restarting as soon as you make a mistake Really fun, really satisfying, really simple. I played infinite mode for about 20 minutes, then went back and tried the first level, got perfect on all six blocks and took the top of the leaderboards. Heck yeah, progress.    Football Wars This game looks nice and clean, the mechanics are simply designed and that’s all great. There aren’t any problems with the audio, it’s all pretty simply put together and does what audio does. Unfortunately it’s very frustrating. The player character slides far too long and so I always felt I was fighting against the game to play it. I managed to quickly learn how to aim the shots, however that is probably because A) I’m a smarty pants and B) I have experience with games that use a similar mechanic where nothing is conveyed, but momentum and the directional keys you’re holding vaguely aim your shot. One thing I would be remiss not to mention is that dying is very easy, and because there’s no health items the game only goes from a little frustrating to very-much-more frustrating. The final quarter, after scoring the first goal, becomes just relentlessly punishing. All that being said, for your first game, first jam and all solo, this is a really nice product. The frustrating bits aren’t mechanical or design issues, they’re secondary issues that can be easily fixed. I swore at my monitor several times, and died so many times that I got pretty impatient with the countdown timer after restarting. The idea is good though. You picked a nice, obscure (for anyone not from South America, at least, probably?) historical event and built a game around it that can be pretty fun with a few more tweaks. I’d be interested in seeing you participate in the upcoming jams of the year, I think you’ll be making good-rear end games pretty quickly.  Glacier Hero I’ve always loved Guitar Hero despite never owning it and only playing it I think once in my life. Back in yesteryear however, there was a game called Frets on Fire which I played to death with my beige-rear end keyboard. We don’t get many rhythm games in jams, least of all during the Little Jams because of their requisite math/audio sync-ing and finnick-y nature. For the most part, Glacier Hero hits the mark. Some small issues pop up though. The placement of objects to hit seems random, to the point where sometimes you’ll get 3 things spawning which need to be hit within a tiny fraction of a second, difficult especially when you’re at speed. It also doesn’t seem to hit through more than one object, which makes sense for a rhythm game, but leads to instances where one track has two objects immediately after one another where it’s nearly impossible to hit both. The objects also don’t seem to be sync’d to the music, which for me being a thoroughly nerdy rhythm game purist led to trying to sync it up on anyway. I got a C rank on my first playthrough, but subsequent games all ended with S’s because like I said before, I really like this type of game. The game also has a definite look to it. It has style. I really enjoyed the little miniatures and the effect of the ice. I wasn’t super into the music. It sounded a little messy in terms of composition, but you don’t need to look any further to find someone who has had considerable trouble composing good-rear end music in a short jam. Another small complaint is that the only way to know when you’ll hit a target during the game is through trial and error, getting a feel for the spacing. The lack of keyboard icons also can lead to those fraction-of-a-second lapses in judgment that causes a mess up when you’re still getting into it. It’s a little short, and a little rough around the edges, but the core concept is fun and simple and can be cleaned up pretty nicely I think.  
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Jan 25, 2018 22:43
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Giggs posted:Back with a few more. .Also now I know the word "hexamino".
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Jan 26, 2018 00:50
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Giggs posted:Unidentified Falling Objects Hey, thank you so much for the kind words! I'm the main programmer. This is our fourth awfuljam, but the first time I thought to maybe take a look at the thread. Whoops. I have an SA account from way back. I had quite the mental struggle with the physics in the infinite level. On one hand, you're right, it feels bad to make what feels like a solid base which then comes tumbling down because ~PHYSICS~, but that's also how physics actually work. Like, if I stack a bunch of blocks in real life it would probably act like that? I know that's not an excuse, exactly, because we are game designers so gently caress real life. I do do some tweaks to the blocks. For instance, when they hit the ground and become "inactive", they triple in mass. This tended to make things less bouncy. But I was leery to screw with the physics too much because the physics sometimes do awesome silly things like having blocks haphazardly tumble off the edge and pounding loose blocks in with other blocks. I spent hours messing with friction levels on blocks, but it didn't have a huge effect in my eyes. I also played with Unity's physics Sleep Threshold value. This makes it so the blocks on the bottom of the towers are ignored in physics calculations because they're low energy. Theoretically this could make it a little more stable? But I was finding things would still tip over but in a much more unnatural-looking way. At the end of the day I witnessed my testers having fun with what we had... And I was a little afraid of making a "sky's the limit" rule set such that it was UNLOSEABLE either and people just got bored. This aspect in general is probably my least favorite part of game design: tweaking tiny variables to nebulous ends for hours as you slowly go crazier and crazier. I'm curious if anyone reading this wants to give our game a shot and let me know if any tricky, clever ideas come to mind. Ultimately, I'm happy with how the physics turned out in the other non-infinite levels, but I bet there's a good/better solution here. I also tend to play all of the jam games, so I'll post feedback in this thread in the coming days as well. Good jamming, all! Edit: maybe an invisible plane at height (last_block_dropped.position.y - X) at which I say everything under here is perfectly still? I dunno. whatPanache fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Jan 26, 2018 |
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Jan 26, 2018 04:25
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netcat posted:A Machine to End War Thanks for playing, sorry about the bugs. This updated version has fixes for the crash bug and can't exit the room bug: https://goo.gl/gwcbja
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Jan 26, 2018 04:52
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Next batch!Ultigonio posted:Unearth by Will B.  Absolutely love this one! Puzzle design that made me feel both smart and stupid at the same time. A very cute story with very cozy graphics. Music tracks that really build off each other well. Difficulty levels that try to incorporate different playing styles (and an absolutely brutal unlockable one). There's even an alternate ending you can get in any mode (though I'm a little mad it took a perfect gold run away. It was a normal mode run anyway)! Also, some minor criticisms, too much but that's a good thing because I certainly put my time into it: Certain movements seemed slippery, in particular sliding on walls and the nudging assistance (like when you fall holding a button to try and enter a tile). Speed seemed a bit fast at times, particularly when having to time enemies on higher difficulties, so much so occasionally I wondered if the game originally was in half speed. Even though it shows the buttons it's not obvious you have to hold down for that long for the charge jump to work (nope, not hearing it. Also weirdly it's a mechanic and you only show the tutorial guy for the other one, the walljump), and the charge jump is pretty useless (in fact, you don't want to use it if you can walljump instead. I guess it could be an easy/costly mechanic to bypass having to do that but I'm still struggling to think of where it would be used). There was a funny point where I was like, "I need to only move a pixel or two, but what am I supposed to do? Crouch and press forward?" But overall: Really great job, a must-play in my opinion! I mean, in my opinion a lot of these are, but we'll just ignore that. megane posted:A Machine to End War by Wardenclyffe Laboratory Technicians (No image, but I did get to the end here thanks to the new version!) Giggs posted:I’ve been playing this game for over an hour. A jam game. Christ. I have to move on or I’ll never finish giving feedback to all the teams. I'm counting these ones: Alligator posted:Molasses! by alligator whatPanache posted:Unidentified Falling Objects! by Some Brothers Studio  really depends on the player. It's simple but I liked it, very calming graphics and music. Bonus points for a leaderboard although nobody's beating Masti and Giggs! There did seem to be a sound/track switching bug that pops up occasionally but I only know that because, um, someone was resetting a lot. Oh, I would like to hear why the score goes up before it's complete instead of after it settles? Is it because it's more instantly pleasing (in a Skinner box way, numbers and ranks)? Did you experiment with any ways with kind of "reading" the final shape (wherever it is) or was it always the zone idea?I think that's it for thread posters! I still haven't decided if I'll go through by submission date or randomly, but hopefully I can keep it up!
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Jan 26, 2018 16:58
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Doom Goon posted:Thank you! Do you have a video of a good run? I always like seeing what I failed to pick up in these games. I dont, but theres nothing stopping me from making one. I can survive the five minutes reasonably consistently, so if I get a chance I'll try and record something and put it up.
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Jan 26, 2018 17:44
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Thanks to Giggs and Doom Goon for your feedback on Clock Jammers! I've updated our game jam page with a post-mortem, and I hope to have an updated version of the game ready before the gong show with some more improvements and bug fixes. I should note that units firing through adjacent obstacles is not a bug - I was trying to imitate how units in XCOM will peek above or around nearby cover while firing. I think this needs to be made more clear by an animation where units step halfway into an adjacent tile while firing and then step back, also I need to update the weapon range indicators to reflect this graphically and do an overhaul of targeting in general. Whew, still got a lot of work ahead of me but I'm glad ya'll noticed how much effort and content we put into our jam entry!
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Jan 26, 2018 19:20
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Giggs posted:...went back and tried the first level, got perfect on all six blocks and took the top of the leaderboards. This travesty has been rectified. (As someone who's participated in jams in the past, seeing reviews from people in the thread is one of the best parts, thank you + everyone else for your reviews) (even though I already thanked you on discord I'm doing it here again because it's really cool and important)
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Jan 26, 2018 21:53
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Doom Goon posted:Oh, I would like to hear why the score goes up before it's complete instead of after it settles? Is it because it's more instantly pleasing (in a Skinner box way, numbers and ranks)? Did you experiment with any ways with kind of "reading" the final shape (wherever it is) or was it always the zone idea? Yeah, skinner box way. I had a sort of "DDR arrows are satisfying to land + confirmation sounds" thought. I also wanted to let things deteriorate without feeling too too screwed over. The zones aren't perfect, though. There can be some weirdness because it essentially looks for the closest zone where distance is measured is center to center. Okay, I have thoughts and feelings too I would like to share feedback! I'm not savvy enough to know who the thread posters are so this will just be shotgun-style. Fenrir I really like what you were going for! Like, Destroy All Humans was a cool thing. Causing as much destruction as possible. My biggest complaint with your final product would have to be the controls. Moving with WASD and then firing damage breath with F was very awkward. Maybe this would have been better if I was playing on a gamepad. As is, I think left click could have been a good compromise too. Maybe a little more juice with the destroying-stuff aspect, as well. Explosions and all that fun stuff. Or terrified townspeople running around, ha. 1937 I thought this was totally awesome. The graphics and crackly audio worked really well for me, personally. The story had me actually laugh out loud once or twice, and the voice acting was on point. I really liked the way you made game overs impossible. One of my jam game pet peeves is games that are too hard to see the end of. Plus it would be doubly disappointing with your great story. Plus I suck so I died a ton. Rip. Try Something New I loved the aesthetic (retro!) and navigation (dungeon crawl or dwarf fortress style!) and concept (I love selling poo poo!) and music (that sales theme is on point. sounds like an old rock song but I can't put my finger on it), but skimming the thread I think I have the same main complaint as other people mentioned. I was pressing Esc to get back to the store menu and exiting the game over and over. I did this like three times before I was sad about my lost progress and quit. Too many years of Dwarf Fortress, I think. Glory Simulator I liked the aesthetic and concept. I liked how the shields essentially gave your characters an extra life. I like how the more "life" you lose the weaker your group gets. But I was not a huge fan of the hitboxes for the spears and arrows. You know how bullet hell games give your ship a tiny-rear end hitbox that doesn't necessarily reflect your whole model? I think this game would have benefited from a more lenient hitbox like that. I would be trying to weave in between arrows like a badass and getting punished to hell. Ditto for the spears you fire. They always felt a hair too small to me, and I had to fire more than once at some of the enemies to make sure they were dead. Maybe I'm just a baby who needs to be coddled by my videogames. Great Emu War Amazing graphics, holy crap. The blood splatters are so great. I love how they slowly dry too. I think I played the Emu too aggressive, though, since I would get murdered by the soldiers pretty quick. Tunnel vision. I realize that if you back off they lose sight of you pretty quick but I just wanted more blood. Y2Kthulu So polished both in presentation and game feel, really nice job. Sweet voice acting. I liked the battle system, but I think it could have done with a touch more depth. Most of the fights it felt like you didn't have to plan super hard, and I never died (I think). I was also disappointed by the last boss. I was gearing up for an epic final battle where I would have to use all the items, but then you just win in one hit with the special item you get and it's suddenly over. I'm guessing this may have been a time constraint? In a sense it felt just like a JRPG in that the team ran out of time at the end. I'll have more later probably.
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Jan 26, 2018 23:52
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Only a couple from me tonight. USX-1944 This game is very authentic to its style of an NES action platformer. Which is both good and slightly-less-good. The enemies are a little drab, which works fine for theme and design, and the main character is appropriately contrasty and feels like a special character which is cool. The sliding sprite is nice, though a little effort in flashing the dash-shadows would have helped make it feel dramatically more dynamic and speedy. I was playing with Z, X, and C for a while then I clued into the fact that C is unnecessary and it made playing the game easier. I remember reading about a fabled long-jump, I saw it described in the controls menu, but then I forgot what I saw and there’s no way to see it during the game. That should be rectified. You did the hard work of a pause menu with two options, a third which jogs your memory of abilities would be cool. I enjoyed the background, though it was a bit distracting and made movement feel weird during actual play sometimes. It reminded me of a stage from Megaman 3, I don’t remember which, but it can make moving at normal speed feel like you’re moving slower due to relativism. Hi, I’m Mr. Einstein. I tried doing long-jumps by quickly tapping C -> Z -> X which I couldn’t get for a while. I did later though, and used it exclusively. It could be a bit more flexible in terms of timing. I think there’s a significant improvement to make to the attack and it’s this: make the attack bounding box cover the player’s sprite. I frequently got hit, ended up standing in the same space as an enemy, swung and missed, which felt more like punishment than anything. Also, the jump attack will not hit enemies on a ledge if you’re right up against it and jumping. One my screenshots is related to this. That should probably be a hit. The animation sprite even covers the enemy for a handful of frames. Getting knocked back on hits is not something I have any particular fondness for. I get if people do, but when I was growing up and desperately trying to murder Dr. Wily in Megaman 3, each time I got knocked back I could feel my body tensing and leaning towards the direction of safety and progress. I’ve never played the Castlevania series so I can’t even imagine what emotional scars that would bring up. I’m not sure how I feel about the end boss. On the one hand, I died 4 or 5 times and that feels like a challenge, but on the other hand, I died 4 or 5 times and that feels like a lot. I think it’s like 5 hits from full health to death? I would suggest either lengthening the player’s invulnerability time or decreasing the damage from the boss to allow for 7 or so hits, especially considering some of its attacks are very quick and far reaching. It’s movement speed is also a little high considering the reach of the player’s attack. That’s a lot of writing. Mostly just a bunch of tiny issues I had, which is to say that I enjoyed it and wanted the finnicky little things to be better because I thought it is good at its core. The level design is good and has those staples of “Use the poo poo you learned, dummo” type layouts that help express or force progress in the player’s mind. The audio is all nicely fitting and appropriate both in terms of volume and style. I’m impressed with your final boss’ behaviour. I’m not sure if I’d say it’s “complex” but it has variety and also just works. A solo jam is always a challenge, especially in these shorter winter jams, so that your game is so foundationally sound is an accomplishment, I would say. I wanted to double check if you’d submitted to the jams before and realized you made Welcome Treasureman last Big Awful Jam and so I’ll just say what I must have said when I reviewed that, “You’re a crazy person and good at it” so keep it up!  This doesn't seem right:  SENSITIVE INFORMATION REDACTED  A History of Videogames Reading the description gave me flashbacks to the worst presentation ever given, which was by me, on the history of animation when I was 12. It was worse than you could imagine. The game icon is very good. I had a somewhat similar idea during the first few days of the jam, but your interpretation of it is so much smarter and better than what I had in mind. This is a cool concept and execution. My first playthrough was just random choices, always a wrong one, of course. The only one I lost was the first with the spaceship. After that I went and tried everything. Firstly, the spaceship is best. Doesn’t matter where or what, it just is. My favourite was the last spaceship level. Mario unfortunately feels so slippery. Mario is real heavy and slidey. Quel maiale scivoloso ama l'olio d'oliva. It’s unfortunate because I utterly failed the second Mario part on my first go-round. Google is trying to correct that last sentence with “Mario party”. gently caress. The lack of music in some of the stages might make sense, I’m not super familiar with the older stuff, but it would have been nice to hear some mashups even, perhaps, or just to have something in the background. The story is relatable (as mentioned above) and Partario reeks of that all too familiar confidence and awkward thought processes. I loved the attention to detail with the teacher. Very appropriate. I played through again to specifically do the “right” thing but after completing everything the ending was the same. It makes sense, but a little something different would have been nice. Also I'm including a screenshot of a spot where pacman got stuck. What audio was in there was good, the concept is fun and fun to explore, Pong can piss right off, and I like spaceships.    Mastigophoran posted:This travesty has been rectified. 
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Jan 27, 2018 03:00
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