Synnah

The game is finally finished! Download on Itch.io! Original Post: Welcome to "Veggie" Panino's deli! You're the new kitchen hand and it's your first day on the job. But don't worry! Veggie's here to give you pointers and explain how to assemble the perfect "paninis". And if things get a weird, well, try not to worry about it too much. Just keep making "paninis"! This title triggered an idea for a game almost immediately, and I thought it would be too dumb to flesh out into a full game until I thought about it some more, and got really excited about it. Basically it's a 3D block puzzle, where you must fit a selection of vegetables together on a panini base without gaps, and as you progress things will get weirder and weirder. I have hard time communicating exactly how it will play, but hopefully it will make sense once I've got a basic prototype running. I'm going to break from my tradition of spending the first week of the jam entirely on modelling and rigging, and start with the game systems. The biggest problems I'm going to have to solve are: Figuring out where to place things; you'll click on the vegetable you want to place, and then when you move the mouse over the panini a ghost image will show you where the vegetable will end up. I'm going to need to do screen-space raycasts to find the spot on the panini that is currently underneath the mouse, and then work out where on a grid that maps to. I imagine this will be straighforward enough when it's just the panini base, but it gets more complicated when there are vegetables on there. Making a system for triggering various weird effects, and causing these to trigger at specific points in the levels. I think this should be easy enough, and I've got ideas for how to solve it already.

Hello! So I was initially planning to sit this one out to work on some other projects, but given that it's going to be the final Wizard Jam, that's not really an option! I was working (not particularly hard) on a jam game in Love2D over Christmas, but that never really went anywhere; I did at least make a nice faux-3D tube out of circles, lines and polygons, that looks something a bit like this: It was going to be a puzzle/platformer where you moved around the tube, and maybe I'll finish it off at some point. Anyway, that's irrelevant! I didn't have anything that I really wanted to work on for this Wizard Jam; I toyed with the idea of making The Octopus in My Mind, which I've had a vague design for (by which I mean I wanted to apply ragdoll physics to an octopus) for a while, but after scouring the episode titles, I landed on Space Boss: The Lord of Space. My plan is to make a procedurally-generated boss-rush shooter in the style of Warning Forever. I'm forgoing PICO-8 and Love2D in favour of picking up UE4 again, though, so I want to make it full 3D (although think of it like a spherical plane surrounding the boss, and you can move forward or back, which expands or contracts the sphere, if that makes sense. Mostly I just want to mess around with proc-gen stuff, and see if I can make a nice system for creating articulated robot ships from lots of component parts. I'm not really expecting to finish anything (as evidenced by my tube, I've not been particularly motivated recently), but I might at least make something cool.

I have a lot of fond memories of the first Pause Screen From Battletoads; it was an early indicator of the kind of cool, weird, unique stuff that could come from Wizard Jam! I just played through the sequel, and I really enjoyed it. It was every bit as surprising and unexpected as the original; I have a few thoughts about the game that are largely inspired by having watched all of Petscop (and a series of analysis videos) recently. I don't think there's going to be anything particularly spoiler-y, but I'll hide them just in case: Just some thoughts, anyway! Thanks for making both of the Pause Screen From Battletoads games!

Ahhh! Excellent! I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for someone to make a Dot Gobbler/Katamari mashup. But yes, I don't mind you stealing 'Do You Believe' at all! I mean, I just stole it from Cher.

EDIT: The game is finally finished! PICO-8 BBS / itch.io Original Post:

Okay, I don't know who's still paying attention to this, but I finished the game! Almost 6 months after starting it. Have a look at this: PICO-8 BBS / itch.io So, this obviously got away from me a bit. If I'm honest, I'm not really sure why it took so long; I think it's mostly because some other stuff came up, and after a certain point I figured it had already taken so long that there was no point in just rushing it out without getting all of the features in and fixing the bugs that had plagued me for most of the game's development! I didn't quite get all of the features in, because I wanted Dot Gobbler to have a jumping dash attack (and there's an animation frame in there for it, which isn't being used, and seems pretty wasteful given how precious spritesheet space is in PICO-8 [you get 128x128 pixels for all sprites and background tiles, and half of that is shared with the map]), but in the end I just ran out of space. That happened as I was implementing the enemy fireballs, so I had to start refactoring the code in order to allow them to collide with the scenery and the player. It's tough to fit a game into 15K! So yeah, give it a try and let me know what you think!

Hello, yes, I'm still working on this! I was away for an extended weekend, which was particularly bad timing, but I've been frantically cramming features in since I got back. Mostly I've added support for other objects (socks, enemies, sock-changing stations). Here are some enemies, which don't currently do anything except play the walking animation: I haven't touched up their sprites yet, so they look a bit pants, but I wanted to see what the animation looked like. I've also fixed the issue where Dot Gobbler is being drawn underneath the ghosts, so that's good. Today I mostly finished implementing the sock-changing stations, so you can now walk up to them and press the X button to bring up the following screen: It shows which socks you currently have equipped, but I still need to allow you to change between feet and select different socks, and then have the socks impact on your movement. I don't think any of that will take too long. My concern is that there are still movement and collision bugs when you go over the standard movement speed, and I feel like it'll take me a while to fix them. I think all I can really do is implement the systems, and then hope I'll have time to fix the bugs before I release the Jam version on Saturday (I'm definitely going to have to work on it after the initial submission, because I do want to polish it, and upload it to the PICO-8 site). Namco did actually make a Pac-Man platformer, 7 years before Sonic the Hedgehog, and it was... not really anything like it: I did initially consider making a Dot Gobbler platformer a knock-off of Pac-Land, but then I remembered that it wasn't very good, so I decided to make it a knock-off of Sonic the Hedgehog instead (I still need to implement rolling).

Ah man, sorry about the trypophobia, that didn't occur to me at all! Let me know if there's still anything that's a bit weird, and I can change it. I like it a lot! There's the initial hump of 'how do I apply the way I make games in UE4 to this', but I spent some time looking at other people's code (One of the example games, Jelpi, was pretty useful for general platformer and collision stuff, and the fact that you can just look at the code of any game that was uploaded to the PICO-8 site means it's really easy to get ideas) and kind of built up a framework for doing basic stuff that it was quite easy to do more complicated stuff on top of (though maybe I wouldn't call the slope handling 'quite easy'). In general, I'm having fun thinking about the limitations, and being creative with ways to work around them. I'm super glad CPU cycles aren't one of the limitations, though, because I am NOT being efficient with my code!

Okay, big update! I didn't make amazing progress over the weekend (there are still so many systems that I need to implement), but I did a lot of spriting, and I'm a lot closer a finished look. Here, check it: It occurs to me that there's a lot of brown in the tileset, but I think the background, and Dot Gobbler himself, do a decent job of balancing things out. I'm really happy with how the sprites turned out, though. While the scaled-down versions were pretty messy and indistinct, it was easy enough to pick out the features, and make them consistent across all frames. Outside of visual stuff, I implemented the start of a system for changing socks (Gobbler's sprite actually has green socks, but they get replaced with yellow by default); I do need an actual user interface for that, along with socks to actually collect, so maybe I'll work on that next. I also implemented the start of a system for rolling, which I'd also like to finish pretty soon. Both of these systems are relying on me to fix a collision issue I discovered when you got faster than the default speed, where Dot Gobbler will get stuck in walls, or walk inside slopes instead of on top of them. There's also a bug where he sometimes does a little hop on landing, which can really mess up your platforming. Not really sure why that's happening, but it's going to be fun* debugging it. *not fun

Thanks! Yeah, I'm going to go with a black outline, because he does get lost in it, and because Pico-8 has a fixed 16-colour palette I can't use a similar-but-different shade of yellow to make him stand out. It's easier to do the outline in code than to add it directly to the sprite, however, because the latter would essentially limit me to 14x14 pixels for the sprite, and I need all the pixels I can get!

Given how much I still have to do, I feel like I haven't made a huge deal of progress this week. I do have basically all of Dot Gobbler's animation frames rendered now (though not all of the actions that use them are in), and I spent today getting my parallax background in: I still need to add some hills in the background, and I kind of want to have the occasional boat on the water. I haven't quite decided on what I want the environment to be, though. My initial plan was for a forest in front of a lake, with hills in the background, but when I chose non-slip socks as the theme, it made sense to reduce Dot Gobbler's default level of friction, in order to make the grip socks more meaningful as an upgrade, and as such a snowy landscape makes more sense. I'll think about it some more. Next up, I might tackle more of Gobbler's movement options. I also need to put enemies in at some point...

It's been a fairly productive second day of the jam! I used the 3D Dot Gobbler as a basis for my sprites, and created a 6-frame run cycle to scale down and import into PICO-8: I scaled the arms and legs down slightly, to give the face more prominence. I'm just noticing that the upper legs are still way too long, though, so the lower legs are all squashed up. I'll fix that tomorrow. Anyway, I wanted to see what it looked like in-game, so I made a super-terrible placeholder tileset and slapped some stuff in place: It's not particularly impressive, but given that I didn't edit the sprites at all it doesn't look too bad. I downloaded Pyxel Edit, on atte's recommendation, which I'm hoping will make animation and tile editing a little easier. Next up, make sprites for the following: - Standing - Sliding - Crouching - Rolling - Jumping - Other vague stuff

This sounds rad, and the road generation looks cool so far. Good luck with implementing a weird mathematical procedure! I thought about doing that for the city generation in my procedural racing thing, but since I'd already written the code to generate the roads, it would have been more difficult to fit something around that than to just write my own thing that wasn't quite as good but did the job. Plus it was daunting!

Welcome to Wizard Jam, and to the forums! I'm glad that someone's just straight-up making a curling game.

Thanks! I don't know if Fire & Ice will be something I go back to after Wizard Jam, but it was a good way to learn how to do some 16-bit platformer stuff that you don't see in a lot of PICO-8 games. In particular, the parallax background is an attempt to recreate the parallaxing of Green Hill Zone/Emerald Hill Zone from the first two Sonic games, which should look pretty good once I've got actual tiles and horizontal movement in there.

Okay, I've finished my slope-handling code! There were a couple of individual bugs that had me stumped, and it turned out in both cases I was just doing something dumb (always pay attention to the order of mathematical operators, kids!). The code keeps track of the incline of the slope you're on, and uses that to affect your deceleration, making you slide more going downhill. This might need a bit more tweaking, but it feels okay at the moment. Anyway, with that done, I'll be moving onto my actual Wizard Jam game! I was hoping to implement variable jumps based on how long you hold the button (Current the jump height is fixed), but I can do that as part of the WJ game, and then back-port it to the Fire & Ice demake at the end. The first order of events will be creating a bunch of sprites from the Dot Gobbler 3D model, to get an idea of the number of animation frames I'll need. I'm hoping to keep it to around 16 frames, which is going to be tough; PICO-8 sprites are usually 8x8 pixels, but I'm going with a whopping 16x16, which means I have a quarter of the number of frames available to me, and I still have to worry about map tiles, background tiles (I'm planning some swanky parallax scrolling), and enemies.

This title stood out to me this year, and gave me an idea for a kind of physics racing game where you sit on a gamer chair and slide down a hill, collecting cans of Mountain Dew (for a boost) and Doritos (for points). Tactics don't really come into it, but whatever. Here's what I've managed today: As ever, I'm using UE4. The main thing I'm going to have to work out this time is how to have physics-based movement that isn't a total disaster; you can't really tell from the GIF, but the ramps are really flaky. If you're not going fast enough the chair will tip over as soon as it hits them (Something about moving from one piece of collision to another messes with the physics), and even if you are going fast enough there's no guarantee you'll land okay. I'm going to have to look up some vehicle example projects and get some ideas about how to constrain the physics so they behave in a way that makes the game playable. EDIT: v1.0 is out now! v1.1 is out now! DOWNLOAD IT HERE!

I've been chipping away at v1.1 over the past week; it's been pretty slow going, but I've uploaded a new build now. There were two main things I wanted to get in, the first being fixes for the various restart bugs; Nick encountered one of these when he played the game on the stream, but there were at least two more that were revealed as I tried to fix that one. One of them is definitely* fixed, but the other two still happen, just much less frequently than before. The second thing I wanted to get in was... ... this guy. Part of me was tempted to also add "Veggie" Panino and a Business Guy (I guess ridiculous physics characters are my Wizard Jam jam?), and now that I've laid the groundwork with Dot Gobbler it wouldn't be too hard, but I kind of just wanted to get this out. I'm not sure that I'll go back to developing it now either; I mean, it's funny, but it's not a very good game, and it would take quite a lot of effort to make it good (I'd have to model a horsebag for one thing...). So yeah, check it out here: https://giraffecat.itch.io/tactical-gamer-chair * don't hold me to this

Oh hey, I just finished this! I mean, I say 'finished', it's basically playable, but it's a bit messy. Nick just played it on the stream though, and it went down well, so I'm calling that a win. (Don't tell anyone the opponents have no AI, they just go in a straight line) Download it here: https://giraffecat.itch.io/tactical-gamer-chair

I'm still working on this, but it's kind of slow going. It seems unlikely that I'm going to have anything playable ready for the showcase weekend. Good news is that collisions and ramps are now working. You can also just about see a can of Mt. Dew in that GIF; I need to make that give you a speed boost, and then add Doritos as collectables. Oh, and maybe have a jostle meter so that the gamer falls off the chair if you collide too much. We'll see how much I can get done!

So I'm making progress with this, but not a lot of progress. Work's been busy and I'm not feeling particularly energetic. However, here's where I'm at at the moment: I put some placeholder buildings on the sides of the road to make it clear that you're sliding down a hill. I also modelled and rigged the gamer; I didn't feel like spending ages painting vertex weights, so I just made it an abstract dummy. Setting up the physics asset in UE4, while it's now possible, is still flaky, so it took longer than I'd have liked. Also, sitting a character on top of the chair meant that it would no longer slide downhill, so I abandoned the entirely physics-driven movement. What I've got at the moment is super simple; it just moves the chair forward along whatever surface is underneath it, so it can (sort of) deal with the ramps, until it goes over the end of them and the chair just snaps down to the road, causing the physics to freak out. I need to write some basic collision handling (You can just pass through the buildings at the moment), and then deal with ramps properly. I'm thinking I'll do something like set a flag whenever you're on a ramp, and whenever you're no longer on a ramp give you an arc based on how fast you were moving. Oh, that's another thing, there's no acceleration at the moment. Need to add that.

The good news is that Epic seem to have finally fixed whatever issue it was that was stopping skeletal meshes that I exported from Blender from working with the physics system, so now I can finally have a fully ragdolling Dot Gobbler. I may include him as a secret character, if I have time (along with a secret rideable horsebag). Stretch goals, though.

I have thought about having tricks! I could do some basic animations for the gamer in the chair (when I've made them) doing different poses, and then have them flopping all over the place with physics blends. I did also think about having grind rails, but why am I even saying that there's no way I'll be able to make grind rails

Daaamn, I've been meaning to do this for a while now! Really interested to see where you go with it. I've got quite a bit of experience with Alexa skills, so hit me up in the Slack if you want any pointers regarding creating the interaction model or the back-end code. I can't see there being any problem with getting the skill through the submissions process, but I would maybe allow for a couple of days..

Thanks for the kind words, everyone! Progress has been slow so far this week, but here are some progress GIFs: Animations for jumping, double jumping and gliding are in. Took me a while to iron out all of the kinks in the animation network, making sure that every state was accessible from all of the states it needed to be accessible from, which also meant fixing a couple of bugs in the movement code. Singing is in. Currently it's just a thing you turn on or off, but it will be tied to the actual gameplay mechanics... soon, hopefully. I've had less time to work on things than I'd have liked this week, and I've got social stuff tomorrow and on Saturday, so it's going to be a bit of a push to get everything in by the deadline, but I'll do what I can!