Synnah

Version 1.0 is now live! Okay, I've uploaded a build! Sorry it's so later, but after I got back from holiday I thought about pushing something out sooner rather than later, and then I decided I'd like to make a half-decent first impression, and patch in the nicer stuff. That being said, the list of 'nicer stuff' is a pretty long one... A Litany of Regrets The business guys don't have eyes or lips... I didn't get to make specific poses for the title screen. There's no collision around the runway, so if you don't take off, you can keep driving along the ground. No sound effects for the plane's engine, flying through a ring, or exploding. No particle effects for rings or explosions either. The Guy voices are mixed like crap. Need to either make these sound better, or rerecord them. Not enough scenery, or rings to fly through! The Guys do weird arm-popping when they flop about, and I never managed to fix this. I wanted to have a couple of different texture variations for both the plane and the Guys. Man, I even wanted to have other planes flying around, but that seems like something for a much later version. A raft of other stuff that I can't remember because I'm tired. Okay, I'm going to bed.

I'm still working on this! Since I got back from holiday I've been working on getting all of the major game systems in place, and it's shaping up. I'd hoped to have something worth uploading by the end of tomorrow, so I'll see how that goes. For the time being, here's the title screen, with T-poses filling in for actual poses which I may or may not have time to make:

I whole-heartedly endorse this product and/or service.

Disaster has struck! Obviously I didn't get the game into any decent state before leaving for my holiday, but I was planning to at least put something on Itch.io and update it after the deadline. I have a plane that you can fly around, and the business guys will fall off one by one if you fly too erratically, but there's little else there. However, when I tried to package the game this morning, Unreal gave me a fatal error, and because I hadn't even started packing at that point, I didn't have time to figure out what was going wrong. So, I'd planned to finish it off when I get back on the 7th anyway, but now you won't be able play it until then. Sorry about that! At the same time I'm kind of glad that people won't see my unfinished mess. If the last Wizard Jam taught me anything, it's that people who record videos of your game will often download the very first release as soon as it goes up and then not update it. So yeah, I'm looking forward to finishing up, and to playing everyone else's stuff!

I whole-heartedly approve of everything in this game. It's all canon.

That is a very good skeleton! Good luck UV-mapping it! It looks super-fiddly.

Oh my god! Also, I just realised that I forgot to put the eye texture in the Dot Gobbler .zip file! I've added that now. Are you just using Dot Gobbler as a placeholder for the real pope, though?

I didn't really get any gameplay done today. I thought I'd model the plane, expecting to spend a couple of hours on it, and I think it took me about 6 hours in total. It looks nice though! I got that in game, with the flying template (Didn't want to have to implement flight from scratch, although the template is pretty rudimentary and is going to require a number of tweaks), attached my Business Guys to it, and this happened: I've got two days left, and I still haven't built any of the systems! I think I may have to add a few things when I get back from holiday. Tomorrow I'm going to quickly model a runway and a ring, so that there's a start point and an end point, and something for you to fly through for points, and then I'm going to frantically try to implement a system for determining when the guys will fall off. Still need to do some work on the landscape too. I'd like to make a better texture, with proper heightmap stuff, but I'm afraid it's probably just going to be grass. I'll put some hills in, at least, and maybe some water.

This sounds great! Count me in.

This looks so good! I kind of miss the old Pixel-Breckon, but the new one's got a lot of character. He's going to say 'Pretty Good' at some point too, right?

I've had a couple of days of radio silence because I didn't get a huge amount done yesterday (I attached two guys to the lower wings, but they were intersecting with the upper wings, so their physics were freaking out). I spent today getting the ragdolls working properly, though, so this is where I am at the moment: Really happy with how that looks. I've got partial physics working, so the plan is for the guys to be in a fixed pose on the wings, but with varying levels of physics affecting their upper body, so that as you turn the plane, they should react in a convincing way. Should. Maybe I'll get some actual gameplay done tomorrow!

I really like the pseudo-3D (Is it pseudo-3D?) landscape! The way you can see the road drop away before you turn the corner is really nice, too. Looking forward to seeing where this goes!

I appear to have inadvertently made a Breakdancing Business Guy simulation. Guess that's what I'm making now.

So I've spent the last few days banging my head against Unreal Engine 4's physics assets, trying to get ragdolls working. I've come to the conclusion that the way I've learned to rig characters, although it works for animation, is fundamentally flawed for physics simulations: I used Mixamo to rig the model, and this is the result: Much better! The torso issue is weird, but I'm hoping that's just because Unreal didn't auto-generate a constraint to hold the two parts together. So yeah, I'm way behind at this point but now that I've got my Business Guy almost working, I can go about setting up the flight mechanics and the system to deal with keeping the guys on your wings.

On the subject of music, I was asking around in the WizJam Slack, and figured I'd post the request here too: Is there anyone who can play (and record themselves playing) saxophone, who would be capable of recording a kind of insane freestyle sax solo (I'm thinking along the lines of this, by Boom Boom Satellites [I know that's a trumpet!]) for the in-game music above? It's a long shot, but I thought I'd ask! Let me or Shoes know if you're interested.

Interim business guy update, before I start rigging him: No detail on the face yet, just wanted to get the basic colours down to see how it looked in Unreal. Skin is way too pale, obviously, but I'll sort that out. I ideally want to do three different skin tones, and a Business Gal mesh, for maximum inclusiveness, but that's going to depend on time constraints. And because women are too hard to model!

My business guy looked like this at one point: I've tidied him up considerably, but Dibs liked this, so this is my update for today. Boy, I'd forgotten how long it takes to model, texture and rig a full character. What was I thinking? On the plus side, I'm getting a little help with the systems stuff from my friend Jamie, who I imagine will check into the thread at some point.

May as well post my first day's progress. Not a lot, really, just made a start on my business guy model: Still needs a lot of work on the face and feet. I did initially think about about making the business guys a fixed, static mesh in either a sitting pose or standing pose, so if they fell over it would look weird and dumb, but then I thought about maybe trying to get ragdoll physics working, finally. I'm not going to make the model super-detailed, so I'm hoping that I'll finish it off and rig it tomorrow. Ideally I want them to be in a mostly rigid pose when sitting on the plane, but with a small amount of give. If they fall off, then they can go full ragdoll.

Nice list! If anyone wants to put Dot Gobbler in their game, here's the mesh that I made available during the last Wizard Jam: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3250291/Games/DotGobblerMesh.zip If you have trouble with it, or need it in a different format, let me know!

Here's mine. It's a bit bass-heavy, but that's sort of just how my voice is! I tried EQing it, but I figured I'd just leave it flat so you could make any changes as you saw necessary. WJ4 - WhyIJam - Synnah.wav

Download it on itch.io! Also download the soundtrack on Bandcamp! Credits: Art, Animation, Game Design, Sound Effects: David Thatcher (Giraffe Cat). Music: James Starkey (5 of 6). Vocals: Chris Remo. Original Post:

Hello! You might remember this as my entry into Wizard Jam last year. Back then it looked a bit like this: I spent a couple of months working on it recently, and now it looks more like this: This is much closer to what I originally wanted the game to look like, and I'm generally happy with the visual side of it. The reason I ended up going back to the game a year later was because I'd submitted it to EGX Rezzed, and it was accepted, so I needed to get it into a much more playable shape. Watching people playing the game at the show gave me a lot of really useful feedback regarding what I was doing wrong; it's a difficult balancing act in a game that's supposed to be confusing and alienating, but I realised that there was a lot more that I could be doing to help people understand the rules without spelling them out completely. Another thing that came out of showing the game to people was that a lot of them just expected it to be on Steam. I'm not crazy about this mentality, but I understand why it exists, and it made me think that maybe putting the game on Greenlight is a good idea. So that's basically my current aim; I want to get a trailer together to show the game off so I can put it on Greenlight, with an aim to releasing it for maybe £1.50. I'd like a bit of feedback on the game as it stands, though! Basically, do you think it's worth paying for, and if not, what do you think would make it worth the cost? You can play the game as it currently stands here: https://giraffecat.itch.io/nineties-cockpit-freakout (Download v0.91) A few things I definitely need to add/change: Music in the main menu. Improve the menus in general; those buttons look cheap as hell, and I'm not crazy about the static title screen. An options menu, for graphic detail levels, volume levels and resolution. A bit of story dialogue at the start of the game, and in between waves; the transitions between waves need to be more like progressing from one level to the next, rather than just spawning a bunch of new enemies. Aside from that, I had a few more nebulous ideas for improving the game: Variation in the arenas; currently it's always square. I spawn buildings in different places every time you play, but this doesn't really add that much variation, and there's not really anywhere to go. I noticed that a lot of people that played the game at Rezzed tried to fly over the mountains, and were surprised when they hit an invisible wall. Actual arms that shoot out and grab the sliders and press the buttons. I feel like it would be difficult to make this look good, though, and I definitely don't want to sacrifice responsiveness for it. More buttons and lights on the console. It still feels a bit too empty. I'd love to hear any ideas you might have; and please, be as honest as you need to be! I want to know if people think my weird thing is worth paying for.

Thanks for your comment! Yeah, it was part of the Leftfield Collection. I didn't actually play anything outside of that room, because I wanted to be in the vicinity of my game as much as possible, and when I did explore elsewhere I got a bit overwhelmed or depressed by what was on show. Leftfield was rad, though, and I played pretty much everything there. I'll have to watch that talk! I liked Antichamber a lot, although my progress did eventually grind to a halt and I never finished it. Iterative design will definitely help with my game, on account of just how obtuse it is at first. I wish I could have made changes after each day of Rezzed, but I was getting home at like 9pm each day, and I was exhausted. At any rate, I do need to sit a few people down in front of the game, and make changes each time.

You missed out on being unceremoniously dumped back to the title screen! I misjudged the length of the levels quite a bit. Level 3 doesn't need to be there at all; my intention was that first you face a single ghost with the option of a power pill in level 2, and in 3 you have to face a ghost without a power pill. In Spenny's stream, he says 'Man I need to get one of those power pills again' going into level 3, and I felt bad that there wasn't another until level 4. So, level 3 could do with being removed, and maybe the final level wouldn't feel like so much of a slog when you see that there are 174 dots to collect.

After a couple of minutes of bewilderment, I figured out how the first set of symbols worked, and managed to complete all of the puzzles on the first laptop! I never quite figured out how the number blocks on the second laptop worked, however. I completed three of the puzzles by taking what seemed like the most obvious path, but I wasn't able to infer what the rules were from those solutions. Puzzle design is hard! If you look at what The Witness does, the first introduction to any of the new mechanics basically takes place on the smallest grid possible, where there are a limited number of solutions so that the player can get it right quickly. The grids then get progressively larger, widening the possibility space so that there's less chance of the player solving it by accident, but doing it gradually so that the specifics of the mechanics are (hopefully) unambiguous. It's really hard to do this perfectly if your goal is to teach the player the mechanics solely through gameplay, because people play the game in very different ways. Talking to friends who were playing The Witness as the same time as I was, it became clear that one of us would often have trouble grasping mechanics that were obvious to the others, and vice versa. If you wanted to not resort to hints or instructions, it would be easy enough to do with the first set of symbols, by following the Witness formula, but I'm not sure how you'd do it with the puzzles on the second laptop, as they seem to be a lot more esoteric. I did enjoy the game, though! The environment is nice, and being able to interact with things and drag them around was fun. I also had the issue with the first laptop that Dibs and Stackel mentioned, because I'd clicked on it before dragging it into the centre of the desk; you could fix this either by taking the laptop's height into account when moving the camera into position, or by simply disabling the zoom until the laptop has been dragged onto the desk.