Synnah

I had fun with this! Took me about 10 minutes and 15 attempts to reach the top; I didn't want to let the game beat me. I was actually quite surprised the first time I got blown away. It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that there was a reason why the game was called I'm Blown Away! It was a good moment, and I'm dumb.

I had quite a lot of fun with this! At first, because there are physics on the tapes and you can drag them around, I thought you had to drag each one into place, so I had a hard time getting past the first podcast segment. When I realised you just have to click on them, however I was able to do a lot better. I think my highest score was about 1,400 listeners! Listening to that Podcast was fun. I'm impressed at the number of podcast clips you've collected!

This game is really stylish! The pace at which everything is revealed at is perfect, and the ending made me laugh. A worthy addition to the 'Shoot That Pizza' continuum!

I liked this a lot! When you said it was 'very short', I was kind of expecting it to end after the second or third carriage, so I found what the game ended up doing to be quite surprising. I think I mentioned it to you in the Wizard Jam Slack, but I liked the zombie dining car, and the way they turn to look at you as you pass through is suitably unsettling!

I liked the story in this; the absurdity of the premise, and that the one game the entire planet would become dangerously addicted to would be a dodgeball game made me laugh. I completed it on my second attempt! I liked how the HPBs would just jerkily snap into different locations and poses.

As with last year, I think you've made the weirdest game of the jam! Lynchian is a good way of describing it, as the whole game just has this slightly off feeling to it. Like you're sucking up all these people and birds at the start, and you don't know what happens to them once they're inside. Also, like Atte, I the way that you incorporate the 'Twenty-Year-Old' part of the title by showing the house being build, and then cutting to 'Twenty Years Later' made me laugh. Good work!

It's hard to get used to the keyboard controls, yeah. At least with an analogue stick you can push directly in the direction you want to go, but it made no sense to require the player to use diagonal inputs on a keyboard, because that means pressing two keys. In the end I just did what old isometric games did, and map the directions to diagonals, but that gets confusing because you have to remember which of the upward diagonals you're going to move in when you press up. The controls are consistent, but it's still a hurdle that your brain has to get over. Maybe it would be easier if all of the controls were relative to your current heading, but I just sort of hacked the keyboard controls in. Also, oops! I thought I'd fixed that bug, but I think I just fixed when you pause and return to the title when a Power Pill is active. If I do another build at any point, I'll get that fixed in it. Thanks for playing!

I don't know if you were aware of this, but a Romanian YouTuber did a Let's Play of Cruisin': For Somethin'. She seems to enjoy it!

I also enjoyed it! The slow plot reveals over the course of the game are really cool, and it had a nice sense of place. I played through three times for three different endings, but on my first, canonical playthrough, I got the Video Games ending.

That's a lot better! I failed my first attempt, but won the second and third times. I started to get the hang of the weird mechanics, too! Slowing down/speeding up so that you're in the right place to collect Euros is pretty much crucial. I enjoyed it! I'm curious about the Papal Infailabilities, JP2's is obviously the Popemobile, but the first pope's appears to be a huge fleshy PacMan, and Pious' is like... a bearded man? I don't know much about popes.

I really like how this controls, in that it's quite hard to get to grips with, but it really feels like you could do some cool things with it after a couple of hours. It looks and sounds great too, obviously.

I really enjoyed this; Luigi's monologues and voiceover, and his singing, are what make it for me. And man, those Boos creep me out!

Gah, this looks so good! The VHS filter is great, and I love all of the characters. I'd like to see more done with it!

This looks amazing and the controls are a lot of fun. I would definitely like to see you continue working on it, because there's a lot of promise in the mechanics! The animations are wonderful, too.

This game is impressively large! The second gas station was easy enough to find, but I ran out of gas before finding another one, twice in a row. I never managed to find Paradise, but I had fun driving around!

Yeah, this was loads of sandboxy fun! Driving over ramps and up walls feels great because of the ridiculous floaty physics, and I really like all of the Idle Thumbs references in the audio and scattered across the various buildings. Amazing work for two weeks!

Okay, so a new version is up on itch.io, which has all of the features I want to get into the game for now. Here's what's new: - The title screen camera moves around a bit! - Keyboard controls. - Power Pills now actually have an effect, and you can use them to knock ghosts over. - Ghost AI is a lot better, and they don't get stuck in the start rooms as much any more. - In-game UI showing what level you're on, and how many dots you've got left to eat! So, a few things I wanted to say about the game. First, the awesome music is by my friend James, and you can download the soundtrack here. With vocals by Chris Remo, who was nice enough to record our stupid Cher cover. Also thanks to ZeroFiftyOne for UE4 advice, and the sweet Power Pill screen effect! I had to cut a few things from the game, due to time constraints. A few things that didn't make it in were Ms. Dot Gobbler (I couldn't figure out how to retarget the animations to her mesh, for some reason!), eye movement and blinking, and the amazing Sweat Tech that I had planned. Between-level story scenes also never made it in. Generally I'm pleased with how the jam went, though! I definitely made more of a game than I did last year, because I'm a lot more competent at building basic game systems now. I still probably didn't build the game in the smartest way, considering I spent most of the first week modelling and animating the character before I did anything else, but one of the goals of this Jam for me was to just make a HD Dot Gobbler model, so I figured I'd get that done first. Speaking of which, if anyone wants to download the model, here it is! That Zip contains the .blend file, the exported .fbx, and the texture map in .png format. Thanks! Once I realised that I wasn't going to have time for my original adventure game idea, I was pretty much resigned to the fact that the visuals and audio were going to be the game's main focus, so I wanted them to have as much impact as possible. You have infinite lives; Mostly I just wanted people to be able to get through the game, because there are five levels that get quite lengthy in the end, and I don't think the gameplay is interesting enough to make people start over again. And yeah, the controls feel a bit weird at first, but it's a difficult problem to solve. What happens is that the game's mostly looking for diagonal input, so if you want to go up-right, you push the stick diagonally up-right. If you push the stick directly up, it's half-way between up-right and up-left, so the direction you get might not be one you expect. I think the game would also feel weird if pushing up made you go up-left, because as you move towards the diagonal up-right, you're probably still going to move up-left on screen. This is a problem isometric games have struggled with for ages. Thanks to everyone who's played the game so far!

Yeah, sorry guys, it's controller only until tomorrow, when I'll release a new build with keyboard input!

There's a new build on the game's Itch.io page that fixes a number of bugs: - You can see the mouse cursor now. - Dots are being correctly cleared when you exit a game. - I also noticed that the ghosts weren't being cleared between levels, so by the time you reached Level 5, you'd have 8 ghosts running around instead of 4. - Dot Gobbler would quite often run too far into a wall and get stuck. I've fixed that, with quite a noticeable pop that doesn't look great, but keeps him out of geometry. I'll do a proper postmortem soon, but there are a couple of things I want to quickly add first: - Actual Power Pill effects. This was a big one; I didn't get around to animating Dot Gobbler's pill freakout state, or do death animations for the ghosts. Shouldn't take too long to do these. - Improve the ghost AI. Currently this is garbage; it chooses a direction at random whenever it has the chance, so it tends to just go back and forth. I want to add weightings for directions, and also maybe implement a basic chase AI when you get too close. - A bit of camera bob on the title screen. Currently it just looks like a still image. I also kind of wanted to animate the characters twitching uncomfortably, as if they're trying to hold a pose, but I don't know if I'll get time. - Some HUD elements showing you what level you're on, and how many dots you've got left. Hopefully that won't take too long.

This looks great! The mechanics look like a lot of fun, and it's thematically perfect. And it probably goes without saying, but holy shit Olly's background scene is stunning. Looking forward to playing it!

This is fun! I mastered Old Norse quite quickly, and now consider myself fluent. I also like the art and the win/lose screens. Also, do you think you'll be able to put the game on itch.io? That way you can add it to the official Wizard Jam page: https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-2016. Since the deadline has passed, you'll have to send a message to zerofiftyone, and he can add it for you.

The game is (basically) done! Download it on itch.io! There are a couple of pretty major bugs in there, which I only noticed 20 minutes after the jam deadline when I finally got around to packaging the game; most notably when you start the game, it fullscreens and grabs the mouse, turning it invisible, which makes it hard to click on any of the buttons. If you alt-tab out and back you should get mouse control back. Also, if you pause the game and return to the menu, it doesn't clear the dots, so when you start another game you'll get a bunch of duplicates. Oops! If no-one objects too much, I'll fix those first thing tomorrow. For now, I need to lie in a dark room for a while and decompress.

Two thumbs up!

Just checking in to say that I'm kind of mostly on track to get this finished by midnight! I'm basically just going to be slamming everything in and hoping it all works, though, so this may end up being a disaster. Game Development.

This looks really good! I don't have a Vive, so I can't try it out, but I really like the visuals.