Synnah

Oh man, this all looks so good!

Certainly I can post the model here when it's finished, if anyone with a 3D printer is interested in it! I wasn't sure how they'd turn out, but they're gross, and that's good. My friend made a start on the title screen music! https://soundcloud.com/5of6/dot-gobbler-v1 . It really captures the inherent sadness of Dot Gobbler. I'm going to cut back on the scope of the game a little, because I thought about the amount of work that's needed to make adventure game environments, and it made me nervous. The intention of the game was always that you'd stumble around Dot Gobbler's neighbourhood for a while, avoiding the bigger boys in ghost costumes and solving puzzles, and then eventually shamble into an abandoned LaserQuest. At that point it would turn into a straightforward Pac-Man clone, albeit an isometric one. So instead, I'm going to start with this, and make the game that finally lives up to Dot Gobbler's box art. If I have time afterwards, I'll work on the adventure game stuff, because this is still what I want the game to be. I'm just trying to avoid a situation where the game I submit at the end of the jam is just a really nicely modelled and animated Dot Gobbler moving around untextured environments with no game systems. Isometric Pac-Man is probably going to be weird. Pacmania seems like it was isometric, but it's only isometric in a way that makes visual sense, not physical sense. I don't think this... ... can be recreated using orthographic projection of a 3D model, at least not without severely fudging it. This, however... ... is a lot easier, because it's just a 45 degree camera angle around X and Z. I'll see how it feels.

When I started my game for the first Wizard Jam, Nineties Cockpit Freakout, I was basically learning Blender as I went along. This time I know what I'm doing, so I made this: Reference sketch. Low poly model, before I finished the face properly. High-poly model (Thanks subdivide tool!) I was hoping to make a bit more progress today than I did; next thing I need to do is rig the mesh so that I can animate it, and once I've done that, and am sure I don't need to make any more changes to the mesh, I'll UV map and texture it. I'm planning on having the eyes be on a separate material channel, so that I can basically move a pupil sprite around, and maybe have a material for blinking. I still need to add the eyebrows, too, which I figure will be two floating meshes attached to animation bones, so that I can move them around. I'm also going to see if I can rig the mouth so that it'll close convincingly. What use is Dot Gobbler if he can't gobble?

Starts on the 7th, and then runs for two weeks! Games need to be submitted by the 22nd of May.

I'd actually forgotten that Atte's amazing collection included a Dot Gobbler! But yeah, what I have in mind is very different, and multiple takes on the same theme aren't discouraged at all. I'm always interested to see how people interpret things differently!

Oh don't worry, I'm still probably going to go with Dot Gobbler! It was just an idea that amused me.

Man, I kind of want to make 'Rolling With The Pope', a simulation of Cheese Rolling with various playable West Country characters, one of whom is the Pope.

'The Bear's Black Heart' is such a strong episode title from the past year. I also really like 'Ms. Petman', 'Signature Moves' and 'Mesmerized, Process and Anxiety'. Though I have no idea what I'd make for the last one.

Wizard Dash Jam! I'm down. Going to have a look through episode titles to see if I can find something I want to make more than Dot Gobbler, which I've been thinking about making since the first Wizard Jam.

Like Nick, I'm still playing NBA 2K16 on and off. Unlike Nick, I discovered The Wizard right at the start of my playthrough. When the game asks you to enter your name at the start, because my surname is Thatcher, I started typing 'TH'. Thatcher wasn't one of the suggested names that came up, so I assumed this meant that they hadn't recorded any dialogue for it. I did however notice that one of the suggestions was 'The Wizard', so of course I chose that. Throughout the story section of the career, the commentators went back and forth between calling me Freq and calling me The Wizard, which was a bit odd. After the first season, I tried to get transferred to the Washington Wizards, but they weren't interested in me.

We went ahead and released the Android version of R.A.B.B.i.T.! It's here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.TriCatGames.RABBiT

That's awesome, BigJKO! And thanks guys! I also hope we can release RABBiT on Andoid very soon. A new major version of Unreal Engine was released yesterday though, and I don't think there was a fix for our issue, so it looks like we're delayed again.

I released a game on iOS this week! It was a long time coming; in May last year my housemate and I quit our jobs and decided to make games together, for as long as we could support ourselves. We kind of saw ourselves releasing a game every few months; obviously things didn't pan out that way. It's a long story that involves a lot of really bad luck, and maybe a few poor decisions. Our first game, Defendy Rocket, took about 4-5 months to finish, and then got put on hold while we waited for an advertising solution for Unreal Engine 4. In October of last year we started a second game, R.A.B.B.i.T., that we were pushing to finish before Christmas, but actually got finished some time around the end of January. This became a moot point, however, because we discovered a pretty major crash in UE4 on certain low-end Android devices, and spent literally a month going back and forth with their support to try and help them get a repro for it. We'd got an advertising solution for Defendy Rocket before Christmas, but couldn't release either game on Android because of this bug. So we focused on iOS, and decided to release R.A.B.B.i.T. first, being as it was a more visually interesting game that sells itself better in screenshots and GIFs. Here's the app store link, if you'd like to play it (It's free!): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1065330225 A trailer and some screenshots: It's been a weird, muted release. I sent out a bunch of press emails, but no-one really picked up on it (There were two pre-release articles, but no-one has posted about the game since its release). My housemate ran out of money, so he took a job at Facebook and is moving out in the next couple of weeks. I'm resigned to the fact that neither game is probably going to make any money without some kind of minor miracle. I'm really proud of R.A.B.B.i.T., though; it's difficult, but the mechanics are really tight, and it's a lot of fun. Also, considering I was entirely responsible for all of the environment and character art, and it was the first time I'd properly modelled, rigged and animated a character, I really like how it looks. On a related note, I'm now basically looking for freelance work, so if you need a 3D Artist/Animator, or music/Audio guy, and you like what you see or hear, let me know!

I had both of these games as a kid, and was never particularly good at either! I played them way before I played Tetris, which may be why I bounced off them, but I think I was a bit young for the kind of spatial reasoning required. I've been playing NBA 2K16 recently after hearing Nick talk about it, despite having basically no basketball knowledge. My experience of playing through the career story was much the same as Nick's; I made my player my own height, 5'8", so he was basically the shittiest guy, constantly being blocked and fucking it up for the whole team because I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing (Which is hilariously at odds with the story). After the story ends you move into the second year, where you play every game in a season (You only play 9 NBA games in the story), and I haven't really been doing much better. 24 games in, I'm finally getting the hang of how to deal with situations I find myself in, and I've purchased enough upgrades to get my rating up from 55 to 66, but I'm still lucky to get more than 10 points and 4-5 assists in a game. So when Nick returns and says he's scoring 60 points in a game, I'm wondering how far behind I am in terms of play time, if at all. Or did I just get dunked on by Nick Breckon?

I like punchy, two-syllable titles: Flywrench Snakebird Downwell Bloodborne Torchlight Wordplay is good too: Antichamber Crypt of the NecroDancer Eufloria Evocative names that I like: Starseed Pilgrim Hyper Light Drifter MirrorMoon EP What about the worst titles? Surely Game of War: Fire Age is up there. I also particularly dislike BeatBuddy: Tale of the Guardians. And Tower of Guns always annoyed me, for some reason.

My game is going to be largely based on this diversifier: My initial thought was of moving Santa's sleigh up and down to produce different theremin tones. Then I figured that any enemies that appear could produce music as well. So, my intention is to make a kind of side-scrolling shooter where everything happens in time to the music, and produces the musical elements. Oh and it's going to be Jungle music. I'm going to be making it with UE4. The audio aspect of it is a bit concerning, though; I've done timing-specific things in Blueprints before, and it's really hard to get everything completely accurate (I wasn't even doing anything particularly clever, just moving from one piece of music to the next and keeping the timing). So, I'm probably going to look into using FMOD or Wwise.

It's just a looping theremin sample that I dynamically changed the pitch within a UE4 Blueprint. Because UE4 stores pitch as a float, though, I had to use a table to find out what the specific pitch multipliers needed to be to produce the notes I wanted.

Yeah, I'm not finishing this! I haven't even done any work on it since the start of this week or something. Unfortunately the timing was pretty bad, what with this being a week of Christmas and Birthday parties, and also for crunching on the game that I'm working on full-time, to get that out before Christmas. It doesn't help that Xenoblade Chronicles X came out, and I bought it, and I've mostly been playing that in the evenings, but it's just hard to spend a day sitting at my desk playing a game, and then have to keep doing that into the evening. So yeah, here's what I ended up with: I've already got an idea for what I want to do for the next Wizard Jam, so hopefully I'll be able to spend more time on that! Looking forward to seeing what everyone else does.

That art is so great!

Okay, finally got something worth showing! For one reason or another, I haven't really spent a lot of time on the game, but I've got some of the basics up and running now. Your sleigh is constantly moving forward, and you can move up and down. Doing so changes the pitch of the theremin. Next order of business is setting up a music manager, which I'm going to use to trigger enemies/events at specific timings; these will in turn trigger bits of music, the intention being that I'll be able to build up a full track from samples and loops in this way. I'll need to put some thought into what kinds of obstacles will make sense, though. At the moment all I've got in mind are angels that trigger a DnB drum loop when they drop things on you.

Great GIF!

I am a man with microphones and a voice. I will record a director's commentary for my game. And... anyone else's?!

I'm so jazzed about the impending release of Episode 4! Episode 3 was one of the most memorable gaming experiences I've had. I also just recently played through all of the free interstitial episodes, so this news comes at just the right time for me. Playing the interstitials did make me realise that I don't remember much about some of the specifics of the plot and the characters, though, so I'm going to play through all of the episodes before playing 4. I also got myself riled up by reading Steam reviews, most of which are now people complaining that the developers are scamming people because the game isn't finished yet. Grr.

So it looks like the Photoshop of Veerender Jubbal did come from GamerGate after all.

Sweet, I've been waiting for another Wizard Jam! Having spent the past 6 months doing actual full-time game-dev, I feel like I'm in a much better position to make something a bit more competent. Depending on what I want to make, I may end up teaming up with someone this time, too.