Dinosaursssssss

I don't think it's a dropped thread so much as an unspecific, inconclusive one; deer are a running theme throughout, with Max regularly wearing shirts with deer on them, and in the final episode a deer necklace. In one ending we also see deer walking through town, and a deer is on a sign with the towns name. I think Chloe's family also has a snowglobe with a deer in it. edit: actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it might be the same snowglobe as the one with a lighthouse in it in the final episode. edit2:

Alright sorry I'm gonna sorta necro this thread a bit 'cause I just finished the game. First off! I liked the game a lot, even the ending. But that said I'm curious what people thought about the use of animals throughout the game. Obviously deer show up a lot and seem to represent Max somehow, and the butterfly seems to represent either (or both?) a 'butterfly effect' or perhaps Chloe specifically. Warren is constantly talking about going ape. Frank is all about dogs. Samuel talks to squirrels. Birds and whales both show up a lot (but don't seem to be related to specific characters). But I didn't really see how the comparison with those animals added to my knowledge of the characters. The deer specifically shows up everywhere but doesn't impact anything, and I don't think the connection is ever explicitly acknowledged or used to drive the story. Are these just supposed to illustrate the personalities of the characters or does anyone think there's something more there?

I saw some people tweet about Locus Jam (hosted by Porpentine) which seems like a neat idea. I've been thinking about doing something similar in order to get better at figuring out lighting and architecture and...I donno, level flow? I donno if there's a technical term for that. Anyway I'd like to do this and it seems cool. https://itch.io/jam/locusjam

Hello! Hopefully you had a good time during the Winter Wizard Jam, hosted of course by Spenny, with ZeroFiftyOne and myself assisting. This was the second Wizard Jam, and we tried to make it even better than the first time around, and now we'd like your help in figuring out what we can improve. The main goals of the wizard jam have been to bring together readers in a fun event, and to try and create a positive environment for new game makers to learn from experienced folks and make their first games. That's why we haven't had a competitive element, and why we've tried to emphasize the availability of experienced developers to help folks out. But of course, there's more we can do. Teams are one way we could make a more formal system for getting more folks involved, is that something people would like to see us build on? Or maybe an organized mentor/mentee system to encourage first timers? Or...both? This jam we also added diversifiers; did people like that? If you've got any feedback, suggestions, or ideas about those or any other ways we can make Wiz Jam more magical, let us know in this thread!

Looks great, good looking fx and lots of nice game feel touches. I uh found it basically impossible to survive more than a few seconds playing normally though; I think it'd be more playable but still very difficult if you could rotate without firing.

Worked for me and I got a good laugh out of this, nice work! One little thing though, you should probably mention the controls and the fact that you need to click the window with the cats somewhere (maybe on the itchio page).

I would have loved to have VR support (probably just cardboard since that's all I have now), but I was having a buncha optimization issues with the floating physics and having ~150 weirdly shaped meshes in the water. Also nice job escaping, I really never used the reverse so I didn't notice it was sorta broken. Hoooooooooonk edit: also I made a slightly better iceberg gif

I forgot to ask, how did you do FB sharing from PC? Is there an easy plugin for that? I only know how to do it on a phone.

This isn't a requirement or anything, but in general people should probably post feedback in dev log threads rather than on itch 'cause the forums are a better format for discussion.

Oh also I didn't respond to Ben's other question about where to put feedback...I'll post this in the main thread too, but I think in general it makes more sense to discuss in dev log threads 'cause the format is way more conducive to discussion.

Post-jam was something we talked about but never really landed on a structure for...a lot of jams have voting and competition following the jam, but since that's not really in the spirit of things we haven't been sure what we could do instead. One idea was to have people organize streaming a bunch of the games, maybe at a pre-set time so other forum folks can watch along, but I don't think there was any schedule made or anything. But, if someone wants to stream a bunch of the games, post in the jam thread / slack and I'm sure some readers will come hang out!

TEAM BIG DOGS is composed of a total of NINE readers: Writing/Design lordhuffnpuff Art SuperBiasedMan Problem Machine Engineering Chasterson defaulttidus N1njasquirrel Audio coods Production elvaq Dinosaursssssss For the winter wizard jam, we will be building Winter Wizard Pro Skater (tentative title), a 2D ice skating game about a wizard who builds sick ramps for himself to do tricks off. I believe we will be using the 'focused palette' diversifier, and probably no others. We're be using Trello for task tracking, Git to host the game source, and Slack to miscommunicate.

If anyone has ideas for how we can improve the jam, please post them here so we can take 'em into consideration next time: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10611-wizard-jam-feedback/

If you want some more useful info, there were a couple Unite talks this year that I found really helpful for figuring out Unity 3D stuff; the first is Elliot Mitchell (who runs our local Unity user group) talking about general 3D art optimizations, and the second is Joachim Holmer (who makes Shader Forge) talking about procedural mesh generation.

The low detail art on the druids/rocks came out really well, and the pantheon art and god picks are top notch. The two art styles feel pretty disparate, but seperately they were both well done, and I'm not sure what I would done to solve that since I think both serve distinct purposes. I'm impressed with how many varieties of building mechanics you managed to get in. The last one in particular was a good goof. I did hit some weird physics glitches like a rock getting stuck at the top of a ramp (I think it was in 5?) but aside from that they mostly added to the fun. Nice job! This is a fun idea that I think has a lot of room to grow if you wanted to.

This game is hot. Really, really nice work. (that said it is crashing to desktop when I play on normal mode I think) Also I found it pretty hard and I wonder if it be a bit easier if music played while it showed you the buttons to press? I feel like being able to tap the buttons along to the same rhythm might make it easier.

Thank you everyone who made games, thank you Spenny and ZeroFiftyOne, and thank you everyone who hung out in #WinterWizardJam on Slack and helped people out with development questions! I'm looking forward to playing all your games.

I intended to put this project up on github, but I forgot that I'm using a few plugins and such that'll make that a pain. So instead, here's the interesting part, which is the iceberg generation code. It's a little bit sloppy, as almost all my jam code is, but maybe someone will find it a useful jumping off point for procedural mesh generation. Basically how it works is it creates a random number of triangles fanning out from the center. Those triangles have sides with random lengths, so you end up with an irregular polygon. From there, I extrude the polygon down to make a short polygonal prism (using an extrusion plugin in the Unity Procedural Examples). This sometimes creates concave shapes, which isn't great for generating collision meshes; the only solution I can think of off the top of my head to that would be for each iceberg rigidbody to use a complex collider where each collider is a triangular prism built from the random triangles. This would also enable some fun destruction options potentially, but I have no idea how performant it'd be. I'm also still pretty sure there's a bug where it's generating some extra tris somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; public class IcebergGenerator : MonoBehaviour { public int NumOuterPointsMin = 6; public int NumOuterPointsMax = 12; public float ExtrudeDepthMin = 1; public float ExtrudeDepthMax = 1; public float RadiusMin = 2; public float RadiusMax = 4; public int Width = 5; MeshFilter meshFilter; MeshCollider meshCollider; MeshRenderer meshRenderer; Vector3 centerPoint; Vector3 lastPoint; float lastAngle = 0; List<Vector3> verts = new List<Vector3>(); List<Vector3> normals = new List<Vector3>(); List<int> tris = new List<int>(); List<Vector2> uvs = new List<Vector2>(); void Awake() { meshFilter = GetComponent<MeshFilter>(); meshCollider = GetComponent<MeshCollider>(); meshRenderer = GetComponent<MeshRenderer>(); centerPoint = transform.position; lastPoint = centerPoint; GenerateMesh(); Matrix4x4 worldToLocal = transform.worldToLocalMatrix; Matrix4x4[] m = new Matrix4x4[2]; m[0] = worldToLocal; m[1] = worldToLocal * Matrix4x4.TRS(new Vector3(0, Random.Range(ExtrudeDepthMin, ExtrudeDepthMax), 0), transform.rotation, Vector3.one); Mesh mesh = new Mesh(); MeshExtrusion.ExtrudeMesh(meshFilter.mesh, mesh, m, true); meshFilter.mesh = mesh; meshCollider.sharedMesh = mesh; } void GenerateMesh() { float start_time = Time.time; int outerPoints = Random.Range(NumOuterPointsMin, NumOuterPointsMax); verts = new List<Vector3>(); normals = new List<Vector3>(); tris = new List<int>(); uvs = new List<Vector2>(); //top center verts.Add(centerPoint); uvs.Add(new Vector2(centerPoint.x, centerPoint.y)); normals.Add(Vector3.up); int totalPoints = (outerPoints * 2) + 2; //generate verts for (int i = 1; i < outerPoints; i++) { //top Vector3 current_point = Utils.GetPointOnCircle(centerPoint, (360 / outerPoints) * i, Random.Range(RadiusMin, RadiusMax)); verts.Add(current_point); uvs.Add(new Vector2(current_point.x, current_point.y)); normals.Add(Vector3.up); } //generate top tris for (int i = 1; i < outerPoints - 1; i++) { tris.Add(i); tris.Add(0); tris.Add(i + 1); } // Generate the mesh object. Mesh ret = new Mesh(); ret.name = "IcebergMesh"; ret.vertices = verts.ToArray(); ret.triangles = tris.ToArray(); ret.normals = normals.ToArray(); ret.uv = uvs.ToArray(); // Assign the mesh object and update it. ret.RecalculateBounds(); ret.RecalculateNormals(); meshFilter.mesh = ret; meshCollider.sharedMesh = ret; } }

That's really cool! How are you generating the audio? Is it built-in UE4 tools or somethin' else?

Got some work to do on the Big Dogs team project, plus life maintenance type stuff, plus a WWE live event to go to tomorrow, so I just uploaded my final version: http://itch.io/jam/winter-wizard-jam/rate/46748

Update! I put in the final model from Lu, which looks great. Still having lots of weird physics issues, which I suspect are related to the mesh extrusion code I'm using (which is from Unity's procedural examples project). I see some z fighting on the side faces sometimes, so I think it's generating some extra tris that are breaking the collider. That said, statistically it's far more likely that it's my fault. edit: not pictured, icebergs colliding with each other on instantiation and flying off into the horizon, and icebergs colliding with themselves and jittering along the surface of the water.

I imagine most of us are busy with Wiz Jam, but if you're feeling adventurous Ludum Dare 34 started an hour ago: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/12/09/welcome-to-ludum-dare-34/ "The Theme for Ludum Dare 34 is... A TIE!?! Two button controls AND Growing! Pick your favourite, or use both" https://twitter.com/ludumdare/status/675495354406592512 I really like LD and wish I could do this one, but between wiz jam and my other game and social engagements there's no way it'll happen. 48 hour solo jams are my jam.

I've been trying to make a song and failing pretty badly. If some musician out there wants to throw something together, I'd appreciate it! I was thinking something along the lines of the slower part of the underwater level song from Mario 64 but with more xmas-y bells but I'm down for whatever.

Honestly I hadn't really thought about it, but it would be fun if there was a real chill whale hanging out too. Stretch goal, maybe.

is Mr Puffin two puffins standing on each others shoulders?? And what's in those gloves? Wings? I look forward to unraveling all these mysteries and more.