Dinosaursssssss

Here's some video from yesterday. Other updates: Spawning basically works, there're zones, when you enter them some number of enemies spawn. There's a very basic quest system in; the guy at the shop (with the big clothing sign) will have infinite quests to go into town and retrieve an item for him. On returning with it you'll be rewarded with some bullets. I talked with a few people about STALKER and they generally agreed that the simulation of the zone was it's most defining feature; the idea that you could get a quest, and by the time you got back, the quest giver was killed by other stalkers or a pack of dogs or whatever. I really liked the start of the faction balance ideas in Clear Sky so I'm going to attempt some more systemic faction stuff to get more in line with the values of the originals. I think NPCs with hunger/tiredness/trade routes/etc is probably out of scope, but I feel like I need to attempt something. I think the scope will be that factions can control areas of the map, and dynamically be able to take over other areas. Not sure what form that'll take yet; I guess whoever the last kill in that region comes from will own it. I'd love to do a more needs-driven AI system, but I'd have to really dig into this Tactical AI plugin to make it happen and probably add some animations. If I have some time at the end of the week I'll look back into it.

Been having fun making environments and tweaking fx

Instead of doing what I said I made this lady who plays guitar in the neutral camp Not sure what bone the guitar is meant to attach to...I tried both hands and neither was a great option. Spine maybe.

I made this list mostly as a...idk, a thought experiment for myself but it's just been sitting open in notepad for a while now so I'll share! Nier Automata Paperclips PUBG Heat Signature Prey Honorable Mentions (Unordered) West of Loathing Crossout Battle Chef Brigade Mario Multibowl

Alright! ~an hour later, this is...acceptable. There's some wobble when he's aiming, and sometimes he randomly shoots at a 90 degree angle from you, but I'll take it. He doesn't crouch in this gif but that also works OK now; I had to set a Y offset in the crouch animation and turn on foot IK. Between my git disasters and this, I've burned quite a bit of time; in total, I've written about 5 lines of code (to add optional tracers to guns). I think the next thing I wanna tackle is a basic enemy spawning system. My plan is to place a bunch of spawn points and some large trigger volumes that'll act as regions. At runtime I'll group the triggers by volume, and spawn AI at the points when the player enters the region.

making...progress?? The first pass at this (in my last post) was me copying one of their premade characters, and swapping out the model/animations. This one I made using both their animator controller generator and their AI character creator. I think I set the mask and/or the avatar up wrong. All the docs say about creating the model/textures/animations is: "Your model must be fully modelled, rigged, and animated." edit: on looking again, the animator got placed on a child object instead of the root when I used their tool, so it couldn't find any bones. I'm now pretty convinced this would have been faster to build myself. Also I don't wanna seem like I'm totally dunking on this tool; making a system like this is an incredibly hard problem. But I have quite a bit of Unity experience and I'm really struggling to make this thing work! I feel like the issue is really the documentation being unclear about how things should be set up, with some fiddling I'm getting closer (I set all the animations to loop which helped, though he still slides around a lot). double edit: I went through and copied the settings from all the animations the package came with, and now the slidiness is mostly gone and he seems to aim alright; the last big issue is that when he crouches he floats a bit. For some reason the animator controllers that came with the plugin are linked to crouch animations from a different plugin(???) so I'm not sure the settings are right.

I needed a guy with a gas mask, so I tried out Fuse for the first time, and exported him to Mixamo. Used Mixamo for animations before (all the characters in The Stake Out, my WJ...4? game were animated with it) but adding Fuse to the mix(amo) really brings it all together. edit: ship it

Alright, back to it. I started trying to build out the neutral town where you pick up missions and stuff. The scale of the buildings in this asset pack is a little off...this wood palette is about a meter tall, making this warehouse that looks like it has a couple floors about 3m total.

Want one of your weird characters to suddenly pop up in someone else's games? Wanna be playing Wizard Jam games in a month and suddenly feel like you're somewhere familar...somewhere you've been, somewhere...that you built in Unreal 4 a year ago that someone else repurposed into a Dot Gobbler sanctuary? This is the thread for you! If you have assets from former jams you'd like to share, post them in this thread and I'll aggregate them into this post, and if you need to host them somewhere, PM me and I can put them in my shared drive or figure something else out. Please credit the original asset creator somehow if you use their assets, and if you submit something, I recommend including a license. Alternately, maybe you just need a good source for some free models, textures, or music? Go take a look at Rilen's excellent thread from WJ4 for some solid resources. Anyway here's some stuff: 2D Dot Gobbler (by Mythalore) The Beef Chief (from The Stake Out, by me) Idle Thumbs podcast soundboard (By GerbilsInSpace. Open source & includes a bunch of mp3s ripped from the cast) 3D Dot Gobbler (by Synnah) Thumbs Sprites (by BigJKO. Chris/Danielle/Jake/Sean + a lovely golden Goldblum, as seen in The Legend of Big Birds Bones) Low-Poly Breckon Head (by Root) Veggie Panino's Veggie Panini's Box (by brendonsmall) Tugboat (by Lu, used in Ice Break)

edit: after some meditation on this subject, I feel like I have basically 3 options. 1. Set up a Perforce server, either on a spare PC at home or on my webserver (though that'd require buying a higher tier plan) 2. Work without source control 3. Reduce the size of my repository I think the right answer is probably 3 'cause 1 is probably too expensive and time consuming, and 2 scares me. I'll add some of these huge asset packs to my gitignore and only submit stuff I actually change.

That reminds me, I should have made an asset sharing thread, really gotta be better about remembering that. Update: I've been trying to upload this thing to git all night, but it's apparently now a ~20gb so this has become a serious ordeal. I think it's mostly the environment art (terrain and related plugins mostly) that's killing me...maybe I need to run a cat5 over here instead of using the wifi. I've been reading Jason Schreier's book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels while waiting around. Each chapter is about the dev cycle for a different game, and It's amazing seeing the struggle it takes to release just about anything. He also gets some really astonishing, candid, interviews. Good stuff.

Alright I've now gotten into a weird state where SourceTree isn't showing any pending commits or file changes, and GitLab is showing that the project is still empty. This seems bad? Not sure what the solution here is, maybe best to just make a new repo, copy folders over and submit one at a time. edit: alright yeah I'm trying this, wish me luck, hopefully this doesn't bone everything up

Update: I've been trying to submit this project to GitLab for like, 3 days, but the commit is too damn big and SourceTree keeps erroring out.

Matt-Hazard-but-Asset-Store is a pretty compelling game idea too. Just grab a bunch of sample games and drop a first person shooter controller and some enemies in there? Actually, less of a joke idea, it'd be amazing if a bunch of people packaged up assets and a single scene from one of their old Wizard Jam games, and then one person stitched them together into a shooter. Fight across the island in Transmission: Lost, hop into a portal that drops you into a fight in Eyes of Cheating Hitman, teleport out and get chased down the street by the Dot Gobbler in Mid Jam Power Move.

I'm currently blocked at work (installing the Unity 2017.3 update has made it so no version of Unity launches!) so here's some more tidbits about problems I've been having with my asset store purchases. The post apocalyptic city pack is OK, a little too low poly, and as mentioned above, it doesn't have metallic maps so it's a little flat looking. Not ideal, but I can live with it for $20. My current big issue is the package has no prefabs, the pivots are all consistently off-center, and in the sample scene they included, almost all the meshes are at the same level in the hierarchy. For non-Unity users, what this means is that if I click a building and start moving it, any deco pieces on it (moss, fire escapes, signage, etc) are left behind. The list is also out of order, making it an arduous task to move things around. This also means I can't easily script a system to place buildings on the ground: because the pivots are inconsistent (and because they all use mesh colliders with extents that also aren't centered) the buildings get placed at weird heights above the ground. What I'm currently debating is whether I should just use the crummy city I have now, or go to the trouble of building prefabs with good pivots and generating a large city. On any other project I'd take the time to solve this, but for this game I think my current solution (I copy pasted and rotated the sample scenes to make more city, then did a little clean up and cut out some streets) is probably shippable.

Haven't baked occlusion yet, but everything is marked as static. I've been thinking about vis blockers but it hasn't really been a problem yet; probably because these assets are all relatively low poly and generally only have albedo/normals. It would probably be good to put some walls or something in just to keep the areas of the city navigable. For names I've been looking at synonyms and nothing is really grabbing me; I think going with an animal that embodies the idea might work better. Vultures or something.

I made a very quick city; I promise this looks better with post effects and stuff on. Mostly need something rough to get started with so I can build the game. Something I didn't really consider is it'd be really nice to have some kind of setpiece assets to mark quest areas so they don't blend in with this grey and brown sludge. I started digging deeper into UFPS; I'd like to add a hit indicator, leaning, and tracers. I kind of got tracers in, but guns in the plugin fire from screen center rather than the gun barrel so there's some work to do there. No idea how to add leaning, the plugin is using procedural animations and IK so it may be pretty time consuming to do at all well.

I started cramming all these assets together and it's mostly working! Randomly generated terrain with Gaia, a bunch of buildings from one of those asset packs, and two squads of AI mans tactically shooting each other. Here's Sgt Bill Computerman marching into the ruins with his squad. Gaia seems like a really fantastic tool, definitely something I'll use again in the future. I'm finding the workflow a little clunky (maybe because I just started with it) but for making a big ass piece of a land with some trees and terrain features very quickly it's very capable. UFPS is one of the most professional asset store purchases I've ever used; the docs are thorough, and it was extremely easy to get started. So far my only disappointment with it is that it only supports shooting via raycasts (rather than firing a projectile with physics); I'm not good at dealing with bullet drop and leading targets, but it'd be more true to the source material. Maybe I can hack something together. Edit: here's some video, there's weather and you can shoot a guy

Update 2 Didn't have a ton of time, but I read a bunch of the UFPS and Tactical Shooter AI (TSAI from now on) documentation and fucked around with the demo scenes; both seem really comprehensive and well documented. AI animation/blend trees and behaviors were what I anticipated to be the most complex system I'd need, and TSAI seems like it'll be a great solution for standing that stuff up. From the docs, it seems like a good template that I can use with characters rigged via Mixamo (or other store bought stuff, if I need it). I started thinking about narrative, and what my stand-in for Pripyat will be too. I think the rough idea will be a Resident Evilish setup: a megacorp has their headquarters in a city, over time they expand and own the entire city. A mysterious catastrophic event causes them to abandon the city, and leaves it uninhabitable, but looters (I really need a good name as a Stalker equivalent, so I can have an NPC say "get out of here, <whatever>") break the quarantine to steal equipment from the now-abandoned city and labs. Enemies will be a mix of megacorp private security, and other looters. And of course anomalies/radiation that you can scan for. I'd like to have one large map; a walled off city, and a small encampment that's the quest hub/store/etc. That may end up being technically infeasible (sure hope these assets I bought have LODs) and need to split into smaller maps? We'll see; I didn't buy anything to handle world streaming and that's probably too big a technical challenge for 2 weeks. You can either enter the city and explore, or take generated quests to find specific items in the city for NPCs. The super basic loop I'd like to achieve is: get mission, enter city, fight, acquire loot, return, repeat. Throw in some anomalies, weather, day/night cycle, and that'll be a pretty dang complete thing. Ambitious but doable. Also something is still throwing this error constantly, I should probably figure out what that is. Assertion failed: Assertion failed on expression: 'scriptParameterClass != NULL'

If it's really, truly terrible I may register a shell corporation or something to put it up, but going through with publishing it feels like an important part of this to me? Though of course it'll also be free on itch for ya'll. Anyway first progress update! I made a git repo then spent about an hour importing asset store packages...sorta a lotta errors but I'm sure it's fine!?

Heck yea

I certainly don't have the skills to make models / decent textures / songs / effects, so naturally I have a few places I go to find things. Maybe other people do too? For smaller projects and game jams and such, it's really handy to have a few places to go so you can get started quick, so let's compile some places we like! I'll try and keep this post updated as people add more. And let's try to keep it legal and legitimate. Audio: Youtube Audio Library - Music for YouTube videos and "other content you create." BFXR / AS3FXR - Sound effect maker FreeSFX - Sort of random assortment of effects, my favorite of which is "Fighting Men In Water" Note: their license requires you to credit them. Free Music Archive - TONS of great Creative Commons music, licenses all vary wildly. (You can search by license though! Also I've been going through a bunch of these and putting ones I like in a list here http://freemusicarchive.org/member/ChrisMaire/favorites/) freesound - CC music and effects. Filterable by license. FilmSound - Links to more effects Incompetech - Music, requires credit musopen - Public domain classical music Models: BlendSwap Turbosquid Textures: CGTextures - Not allowed to be used in Second Life, as per their license? Texturer - These ones you can totally use in Second Life. Fonts: Google Fonts League of Movable Type Other / General : TIGSource Assemblee - A bunch of really bonkers (and I mean that in the best way) sprite sheets/textures and assorted music/effects OpenGameArt.org - 2D/3D art, music, sound effects, and a handful of scripts/fonts. Filterable by license. Creative Market - Icons/Images/Logos, other things (Paid) Kenney Donation Pack - A big set of fonts/icons/tiles/sprites ($1+ donation) Also this thread.

I was flipping through some extremely old PC Gamers and found their original review of Beyond Good and Evil; it apparently only warranted a half page review, and scored a 73.

I just watched Phill playing this on his stream and I had to come by and say how impressed I was. It says on the itch page that this is your first game and like...really? There's an attention to detail in it that really shows a really strong understanding of how to make a relatively simple concept like this engaging to players, it has a consistent (and well executed) visual style, and a polished beginning/middle/end. And I think it's quite well scoped too, which new developers frequently miscalculate. Well done!!!

This thread is for folks seeking a team to work with! If you have a particular set of skills and want to contribute to someone elses game, post in this thread, preferably in the following format to make it easy for people to skim the thread and find you. You can also drop by the #wizardjam channel on the Idle Thumbs Slack channel and chat with people to find teammates. Or just drop in and chit-chat with us while you're working on your game! And if you find a team, please edit your post and note that. This is the team seeking/LFG thread; if you have a game idea and want to recruit people, use the recruiting/LFM thread. Format: What I'm Doing: What you're able to contribute and your experience level Contact Info: Your contact info (PM, email, whatever) And optionally: Time Zone: It's probably easier to work with people who aren't 12 hours off from you? But maybe it's fine. Portfolio: A link to your portfolio / website / whatever if you have one, so people can check your style. Then whatever else you want. Example: What I'm Doing: Programming; I'm a web developer and don't know any game engines but would like to learn. Contact info: PM me on the forums or message me on the Idle Thumbs Slack channel Time Zone: EST (UTC -5) but I'm usually up late Portfolio: I've never made a video game but here's my website! www.chrismaire.com I've been programming for a long time and am a terrible artist, I'd like to team up with someone who has a little Unity experience that can help teach me and also do art. Willing to work 24 hours a day for 2 weeks straight and my cat can do a perfect Wario impression. Template: Pitch: What I'm doing: Contact Info: Time Zone: Portfolio: