Dinosaursssssss

yeah ok Here's a little thing I made a while back. I think initially I wanted to prototype computers with working screens that would accept keyboard inputs, but I pretty quickly went wildly off into making some weird environments with computer screens in them. RIDE IN AN AMUSEMENT PARK by dinossaursssssss http://maximum-extreme.com/ride/ride.html - I never actually made the computers accept input - There's a teleporter in the bright spots of light (behind you when you spawn) - The "coolest" area is the third one, which features a wacky Source-engine-style 3D skybox. - There are 3 areas - I think I had watched the Matrix about a week before making this clyde, are you inside a zebra or something in Room of the Rad? What is that weird shape on the left side of the screen?

I think yesterday I successfully made a multiplayer FPS for the first time? It's still kinda sloppy but it seems to mostly work. http://maximum-extreme.com/high-moon/

I didn't really mean to but it's been a long weekend so I ended up starting something by accident.

They ARE very pretty. I liked some of the dialog as well, and I think you were able to tell the story you wanted to very concisely so even with its brevity it feels pretty complete. Also I got a chuckle out of that "the goat" line. I think the only feedback I have is that it was a little unclear initially that the panels were interactive, and that clicking different things branched the story (maybe partly because I looked at the URLs and wondered why they were identical). And once I knew that the yellow-ish color indicated interactions, there were a few places where other elements of the image had similar enough coloring that I thought they were clickable as well. None of that really negatively impacted it though, I just thought it could have been a little more clear. Nice job! edit: ha, just saw that you also got the same feedback in IRC while I was driving home.

Well, I ended up having almost no time to work on my public domain jam game after the weekend, but I got a song from a friend and overall I feel alright about what I put together. It's not exactly in the spirit of the jam, given the tenuous connection between this game and Mary Shelley's vision, but it was a good excuse to make a dumb little thing that I think is moderately fun. I ended up releasing it under CC0, cause why not, so there's a link to a github with the full source on the itch.io page. http://dinosaursssssss.itch.io/surfenstein

Apparently "Fuck This Jam" is also coming up? For some reason my office has blocked their site so I don't really know much more about it. www.fuckthisjam.com

If anyone was put off by the price, Playmaker is on sale right now for $25 for 24 hours. I'll probably pick up a copy just 'cause I'm curious about it, though what I really want is the source code for their editor window which unfortunately seems to be packed in a .dll. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/368

Thanks! Yea, the song is Miserlou which is definitely not public domain. I'm waiting on a friend who's said he'll make me a little surf rock tune to use but needed something temporary...I was using an unedited version of the song, but I thought slowing it down and adding some echo would make it more gothic horror? Anyway there's another online jam coming up that sounds interesting, the Space Cowboy game jam, organized by Venus Patrol and Juegos Rancheros. I have an in-person jam the weekend of the 30th so between public domain and that I donno if I'll make something for the space cowboy one, but it's a fun theme and memorial day is coming up so who knows. http://itch.io/jam/space-cowboy-jam

I only juuust got it to the point where I felt ready to show my game; here it is, my weekends labor of love: Surfenstein (note: music is placeholder, the friend I think I'll be working with is out of town until tonight.) Lookin' forward to seeing your game soon BigJKO

I've been having a loooot of fun this weekend working on my pd jam game...the theme gave me an excuse to try out something I've been meaning to do for a while now, and so far I'm really digging the results. It's really dumb, I can't wait to show it to people. Thanks for organizing, Gritfish!

I've had a number of issues with Monodevelop/Unity seemingly not re-compiling code and just using whatever is already built. I honestly haven't looked into it much, since resyncing the solution (Assets -> Sync Monodevelop Project) or restarting Unity/Monodevelop seems to fix it but it is kind of annoying. Just one more thing to make me wish I had ~$2000 to get Unity Pro/Visual Studio Pro/UnityVS. Has anyone else encountered this and know of any fixes (or what causes it)?

And speak of the devil, the saga continues. Two years after the fact, Rhode Island continues to try and figure out what to do about the massive debt they were left with when 38 closed. "Report: 38 Studios Debt Default Probably Not a Great Idea for R.I."

I haven't played Reckoning so I don't have much to add, but I did follow the 38 saga pretty closely. If you want to read a little more detail about just what went down (and why) this Boston Magazine article was the most in-depth investigation of what happened that I saw, including some quotes from Schilling and a bunch of employees.

Here's a silly little thing that I've looked up twice now: how to make 3D Text not show through all other objects. By default the text that's made when you go GameObject -> Create Other -> 3D Text uses the same shader and material as the GUI text, so its never culled and shows through all other objects. The fix is to create a new material that uses the fonts texture as its texture. http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=3DText

Sadly, Felicity died after successfully repairing the door system, in the doorway between the cloaking and shield rooms.

Based on the talk I just saw, this tool seems pretty useful; I think I'm most likely going to adopt it in the future, specifically for scripting cutscenes/in-game cinematics. The node-based visual editor seems really intuitive/well-made, and for $95 it's cheap compared to the time it would take me to whip something up for scripting dialog and such. On the other hand though, watching 2 artists explain Playmaker I could kinda feel my C# knowledge slipping into redundancy and it scared me a little bit.

There's a Boston Unity Group meeting tonight that's actually about this tool, which is well timed for me as it has come up more than once as I've been researching how to script cinematic sequences. I'm curious how useful it'll be to me as a person who knows C# fairly well, if I learn anything particularly interesting I'll be sure to report back.

I've been struggling to figure out what I'm doing with these prototypes so I'm definitely open to trying things out and seeing how they feel. So don't feel bad/weird about suggesting things!

Thanks for playing! I agree that the fun of the dual joystick thing is trying to keep them close together and move them in tandem...it kinda just feels good when you're able to control them both simultaneously, but it's also challenging to do consistently (especially when you're playing against someone). Based on watching you move around, I probably need to tweak the numbers so you want to stay even closer. To get to the other game modes you should be able to hit back/select and pick a mode with the left stick or d-pad. It gets a little weird though because they're also clickable with the mouse, and you need to click in the window to get its focus so you can use the controller. Guess I probably ought to just take the mouse clicking out. Also you're right, it totally does need sound effects. Maybe I'll use these mp3s that somehow appeared on my hard drive.

This is Zach Gage / @helvetica's tumblr, "Great Talks About Games" http://talksaboutgames.tumblr.com/

If anyone has a few minutes and another person, I would love to get a little feedback on a small project! These are a couple little arcade game-y prototypes I made after playing through Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons that use a similar control scheme. http://www.maximum-extreme.com/bros/bros.html I'd like to pursue one of the ideas and make it into a more full fledged game, but no one I've asked can agree on which concept is strongest and I'm not sure either. And honestly the control scheme is so confusing, it might not even be worth pursuing! You can get a sense for the controls with one person, but you need two players to actually play. The controls are mostly explained on the page and in-game but if you have any questions please feel free to ask me here or on IRC/ Steam/Twitter. I'm also trying to figure out what I can do to make controlling it more...sensible. One thought I've had is that I need better visual feedback about which ball you're controlling, like having a thumb-like shape on each ball so it's more clear which hand it is. So any suggestions along those lines would be appreciated too! Also...I wonder if it would be better to have this thread in the general video gaming forum? I imagine a lot of people don't come into the game dev subforum who would be interested in doing some playtesting.

Looks like GDC 2014 talks are up on the Vault now, if you have access Also about a week ago I was looking for a summary of Tom Betts' (of Big Robot / Sir, You Are Being Hunted) GDC talk on procedural world generation 'cause I'm foolish and didn't take any notes, and instead stumbled upon a talk he gave at the Unity conference that seems to cover a lot of the same ground. The knowledge here is pretty specific and technical, but I found it really interesting and bits were definitely still relevant to a 2D project I'm working on. And here's the GDC Vault version: http://gdcvault.com/play/1020340/Creating-FPS-Open-Worlds-Using EDIT: I forgot there are also a ton of free talks too! I don't have specific recommendations from this list but there are some interesting sounding ones in there. http://www.gdcvault.com/free/gdc-14

The problem is that even if the game continues to work post-GFWL, saves are tied to your profile and I already have a ~60 hour game on my GFWL account. I imagine there's some hack to run those saves offline, but I don't know it. Anyway I made some good progress this weekend (did Bed of Chaos and took a first stab at Gravelord Nito) so I'll probably finish the game up this week, and none of this will be an issue for me.

Does anyone know if there's been any update to their Games for Windows Live situation? I'm starting Tomb of Giants now so I'm not suuuuper worried about being able to finish before July 1, but I haven't heard anything about whether From was gonna patch it out so I'm a little concerned about my save.