Dinosaursssssss

This thread is for recruiting team members! If you have a game idea and need help from a reader with a particular set of skills, post in this thread, preferably in the following format to make it easy for people to skim the thread and find you. You should also look for collaborators in the team seeking thread and come join the #wizardjam channel on the Idle Thumbs Slack channel and see if anyone can help out. Or just drop in and chit-chat with us while you're working on your game! And if you have enough members, please edit your post and note that. This is the recruiting/LFM thread; if you want to post what you're able to contribute and have someone else find you, use the team seeking/LFG thread. Format: Pitch: Game Pitch (Try and keep this to one or two sentences!) What I need: What you need (Artist, programmer, writer, etc) What I'm doing: What you're contributing 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: Pitch: I wanna make 'You, Fisher', a 3D stealth fishing game about casting lines without being spotted by security, and catching as many fish as possible before sunrise. I want to learn UE4 and C++ What I Need: 3D artist who can animate some fish (and help with design!) Audio person to make some sneaky music and fish noises. Smoky jazz? What I'm doing: Programming in UE4, Sam Fisher impressions 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: Here's my website with some gifs of other games I've made! www.chrismaire.com I've been a fan of Splinter Cell since first seeing screenshots of their dynamic shadows in ~2005 and I have a Sam Fisher bust above my fireplace. I'd like the game to have a light stealth system, fully rigged realistic humanoid characters, and a dynamic music system that's entirely early-2000s style drum and bass but made exclusively out of samples of water splashing and seagull noises. Template: Pitch: What I need: What I'm doing: Contact Info: Time Zone: Portfolio:

Wizard Jam 4 brought us the Dot Gobbler multiverse, and if in Wizard Jam V you hope to help build that sprawling canon by including assets from other readers' games then this is the thread for you! Or maybe you just want a nice model of a bipedal cow in a police officers hat for reasons unrelated to WJ4's hit game The Stake Out, in which case this thread is also 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)

The confusion is probably time zone related; I think technically the jam page opens at 12 am at +12 GMT? Anyway unrelated, International Love Ultimatum 3 aka iluJam is also running all of June, so consider making a visual novel and submitting to both! https://itch.io/jam/ilujam3

Fun fact, Unity was actually originally Mac only! Here's a forum thread from almost 10 years ago ('08) where someone makes an impassioned argument that Unity shouldn't be cross platform: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/keep-unity-mac-only.12065/

So, with the abundance of conferences and such related to game design and development these days, I'm sure there are just about a million interesting/useful/inspirational talks floating around. Let's share and get our learn on! This is a recent favorite, Jan Willem Nijman from Vlambeer talking about "The Art of Screenshake." I really like this talk, from both a content perspective, and in how Jan illustrates his talking points with a game that's iterated on over the course of the talk. This really informed my understanding of what it is that makes Vlambeers games so damn good; it's a thing that's hard to put into words, and I think that's what makes this presentation so effective.

Talks from PRACTICE 2016 just went up, here're a few I recommend. Robin Hunicke talking about building her company: Dain Saint talking about UI/UX: Ken Perlin talking about the future of AR/VR:

Woo! Thanks Zero! This'll mark the third year of wizard jams and I continue to be delighted by the stuff everyone puts together. As always, we've been chatting a bit about how we can improve the jam and if anyone has suggestions now would be the time to post 'em or drop in the slack channel and let us know what we can do to make this as positive an experience as possible for everyone.

It was! And now that we've done it twice, it's officially a tradition and will happen every year.

If anyone sees this late, a few of us talked in Slack and are getting dinner on Saturday. Drop in the slack channel or leave a message here if you're around and wanna hang out!

Yeah, I'll be around all weekend again. Not working this year I don't think (though I might try and run some demos at an event saturday night).

THE SEMI-OFFICIAL IDLE THUMBS GDC 2017 MEETUP WILL OCCUR AT 5 PM MARCH 4, 2017 AT WHITECHAPEL GIN BAR SAN FRANCISCO

This is sorta confusing...Android and iOS both host their own leaderboards via the Google Play Games / Game Center. I don't know why you'd spend the time writing your own, or relying on random 3rd party.

GRAVITY WOLF will be the third release from Fun Ghost's Haunted Fun Factory. It's a first person shooter about orbits, lasers, and recycling. While floating in space, you can orbit planets, fall to their center of gravity, or lock a movement vector to move in; you use these mechanics together to conserve fuel, which will allow you to explore further star systems and gather resources. There's a fair amount done and it's feeling good, but of course there's still a ton of work to do. This'll be my first real PC/Mac release after doing mobile for a bit; it's still very early, but I'm shooting to be on Greenlight in the spring. I'll probably start showing it at some local events around then as well. Anyway, we're all really here for the gifs, right? First iteration of a message / log system. This is in my test level, and shows off the movement system a bit. The player and the satellites are both affected by the same gravity system that keeps them orbiting.

Yeah, I was just curious to see if I could do it and this was the first method that came to mind. I'd like to take another shot at it, but it is sort of reinventing the wheel at this point. Anyway, I've never used the Unity ragdoll creator thing so I was messing with it last night. It's pretty easy to use! I wanna start messing with IK next I think.

Alright I continue to be very busy with work stuff (we shipped a launch game for the Google Daydream in December! woo!) and haven't felt like finishing anything really. But I've been noodling around a bit on some other projects...here are some gifs of tiny bits of other things I'm poking around on. This is a first stab at making an arcing teleport-y line that seems to be so popular in VR stuff right now. I used a linerenderer, which I think was a mistake...for one, being flat just looks mediocre in VR, but also the line renderer just lags in a weird way (possibly due to bad math?) so I'm going to rebuild this with a 3d mesh instead, and try to use a vertext offset shader to get the arc looking good. Also I'm trying to get a grip on doing shader work (starting in Shader Forge because good lord writing CG seems hard). This shader changes saturation based on distance from a specified position (in this case, the camera).

This was fun and we should continue to do them on some kind of semi regular cadence!

I was thinking on the early side...I think we did 5ish last time? So probably around then? edit: Also, gdc goin' folks, tickets for That Party are going on sale weds http://that.party/

First time GDC advice? You'll have better luck meeting cool folks if you just bum around Thirsty Bear or that bar at the top of the Hilton rather than the big parties, but I guess generally I would recommend signing up for whatever big stuff is going on, then if you have even the slightest inkling that something more chill/intimate/whatever is happening somewhere, go do that instead. And if you know people you wanna hang out with are gonna be in town, make lunch/dinner plans early. Branch out and check out some weird talks that aren't strictly in your discipline, and if you hear about interesting talks from people, write 'em down and look them up on the GDC Vault later. Check out Lost Levels, in the garden above Moscone North, I think it's on Thursday. And go to Experimental Gameplay Workshop on Friday, there's usually some really amazing stuff there, and also go take a peek at Alt Ctrl GDC in the expo hall. I also hear the gameplay workshop on mon/tues is really good? I haven't done it myself, but my coworker Tim helps run it I guess, and he's a truly astoundingly brilliant dude, so I'll go ahead and recommend that anyway. Also there's a MA developer party thing on Tuesday that I'll be at, and there was a good turnout of other Boston devs last year. If anyone wants to come hang out with me, it's $10 but you get a drink ticket and it's pretty close to Moscone https://www.eventbrite.com/e/made-in-ma-at-gdc-2017-party-tickets-30889267631 Whoops that got long my bad

Alright, cool, sounds like we have a consensus on Whitechapel then.

The only thing about this plan that gives me pause is that Pagan Idol has potential for good Idol/Idle jokes

Yeah, I think we started basically as soon as Pagan Idol opened. 5 or 5:30ish. So...I guess let's officially plan on Whitechapel on that Saturday (March 4th) at 5ish. I think it's walkable from Moscone(?).

Yeah, I'm just hesitant to do a weeknight thing 'cause so much other gdc stuff happens during the week, and Saturday tends to not have as much going on. On the other hand, it might be cool for people to meet earlier on so we can make other plans for the week or say hi in the halls or whatever.

We had a pretty good meetup with a bunch of readers last year on the Saturday following GDC at Pagan Idol; I was actually about to post and suggest we do that again, which would make it the evening of March 4th. Sarah had also suggested Whitechapel (which is a gin bar by the same owners I think?) last year, which is another good option, though I think we'd need to get a firm headcount and make a reservation. But they also have some food, which'd be nice, as I don't think I ate anything last time and ended up flying home with a massive hangover on Sunday. Or maybe we do a food first then go somewhere else for drinks. I'll also be around all week (Sunday to Sunday, 26th to 5th) if people wanna less formally grab dinner or beers or somethin!

Thumper added Oculus/Vive support today on PC...I played the PSVR demo the other day and REALLY liked it. I haven't played in not-VR but despite using a gamepad, that feels like a game that gains a lot from completely immersing you in it's trippy visuals and heavy industrial music. Also I found out that the bassist from Lightning Bolt is one of the developers which...is very fitting.

I donno how I missed that button...I was trying to find that for a VERY long time. I think I was expecting it to be in the top right set of buttons along with quests.