Dinosaursssssss

I have some plans for experimenting with movement, but to start I'd like to try implementing the now-standard arcing teleporter-y thing. BUT I also had this wacky idea to tie the Vive controllers to your shoes and walk in place to move... edit: Oh also, I think the idea for the wrist control thing came from this guy, who I think is a VR researcher at the goog now.

The other teleporting method I've been thinking about is like...you can pick up and throw a teleporter 'beacon', and wherever it lands, a telephone box/elevator/whatever drops out of the sky and lands. Then if you go in that, it has buttons to bring you wherever. What's nice about this method potentially is that it means I can shut the doors and load a level, and have that cool moment where the doors open after a few seconds and you're suddenly somewhere else completely. I do like the wrist thing a lot though, so even if I do that I'll use the wrist for other controls.

alright I started messing around with the Vive SDK, which it turns out is extremely easy to get started with. At some point I'll probably share the stupid sandbox I'm goofing around in, but for now here's a teaser of the very dumb antics I've been getting up to. While I was working I was thinking about how strange it is being able to change the properties of physics while inhabiting a virtual space...I was playing around with making throwable objects, and the ability to just change a slider and suddenly throw an object hundreds of feet is surreal. Tweaking weight and velocity and drag suddenly feels like wizardry. Also, living in the same world as the bugs you create is a different experience than normal game bugs...having an object stop behaving how you expect and just stick to you or suddenly get replicated hundreds of times is really jarring (and hilarious).

I do think there's something interesting about having a singular theme like you suggest; Global Game Jam is a great example of that, and they've done a great job picking themes with enormous potential for variation. But I also feel like that'd be hard to do while also maintaining a connection to IT, which is seemingly what people want from Wiz Jams.

My personal feeling is that the jams should be different in some capacity, and doing episode titles for summer and Something Else for winter made the most sense to me when we were trying to figure out what to do last year. Obviously for the winter one I don't think we'd not allow people to do ep titles, but SOMETHING to differentiate them feels important to me for keeping this event fun and special. If anyone has suggestions on this I'd love to hear them!!

I played Accounting today and it was probably the most entertaining and bizarre VR experience I've had yet. It's free on Steam and I can't recommend it highly enough. Also fwiw it'd probably be ideal to go in knowing as little about it as possible. http://store.steampowered.com/app/518580/

I don't really have a specific thing in mind, but I have a bunch of small ideas I wanna try building. For now I kind of just want to make a weird sandbox and play around, see what feels fun, what sort of interfaces work well with the vive controllers, whatever. I was kind of working on a space sim idle game loneliness simulator thing that I feel like might work well in VR that'll probably be sorta the framework for this but I'm not dead set on it.

I know a bunch of people who've done this and liked it, seems like a great way to meet some people and get a free pass. Plus they pay you for it now I think(?) so that's cool. Really the only thing that kept me from doing it is that apparently there's a mandatory meeting early every morning at 9 am I think, and generally the way I live that week isn't compatible with that schedule.

Welp I went ahead and bought some huge poles to mount my vive guys on, cause I don't wanna put any more holes in the walls. Now I just need to completely rearrange this room and I can start construction (of a vr game).

nice, I was actually just about to message you about this

I feel like I've played a lot of this and the club stuff still hasn't opened up :\ anyway, car fashion show has been fun. There're some really dumb (in the good way) paint jobs out there. I really like that the one with all the aliens and UFOs on it is called 'NASA'

what's the deal with this trial thing I've been hearing about, do you need to be paying for their subscription service thing to use that? I missed the open beta and wanna goof around with this a bit before I drop 60 bucks.

I initially bought this game (and Windows 10) because I was told that X Gon' Give It To Ya was on the soundtrack, but the actual great part about the music is that there's a Hospital Records station!

I've been playing and enjoying this so I added a buncha ya'll, my video games name is dinosaurssssss (with 6 s's because I have made mistakes in my life)

I feel like level design is increasingly becoming a lost art...recently we were trying to hire a LD and couldn't really find anyone around with experience. Obviously this is totally anecdotal but it feels like the AAA industry is shrinking and procedural generation is getting bigger, which makes finding dedicated level designers surprisingly rare.

mayo on pizza?? y / n

Anyone WoWin' for Legion? Been thinking about going back but I donno what server I'd play on or which character to pick back up.

Got this working again after updating from Unity 4.6 to 5.4. The question I keep asking myself is...why did I ever stop working on this, it's so perfectly dumb.

I got rejected by the Boston Festival of Indie Games today, a show I did last year and enjoyed, which kinda reminded me that I haven't really been looking at this thing recently...I got to a point I was happy with, then started hitting design problems I didn't have good solutions for, and tutorialization issues that required a ton of boring work, so I worked on it less and less, until I was touching it once every two weeks or so. That, plus starting a new job that I'm really trying to put my heart into is making it hard to put the time I need to into ol G Wolf. So I'm thinking I ought to officially take a little break, and make something small and dumb so I can regroup a bit. There're a lot of kinda core decisions in gw that I think need to be reexamined as well, like character progression and procedural levels, that I think the game miiight actually be better without. I donno. I think...also just working on something for this long mostly solo isn't fun for me. Making little stuff and doing jams has always been my true love, and while wrapping up a full Steam PC release is still a goal that I wanna hit for myself, spending a year on a project has just been a real drag for me. And multiple months of working a day job + 6 hours of dev while gearing up for PAX mighta just burned me out too much. The short break I took post-pax after crunching for months never really ended, I never really WANTED to get back to it. I think in those months the fun of doing game dev became capital W Work and stopped being a thing I loved doing for fun. I'm also just at a place professionally now where I'm finally actually kinda satisfied by my day job for the first time in my life, so there isn't a raging fire of dissatisfaction burning in my heart, keeping me up late at night working toward something better. Anyway, so, I'm gonna take a little time and work on Surfenstein, which was a game I made for the first Public Domain jam a couple years ago and started on a tablet version of, then stopped cause my ipad got stolen. And I'll probably just keep posting updates in this thread, cause, why not. So here's a gif of that game from a while ago that I like:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=721489811&searchtext= Poking through mods...here's a starting scenario where all your people are alcoholics?

After hearing the cast where Nick talked about having multiple year colonies I started to feel really bad about how many hours I've put in and how bad I am.

Played a little Windlands tonight (grappling hooks vr, basically) and that game is barf city. Perfect example of why having movement mapped to controller buttons is a bad idea. The grappling hook movement was fine, but moving around with the controllers made me sick almost instantly.

These are pretty excellent colony names.

that's fucked up

it's not *that* bad since you have the turrets, and you get other colonists relatively quickly, but if you goof up early or get colonists who can't do medicine it's pretty annoying.