Dinosaursssssss

Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential for those subtle social features to build a really great community. I just can't help but feel like it still won't match the feeling of having a regular server. The Team Funcom TF2 server just feels like home to me after so many years of playing there, in a way that a system like this can't really replicate...there's something about seeing someone drop by who hasn't been around for a while, or coming back after months and having friendly faces (or steam icons I guess) still kickin' around that just makes me feel cozy and comfortable in a way that matchmaking can't quite capture I don't think.

This article tackles some of the social issues that ZeroFiftyOne mentioned; remains to be seen how successful this stuff will be, but Blizz is tackling the problem in an interesting way that makes me hopeful. https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/05/how-overwatch-tries-to-create-friendly-competition.html

If you're looking for people to play with, drop by the Slack channel and ask around! A buuuunch of us played together during the last open beta weekend thingy and I'm sure once it's out that will continue. Also, to Clydes point about TF2: during the Overwatch beta weekend I got curious and played both some TF2 and some Quake Live to do a comparison for myself and it ended up being a really interesting design exercise to compare them. For example, comparing Pharah and the TF2 soldier, you can see that they have a lot of the same capabilities, but are accessible in different ways. Pharah's rockets have no physics impulse; instead she has the conc grenade, and her jump always goes straight up, but you can reach different areas by combining that with her jetpack. The TF2 soldier basically combines all those abilities into one weapon, rather than one weapon + 2 abilities. The soldier rocket can push players out of (or into) position, and using well placed rocket jumps and air curving, you can maneuver to any point on the map very quickly. The difference is that to use Pharah's skills takes a single button press, whereas rocket jumping is a skill that takes some time to master, that can also be pushed further to allow for jumping off walls, jumping off players, etc. I don't say this to mean that TF2 is strictly better than OW, but it does mean that on a per-character basis, TF2 has a higher skill ceiling, for better or worse. Obviously I can't say for certain, but it seems to me that it means a game like TFC or TF2 will have a much longer tail as players push the classes to their limits and discover new ways to reach areas quickly, at the cost of accessibility and in many cases game balance, two areas that OW seems extremely competent. edit: I don't wanna be that asshole, so to reiterate, I don't think complexity is strictly good, and Overwatch is an incredibly well made game that I will play many hours of.

Loving this, well done so far!

I don't really like the teleporty movement in Minecraft (or anywhere else). I'm sure it feels less awkward than moving with an analog stick, but it just ends up feeling fiddly and unnatural to me. That said, it did feel really good to get to the top of a mountain in mc and just look around and soak in the world.

I remember being pretty young and buying Gunman Chronicles when it came out, and just assuming it was made by the same people as Half Life. I don't think Valve actually had anything to do with it though (aside from making the engine)?

Neat! Can you talk a bit about what your development process for a physical game like this is? I'm mainly curious how much iteration a project like this goes through vs how much is determined up front, given how hard it is to really effectively test. Obviously in a digital game if you want to play through your game it's fairly straight forward; to test a game like this requires quite a bit more setup. I suppose puzzles can be examined individually, but overall it seems like it'd be a challenge.

Sure, seems potentially interesting? https://cartrdge.com/dinosaursssssss

Got my Vive set up last night! Wasn't too bad to get going, had to update the controller firmware but after that things were pretty smooth. The area I have juuust barely fits the minimum for room scale (about 5' by 6' I think?) So here's me playing Space Pirate Trainer in my pajamas and grinning like an idiot.

wooo PAX is here almost! One more full night of work, then setup day and PAX parties and chit chattin' for days. Game's looking alright, Greenlight went up over the weekend and is...slowly ticking along. I've been cramming features in as fast as I can to prepare for the show, here's a short list: - Attract mode - Pause menu with controls - Tutorial - Player upgrades (right now just health and ammunition maximum increases, but the system is pretty flexible) - A boss who shoots many lasers Also had to spend a while getting video assets together (for the magnificent ZeroFiftyOne, who cut a top notch trailer for me!) and screenshots for print assets and Greenlight. Greenlight ended up being a big pain in the ass, mainly due to how little info Valve provides. You're not told the dimensions or size restrictions on any assets, and nothing about how to format a Greenlight page is explained anywhere. And then of course the process itself is pretty opaque, although they do provide you with an OK set of metrics to track your progress. Anyway, pins 'n flyers came in today, just in time. Though actually I accidentally had the pins shipped to the wrong address (Chrome autofilled my parents ZIP code in). But my mom went over to the place and grabbed em for me! Aren't moms just the best?

Alright, now I can say that I'll be in booth #9177 this year, showing my new game Gravity Wolf! Come say hi My plans are still kinda up in the air but I could probably meet up Saturday night, maybe at Tamo across the street(ish)? It's pretty close by but usually not too crowded, and generally some fun folks are kicking around. Friday probably also works for me.

omg and I forgot to mention that zerofiftyone did the trailer on the greenlight page and did an amazing job! So if nothing else go watch that and give him some props.

My game Gravity Wolf is now on Steam Greenlight, please take a sec to go vote it up!! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=637404662

To add a bit to what ZeroFiftyOne said, a major goal of the Wiz Jam has always been to create a really positive environment for new/inexperienced games makers, so please don't be discouraged if you've never made anything before, and if you ever need help or just want people to bounce ideas off, drop by the gamedev slack channel/forum and come hang with us! We have a fun mix of new folks, professional developers, and everything in between kicking around and we're all happy to help out or just chit chat.

Wizard

GDC Vault stuff is up, here's the link to all the free ones: http://www.gdcvault.com/free/gdc-16 From those, I highly recommend Trent Kusters' Armello post-mortem (marketing focused): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023416/-The-Armello-Postmortem-A and Piotr Iwanecki's talk on SUPERHOT (design-y): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023483/Game-Design-and-Mind-Control I don't know that it was useful, but Tim Rogers' talk on why Videoball is the worlds greatest sport was very entertaining http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023454/video games-Are-Better-Than-Sports And Jakes talk on building had some good specific implementation info for doing Unity terrains and building an open world game http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023556/Level-Design-Workshop-Building-Firewatch The Diablo and Ms Pac Man post mortems were supposed to be good too, but I didn't see them. Some other good ones that aren't free I don't think are Meg Jayanth's (80 Days) narrative summit talk (she also gave a main conf one that I didn't see) and the Darkest Dungeon post mortem.

I'll be working every day during the show (drop by the Indie Mini Bar and say hi!), but if there's a meet up at night I'd love to grab a drink with folks or something.

Tennis is great! The other day I thought it would be warm enough to play again soon but then it snowed a lot today.

Honestly I love New Day but their booty is out of control

I made some cinnamon buns for a Wrestlemania party (I called them cinna-mcmahon buns), they were super good and people liked them. Not a lot of things are better than a cinnamon bun fresh from the oven. Recipe: Cinna-buns

Did a fair bit of UI work this weekend; a lot of it was just organizing the HUD and making things more obvious to people who didn't make the game, but I did a little general sprucing up as well. The biggest thing (to me) that I updated was I was looking at some screenshots of the upcoming game Strafe, and really liked their helmet-hud thing: Metroid Prime and ADR1FT also kinda do this and I think it looks fantastic in both those games as well, so I tried something similar. I tried to be really unintrusive with mine, but I think it adds just a hint of claustrophobia which I really like. ADR1FT actually models their UI in 3D because it's an oculus game where you move your head independently of the helmet; I don't think I want to go that far, but adding just a tiny bit of delay so the helmet has to catch up to quick turns would go a long way I think.

I don't like how when it suggests friends, it just tells you one mutual friend. I have no idea who the heck these people are!

Small update. I showed the game at a small event here in Boston and had about...oh, I donno, 10 or 20 people play. It went well, mostly; the issues that came up were the ones I expected, mainly related to the orbit/movement mechanic being a weird new thing that I don't tutorialize at all (yet) or explain through UI well. I took about a little over a page of notes and I think I can probably make this into a thing people can understand and enjoy in the next month. But not tonight! I just did my taxes so I'm gonna play Darkest Dungeon I think.

Thanks!! It's looking good and coming together, but there's still a lot to do! The things I am focusing on right now are fleshing out the UI to teach the movement mechanics better and building the game structure out so it doesn't just feel like a tech demo. I'll be showing at a small event in here in Boston on Monday with an aim toward nailing down the specifics of what that means. I think it probably mostly means some button prompts. I also finally found a decent asset on the store that'll get me the curved UI that I've been trying to build for a while; it's a little bit slower than what I was building out, it doesn't handle resizing UI images (like my health bar, which is now broken) but I think the curve helps make the UI feel more unique and it doesn't have the weird glitches my method had.

Current Playable : funghost.com/robot-news ============== I drew a quick sketch of what this game will be. I've been way into the low poly matte color renders I keep seeing pop up on Twitter so I wanted to take a stab at that. My main goal for the jam is to learn some more modelling basics and model, rig, animate, and uv some stuff for the first time. I'll probably spend the next day or two focusing on learning Blender stuff before even opening Unity. Basically this game will be you controlling a BigDog robot as it delivers newspapers to a neighborhood. Everything will go fine and no robots will kill all humans. I donno how much of this is intelligible to anyone else, but here it is anyway!