hedgefield

This sounds amazing, good luck!

Thanks! What were these ideas you had? I haven't thought out much of the gameplay, so maybe I can incorporate some of your ideas! Are you on the Idle Thumbs slack?

Hyped for this. I've been missing the Egyptian setting in games for a long time now. I was very excited for Assassin's Creed Origins in that regard, but not when I saw the gameplay. This looks like it'll turn out to be the perfect mix! Dang though, guess I'll have to shelve my game about a black woman making a documentary now.

So far so good, with a lot of trial and error I've gotten the ledge climb system working, and for fun I set up some lighting and a stock sprite hand for the idea. The purple trigger checks whether the player is jumping when entering the trigger volume, and moves them up onto the ledge surface. Some optimization can be done there, it literally just moves them up and forward by 1, I want to make it check the player position first and calculate the difference needed to get to the target position. And eventually animate the camera and all. But even with that basic implementation, it already feels pretty cool when jumping from one platform to the other and scrambling up by the skin of your teeth. Next I want to make another trigger to slide over low obstacles, and charging up the jump height by holding down space.

Yeah just keep it simple. The main thing I wanted to achieve for this jam was to have a first-person character that can climb up onto ledges in a Blade Runner-esque environment. That's basically done already, so everything else will be fun extras

So cool how a random idea like that still reflects back on what's happening in your life, your take on vegetarianism. Good luck, sounds ace!

Sounds interesting! I like that you are trying to base the gameplay on real behavioral studies. Good luck!

Agreed on Resident Evil 7 and Tacoma. I just finished writing up a post about my media log of 2017 (yeah I keep a log), but fuck naming my GOTY is still hard. I think it's a toss-up between Prey, Horizon Zero Dawn and Hellblade. Prey made me realize the immersive sim is my favorite genre and that I need to make a game like that. HZD is just beautiful and lush and interesting and Dutch, and the politics are so well-nuanced. And Hellblade gave me hope that the AA space will grow and accommodate all the great narrative experiences I crave, and also it's damn spooky and intense.

I've updated the guide to work with the new version of Github Desktop, which now has identical functionality on every platform, making the process on MacOS especially a lot easier. If you were confused or turned off before, give it another read.

We were talking in the Idle Thumbs slack about GIT, and it's still pretty difficult to explain, so I thought I'd write a GITting started guide (sorry). It got pretty long, but it's good knowledge! STEP 0: ...What the hell is GIT? GIT is a 'version control' system, a way to back up files to the cloud and make collaboration easier. It's kinda like Dropbox, but unlike Dropbox it allows you to write a description each time you do a backup so you know what you did and when. This makes it easy to roll back if you break something in the game, and see exactly which files you affected with your most recent changes. It also handles conflicts a little more gracefully than "THIS IS THE NEWEST VERSION DERP". You need three pieces to make GIT work for you: A project folder on your own computer A 'repository' (which is a folder in the cloud that stores the back-upped files) An app to keep the two in sync STEP 1: Make a folder This one's easy: make an empty folder somewhere on your computer, called "repos", or "gamedev", or something like that. This folder will be the new home for all your projects from now on. But don't put anything in it just yet! It has to be empty, so don't use an existing folder either. STEP 2: Set up a repository To make a repo, you first go to a website like Github or Bitbucket and create a free account. Github is the most famous, but as a free user there you can only make public repos, which means ANYONE can view and download the files you store there. Therefore I recommend Bitbucket, which has unlimited free private repos. (once your projects get big enough and you want an integrated issue tracker and wiki etc you can consider paying for private Github repos.) So, once you're in Bitbucket, click the + on the left and make a new Repository. Give it a name, make sure that you check PRIVATE REPO and the type is set to GIT, then click Create! Now you should be looking at your repo dashboard. You won't need to be in here very often, but for now, select the URL listed at the top, next to the HTTPS dropdown, and copy it. STEP 3: Linking the repo to your local folder Next, download the Github desktop app. You may be thinking "Whaaat, Github? You just said it sucks!" Well yeah, but in my opinion their app is nicer than Bitbucket's equivalent Sourcetree. But the difference is not as big as it used to be. The process will be quite similar, but I will explain using the Github app. So install and open that. Click on File > Clone Repository. In the next window, click on the URL tab on the right and paste in the URL you copied in step 2. Then below that hit Browse and select the empty folder you made in step 1. Git will automatically make a folder for your project files inside that, don't worry about it. Hit OK then hit Clone. If all goes well it will start cloning the remote repo into your local directory. It's basically just making a folder, because your repo is still empty. Next, we'll start filling it. STEP 4: THE .GITIGNORE FILE BEFORE you put anything else in this newly created folder, go to https://github.com/github/gitignore Here you can find essential documents that tells GIT which files it should NOT back up, namely auto-generated files that are platform-specific and are not needed to safely backup your project. In fact, they needlessly clutter your repo and make each backup very hard to understand. So find the .gitignore file that matches your game engine (so for instance Unity.gitignore), right-click it and save it into your project folder. When the file is in place, go back to the Github app. If all went well, it should show up under the Changes tab. This list shows local changes that have not been synced to the repo yet. Performing that sync is called 'making a commit'. It's GIT copying those files to the cloud (the repo) for safekeeping. Think of this as the changelog of your project. For example, let's say you changed the main character's shirt color to red. When you commit that change, it gets saved to your repo. If you then change the shirt color to blue and commit THAT, that's a second entry in the repo history. So if you look back later you can see "oh yeah I changed it to red but decided blue was better." For now just type something like "gitignore" in the Summary field, press Commit to Master, wait for the list to clear (which means the commit is ready), and then press Publish Branch in the top right. Congrats, you just backed up your first file! Now you're in business. STEP 5: SYNCING LOCAL AND REMOTE On to the good stuff. The local folder is now safe to put project files into. Either start a new project in your favorite engine using that folder as a destination, or copy existing files into it. Go back to the Github app and see these new files appear under Changes. They're all selected by default, which is good. Type "initial commit" into the Summary field, press Commit, wait for the list to clear and then press Push Origin. This time it will probably take longer because there are more files. It's generally good practice to make a commit after each feature or task is completed. If you wait until the end of the day, you'll just see a bulk of work that might be hard to remember and describe. You're doing yourself a favor, because you can pick any commit you made and roll your project back to that state (if you fuck up real bad), and having clear descriptions of what you changed helps a lot. IMPORTANT: making a commit puts your changes into the upload queue, but ONLY when you click Push are they actually uploaded to the remote server. STEP 6: OH GOD WHAT DID I DO? You shouldn't really ever run into problems if you're the only one working on the project, but sometimes things can go wrong. And with a team, it gets a bit more complicated still. So here are a few tips to avoid BAD TIMES. Try to only commit things that work. It's the same principle as cleaning up after you take a dump. You don't want to leave the next person with shit to clean up before they can do their thing (even if that person is you). If you work on a project across multiple computers, ALWAYS sync first before you start working. This is called "pulling". It's the same button as publishing/pushing. I've forgotten to do this sometimes before making more changes and ended up with a file version conflict. YOU DON'T WANT CONFLICTS. Same goes if one of your teammates made changes overnight that they maybe didn't tell you about. Which leads to the third tip: When working with multiple people, make VERY CLEAR agreements on who works on what when. If you both work on the same level, even if he did prop placement and you did collision boxes, you'll get a conflict because there are now two versions of the same asset. Only code changes can be merged together, but that's still a pain. Just try not to do it. If you really want to try something radical or hack out a feature that will likely break the game for a few days, make a branch. A branch basically isolates changes into a separate 'timeline', so the original can remain stable and working. You can merge the changes back into the master branch later when everything is bug-free. I won't go into detail on this, there are guides out there that explain it better than I can. If you get a merge conflict: good luck. Debugging those is a pain. But I can share One Weird Trick that can save your skin: if you tried to push files that conflict with their remote versions, GIT will usually barf everything back in your face and it can be hard to decide what to do next. In that case, you can undo your commit. Click Repository > Open in command line/Terminal. Then type git reset HEAD^, and now all your changes should be back the way they were, and you can uncheck the conflicting ones before committing again. Then you can choose to discard the remaining problematic local changes or push them to overwrite existing remote files. For more in-depth troubleshooting I recommend bookmarking this page https://sethrobertson.github.io/GitFixUm/fixup.html Now you should know everything to practice safe GIT! Good luck! If anything was unclear or you're missing something, let me know and I'll update the guide. Maybe I'll make a Youtube video out of it eventually if people want that.

I had pretty high expectations from the first trailer. As an artist I love color and composition, and as a sci-fi fan I love the Blade Runner/Akira/Ghost in the Shell/Deus Ex brutalist futurism. The later trailers did make it seem all action-packed, but I was convinced it would be a good one, and it delivered. To me the story is less important, I found it very inspiring as a work of art. The colors are very good of course, and the craft of doing it with physical sets and all is very good too, but also the fact that in almost every scene in the first hour they introduce some futurist concept with a fresh spin - the cars with the drones, the projector and the emenator complete with a working UI concept that feels natural, how they store data, how they light the Wallace offices, it's all extremely well thought-out and presented, and often manages to avoid tropes too. That trend continues in what you mention, @Vainamoinen.

Finished it yesterday, oof woof. That ending was intense. I love how they make it feel like you become more powerful towards the end without offering any skill trees or XP boosts. It's just like oh shit, now I can decimate three or four dudes with one chop. Not sure if that's me getting more skilled at timing or them tweaking the damage, but it felt great. They really did a good one here. I hope more people check it out and sing its praises.

I've heard good things about GitKraken yeah. I stayed away from Sourcetree in the beginning because their GUI was very classic-windows-toolbars-everywhere-gray-drab, but I see they've made some major improvements in that department since. I can imagine that their features are very useful when working with multiple people.

Man, this game. Until two days ago I didn't even know it was in development, and it has shot up to be my GOTY since then. It's such a bold project. From the start it was definitely one of the most chilling games I've ever played (you have to play with headphones), but I was waiting for it to become rote (fight some guys, do some puzzles, bossfight, repeat) but after the first two 'dungeons' they turn the formula on its head and dive into some experimental gameplay, and then explode out with amazing setpieces. So glad to see an AAA dev throw an AAA budget at new ideas and great, well-researched storytelling. @syntheticgerbil there are NPCs, but not in the traditional sense, there are no sidekicks or villagers, but you do see some other characters. The overall style is pretty bleak, but that fits with the opressing atmosphere of dread and tragedy. That's not to say the environments are dull, they really did a good job making some impressive vistas, and they play a lot with the weather and time of day. I feel like it both fits in the line of Ninja Theory games and also stands out because of the wildly different tone. I didn't play that much of Heavenly Sword or Enslaved (though I loved their aesthetic) but I feel like those are way more action-packed. Hellblade has a really sweet combat system too, but they use combat more as a story beat and not so much as the main gameplay. The majority of the time you'll be exploring the environment and learning about Norse lore and the workings of mental illness, as told through the parable of Senua.

Haha I love it.

Wow looking great already!

I love that you can always tell it's a zerofiftyone joint from the reliably sweet cyber aesthetics.

You might have the next casual games hit franchise on your hands here.

Heyyy really nice! Great idea to have the door stop when it hits the player. Looking forward to seeing what you do with the story/setting.

Sounds great, good luck! I bet there are a lot of cool things you could do with the blend between the real world and the fantasy internalization world.

Delightful!

The writing is amazing. From the feel of the town to the mundane but enchanting conversations, and also the aesthetic of cartoon animals that blend seamlessly with human personalities, it's a masterclass in world design. And all the little interactions are wonderful. I was especially Blown Away by the fact that there are even full little extra games in this game, like the rockband and the pixel dungeon crawler!

I'm not even going near that mode. I tried it once, started with a knife and the assignment "defeat marguerite", and when I learned I had to get the greenhouse key from the house where a barfing juice boy was camping out I said fuck it. The other DLC is fun to replay, but I'm waiting for that story DLC to drop now.

I was deep into the first one, but the gameplay vid left me ambivalent. Maybe it's because I'm occupied with Horizon Zero Dawn currently, or the tech looks a little outdated (to be fair, it is an alpha), I'm not feeling it yet. Building up an army to take on raids is pretty cool though, but I'd like to see more of the filler stuff between the showpiece battles.

To me it reads more as an exploration of how things could get fucked up in isolated communities. That's the strongest reaction I had to it, realizing how people in these situations start thinking of arbitrary rules in service of structure that do more harm than good. It's no wonder Aloy doesn't want to be associated with the Nora. But I'm not that far in yet. So far I've found the Carja to be surprisingly nuanced; they are made out to be assholes at the start, and then you get to their outpost and they're super accommodating and gentle. But maybe that will turn on its head later too. I think I'm about 15 to 20 hours in now, just reached the Carja gate that leads to the second biome. Holy moly this world is huge. I still feel pretty inadequate so I'm going to spend more time practicing on the bigger bots. Although I did survive taking down all four gators on that island in the west. It's nice when you feel like you're starting to get a grip on the big bots and then go back to striders or grazers, they're so easy.