Travis

I am liking your finalized character renditions there. Definitely a lot of detail, but not too much. Has a differentiated style to it all, which is nice!

Sorry to hear you've been having some troubles. I don't know where this game will end up, but that final gif... that is pure gold!

Sent out a few codes to get some early impressions and testing done. If you're interested in giving some test runs if the game, send me a PM here or in slack and I will set you up.

Way back in 2016, Jon Coughlin and I decided to make a game for the GBJam. We had been fiddling around on another project prior to that and decided to set it aside and make a game celebrating a system we both love. We batted around a few ideas ranging from strategy games to arcade games, but eventually decided on something a bit different: an exploration game where you control a little boy out exploring the outdoors. We did a lot of good things during the week long jam, including getting several systems in place, and creating enough art assets to get us through. There was a solid mini-game to support the collecting of bugs as you explored. The mini-game, the ambient sounds, and the art were all in decent shape and yet we still ran out of time. In a frantic state, we threw together a world to explore and submitted the project prior to the deadline. The jam submission didn’t use the environmental sounds properly, and the world definitely felt fairly rushed. I also threw in some footstep sounds in the last three minutes or so that are somewhat irritating over time. So, we decided that our game idea definitely needed some more love. I have been working on it (somewhat regularly) since the end of the jam. Jon has largely been working on his Eyes of Cheatin’ Hitman project, which is turning out to be really cool! He is welcome to jump back in at any time, but regardless, I want to get this game polished up and re-release it. I am starting this devlog to motivate me to push through what is hopefully the final bit before letting people test it. I might be dredging up some old progress here and there just to show some of the game, but I just wanted a place to post some stuff about it as I go. You can go play the jam version of the game if you’d like, but you have been warned of its issues! Thanks for reading!

This is the bad ending, when your child throws himself off of a building to escape your overbearing helicopter parenting techniques.

That is looking really cool so far. I really like the art style too.

My wife and I opened a studio... a craft studio! We got a lot of help from a local government group called the "Small Business Development Center." That is local to us, though, but maybe you have something near you that is similar. They really helped guide us through the process we needed and either answered questions or knew who to ask.

I have been playing through the game a bit looking for obvious errors, such as this: Not sure how an egg ended up in the list of bugs. Most of the other problems have been with the saving/loading of objects' states, and I generally haven't found too many, so that's encouraging. Also, I have been fixing up a few things that have been bothering me for a long time, like the way the river water looked. I forgot to take a before picture, so all I have for you is the way it looks now: I got some good input from the game-dev slack channel to make it look this good. Trust me, it is much better than before! Now I am doing similar improvements to the water in the rock-skipping minigame, but that is going to require more than just applying this system there since the river flows in a completely different manner. The bad part about it is this means adding more (albeit very small) textures to the scene and continuing to trash the load times. I have done a lot to reduce those, but outside of devising a clever loading scheme, I am thinking we'll just have to live with a long load time. I will keep hacking at it as I can, though. Which reminds me... this game started as part of the 2016 GBJAM, which is about to happen again! I was hoping to make a few minor improvements to our entry and call it good. Here we are a year later, though, and I'm still working on this project. A lot has happened in that year, so I forgive myself, but it is time to put a bow on it and move on to the next thing I have brewing! I am hoping to get early copies out to a few people to help me find errors that I can patch up before "release". Hoping to get to that state in a week or two. Thanks for checking in!

YES! It must end soon! Doing a debugging pass this week, then a few other changes I had planned.

I'll be sure to check it out and try to support it if I can. Keep us posted!

Well, things got pretty nuts for me because of Wizard Jam and other various factors. Plus, I have been doing freelance work using Unity for a while now, so getting motivated to fire it all up in my off time is a bit harder. Anyway, I have picked this back up, started remembering what the hell I was doing, and made some progress. I now have palette swapping implemented from the main menu, and a nice variety of palettes to choose from if you don't like the greens we used originally. I am open to other color combo ideas if you have any, as it's pretty easy to set up now. You can see the ones I have in the game here: The really ugly/muted greens are supposed to emulate that GameBoy that survived Desert Storm and is at the Nintendo World Store. Additionally, I have gotten back into the game saving/loading system and seem to have it remembering interactions that I want to save across sessions, etc. I need to add in an option to clear save data, and then that system should be complete, but definitely needs some testing. After that, I need to spend some time just wandering around the world a bit and see what is missing. I have some graphical things that kind of bug me, but I am not sure how/if I will be fixing those up. I'll see how I feel after some playtesting from me and a couple others. Thanks for checking in on this oft-delayed game jam expansion project! I am hoping to wrap it up to start on a different game brewing in my head soon.

Just checking in here and see pretty interesting ideas! Although the greek time-looping game is a bit confusing, I like all three. The look in the first game is really nice for a quick prototype. I hope something sticks with you soon and inspires you to keep going.

This continues to look really good! I signed up for your email list and everything. Keep after it!

It hasn't been decided yet. Join the #wizardjam slack channel to be involved in any polls that come along to pick dates. It will probably be around the same time as WJ4, but the time could vary by a few weeks based on polling. Hope you can join in!

I agree with this. There is no way to do things perfectly your first time through (or ever, really), so just make a thing. Looking back later, you will know what you could have done better, but you wouldn't have that wisdom without that first messy project.

Intriguing!

Man, that's a ton of cool new stuff in just a week. I like the cards and the pet ideas... but now I am really curious about the two-"headed" blob chef in that house.

This sounds like a neat concept and looks really good! I like the style of everything too.

Suddenly, the King of France! Hello! This will be my third Wizard Jam and I am stoked to get started! If you want to see my previous WJ games, I was pretty happy with Cool Blob Future and sort of like a few things I did in Devil’s Snuff Box (but not many things). For Wizard Jam 5, I am taking on Idle Thumbs 241: Suddenly the King of France. This will be my first jam game where I go all 3D, so I am going to try and push myself within reason and within the two week time limits. The Pitch: Suddenly the King of France is a puzzle shooter that puts you in shoes of the King of France at the time of the French Revolution. Your goal is to save your hide from the angry masses and earn tons of points while doing so. If you are wondering how the lengthy imprisonment, trial, and sentencing of King Louis XVI will make a fun game, it won’t. So, I’m just mashing a bunch of historical events, stereotypes, and misunderstandings into a scenario that will hopefully be fun! Perched on the top of your castle tower, you must distract and destroy the charging citizens by making them turn their lust for the king’s blood on each other. You’re equipped with a special cannon, precisely firing king accoutrements onto individuals, causing their fellow citizens to toss them onto the guillotines they intended to use to lop off your regal head. Once you tag a citizen with all three pieces of the king’s regalia, the citizenry will turn on that poor plebeian and you’ll earn points. If you shoot the same citizen with the same piece of king equipment, it will destroy both of them and act as a setback. As the citizens continue to flood into the court, they will slowly chip away at your tower, bringing you ever closer to your death and the end of the game. The Mockup: This picture is pretty bad, but it gives an idea of the layout. You are shooting down from a high tower as citizens pour through several doorways, coming to get you! The perspective on this mockup is all off, but I decided to save my energy for really making the game instead of this mockup. Hopefully it’s good enough to give you the idea! Since I am no artist and no modeler, my characters and props are going to be very basic and cartoony, but I think I can create a consistent and fun look that should work. I hope so anyway. The Team: Game design, programming, and bad 3D modeling: Me Voiceover work: Jon Coughlin & YOU?? Music: Joel Whitaker Personal Learning/Stretch Goals for this Jam: · Create all simple 3D models with Blender and ProBuilder · Make basic AI for citizens that complements the “puzzle” elements · Create an online leaderboard? This is a stretch. Want to help out with a game and do it in less than ten minutes? Great! Just send me a quality recording of you yelling some sort of charging growl or grunt sound that you would imagine an angry Frenchman making as he passionately charges into a castle. Send me a link or a file through the forum PMs along with the name you want in the credits! I will try to update this log as best I can, especially with juicy gifs! Thanks for reading!

I think I finally found the primary source of problems people were running into. I had caught a couple others previously, but I think this one was the biggest direct cause. I also touched up the menus a little, added a non-standard skybox, and rebalanced the whole spawning system. Hopefully there will be fewer jams at the tower base now and more firing out into the plaza if you use the Majestic Blast properly. If you've tried the game before, give it another go and let me know what you think and if you are still hitting bugs. Here's the devlog I posted on itch: https://whogas.itch.io/suddenly-the-king-of-france/devlog/4115/significant-update-today Also, as a bonus, here is a gif that makes me laugh of a very early prototype w/o many restraints on the physics system.

I watched your dev video and enjoyed it! My dog on the other hand did not. She looked like this until she eventually left the room. Weird since dogs on TV don't normally even get her attention. I guess it was something about the 500 dogs!

Just played through this and left a comment on itch. Nice work!

I've enjoyed showcase weekend! Watching streams and getting more feedback on my game has been great! Thanks to everyone participating. I personally didn't have much time to actually play many of the games over the weekend, so I will try to play some throughout the week and leave feedback in threads or on itch. If you feel like you haven't gotten a lot of downloads or input on your game, send me a DM and I'll put you at the top of my personal queue. I don't want anyone to feel like they spent two weeks working on something that nobody played. Don't feel guilty shooting me a message, either. I really want to give your game the attention it deserves.

I saw elvaq play later and I realized I didn't upgrade at all! Silly of me not to try since I've played plenty of tower defense games. Not sure why I didn't even think about it... I am not so sure I would blame the game over the player in this case.

Another quick fix uploaded just now after watching @elvaq get totally hosed by the 100% random ammo distribution. It should now be ~equal with some 2-in-a-row cases and such so it isn't just a continuous pattern. Also fixed a bug I found when testing if a guillotine was in use and you died. Hope it didn't break more! 6/26/2017 EDIT: Uploaded another small update. Finding more little spots where trouble can slip in and ruin everything. I am sure there are more. Let me know if you run into bugs, especially after updating after today or on Mac with version 1.0.5