SuperBiasedMan

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Everything posted by SuperBiasedMan

  1. WIZARD JAM 9 -- Welcome Thread

    I look forward to many shoe-horn related games.
  2. Oh my god that's so good!
  3. Idle Fiction Jam - Rumours and Hearsay

    Well we have a game jam and now we have cocktail jam, so the natural progression is a fiction jam! (Credit goes to clairehosking for suggesting the jam) The basic idea is to write a little short something with all your thumb friends. I was thinking we could steal be inspired by wizard jam with episode title themes. Have a story inspired by any episode title from the network. You can write about Poopwater, New Mexico, In Search Of (Burnout) Paradise or Brendon Chung. Unlike in wizard jam, everyone writes about the same randomly chosen title. That way we see everyone's take on the same title. This is a lot of fun, see the multiple "Build the Nublar"s and "Shoot That Pizza"s from wizard jams. Basic rules: We start a new theme every month on the 4th. We submit our entry every month on the 1st. Entries should be a maximum of 3000 words. When you're ready to show your story, you can post it on Medium.com tagged with "Idle Fiction Jam". Feel free to add other tags you want of course, this tag just allows us to see all our entries together. Our theme for July 2016 is: A Person-Shaped Thing is a Person We also have diversifiers, optional constraints for you to apply to your ideas, in the hope that it can generate new interesting ideas. Try one, try five or try none if you want! The entries for June's theme Space Boss: The Lord of Space are here: There's also a #fiction-jam slack channel for anyone who wants to go on there for chatting about how the jams will work, or just chatting when we start writing. Here's the thread about the Thumbs slack: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/10426-idle-thumbs-readers-slack-discord/?hl= discord I think this is the current signup link for the slack: http://stingo.infinitebit.net:8001/
  4. Recently completed video games

    Not entirely a difficulty spike, but that was a very hard boss for me. Oddly, as someone who had done the full 107% completion before the new DLC, I did actually find it more difficult than any other boss in the game. I specifically found it notable that they did make that boss hard compared to the final boss of Dark Souls being a relative pushover, so I would definitely count that as a win for you.
  5. Life

    If you want to PM me that code you didn't understand, I could look through and break down exactly what's happening to try help clarify it. And yeah, something I did that was helpful was that I started making one game every week. I rarely actually finished any of these, but I had to stop working after a week. The time limit was good for not making me get too deep into anything, and I also could just do whatever idea I had without being concerned about whether it was good enough to take up my time. A week might be a rough schedule for you, but I endorse setting deadlines with projects where you have to stop regardless. Then you can look over what you did/didn't learn, and bear that in mind for the next thing you do.
  6. Life

    When I was a kid, I actually learned some programming in summer courses held in colleges. Mostly we learned the basic principles of how programming stuff worked and made very simple stuff. I've self taught a lot more since using code academy to brush up on some other languages, but a lot of my learning was really using tutorials to male games and then googling around to find solutions to problems. The way to make this work best is to actually try to understand the why behind the how, so that you can reapply the knowledge elsewhere rather than just having a solution to a single problem. I've had multiple different points where it felt like I 'got it'. Getting text to appear on a screen was great, having a functional little script was a new one. But there's always a new thing to figure out. It took me a while to understand what a class was and what it was for. Right now I don't think I fully grasp multithreading for example. But I think when I first got a computer to do a thing I told it, I felt like I got the basic idea, and it's just building onto it from there. In terms of work, I had a weird route. I studied animation in college and now work at an animation studio, writing scripts and tools for them. In this specific case they preferred me having an animation degree rather than a programming one, because it meant I'd understand the jargon and how the industry worked. No one else there did programming at the time, so they basically wanted me to come on and try streamline things by myself as best I could. I can't say for sure what it's like in other industries or software development itself.
  7. Life

    I would agree that Python is a good early language because it hides a lot of programming cruft that other languages require you to specify. With Python you can focus on understanding what variables, functions and loops are and how to use them. It was my first proper programming language, and I've since learned about the more crunchy bits of other languages. I'd have found it much harder to learn it all in one go. I use Python in work all day, so feel free to hit me up if you need help with anything specific. Judging by my LinkedIn inbox, there is a demand for Python out there.
  8. Hey all! Welcome to my thread. I'm working on a game that's basically a modified version of a game I had already been working on. This is a podcast simulator game, where fictional prompts are generated for the player and they write their own episode of of an Important Podcast. ==================================================================================================== You can get the game now!https://superbiasedman.itch.io/our-newest-show ==================================================================================================== There's a giant JSON file full of prompts that get served up to the player to flavour their choices as the episode goes on. Then to actually play it, you're just given a series of passages to fill out or make narrative choices and string together an episode. In the spoiler below you can see a gif showing how some of the original game works, for writing a Fantasy story. I've started building a new file with prompts and figuring out the structure of an Important Podcast episode, leading to this very early test episode I wrote: (As you can tell a lot of the prompts are still blank) The main thing I need to do for the jam is fill out the prompts you can get, write up explanations to help a user understand these prompts and improve the UI, because right now it's basic Unity defaults and you can't go back to see most of the stuff you've written. Plus I need to listen to a LOT of Important If True to learn the proper structure of a dysfunctional episode and replicate it.
  9. [released] Our Newest Show - Important Podcast Simulator

    Bah, sorry about that bug! Those examples were made before i adjusted the UI structure, you can even see how they look out of date. I'll fix that and the build compatibility thing. Also the reason I'm using Unity is mostly for me being comfortable with it, and it just being a tool to build programs for different platforms. It hasn't been all that heavy for me, but was it running slow or eating up resources for you?
  10. [released] Our Newest Show - Important Podcast Simulator

    The game has been released (a week ago)! I released in time for the deadline but I still wanted to do some hot fixes and UI updating before I posted here and declared it released. I was a little bit tight on writing as much as I wanted for this, but I did a lot of work changing grey squares into some rough looking, hopefully nice, paper textures. You can get the game now: https://superbiasedman.itch.io/our-newest-show Big thanks to atlantic creating music for this, when I had a vague and uncertain brief of ambient music that might need to play for a whole hour. Thanks for the kind words folks, I hope you enjoy this house of cards. Please do let me know about bugs too, as I'll be continue to work on the main game this was a branch off of.
  11. [released] Our Newest Show - Important Podcast Simulator

    Updates have been slow for the moment, but I should be able to pick up speed next week. However I have been working on making the UI smoother. Now it feels like a real game! Obviously needs actual graphics, but I think the layout is working super well.
  12. [Released] Stream Frasier Online Free

    This is amazing, I love it.
  13. [Released] Stream Frasier Online Free

    Incredible idea, I love it. For Unity you could look at Fungus, it's a great tool for visual novel style text conversations. I've never tried to use it for code generated text so I can't speak to how well that works.
  14. [Released] Betrayal and Manipulation

    I love the flavour of this, and the idea of it being similar to Into The Breach.
  15. WIZARD JAM 7 // Welcome Thread

    As a long term Pythoner who's also made a terminal based game I'm curious to see what your idea is. For the posts, I'd recommend cross posting because some people can be lazy and might not make that extra click.
  16. [Dev Log] Pegasus Launch

    Your meets are too enticing, looking forward to what you come out with.
  17. I joined this club by mistake

    Do you mean the Ron club?
  18. Important If True: "Inspired" by "real" "events".
  19. It's Twilight Mirage, the current regular free campaign. Though in the paid one set in modern day real world they have also borrowed stuff on occasion.
  20. There's a roleplaying podcast called Friends at the Table hosted by Austin Walker that's currently doing a sci fi season where it's "anything goes" sci fi bullshit. Austin has outright said before that he borrows ideas from discussions on this show, and I cannot wait for numerous sky scraper sized celebrities to appear on the show.
  21. I bought it last week and just last night finished the game after two islands! I was having a good run with the Steel Judokas. The thing that made them click really well for me is caring less about damage and more about moving enemies away from hurting the grid or me. A few times I actually got into good spots by having too many bugs, so they crowded and blocked each other. But also, I did get lucky with some good islands. Everyone had 2 weapons by the end of island 2 and my grid was maxed out, so I just went for it. My punch mech had a great second weapon, which basically did damage to every enemy on the map. It was a good fallback for when I couldn't get the mech into a more useful spot.
  22. Idle Thumbs 317: Press Start Go

    A really good indication of how Into the Breach works is that Patrick Klepek streamed it for over an hour, and managed to do only 3, maybe 4 turns, as he verbally talked through all his options to make sure he played as optimally as possible because he was in a tough corner.
  23. Hero's Journey

    Howdy folks! As some of you already know and have tested, at the start of this year I started work on a digital pen and paper roleplaying style game. I basically wanted the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons or other tabletop roleplaying games but without having to need other people and cumbersome dice rolls and stat tracking. So, I started work on this game. It basically randomises prompts and suggestions for a player, who has to then build the story out of what the game provides to them. I'm trying to keep it simple and extendible so that it could be easily modded or rewritten at a user's whim. Here's a quick demo of how one part of the game works. This shows a randomly generated prompt for the Setting of the game. The prompt just has some key jumping off points, and then I as the user have to define what it actually is in the story by incorporating the details that the game has provided. The goal is for it to be a player driven narrative, so that it offers a lot more breadth of options but that the limitations of the structure still encourage creative ideas. And the fact that so much of it has to come from the player is supposed to make you more invested in the story as it's playing out. It's been surprisingly successful so far! I have a solid working build, and it reads everything from a JSON file so it's easy to rearrange the structure and rewrite the prompts. My intent is that down the line people could easily write a new JSON file with a totally different flavour. You could make a noir game, road trip or reality show simulator without having to actually edit any of the code. I wanted to start this thread now as motivation and to start talking/thinking more deeply about some aspects of the game so far. It's a fairly strong foundation (I hope) so I just need to continue fleshing out parts. Right now my main focus is making it communicate a lot of things clearer to the player. Thanks for reading this post! If anyone's interested in trying the game out for yourself, get in contact. I've been getting great feedback from testers so far and it's helped shape the upcoming road map.
  24. Axon Devlog

    My two cents on the tutorial stuff is that the thing people usually hate is being slow walked and hand held through an inconsequential bit of the game that's not "real". Of course that's at odds with the fact that you don't want to throw them straight into the beginning of the game either, because then they're at a loss. I think your Dark Souls example is good because people forget that it's a tutorial. The opening level is small and limited, it has very clear exact prompts about what every little thing does. But it doesn't force you to read every message to be able to get through. A good enough player can fight the boss immediately and just leave. Someone who likes playing around with controls can figure out the buttons without reading every message. It's also just like the rest of the game really. It's fun and challenging. You're learning the game but you can still die, you still get to feel the triumph of overcoming enemies. It's easier and more directed, but by no means is it tacked on to the start as a fake level just to tell the player the mechanics. Unfortunately that does mean more work because effectively my answer is "Make a whole new level that's both a good level and can teach the players."
  25. With Nick redubbing this episode... I'm very suspicious. He could have subtley changed lines without us ever knowing since we haven't heard the source material. Have we been Wax House Babied?