coughlinjon

Added an oil pan

damn. that was my fear. alright, i rescind my fascination. can you imagine the version of this game in which they're just adding color to all of the characters with a genuine discussion about quail hunting? that's the game i want.

It's either the super quail hunting kind, or I'm guessing it's a sexuality euphemism; I hope it is the former.

Loving this game more and more. The writing is such high quality. Every character is fully developed. This has been my favorite line in the whole game Burke: She's around here somewhere if she aint out quail huntin Clay: Quail aint in season Burke: Bwuhhuh, for her kind it's always in season lolol are you kidding me!? Lincoln even pauses and processes it for a second - Lincoln Clay is a man who knows his quail seasons. This is Naughty Dog-level nuance in a gigantic, LONG sandbox story. The more I watched that line, the more I hope they're actually talking about quail, though, and not some shitty euphemism. I played about ten hours of The Witcher 3 two years ago and I really liked the depth of its characters, but I have found Mafia better written, better acted, more grounded, and richer, so far. I wish I had played this game when it first released.

I saw a bit of Ultrawings talk earlier; it is still my favorite VR thing. I borrow a PSVR from the office, and I should play it more than I have.

I have played enough Mafia III to decide I love it; it is socially and politically ambitious in ways no other sandbox games have seemed, to me. The characters are deep and the missions/activities are consistent with the plot and the game world. I understand what Lincoln is doing at any moment and why it is necessary. All of the upgrade systems, as favors from your network, make thematic sense. I don't think I have played a sandbox game this consistently designed. Mechanically, I love the driving - I set the model to Simulation and suddenly driving with analog triggers becomes necessary and allows me to drive with precision I wasn't getting in Arcade mode. The crowbar lock cracking is dull - it's about the only aspect of this game that turns me off. Anyone else?

Mafia III is a PS+ game this month. I have started playing it - I'm probably three hours deep. I am impressed, so far. Anyone else playing, lately, or have thoughts they never got to dump about Mafia III?

Like I said, I hadn't played video games for a couple years, and what I remembered of GTA made me think RDR would encourage violence, but the outlaw system they had in the game (novel for me at the time) discouraged me from doing anything careless, so I never did. Also, the game was an order of magnitude kinder to women than other Rockstar properties (no engaging with prostitutes, some awesome female NPCs). I know these are low bars, but in the landscape of AAA video games RDR felt tame and mature. I did spend most of my time hunting and taming horses and tracking down wanted posters. I also enjoyed that my family was alive instead of fridged (a term I definitely wasn't aware of yet), and that kept me focused on the critical path toward building a family farm. It doesn't seem like the new protagonist will be afforded the same humanity of Marston, but at this point in my gaming adulthood I have learned to play characters the way I want to experience their stories. I am playing Mafia III right now and I'm impressed with their ability to tell a very violent story with a bit of grace. I'm confident Rockstar has the chops to do the same.

Aw, man, sad to see so many people bummed about this. I was 23 when RDR came out and I hadn't played video games for three or four years. I was traveling a lot for work, coincidentally out to the desert for weeks at a time, and RDR was the video game that pulled me back into the medium. I had never liked cowboys/westerns as a kid, but the combination of lots of long, quiet drives through a real-world desert and horse rides through a digital one calmed my newly adult anxiety. I have a love/hate relationship with Rockstar sandboxes - I despise the juvenile cynicism and apathy of so much of their plot threads, but I admire that their worlds always push the state of the art. I still jump into GTA V just to drive around, and I did the same for a long time in RDR to horse around. GTA is so cynical that I can't finish the campaigns, but I was impressed with RDR; I found some characters and points distasteful, but I mostly enjoyed them, and Marston worked for me. RDR felt hopeful - it has "redemption" in the title. I am excited for the second game. I will be a decade older this time around, so we'll see if their writers have grown, too.

Oh boy, I am 1/3 through book 2 and I hadn't yet heard negative criticism of the series. You all are opening my eyes to some stuff that I had ignored I do enjoy a lot about this series, and I'll try to capture that in a post after I think a bit.

!!Released!! https://coughlinjon.itch.io/the-octopus-affair The Octopus Affair: an Eyes Of game Concept You are the first super-intelligent octopus. Structure FPO (First Person Octopus) Do the things a smart octopus does Team Caleb Sullivan - new to Wizard Jam!!! Justin Terry - (WJ5 - Kill the Last Alien) Jon Coughlin - (WJ1, 3, 4 - previous Eyes Of games) Progress Justin has built a generic interaction system for objects in our game. It is awesome and I am excited to add props ASAP. He built the whole thing in two hours while watching Netflix. Caleb has built a whole aquarium simulation with fish of different sizes and positions on the food chain. This is the coolest thing in our game so far I have begun building the Octopus controller. The octopus currently walks laterally and swims

There is an Invert option: if you hit Esc or Start/Options, it pulls up controls, and you can use the arrow keys to change sensitivity and inversion on the camera. Thanks for playing

Finally released this game I was having trouble getting it to build (my first time in Unity 2018 was not a smooth time :() https://coughlinjon.itch.io/the-octopus-affair

I am very excited to try this game

Stautus update: Last weekend Caleb and I hooked together all our work. We now have an octopus inside the aquarium. Separately, I added a time slow and zoom to the left trigger, and a pulsed dash to the swim: Next I added grabbing and throwing: After that I added a spear object and started throwing it, and I added grab/throw to both a left and right arm - our octopus can hold two objects at once. HOWEVER... you'll have to take my word for it because I didn't capture any gifs, and once I dropped the octopus into Caleb's aquarium, I realized that those features of mine were so underdeveloped and lacking art that they wouldn't add to the experience (which we have to wrap up tonight, June 29, before showcase weekend). -We did all that last weekend, and I didn't find any personal time to attack this project again until today, so the following is two hours of work this morning lol- Here is the octopus in the aquarium and my first attempt at adding rigidbody motion to it (before I'd just been manually adjusting the transform). I want RB physics only because I want collisions - I am still pretty strict with the actual physics of the octopus controller. I forgot to mention that I added passive camouflaging to the octopus. In the gif above, you can see that my immediate RB implementation is terrible - the creature is rotating out of control, and during the pulse swimming you can see the RB and manual transform adjustments fighting each other every frame (notice the jittering - that's unintentional lol). So! I did a movement polish pass and got something smoother, and then I added a smarter camo system that will only camouflage the octopus when it is near static environment art (1m distance or so) and moving below a speed threshold (meant to represent slow movement). Here is a gif of those two features: You can still see that the rotation is nasty - there's nothing scripting octopus orientation except those pulse dashes, where the whole transform orients in the direction of the camera. So I added a tiny bit to OnCollisionStay that will rotate a walking octopus normal to the surface with which it is colliding, and you get movement that is far more pleasant to watch What you don't see in all this is that the octopus is constantly alerting fish of its presence when it's not camouflaged, and the fish are becoming scared and fleeing. You don't see it because I think our "flee" logic is a bit broken right now, but I think it'll be a simple fix to make those fish dart away from a scary predator. The last bit I absolutely want to add to the project (before tonight) is subduing/eating fish. We already have the movement and camouflaging/stealth that we need to fill out most of the hunting experience, so I am hoping that eating fish will tie it together.

Caleb has added meshes to all the fishes 🐠🐟🦈

lol you do not have to apologize to the guy whose character model is this: https://www.joncoughlin.com/ about riffing on Blendo Games

so much Brendon Chung in this game. I absolutely love it.

woah, that is a gorgeous feature. Great job

I am always impressed when gameplay develops with purely greyboxed assets. Great job, lol, this looks like a real game

This looks so cool!

good idea Alright, the most basic animations are in - they're all a single frame besides the breathing, but they'll give me a sense of whether or not my movement dynamics are working well. Next step is to attach the camera to the head bone and see what it's like in first person.

Great dev log, great gifs!

So, the simplest way to do this IK arms rig is to make the chain length the whole arm, but that doesn't allow me to bend arms more than once, which is bumming my novice animator brain out. The result is arms like the gif below, in which I only have one major bend per arm. My octopus isn't as squiggly as I would like right now, but it's probably as complex as I should make it for a two week game jam. Also, I made the head floppy and put breathing into the idle animation, but this is a first person game lol so I don't know how much of that the player will see. Similarly, octopuses seem to be able to look in 360 degrees - the crawl in any direction, they swim in what looks to me to be a backward configuration, so I have no idea right now how I am going to map camera control to body movement. I think it will be a fun design problem. Caleb has refined his fish and continued building our aquarium tank. His work continues to be the most impressive part of our game

getting somewhere with this octorig