Rilen

Hey guys, I'm trying to write about video games! For money! Here's where my stuff is at the moment: https://anewdivinity.blog/ I'm just starting to put together a portfolio and I'd really appreciate any feedback! Also if any of you work in games or other cool fields and want to tell me about it, that would be awesome! I've been interviewing interesting people and am shopping around pitches, so hopefully you'll see some of my stuff up on a big website someday!

Really excited to be back for another Wizjam, and using Gamemaker for the first time. Already blown away by what all of you talented people have cooking up, can't wait to play the entries! Episode: Idle Thumbs Book Club #14 - Everything I Never Told You Idea: Returning from a long absence, you begin going through your share of your late grandfather's inheritance. You discover a mystery that compels you out of your small Texas town and down the road in search of answers. As you journey further from home you discover more and more strangeness. Conversations in towns lead to decisions about where to drive next. Artifacts and clues lead to new mysteries. Nothing will be resolved. Game: Kentucky Route Zero meets Aviary Attorney meets What Remains of Edith Finch. (just, y'know, smaller and probably sillier). You drive along routes in map view, stopping at towns to have conversations visual novel style, click around scenes to find clues, and check your inventory. Because I do not currently have an artist lined up I am planning on creating all the visual assets using images from the public domain. The overworld map will be drawn from Google Earth images of Texas with some editing (this is my first stab at it above). The characters in towns and the clues will be sourced from historical illustrations like the British Library's free image collection and the Smithsonian. I still need help! If anyone has any interest in getting involved I need help finding or creating main character and car sprites, and in editing the volume of images it is going to take to make this. Any help, advice, or friendly words would be deeply appreciated. Link to team building thread with contact info here. Thanks!

These look amazing!

Super cool idea and your art is great as always! I just re-read Bone and your second picture reminds me of the hooded figures and serpentine monsters of that series.

Super excited for this, it's a beautiful idea and I can't wait to see how it comes together!

This year I'm trying Game Maker for the first time and I could use some help! I specifically need folks who are talented with image editing and like combing through image archives (I know I do!) I'm planning on making my game using entirely free assets and so that means a lot of small amounts of clean-up and re-touching to give them all a coherent feel and size. I am also going with a top-down style for most of the travelling sections of the game so I need help creating assets for that. Pitch: Going through your grandfather's effects leads you to a mystery in the hill country to West Texas. And then another. And another. As you drive from small town to small town you try to make sense of the endless strangeness you encounter while navigating conversations with other lost and searching souls. Kentucky Route Zero meets Aviary Attorney meets Edith Finch. What I Need: Google Earth images of the countryside of Texas for use as maps, images from the British Library's collections and others for use as characters and clues, and a top down view of the main character and their car. What I'm Doing: Everything but the music and the art? Contact Me: Send me a DM here or on the slack (same username), or twitter at @meatNbones Time Zone: EST USA Portfolio-ish: https://hellameaty.itch.io If you have any familiarity with Game Maker and just want to chat/give me advice that would be cool too! If you think the project sounds cool and you just want to chat feel free!

This sounds amazing, turtle! Can't wait to see what it shapes up to be!

I just worked PAX East with my friend Joe, who is a lovely guy looking for some advice. He's an audio engineer, 21, and just got his first big gig (for Big) and is moving to Shanghai for it in the summer. He was wondering if there was anyone he could talk to about working for a larger company and living in Asia. Any advice would be super appreciated, and if you'd be willing to chat with him respond or PM me and I'll but y'all in contact. Thank you so much!

Hey fellow readers, I need your help. I'm trying to scratch a gaming itch, and having a lot of trouble finding what I'm looking for. I'm looking for game recommendations, as well as help defining the genre I'm looking for. I can take the post down or move it if this isn't the place to ask this, I couldn't find any subforum that seemed the ideal place to post it. I'm a Kickstarter backer for Clockwork Empires, but it's still too unstable in it's beta form to play indefinitely. I've messed around with Dwarf Fortress, but haven't really clicked with it. I'm coming around to Rimworld but hoping to wait till it's out of Early Access. I loved playing Caesar 3 and it's ilk when I was young, but they seem fairly janky now. What do all these have in common? They are all sims/city builders with an independent AI component and the ability to focus largely on peaceful actions. Like Chris said in the RImworld stream, I really dread doing combat in building games. What I'm trying to find more of is games where you get to slowly grow an AI 'ant farm', helping the game's people along as they struggle and survive. I'm not sure what to call this when looking for more, and it's driving me up the wall! Any suggestions, forum friends?

I finally picked the season up and started playing after being obsessed with other people's stories. Absolutely in love and can't stop playing it in between everything else. Have found myself trying to really get familiar with a setting before moving on. So I've pretty much maxed out Paris, Sapienza, working on Marrakesh and Bangkok, and haven't started Colorado or Hokkaido yet. The wacky/tense nature of the game has really made me pine for old school couch gaming with friends to shout at you, so I have been trying to re-create that. I've been streaming it and having other people on who I screen share with so they can give color commentary/advice. If anyone would be interested in joining me I'm at RilenGames on Twitch and would love advice on some of the trickier escalation missions or any of the sniping challenges. Part of the fun of this approach is certainly that it leads to more exciting moments, as failures that I would normally savescum turn into rampages because I'm streaming. Case in point, from "Landslide": https://clips.twitch.tv/SlipperyPlainMonitorMVGame I'm really sad I didn't start playing earlier, as I think I actually picked the game up earlier. Now I never get the chance to collect any of those fancy Elusive Target suits.

It's been interesting continuing to read this thread while trying to avoid end-game spoilers. I greatly enjoyed playing The Witness when it first came out but....I think it was a good example of why I don't often play games when they are first released. I kept hearing other people talking about how far they were, or what they were getting out of it, and I was really enjoying it as a kind of calm, at-my-own -pace refuge. Eventually I got stuck on several sections at once, ended up looking some things up (which killed my sense of momentum) and after not playing it for a week or so, filed it away. Now I've started it again from scratch, playing with my partner, and I'm having a much better time. Being able to split the workload or trade off relieves a lot of the fatigue, and I can't wait to finish it this time.

@Gormongous Really glad to hear it! If you ever want to gush or commiserate about a current quest drop something in #now-playing, I always want to talk about that game.

This game is amazing and I came here to start a thread on it. The casino-like atmosphere can not be overstated, loot drops on gachapon rewards on check-ins galore. The game is stuffed with what seems like the pieces of 3 lesser games, and large swaths of it are still marked as "Coming Soon". It is fun, addictive, challenging and compelling. I love being in a fashion battle and quietly whispering "Oh no, you b-" as a severe older woman disses my style, bringing my score down.

A game I have quit twice and almost found myself re-installing last night before realizing that I should hide it in my Steam Library is They Bleed Pixels. To be clear, I have played this game almost entirely through twice, each time enjoying it immensely, even to the point of being happy to replay levels or checkpoints to reach collectibles. I actually love the way this game feels and looks. But each time, I get to the same world, where everything is just kind of slippery platforms, and I get to the same level, with the same section of buzzsaws on buzzsaws on slippery floor....and it destroys me. I play it over and over and over again until I feel awful. I blame myself because the rest of the game was fine, so what's wrong with me? Why can't I finish this? Then I realize I want to smash my controller and uninstall it again and feel better.

Gah, we should have just had a trailer dump at the beginning of this, had to go digging for things, still haven't found them all. So far my takes are: I'm super glad I took the last few games off of the Assassin's Creed franchise because I actually got excited watching the trailer for the new one. I'm interested to play around in that setting and genuinely stoked that the character doesn't appear to be white-washed at all. That Spider-Man game looks lovely and I am sad that I will never play it because it's probably going to be PS4 exclusive. I liked the feel of that take on the character and I don't think I would mind all the QTEs because you're just getting to see a pretty great looking spider-man movie in between web-slangin'. Anthem looks much better in video than my earlier impressions of it, but I just feel like I'm going to be filling that shaped hole in my life with Destiny 2 when it rolls around. There are a lot of neat looking things that I lost interest in when I realized they were VR. The Doom VR thing especially seems like no fun. A huge part of having those fucking great big demons running at me feel fun in the game was the knowledge that I could run away and having to turn and teleport seems like it would be much more stressful. Feels like PS4 and VR really had massive showings. With Hidden Agenda and A Way Out it seems like more people are trying to make interesting narrative experiences for couch co-op and I love that. The Artful Escape got a write up a while back but if you missed if you absolutely should watch the trailer. I feel like some stuff got buried in the shuffle. 2 Yakuza game announcements, Vampyr continues to look good, new Tropico, TW: Warhammer II with those freaking lizard-men, new Kingdom Hearts, and Crackdown 3!

@Gorbles Well now I want to hear what your's was going to be! Mine would probably be getting into camping and hiking because of Morrowind. I kept chasing that feeling of cresting a new mountain, hearing the theme of the Nerrevar, having your locations update..... And I realized that I just wanted to be up there myself. Getting into rock climbing because of Assassin's Creed and other mantling games. I'm pretty sure that's the genesis of that.

Just wanted to second that this was a really stellar episode. I had to pull over twice because I was laughing so hard, mostly at Chris's fervent speech about being an old man followed by a sentence containing a joke book's worth of old person phrasing (saddle soap, spend all weekend polishing shoes, etc). Also, thank you everyone above who knows infinitely more about CRISPR than I sharing your thoughts. It's been fascinating to me for years and it was good to learn more about the ethical discussion surrounding it.

@TychoCelchuuu I also really enjoyed Gunslinger! It was a real surprise, in that I finished it and enjoyed the collectibles and endings. For those who don't know, the framing device is that a drunk cowboy in a bar is telling this story to several listeners, so sometimes you have arguments with the narrator that result in the game state changing. Ie, a moonlit sneaking mission never gives you any enemies because the story teller dozes off before getting to it. Or the horde of 100 enemies dissolves as someone questions whether he actually fought that many. It's interesting, and as the story goes on you realize that the narrator is not as drunk as he seems and is in fact playing a kind of cat-and-mouse with one of the listeners, goading him with intentional lies and bits of truth about one of their pasts. Really surprisingly fun and funny game.

Nice! Very "Cart Life".

phill, have you considered making the drunkenness another thing the player has to make a decision about? Ie you somehow affect the drunken mob, either through pay or placement. Like, you could choose to put out a keg/kegs at the end of the night for worker satisfaction, and that would give you a higher percentage chance of the mob starting at that building, or of spawning different building effects than a mob spawned by unsanctioned alcohol.

The game is out! There will be an update in a day or two with some gussied-up assets and a fuller ending, but it should be fully playable! https://hellameaty.itch.io/hittoman Big Week 1 Patch is up! I have fixed all the bugs that were keeping people from finishing the game! We are still going to have one more patch shortly to update a few rough art assets and add an ending screen, but the game should be fully playable and now includes credits! Hello world! I will be streaming development on my Twitch! Nope, that didn't happen! I am going to hold back on starting the actual writing and plotting, but I have also written a lengthy design doc (shamelessly style-cribbed from travis), and it can be found here. If you want to see a folder with mood boards of the different visual elements that can be found here. I will be trying to stream some of the dev cycle as I struggle with a new engine (either TyrannoBuilder, Fungus, or Yarn) and scribble madly! Basics: Cheatin' Hitman: Throwing Stars & Dead-End Bars Visual Novel where a drunk, ornery, old 47's handler tries to get him to focus on recounting a mission. People already onboard! (we can always use more) @kevin888 - art @JoelWmusic - music @Brett E @Mythalore - background art @vimes - character art @clicktozoom - voice acting The game is out and I changed the name! ;-)

http://kotaku.com/i-accidentally-got-the-worst-ending-in-the-witcher-3-1793040692 I enjoyed the hell out of this article. I felt a deep sense of satisfaction on the ending I got for the main campaign, borne out of my attempts at RP'ing a crappy dad trying to be better. I hadn't investigated the other possible endings, so this was kind of validating for me.

@Travis This is such a wonderful little gem, I can't wait to walk around inside of it! I love the bug glint, and the transitions/being called home thing is really perfect and feels GB-appropriate.

These are great, spaceturtle! It's very cool to see your progression, and inspiring for those of us who keep meaning to get better at drawing. Did you ever end up using that Blender intro for anything?

Thanks, @slime for posting this in the Slack. I just realized I had seen all of the excellent videos recommended in this thread, and sure enough here comes another truck-load.