getinthedamnbox

Congrats, man. Looks good---I wish I could pixel art like you.

Thanks for the really kind words, everyone! I've been hosting friends for the past couple of days, but I've been slipping away to check in on all your dev logs. I'm super impressed and can't wait to play your games! I might try to do an LP of each one as I do. Nothing beats watching someone play the thing you made, at least for me. Maybe it'll turn out lame, idk---I'll give it a shot and see how I feel. My friends also blind-tested Mad Skills yesterday, and [huge sigh of relief] it worked! It was cool to listen to them develop #strats for how to communicate info quickly.

All right! It's done! https://getinthedamnbox.itch.io/mad-skills Dr Nick, I made the impact sounds a little bit musical, after being inspired by your idea. They're just decorative sounds, not ones that affect the game mechanics, but I think they're nice. Thanks for the suggestion! Whew, photo finish for me. I'm pretty much gone for the rest of the jam, but I'll sneak back if something is totally dysfunctional. Good luck to everyone who's still going! Looking forward to playing your games!

Man... those worldspace instructions are so pretty.

ah, that's a cool idea! At one point I did consider using a glockenspiel for the sounds, but I was worried I'd commit some musical faux pas or make it too tough for players who don't have a great ear for pitch. If the point were to train their ears, though, that could be awesome. Also, if the game were musical, you could introduce more decision making into the role of Audio Player. Right now, there are only two possible states for a pair of sounds: matching or not matching. But with musical notes, a pair could be a third apart, a fifth apart, an octave apart, etc. Each one of those states could, perhaps, have a different effect.

Thank you! I'd love it if you did! It's been tricky to find the right level of difficulty for it, but I'm hoping it's the kind of game that duos will enjoy getting better at together. (Or maybe they'll end up yelling at each other and then yelling at the game before quitting forever! That's an acceptable outcome, too.) Should be posted soon!

Whew. Winding down here. Tomorrow is the last day I'll be able to work on this, so I'll probably release it in the evening. There are a few more sounds I want to add (mostly impact sfx), but otherwise I'm pretty much ready to call this done. If you have any last-minute ideas for me to obsess over, let me know. Music is by Mister Beep (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Mister_Beep/). Way up on my favorite-chiptune list.

Thanks! Really hope I can make it fun. The main thing I'm thinking about now is how to produce sound effects that are distinct from each other (maybe to the point where Audio Player can mentally attach a word to each one: "scrape," "ring," etc.) but also consistent in theme. My brain ran away from me over the weekend with a whole cyberpunk-Indiana-Jones thing, so I'll probably steer toward that. And yep, my girlfriend is helping me test. We also have two cats, but their idea of testing is sitting directly in front of my monitor and pawing at my face when I try to ignore them.

I'm excited for this. I'll need to finish a few days before the final weekend, so I'm going to do my own thing (most likely "Mad Skills"). But if anyone needs help with voiceover production, that's something I can do pretty quickly. I can also create sound effects of all kinds (ambience, foley, monster voices, etc.). I'm getinthedamnbox on Slack, Twitter, and everywhere else, so hit me up if you need.

Zombie Train Beyond Earth <3

I'm an amateur/indie dev planning my next game, and I was hoping I could bounce an idea off of you all. With the project that I just finished, I didn't seek a lot of feedback early in the design process, and I ended up paying for it later. I'm proud of how that one came together in the end, but I feel like it would've been well-served by some more brainstorming and prototyping early on. So, now that I'm between projects, I'm forcing myself to slow down and think things through. Here's the current idea I'm considering: It's a top-down twin-stick shooter that controls like Geometry Wars. The player's avatar (let's say it's a ship) has a variety of systems: movement, shields, weapons, etc. When a new game starts, most of the ship's systems are offline, the hull is critical, and the area is swarming with enemies. Warning messages are flashing; alarms are ringing; everything is red. The player has been dropped into a battle that they are on the verge of losing, and their task is to turn it around. If the player survives for the first few seconds, systems will slowly start coming back online, and the difficulty level will recede. Eventually, they can go on the offensive, and the difficulty level will rise again---this time in the usual bullet-hell way of enemies becoming more numerous and powerful. In this way, the difficulty curve would be a "U" shape. The first few seconds might feel like Super Hexagon, with quick deaths and restarts. The player would hopefully feel compelled to keep trying by the promise of getting their systems back online, stabilizing, and enjoying a respite before going on the attack. A few more thoughts: I'd probably subdivide the ship's systems: shield quadrants instead of shield on/off, movement along each axis instead of movement on/off, etc. In a pre-game interface, I could give the player control over which systems are offline at the start and which order they are repaired in. Whenever the player's ship takes damage, a system could go offline. (Maybe there wouldn't even be a hull/health bar, and death would happen when the final system broke.) In this way, the U-curve of difficulty could repeat throughout a run, with the player periodically having to slow a freefall toward death, stabilize, recover, and then continue advancing. What do you think? Should I consider anything else before I start prototyping? Scrap this idea altogether? Thanks for any thoughts you may have.

Awesome, thanks. That's true, and I'd be worried about the other side of it as well: that the chaos of the first few seconds will be too likely to discourage players from continuing. I'll keep those concerns in mind as I iterate. I'm hoping that play sessions will be quick enough that I'll be able to find people willing to help test it. This was a challenge with my last game, which was slow and dialogue-heavy... tough to ask friends to make that kind of time investment.

Cool, thank you. That's good advice, especially because, tbh, my rationale for doing twin-stick is a little shallow. Basically, I'm trying to get a lot better at game feel. The movement/aiming system of my last game was pretty unique (to my knowledge), but it didn't have much visceral appeal. The positive reactions I got were something along the lines of "it's cool that by the end of the game I could move/aim pretty well despite how challenging it was at first," which is what I was going for, but I think I lost a lot of people in the first few minutes of play. When I think of control schemes that feel best to me right from the get-go, twin-stick shooter comes out on top for whatever reason. So, that's more or less the whole reason for starting with that idea. I'll definitely keep my options open as I work on it, as you said.

Hi Jason, Whoops! That was silly of me. I believe I've fixed it now, and I've reuploaded the files. (I simply failed to include a couple of .pdb files in the .zip. I guess I got a little too excited yesterday.) Thank you for letting me know, and for looking around for a solution. If you care to give it another try, the link is here: http://getinthedamnbox.itch.io/heartread?secret=UARc2KJTugSLiBVNNonEjezqKrc Either way, I appreciate the help!

Hello! My girlfriend and I are developing an audio game, and we're hoping that someone here might be willing to playtest it. It's a short game (25-30 minutes), and it is played on a blank screen with stereo headphones and a keyboard. Here is the URL to the (unpublished) game page: http://getinthedamnbox.itch.io/heartread?secret=UARc2KJTugSLiBVNNonEjezqKrc The page itself is a work in process, but it'll give you access to the game files. If you can spare half an hour to give this a shot, we'd really appreciate it!

I'm working on a solo project in Unity (C#), and I need to script something that will handle conversation between characters. Players won't be able to choose between dialogue options, and there's no UI, so basically all I need is to be able to manage a large number of sound assets in an organized way. Before diving in, I thought I'd ask if anyone here could offer any ideas. Previously, I had started managing conversation with a list of sound assets and a function that could be called to play one of them. So, there was a lot of "if (Time.time >= nextLine)" to determine when the next line of conversation should be played, etc. My Game Controller script was riddled with calls for lines of conversation... it was gross and confusing. Ideally, I want something that will store properties about each line of conversation (e.g., who is the speaker, what is said in the line, how long is the line, should the line be interruptible, should the line be repeatable, has the line already been said, what triggers the line), so that I can avoid having "SayDialogue (12);"s everywhere, and so that I can revise the sound assets and their properties in one location. Also, I'm thinking it might make sense to have a conversation queue, so that lines that are ready to be played stack up in there instead of interrupting each other. I don't have a formal CS background, so my main problem is that I don't know what my options are with designing this. I was thinking of trying to use an array to store the assets/properties and a list for the queue... Is there something else that I should also explore? Or am I overthinking this? Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. For reference, you can read my devdiary and/or play my latest build here. Thanks!

Very cool, clyde and itsamoose---this is exactly the kind of help I needed. Thank you. I have a much better idea of how this should work now, and I'm going to give it a shot. I like the art style of your game, itsamoose! Baba Yaga always makes me nostalgic for Quest for Glory...

I don't know if this is the kind of advice you're looking for (or if this is obvious), but one important thing is not to get discouraged when your social media posts don't get a lot of attention. Early on, I had to come to terms with the fact that I'm competing for people's most valuable resource---time---and that this is the case even with friends and family. This has had the double effect of (1) helping me refrain from questioning my existence whenever one of my posts flops and (2) making me have a huge appreciation for each and every person who looks at my work. On a more tactical level, I find that my social media posts tend to do better when they're funny. That way, even people who aren't going to check out my game have something to react to, and their 'Like's give me a boost in Facebook's algorithms. I also post everything on weekday mornings, which works a lot better than evenings or weekends. Finally, I found this series of blog posts by Taylor Bair to be extremely helpful. A key point he makes is that even though word of mouth is the best form of promotion, it's the most elusive, and you shouldn't focus on it exclusively.