Broxxar

Wow that actually worked? Skinning and rigging is all pretty new to me. I've known some of the theory but never actually done it. It's baffling to me that I managed to weight some verts on to a little helper and actually get the desired effect like this... this is flippin' sweet. "Hhhhoooooiist. Hhhhoooooiist. Hhhhoooooiist..."

If this was going to pirate themed, the coins would definitely be Du'blums.

"Ahhhhhhhhh!" - Peasant, probably. Pretty happy with the way the jaw is deforming, I didn't really give myself the right geometry at the corners of the mouth to facilitate this but It still kind of works. Next I need to do some little control bones so that the lips can move up/down a little and show off that pristine 16th century dental hygiene.

Here are some various progress shots of the peasant. I started some practice modeling last weekend, and it was actually kind of promising, so I'm doing a bit of retopo work, and getting this guy properly skinned and rigged. Next I'll unwrap/texture, and finally get to a bit of animating. All this before writing a single line of code... really a very strange way of approaching a jam, but I'm way more confident in my ability to program the game than I am in my ability to art it up the way I want. It has to look good for truly satisfying hoisting. Though perhaps it is I who will be hoisted when I have one working character model running around a grey box environment with unfinished game logic 2 weeks from now... Only time will tell!

I'm in. I will make a video game.

This will be my first GDC so any guidance from fellow thumbs readers is much appreciated! Also down to meetup wherever. I haven't gotten to know many bars in SF, so Jake's proposition of a tastier drink menu and food sways my opinion that way.

Hi. I don't know what this game will be exactly, but it's gonna look like this. I think it's going to be first person, and definitely going to be trippy. Might get a little bit of the Witness feel or something. For diversifies, I figured I'd get two birds with one stone by going doing a Shallow Copy of "The Return to the Obra Dinn", because I'll also get Focused Palette for free seeing as the game will only use two colors. I'll probably do Designer Notes again, though hopefully implement it better than I did in my last Wizard Jam game. I'm going to write a shader for the humanoid models that let's me do several things: Cross fade between silhouette, and shaded model Do stencil buffer writes/reads to make silhouettes of people appear as though they are holes into other rooms/worlds Fade/burn away with an alpha cutoff probably If I can get that stencil buffer thing working, I could maybe do some non-euclidean trickery. Wherein characters or objects create holes into other rooms, and when your camera's frustum is completely obscured by the geometry that cuts the whole in the world, you're teleported into that world? We'll see how all that goes. Update 1: I think I need edge detection, as part of recreating Obra Dinn's look and feel. I opened the demo for that game up and it actually doesn't seem to dither at all, or rather, it does thresholding of the pixel's color by only looking at a single pixel, rather than using a 3x3 kernel to get a threshold value as I'm doing. I think I'll keep the dithered look, but as Obra Dinn seems to do, I'll invert the threshold value on edges. Edges are found using a grayscale (luminance based) version of the image before the dithering pass. Just outputing my simple sobel edge detection looks like this: The top of the head's color is pretty close to the sky box there, so the magnitude of the gradient, and thus the prominence of the edge is very faint. I might opt for depth-buffer based edge detection, but I suspect the accuracy of edge detection isn't going to matter after the dither filter is applied anyway. Once I combine the two effects this is going to look pretty cool and I'll spend some time on other effects like cutaway alpha and particles to create some badass looking GIFs. Update 2: Eh you know what, I'm not crazy about the direction this look is going. It looks really messy when I blend it with the dithering, and without it, well it's just not the same feel as that original gif! So I think I'll skip on hard edges and stray a little bit from Obra Dinn's look. I did make a gif of something that is very Obra Dinn-esque, featuring the ominous suit and tie faceless man. But for now I'll focus on what kind of effects I can make with the dithered look and scrap the edge stuff. Update 3: Gameplay! Okay, so it's definitely going to be some kind of First Person exploration game. I'm hoping I can use the 1-bit colors and lighting trickery to do stuff like this: The corridor leading out of the room is always there, but it's completely invisible without the flashlight. I think I can use this in more areas too, especially when paired with some of my other shaders for silhouettes. I might even do narration for object interactions like in an adventure game, over some ominous/looming tones... things might get spooky, we'll see what happens. Update 4: Basically just making the game now, no more fussing around with systems and shaders. I wrote simple system for checking and setting flags (string/bool key/value pairs). Objects can also register a callback with the system to get notified if a given flag has changed. So now I can easily enable/disable stuff or play sound bytes based on player interactions. The main character has an inner-monologue going on, voiced by yours truly. Also not planning on jump scares or anything, but I will try to create some really tense moments when I can. I also think from here on out I won't be posting any GIFs. This last one happens right at the beginning of the game so it doesn't spoil much, but going forward, most stuff I show could give away some plot beats I have planned.

Aww snap, Jake mentioned my game... better actually get something finished! Unfortunately I'll be away next week, so whatever I get done this weekend will be pretty much it. I guess it's time for Game Jam Mode: Engage!

No Dominoes vs Taco Bell?! D: Awesome though, love Pico-8 and look forward to seeing what you come up with!

I hope it features mechanics from both Braid and The Witness!

Not at all, go right ahead!

Random Thumbs: the idle thumbs random episode selector! Here's yet another version of the page panzorfork and mattishii cooked up. Now includes Playscape LA and let's you filter which Podcasts you want to get random names from. I also spent a bunch of time styling it all pretty like because I've been brushing up on web development.

Reytunrner, I'm really interested that you found the chain-dash to not be an essential upgrade! I found it to be by far the most useful upgrade, with either sword deflection or X+A dash attack the second. You are aware that the only limit to the number of dashes you can chain together is your stamina bar right? That's 25 dashes with a full bar of stamina (and 51 if you get the super secret stamina upgrade that it stupidly difficult and tedious to unlock). Not only do chain dashes provide that quality-of-life because you can traverse the map way faster, but I found several of the southern boss fights and end boss we're much easier when I could dance around all day. I also got that Titan Souls vibe. In the art style but also in the trial-and-error nature of boss fights, respawning right before the fight after each death. This game is not without it's quirks. I definitely dashed and fell through the floor in a few places, or got caught on invisible walls and pixel thin edges that caused me to take hits that felt "unfair". But aside from those issue, this game was a visual delight and has some of the most viscerally satisfying combat I've played in a while. Definitely recommending this to friends and other devs that are fans of the ARPG genre.

Hype. But the real question is how many of us are going to make "Rigidbody Rat King"?

Disaster Blaster - A Bullet/Physics Hell Shmupaqwopalike Space Adventure! Dev Commentary and many many last minute bugs held me up. A few things just got bolted together with terrible code to make this work but it's ready! Download now from itch.io!

I struggled with making the game a fair challenge. But I figured like QWOP, you can die in 2 seconds because of how obtuse the controls are, or you can go for gold. Then there's a shmup on top of that, and I ended up putting a decent amount of time into that part of the game and wanted to give people a chance to see it even if they didn't care to learn to play with the awful controls hahah. Have you found other games with dev commentary? I haven't seen any =( Here's a video of my playthrough. This was my third try (and you can see from my score, I start with like 15,000 due to a bug, I got pretty far in my second of 3 plays haha). When I was developing, I was consistently beating it. The most important part, and I guess this is sort of the most random/hidden system bullshit, is the drops. It's really important to kill everything and get gun upgrades. That includes blowing up the otherwise dormant asteroids that are of little threat. Watching this again, I also got incredibly lucky on the boss. The Gattling Gun half got to use 3 attacks, each had a 50% chance of being a shmup wave of bullets, and luckily it used 3 big shots which are much easier to avoid (even though one still hit me) than the bullet hell wave.

Thanks! I don't think I'll take this little prototype further for the time being. It just feels to niche and ridiculous to spend too much more time on it Woo game feel! Yeah it's ridiculously hard... probably too hard. But that's qwopalikes and shmups for you. Also you're totally right. The first shot or two in the wrong direction while your gun swings around usually do more bad than good. On controllers I could bind shooting to the triggers perhaps.

Yes so character choice ignored on death mixed with dead bodies being left behind resulted in a scenario where two Waluigis were separated by dead bodies, unable to jump them and the game dead locks. It was also confusing at first that Missunderstoods dead body is a single 0 floating in the air. There's also no shortage of physics/animation quirks. Examples: unable to jump off other players; holding run into a wall causes you to stick to the wall while still in the fall animation; shooting while mid air (or stuck to a wall) returns to the running animation; all sprites look as if their floating several inches off the ground. I recommend if you want to keep going on this, you use Prime31's 2D Character Controller. I'm also quite interested in how some characters can jump and others can't. Aren't they all the same Object just with a different sprite/animator? If you have any Unity questions, feel free to hit me up! I spend a lot of time on the various subreddits and Unity Answers anyhow, so I'm happy to help out if I can!

Hahah yeah I suppose I could update the Dev Log one to have a link to the finished product. GB mode kind of got scrapped because I needed to change a bunch of sprites to make it high enough contrast in a couple of places. I should really just add a button to enable it anyway though.... I may do that later

"Sonic Adventure!", I literally laughed out loud. The game itself is a bit of a buggy acid trip but it's oozing with potential. Great work everyone who contributed, hope you can fix this up and put a bow on it!

Over Designed usually has a bit of a negative connotation... but this is brilliant! Damn hard though. Hard mode is certainly not a baby game!

Dat ending doe... and after I made sure I heard every piece of dialogue on the other walls... god damn you.

Pretty amazing! Really tight controls. Also really impressed with the AI; I think your dev log mentioned it was triggers telling the kids when to jump or fall through a platform? In any case it was great because I was chasing those little bastards around for 10-15 seconds a couple of times.

Someone's gotta do it... Planning on using at least Focused Palette, Talk is Cheap, and Tone Control diversifies. If you are a musical person interested in making some music for me that would be dope. I'll post some pretty gifs and stuff here as I go along. My offer of scripting/shader help for other Unity users is still open, so hit me up if you get stuck on something and need a second set of eyes. Dis gon' be fun. Previous Updates: Update 15: Damn Real Life... I needed this last weekend to finish things up but unfortunately I'm heading away for the weekend and don't have time to finish scripting the boss and adding the last couple sound effects. But worry not! I will finish as soon as I can and post the finished product for all to play! Until then, here's a preview of the boss in Gameboy mode to tide you over...

If I don't share these variable names with you guys, who will ever see them? (Answer: nobody)