Broxxar

Just updated this post to reflect that the game is in a much more playable state than it was at the jam's deadline! Specifically, there's an end screen to show the winner, and some SUPER basic AI so you can play without a full group of 4. Have fun!

A Good Bug Me: Okay item spawning should be working, let's just double check real quick! Game: YOU WANT ITEMS? YUP NO PROBLEM HERE YA GO BUDDY The sky cracked open... and from above a bunch of random garbage rained down. Everyone was pretty nonplussed about the whole thing.

Wait, I still need to model stuff? Wow I really just, forgot how much stuff I needed to do. I think I'm just gonna keep grinding super hard right up until midnight. Like how did I forget that I didn't even have a coin modeled yet? Gosh darn it. Anyway it is a Mario-ass looking coin because everyone knows what that is and Mario fanfare is pretty on brand for Thumbs! This is probably my last update while I really go crazy for the last few hours... Wish me luck! "Threat neutralized!" - Super Mario

One Billion Things Left To Do The last 10% is 90% of the work. It's a common saying in software development, but my god is it ever true. With game development especially, it's easy to write off a lot of the tasks that fall into the "Oh and I just need to hookup X system with the main game" category. X may be very complex or very simple, maybe you set yourself up for success and made it robust/extensible, maybe it was a bit of a hacky mess. No matter how you engineered that thing, integrating it with every other little piece of gameplay/code/art it has to touch is going to be a bitch. But the upshot is, I'm really in the last 10%... I think. I mean, there are still MAJOR features missing (like the game time limit, scoring, and wrap up screen), but I mean, those seem so small compared to everything else right? How much time could the last 1% really take? The Hoisting Arena, filled with a bunch of gizmos. And for some reason there's a petard floating in the air. Who put that there?

Heads Down Okay I have been super busy with other stuff and it really ate into my jamming time. For the next couple of hours I'm going into full-on uber game jam mode to finish this off. I'll leave you with the snazzy incomplete title screen for now. Looking forward to playing all your games! (after a short break from staring at my computer screen...) "HHHhhooooiissttteed..." - Jake Rodkin, 2017

Be Lazy I had originally thought I might need to animate a few things with/without the petard in the peasants hand. But thanks to Avatar Masks and Animator layer blending, there's no need! I just created a mask from the shoulders, and made a single animation of the arms in an item hold posture. Then I attached the item dummy transform to the right hand, et voila! I can just blend in this layer when I need to show the peasant with his arms out carrying an item. The gif was already a bit large and awkward to show off the running animation but it also works with the same principle, and the held item moves with the character in a pretty natural way. My progress is feeling pretty slugish, mostly because work has been a bit of a grind this week. Hopefully I'll catch a second wind tomorrow and really get a lot done. I'll do an update tomorrow that re-tallies the major remaining tasks and get things on track! "And one and two and one and HOIST and..."

Progress! Work's been super busy this week but I'm still making a bit of steady progress. Doing a bit of the purely functional implementation of things without any of the polish. I've got a say, I'm not a fan of this. Is it a bad thing to be polishing everything to final quality the entire way through? I think there's enough time in this jam to do just that, and not really leave any one part of the game behind for too long. Nevertheless, I did a basic pass of picking up a petard, planting it in the ground, and then detonating it by proximity. The bomb asset is protoype, literally just a sphere and two cylinders slapped together. Notice the tip-top of the bomb is poking out of the ground here... I think for the actual petard, I'll have a little flower on top, but then also have these flowers pop up from time to time naturally to throw off the player. Probably even start the round off with a dozen or so flowers scattered about. So players could always avoid the flowers... or you could B-line through flowers that you think aren't petards in disguise. By the end of the round, with the randomly blooming flowers and petards player's planted, the ground should be so littered that it's nearly impossible to tell what's safe. Hopefully players remember which one's they put down to avoid the devastating self-hoisting. This peasant appears to be miraculously immune to self-hoisting. Everybody is jealous of his resilient pants.

Yeah everything is sweet so far! Didn't really have a plan for the peasant's VO but they should definitely have some little dopey voice barks and stuff!

Particle Fun I've been messing around with particle systems for a while. I had pictured some 3D mesh particles that evoke Nintendo's aesthetic and I think I've just about realized that image! I think the actual petard blast will have a bit more upwards motion and not spread out as much. The central flash will have a bit of vertically to it. And finally, there should be some rocky debris bits that shoot out and bound/crumble on the ground. If I get super ambitious, I'll think of some way to dynamically scorch the ground! That would be tight. Over all, I'm feeling super good about my progress in the jam. It's back to the office tomorrow, but nevertheless, there's still plenty of time to Get Hoisted! "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a hoist."

I agree, that style does indeed look dope.

Poetry in Motion! I'm getting super excited now. It's always a great feeling when art and code meet so spectacularly. The Blending idle and run works great! I also got a head start on controller input. I purchased Rewired from the Unity Assets Store and I couldn't be more pleased with it so far. It's a total replacement of Unity's Input system and it's incredibly powerful while simultaneously easy to use. I sound like a shill for the plugin but seriously, compared to fussing with other plugins or actually trying to use the built-in InputManager, this thing is a god-send! I did a test for multiplayer input and here's how completely dead simple it was: duplicate my peasant prefab, change the serialized PlayerID value in the inspector from 0 to 1. And bam! My X-Box gamepad controlled one player, and my keyboard the other. Flippin' incredible. It's a heckin' no-brainer. Gonna take a short break for the evening for foods/relaxin'. Then maybe later tonight I'll do some fun polish stuff. I really want to see some 3D dust particles kick up when you go from zero-to-sixty! "Ya can't hoist what ya can't see!" - The Fastest Peasant Alive

No one's Unity internalization meter can fill as quickly as they add new features to the engine.

This is flippin' sweet! Without a doubt the coolest untextured white capsule/cube and default skybox scene I've ever seen. Can only imagine how awesome it will be when it's a sea of Breckons and Macklemores.

I think the UI has always had "Stretch" and "Tile" options for how to fill a 9-slice (as well as having no fill for when you just want a frame). As for the 2D SpriteRenderer, support for 9-slicing just came in Unity 5.6.

Oh snap just saw this reply. Yeah I would love some tunes! I'll message you when the game is a little bit more formed. If you want to start noodling around with something, my only thought so far that it would be sort of a goofy, upbeat version of typical renaissance music! If you're also game for sound fx let me know. Some foley, a hoisting boom, coin collection twinkle, etc Edit: if you play that YouTube link back at 1.5x speed, it is very much alike how I'd imagine the game's music being.