pdotjpg

Oh, and @RubixsQube, kudos on your pronunciation of my last name. You butchered it quite a bit less than most people do, let alone most native English speakers.

It's done: https://pdotjpg.itch.io/buried-treasure Hope you enjoy! Looking forward to feedback. ====== Based on this Idle Weekend episode. I spent about 2 hours looking through titles of all the podcasts yesterday and brainstorming, and somehow I wasn't getting any interesting ideas, so I settled on this pretty straightforward title. The game's gonna be exactly what it says on the tin: the player will be dumped into a small 3D environment and look for treasure, based on vague directions and crudely drawn treasure maps. I'm basically copying the treasure hunting quest chains in Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption. Those navigational puzzles were basically my favourite parts of those games. This project is also going to be as much about practicing 3D modelling and animation as it is about gamedev for me. My goals for this: A fully animated 3rd person character, and a camera to go along with it A small and pretty 3D environment that can facilitate 5-10 different treasure locations and has solid landmarking Haven't had a chance to work on this yet, but I'm hoping to have a character modelled and rigged up by tomorrow night.

Thanks for playing and giving feedback, everyone! Didn't think the depth of field would be such a widespread complaint - really valuable to know! There's a temptation to go overboard with the post-processing effects. I think what happened here was that I lacked confidence in the look of the game and overcompensated with the DoF to make the graphics "fancier". I'm glad people dig the ending - the narrative stuff was added to the game in literally the last couple of hours of development. Had no idea what to do on that front and I'm glad that my goofy solution seems to have worked. It's also encouraging that people are able to get to the ending. I was worried the game might be too difficult/boring/annoying. @FartSatchel: Good point about the downhill movement goofiness. My character controller is really basic, it's a shame I wasn't able to polish that a bit more. With my limited coding skills, any incrimental improvements there would have taken an exponentially longer amount of time, I imagine. Glad you dig the layout! And thanks for the Wind Waker and Life is Strange comparisons - I'll take them! @fabian: Thanks for pointing out the dual monitor issue! I don't have that sort of setup myself and hadn't considered that. Will definitely keep it in mind from now on. Glad you were able to play it with a controller. @SharedControl: The people who have reached out to me about getting stuck have all done so on 5/10. In fact, I was worried about that one during development already. So you're probably not super dumb and I've just made that one a bit too obscure, or haven't introduced the line of reasoning used in that one well enough. @RubixsQube: Thanks for the video, so useful to see someone play the game and voice their thoughts. No worries about the silly mood or the singing - catchy tunes! I echo your frustration about 7/10. I didn't realize what a misstep that was. Your response to the ending put a smile on my face @atte: Your suggestion about the traversal options now makes me want to go all-out Breath of the Wild. I'm glad that you also dug the island layout. This idea of two abstractions colliding is really interesting! I hadn't thought of it that way, but I'll be mulling over that idea quite a bit now, I think. Thanks for that! A big thank you to those I haven't responded to directly as well! I don't have much of a response to your comments, but I really appreciate them.

I'm not really interested in creative writing, so this isn't for me, but I think the prompt and power systems are cool. I feel like this is an idea worth expanding on, but it'd probably make more sense as a website or a lightweight app or something, rather than a Unity game. I experienced this show-stopper of a UI problem unfortunately:

The amount of polish you put into your Wizard Jam games does not cease to amaze me. As others said, this feels like a finished product. The visuals are gorgeous, and the mileage you get out of your mechanics is much more considered than in the average puzzle game prototype. Did you make the music yourself as well? I love the little horn flourishes. I do have gripes with the gameplay, though. I agree that the game is a bit click-intensive - not helped by the fact that some levels have a hidden exit which can only be found by blindly clicking away. I'm also not entirely sure that the isometric perspective is the right fit for these gameplay mechanics. It's a bit visually confusing. The lack of perspective and the flat, smooth lighting puts my brain into Monument Valley / Fez mode. I had to remind myself that this isn't one of those games and that the path which looks complete from this certain angle actually does not connect in 3D space. It's maybe an unfair criticism, but I dunno, I feel like that's the risk you run by choosing this visual approach. The perspective also means that you can get into the frustrating situation where you know there's a platform in a specific spot, but you have no line of sight from any of the cardinal directions. Perhaps you intended this as part of the puzzle, but to me it felt finnicky. It also meant that it was possible to get the levels into a state where it seemed easier just to restart, because some platform seemed permanently inaccessible, or it would be too much of a hassle to find a way to access them. This is amplified by the fact that some levels seemed a bit cluttered. One thing about the gameplay I want to give kudos to specifically is the mechanic of shifting a whole row horizontally - it's a simple addition which opens up the possibility space and complexity considerably. I liked those levels a lot. Though perhaps the controls should have been in the UI, rather than world space - they were made a bit cumbersome by having to switch angles because level geometry would block line of sight on them. I hope this doesn't come across as too critical. As I said, I think it's really incredible work for 2 or 3 weeks.

@eRonin: it was indeed the browser version, I should have specified that.

Haven't seen an episode of Frasier, but I really, really loved this.

This was really surprising. Such a lovely atmosphere! It has the feel of a children's story or something - wholesome, slightly melancholy, very sweet. There were some frustrations gameplay-wise, though. I somehow missed the fact that you had to right-click on ships because the text of the repair ship implied that it joined me automatically (and though it was slower than me, it seemed to catch up with me every once in a while, so I didn't realize it hadn't). Text prompts for space stations also seemed to disappear and selling minerals was also finnicky (it seems I have to click one specific, nondescript part of the station). Some text prompts would also overlay over each other, preventing me from enjoying some of the nice writing. And finally, I wish the main view were a bit more zoomed out - it's very claustrophobic. Once I got the map, I played the game almost exclusively in that view. But again, the atmosphere and story here are really lovely, and carry the game despite those minor frustrations. Good job!

I had a lot of fun with this. Great writing! What a cool way to participate in the jam. Can't wait to see the main game.

Re: mouse clicks, same thing is happening to me. It's difficult to give much feedback on this at its current state as a player. Looks like you have a solid base here, I'm also looking forward to seeing more.

I'll echo others in saying that tool selection is needlessly finnicky. Other than that, great work! Very impressive for 2 weeks. I really appreciate the little bits of personality you've snuck in here already despite graybox/protoype visuals - the funny writing and audio cues, the ending. Solid set of base mechanics for a Portal style puzzler. Really looking forward to seeing what you do with this.

I love the prop work here - reminds me of Blendo games. The visual fidelity is really well-considered and the shapes, colours and texturing of the 3D models is beautiful! The name of the game and the prop work already creates this tantalizing feeling of a bigger world and story. The Unity terrain looks janky as ever and the fog is a bit too overbearing for my liking, but I'd really like to spend more time in this environment when/if it's more fleshed out.

@RubixsQube: same thing happened and I wondered that as well. This is very cool and surprising. I agree with others - good pacing/buildup, and a well exectuted ending.

I also struggled with the mechanics at first, but did manage to beat one of the levels after a few tries. I agree with @SharedControl that once you get it, there's quite a lot of room for interesting strategy. So while the mechanics are a bit obscure at first, and I agree with others that controls on keyboard could be better, the core gameplay is actually really solid! These are accessibility problems that could be easily fixed. Visuals and audio are excellent! They create a really tense and creepy atmosphere. I particularly love the realy solid click sound when you hit one of the switches - so satisfying!

Yep, technical problems for me too unfortunately. Added an event with the date 12/12/2018 and when I submitted the time - "5 pm" - it froze. But it's a cool little thing! I like the writing, and there's something really refreshing and clean about one of these calendar/motivation tools being just a console program.

This is really good. Reminds me of Pandemic or Into the Breach in that each decision carries so much weight, and that there's no room for error. Every turn ends up being very carefully considered. Haven't beaten it yet, but will continue to work at it. Very fun!

I personally don't get much of a kick out of these sorts of things, but I agree with atte about the ease of use and flexibility. I like the MS Paint visuals and goofy music too - very cute. Overall, quite a cool little toy!

I agree with others, this is really good. I like the presentation a lot - the rhythmic nature of the game combined with those sound effects create a cool, sparse vibe. Gameplay is fun too. The fact that some objects can't be scaled and rotated to match the target position exactly does aggravate a bit, though. And I'm conflicted as to whether I want a visible grid or not. On the one hand, it feels finnicky without it. On the other hand, having it might be missing the point. I feel like at times the move command was a bit inconsistent, as if it was being affected by an object's rotation and scale - a grid would help with that. Quibbles aside, this is very fun and I'd gladly play more of it.

This is an excellent prototype! I love the mechanics and feel like this has potential to be a really good mobile game. Two gripes of mine would be that the pace is a bit too quick right now and that the distribution of letters needs to be considered (too few vowels, too many same letters next to each other). The second problem in particular is probably difficult to solve, but both of these contribute to rarely being able to string together 4+ letter words, which isn't very satisfying. Or I'm just bad at the game. Then again, the frantic pace and difficulty leads to my rounds being around 2:30 long, an excellent length for this sort of game. Presentation is already quite good as well, though I agree with Brendon that there's room for even more 'juice'. Overall, great job! I might put this on my phone and take it with me.

Thanks! I get what you mean about the 'pixel-hunting' aspect. It's difficult to gauge how easy it'll be to find the exact spots when you're making them - I might have fallen a bit on the difficult and obscure side and could have used some sort of hinting system. Nonetheless, I'm glad that you liked it and got to the end! Oh, sorry to hear! I uploaded a version where you can disable the DoF effect.

Looks like your .rar file is missing the UnityPlayer.dll file and the Mono folder.

Nooooo! This looks excellent, I really like the crisp, cartoony aesthetic.

Thanks, Travis! I won't have time to work on this during the weekend, soooo it's done! https://pdotjpg.itch.io/buried-treasure I'll write some more detailed thoughts about how this project went on Monday. For now, I'm happy I managed to get this done on time - a couple of days ago I was stressing it might not happen, but the last two days were super productive. For now, I hope y'all enjoy!

I vote #2. They're all cool though, I like the ASCII vibe.

The "I'm not a robot" test in the tutorial is on point This looks to be shaping up really, really nicely. Can't wait to play it.