phill

04/02 - 09/02 Shorter period this time as I go back on shift next week, so I'll be completely unable to work on anything for two weeks from Thursday the 9th. I'm going to adjust my goals accordingly! Goals: Improve jumping enemy to deal with obstacles between start and end points, and also give him an AoE effect on landing to make it a bit more tricky to dodge. Enemy spawning layers and timings. Goals Scratch: Jumping enemy: AoE attack is fairly easy, I'll just check if the player is within a radius of the landing point and switch the player to their 'hit' state if they are. At the moment, the jumping enemy can collide with obstacles if they are in the way of the direct line between the enemy and the player. It looks really weird because even if the obstacle is, say, 32x32px (e.g. not apparently 'tall' enough to stop the enemy jump) and the enemy is halfway through the jumping animation, it'll collide and slide off in either the x or y directions. This also mucks up the calculation of the ending of jump animation, making it so it does not line up with the actual hitbox: http://imgur.com/OY6oyAg. So either I have to basically just say that it'll never collide with obstacles during its jump (which may end up looking weird, I'm going to have to test it) or I have to figure out a way of sorting out which obstacles it should be allowed to jump over. The latter will probably be pretty tricky and involve some depth calculations, which should be interesting. Enemy spawning: The basis of the game will be throwing enemies into buildings, within mini-arenas. So I need to make sure that enemies spawn in a reasonable way, so as not to completely overwhelm the player, and to make the gameplay a bit more interesting and varied. I think the best way to do this would have a pool of enemies that the arena can pull from, each worth a certain number of points depending on their difficulty. Then for each wave, the arena makes up a new squad of enemies with a max number of points dependent on a difficulty modifier (TBD how that would be calculated). So I'm going to make a start on that kind of system. Building System: I'm thinking a bit forward on this one, as when I was writing out my system on the enemy spawning I started thinking about what kind of spawning I actually needed? In terms of player incentives and how to make combat something that can be nuanced, rather than just kill all the things. So here are some scratch thoughts on a system so that I can ask people's opinion at a later date: General building/arena system: Each arena will have one building(/objective.) This building can be made up of different sections, but a basic version would be an object that takes up the entirety of the North side of an arena. More advanced/interesting versions could be buildings that occupy different sides of the arena as a function of time, or weak points that open after fulfilling a requirement. The arena's Building has a HP that needs to be filled. The player fills this by throwing stunned enemies into it. Each enemy is worth a certain amount of HP, dependent on their difficulty. Enemies spawn in waves. There is no time limit, but there is a meta variable that determines how many waves the player can face per overall day (day/night progression cycle is the outer loop). So the player is incentivised to be efficient with their combat and not kill too many enemies, but use all of them to throw into the building.

Oh! I should have taken that out, it's the hitbox for the enemy, i.e. where he's actually travelling rather than what I'm drawing him doing. Actually, you've now prompted me to make one of my next goals figuring out how to make the jumps work with obstacles in the middle of them, thanks!

Review 27/01- 03/02 Goals: 1. New enemy that jump attacks I did this! It actually took way longer than I thought it would, as I had to relearn all my old-ass physics calculations/algebra in general. Thanks heaps to @Lork who linked me to this very good post about how to make ballistic projectiles look nice. The finished product looks roughly like this (sans debug text, and using my CBF assets): 2. Refactor the enemy ‘type’ system I didn't do this! I actually spent way too long trying to fix this tiny little issue which doesn't really affect anything, before deciding that I'd have to completely re-do the way I do stacks of enemies. This probably is going to happen, but I may delay it while I get more important things like the extra AI behaviours going. 3. Building spawning stuff I did this! I won't post an image of enemies sitting around not doing anything, but it works, and now I can make a start on trying to get interesting spawn behaviours/layers so the player isn't just instantly overwhelmed with enemies. Additional Stuff: Fixed an issue where the player walking against a building would cause them to transition between idle and walk states every frame and look like they were having a seizure. Worked on my Wizard Jam 4 game a bit to add in some fun extras for the gang. New goals up next!

Thanks Travis! I appreciate that you guys pushed me to do it. I've already accomplished more in a couple of days than I would in a week.

Using Gamemaker 2. I've used gamemaker studio for ages but the new one is quite an improvement.

27/01 to 03/02 Goals: Develop a state machine for a new enemy that jumps to attack the player. Refactor the enemy ‘type’ system for lifting groups of enemies. I’m currently using a weird maths thing rather than having an array that I can loop through. Make a building that spawns enemies and waits for the player to attack before moving them all out of their Idle state. Goals scratch: State machine: Idle: Dummy state for the moment. Will eventually be a kind of pre-idle state where the enemies move around and do little idle animations. Waits for a signal from the building that spawned it to kick the jumper to its neutral state. -> Neutral Neutral: Checks whether the player is close or far away (radii TBD) and either moves to attack or retreat states. -> Attack | -> Retreat. Attack: Sets destination x,y to the player’s current future position in a second. Telegraphs the attack with a circle with a growing radius and increasing opacity. Moves to position with a jump that goes through everything (not sure if jumps off screen, or just appears to be far above everything). Is stunned for a short time on landing. -> Idle. Retreat: Does a short hop directly away from the player. -> Idle Refactor types: This one is actually just a pain to explain, so I'll just say it’s definitely achievable. Building spawn: Have a list of the types and numbers of enemies to spawn, plus their initial positions, stored in the building. Can use ds_ for this. Then need to loop through the list of enemy IDs to let ‘em rip. Would be nice to maybe have an order function built in so that later I can layer fights a bit better rather than every man for himself. Though I could also achieve this by reusing an old bit of ‘battle circle’ code within the enemy state machine. Which could give them more interesting combat.

I've had some negative experiences with streaming game jam games and giving that kind of feedback. I think maybe because it was a shorter jam and they were defensive of what they could achieve in that amount of time. So I tend to keep my comments fairly positive and surface level for the most part. I'll keep it mind for next time though. Perhaps we could ask for people who want critical feedback to post in a thread opting in?

Okay, I think I've added everyone to my auto-host channels and set them to host randomly if you guys are ever streaming at the same time (no favourite children ;P). My channel is https://www.twitch.tv/fifogamedev, I've been streaming the Wizard Jam entries. I'm hoping to let the good times roll and play through some of the GameMaker gm(48) game jam games once I'm done, and then finally onto a series where I play at least one hour of every game that I've never started up in my Steam library (there are so many of these that I'm kind of scared). I'm Australian but I tend to stream in the morning and the evening, so hopefully see a couple different crowds.

Phill's Stream VODs Creators should be able to see their game cover on the preview image (thanks @zerofiftyone for permission to use your boss header). If you go to the actual YouTube page, you can skip to your game using the time stamps in the description if you like! I'll update as I do the last couple of streams necessary to cover all the games.

I'm going to stream tomorrow morning to catch some of the American crowd that represent way more of the people that have participated (than Australians). That'd be Thursday 22nd, 10am Australian Central, so Wednesday 21st, 7:30pm Eastern Time, 4:30pm Pacific, and 12:30am GMT (edit: sorry SBM) according to this thing. https://www.twitch.tv/fifogamedev

https://titanfist.itch.io/cool-blob-future Some more updates to come hopefully before the guys stream, and a post-mortem ---------- Team: Myself on code and art, Anders Groenningsaeter (MiniBoss Audio) on music! Concept: A one-button top-down brawler where the player picks up and uses enemies as a key/lock system to destroy environmental barriers and progress through each level. How's that for an elevator pitch? Diversifiers: Mainstream Thumbs, One of These Things is Not Like the Other, Wizard Jam Shared Cinematic Universe, Box Art, Learn by doing, From the horse’s mouth, Nice Segue, Game Development 100% Internalised. Theme: Alright so I think that the player will play a blob. This will make art pretty easy, v especially if, given it's a cool blob future, everyone else in the world is a blob. The game will start with the player character having just become a blob against their wishes. You will escape the birthing pod and begin your blobby reign of terror against the rest of blob kind, justified by the fact that You Need Answers. Mechanics: Each blob you encounter will fulfill different requirements for removing barriers in the environment. You will need to absorb them and spit them out to do so. So a particular barrier may require the player spitting three of a type of enemy at it, or a combination of different enemies. There's a lot of room to muck with the requirements so hopefully I can strike a balance that gives it a kind of action puzzle element. Pretty keen to get started!

I don't have a huge amount to say for myself other than this was, as usual, an awesome jam to participate in. So I'm going to respond to other things people have said. Length/Being Late: I like that there’s kind of two soft deadlines of the 2 weeks and then the time at which the thumbs stream the games. When the worst thing that comes out of it is that people make their games cooler, I don’t feel like there’s any real issue. Unless there ever is a money/big incentive reward, in which case I imagine there could be two separate classes of jammer (competing/doing it for lulz) and we could deal with it that way. Awards: If it’s awards that are completely meaningless and have no value so people (including me) don’t stress out about them, sure why not. Getting Too Big: Something that could be considered is maybe teams/groups within the jam? So say if we have around 60 jammers again, three groups of 20 that are encouraged to at least (important note) comment and encourage within their groups would be cool. So you have a big jam (which is cool) but retain that close-knit feeling (which is cool). Dot Gobbler: Is awesome.

Hey, thanks Ben! I didn't realise I had an aesthetic except for 'what on earth can I do that is simple as heck and doesn't look like complete arse'. I definitely did not balance the levels/respawn times at all for that first release. I've now made that initial two-colour level full-size and lowered the respawn time so the player can have a bit more breathing room. The one after that is still pretty hard though! Thanks heaps for the feedback as usual, you're a machine!

Released! https://titanfist.itch.io/cool-blob-future Unfortunately I went back to working my long-ass hours the Wednesday before the deadline. I'm hoping to do some extra work to it (mainly polish and adding in-jokes before the guys stream, so I hope they aren't organised.

Hoooly shit this looks amazing! I can't wait to play it.

Hey, Pico-8 is super sweet! Best of luck in the jam!

This is the first time I've looked into this thread and holy shit this is all looking amazing!

tl:dw More work on the building system because I hadn't quite got it working into something interesting last time. Some more level design to go and maybe making some objectives not look like dicks. Edit: Turns out that the audio is a little less loud in the video than I thought. Trust me when I say it's awesome.

Day 7 Update! tl;dw Got the building system working, some awesome audio from Anders, and looking to think hard about level design to make the absorbing and spitting out of enemies a fun thing.

There had better be a yeti dude that you can only escape by pressing a key that makes you go faster that 90% of the population doesn't know exists.

I would play this game.

You can do it! Looking spooky already, nice work.

Those are some very sweet, subtle effects there zero. Can't wait for the gameplay!

It's business time!

Congratulations on your first jam! That's a really neat idea to start off with, though I am 100% not letting my fiancee play this with me with my good keyboard (she's already ruined two, two!).