phill

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Posts posted by phill

  1. Posted

    Sounds very cool! I like the thought of exploring an old school SNES-ish-looking tavern again. 

     

    An idea for a recurring character that may be fun is a person that is just trying to get a drink. Like, from start to finish all they are trying (and failing) to do, even when the big event happens, is getting a drink. Could provide some nice counterpoint to anything serious going on!

  2. Posted

    Hey, thanks for streaming SBM! I learned a lot by your reactions to my game (CTEOOMH) just in the way that what is obvious to me is not obvious to other people because they haven't spent two weeks making the game, hehe. Definitely need to focus on an easier user experience next time! Thanks again! :D

  3. Posted · Edited by phill

     

    Wizard Jam 5: Part 1 -- See spoilers below for time stamps of individual games.

    Spoiler

    1:09 -- A Chill Hell by themousery
    5:32 -- A Thousand Dormant Machines by jctwood (sorry about the initial muck up with the screen)
    10:32 -- A Thousand Dormant Machines by TheCalster
    15:19 -- A Thousand Dormant Machines by Lu
    22:52 -- And That's Why... by atteo
    30:30 -- Classic Dogs and Demons by z_bill
    40:35 -- Countdown to Tears by vegas
    46:52 -- Cruisin' For a Word That Rhymes With Cruisin' by ryanfb
    51:07 -- Cull Your Frustrum by 1y1e
    1:03:27 -- Dear Mom (The Pizza, The Bee, and the Trash Can) by wstacey
    1:08:50 -- Disable Enemies to Reveal Enemies by superbiasedman
    1:18:00 -- AUSTRALIAN UNTERNET BREAK
    1:18:58 -- Evader by zerofiftyone
    1:24:07 -- Frankenstein's Monster's Monster
    1:33:35 -- Furnish Your House by jorhlok
    1:40:37 -- Get Hoisted by law5guy
    1:44:20 -- Get Hoisted by broxxar
    1:48:40 -- Good...Bye by mythalore

     

     

    Wizard Jam 5: Part 2 -- See spoilers below for time stamps of individual games.

    Spoiler

    1:06 -- Hamburger Mode by technomagie
    14:20 -- I'll Kill The Last Alien by scary-wizard (unfortunately you cannot hear me talking over the music, sorry! No-one mentioend this during the stream so not sure what happened there, but you can see by my pantomimed reactions that I really and truly super loved this game!)
    31:42 -- Kaedemus by mirakus
    38:40 -- Kill The Last Alien by tautesauce
    38:58 -- Life Finds A Way by epiblitikos
    48:30 -- Lord Hoistmas' With Bagblast by blushine
    50:28 -- Nick Breckons 1: Mackle: More by nikomek (sorry nkornek but we couldn't play it :S It looks super sweet though!)
    1:01:00 -- Odds and Ends by kyletyler
    1:05:30 -- Order Order by nicmagnier
    1:17:20 -- Prepare for the Jelly by zirrrus
    1:34:01 -- Pro Fish Smart Fish by felixludewig
    1:44:25 -- Psyching Out That Bear by supertarexturbo
    1:49:05 -- Signature Moves by squires
    1:56:30 -- Sit in a Row and Look at the Wall by whilefun
    2:02:19 -- Sit in a Row and Look at the Wall by adsmz

     

     

    Wizard Jam 5: Part 3 -- See spoilers below for time stamps of individual games.

    Spoiler

    1:30 -- Somebody, Somewhere, Somehow, Something by authenticexperiences
    6:23 -- Sorrow and Horrow by professor-dorkface
    10:44 -- Suddenly, the King of France
    22:46 -- Super Hollyweedland by pdotjpg
    28:28 -- Super Pools N' Ghosts by sunless
    34:11 -- The Curious Case of the Rhode Island Reader by moncolin
    37:40 -- The Pizza, the Bee, and the Trash Can by one8two8 (I'm so sorry, my OBS decided to stop at your main screen :S)
    44:17 -- The Power of 45 Brains by boltsoft
    52:15 --  The Power of 45 Brains by foggy-cornslakes
    1:05:42 -- The President's Dog by teljoor
    1:10:31 -- The Purity of a Child's Boredom by getinthedamnbox
    1:17:05 -- The Robot's Lips by timegentleman
    1:19:35 -- The Stuff Dreams Are Made of by rubixcube

     

     

     

    Wizard Jam 5: Part 4 -- See spoilers below for time stamps of individual games

     

    Spoiler

    1:56 -- Beware of Falling Samurai by SharedControl
    11:00 -- Businesss Guys On Planes by dibs
    19:11 -- Fight Garbage With Garbage by keibo
    19:45 -- The Titan Falls by theschap
    31:11 -- The Wizard by fartsatchel
    40:07 -- The Wizard by Doodlebear AKA infinite_space_cat AKA Infinite Space Turtle
    51:37 -- The Wizard (of Disastris) by paulio
    55:10 -- Unsubscribe, No Advertisements Please by fojlip
    1:02:47 -- Welcome...to Important If True by goodwintq
    1:05:34 -- Bablyon: I can't Do It, Gilgamesh by VagueBagel
    1:09:30 -- Transmission: Lost by fabiandenter (what the fuck this game)

     

     

    ---

     

    Thanks again to everyone that made a game for Wizard Jam 5. You're all an inspiration and a kick ass reason to keep coming back and enjoying the awesome fun and feeling of community that this jam creates. Thanks again to zerofiftyone for organising everything, you legend.

  5. Posted

    5 hours ago, nkornek said:

    Pretty neat! I really liked the story but some of the games were really hard!

     

    Thanks nkornek! I added a skip cheat button yesterday so if you got stuck on any of them you can go back and skip them. I'm really happy people liked the story, I worked on that quite a bit even though it was so short! :D

  6. Posted

    On 2017-6-25 at 7:09 AM, atte said:

    The strange fairytale framing the minigames was a good and interesting element. I was starting to get really frustrated with the Osu and follow the circle* parts - "Philllll, these are clearly way too difficult, well let me just focus and try one more time.... oh, that wasn't too bad" but got through them in the end ^_^


    * At first I thought I was dragging instead of following the circle but I understood it after a couple of tries, and you explain it on the itch page.

     

    Yeah I thought about going back and making it super easy given how much people's mouse sensitivity changes between computers but then I thought it could go either way depending on what kind of system they are on. Woe to anyone who tries that game on a trackpad! :S

     

    1 hour ago, getinthedamnbox said:

    What an imaginative story and world. I'm impressed by how smoothly the narrative zooms through an entire lifetime, and your acting gives it weight throughout. I got stuck on the first level a couple of days ago, but I went back to it today and had no trouble. Either there was a patch, or I found my osu flow state.

     

    I'm glad you enjoyed the story! I used to do a lot of fiction writing so it was lovely to get back into that mode. MAkes me think that maybe narrative games could be something I could focus on for the next few jams I do. And yes, I did tune down the difficulty of the osu game a few days ago so I'm glad you could get through it. I didn't want people bouncing off the first stage!

     

  7. Posted

    Hey, my partner and I just got finished playing a round of Stat Decay (see attached pic) and I had some feedback! First off, I love games where the mechanic is racing against an enemy that has advantages over you, and I think it's got legs as a board game concept in this case too. Some things that we found as we played through:

     

    - It's not clear in the instructions if you can move diagonally. Eventually we decided that you couldn't because if you could then there'd be very little difference in movement times between hero and bad guy.

    - Similarly we weren't sure if you must take actions in the third phase or if it's optional. We ended up deciding not to make it compulsory, but I almost think it should be. We had I think 3 or 4 turns where it was best for us to do nothing except move the hero once and replace that discarded card. Having the use of cards be mandatory would make it a lot more tense and involve a bit more planning. Also you get to turn over new cards, which everyone always loves doing! :D

    - EDIT: Final unsure thing was whether or not the tokens were supposed to be face up or down. We played with them face up because unfortunately when we printed them on paper we could see through to the numbers anyway. :s

    - The main thing we noticed is that it felt like we were very much in control of the game from start to finish. I'm not sure if we were just lucky with our card draw, but having 10 cards available to us to muck around with stats as well as event cards which didn't really screw us over too much (we got both 'enemy moves first' cards but they didn't affect the outcome of either turn) meant that there were no real panic moments.

    - The card that ups one stat by 2 and downs another by 2 is super powerful, probably overly so. We used it at the end of the game to 'win more' (we ended up having all 3 stats over the bad guys) but it's a serious ace in the hole that it seems like you'd bea ble to keep for the last turn in most games.

    - While I think of it, the other thing that may have made our game a bit easier was the fact that we never shared the same target place as the bad guy. Not once! Statistically speaking I guess it's a 1/36 chance when both die are rolled and you roll dice a little less than 10 times per game. Maybe something there?

     

    Anyway, that was our initial impressions. Co-op games are super difficult to balance (see Pandemic/XCOM/any board game where an impossible game state occurs) so I can understand if you went under powered for the enemy. One suggestion may be to guarantee the movement of the bad guy, as in he always makes it to his destination whereas the player can take either 1, 2, or 3 turns to get there. That may seem harsh but thinking back on our game I think it would have made it a lot closer and we'd have to make some real decisions about how we would go about using our cards.

     

    Once again congrats on making a board game for WJ5! I really love it when people try new inventive things like this and since I'm a massive board game nerd this was especially great to try out. Thanks for making it! :)

     

    IMG_20170621_194923.jpg

  8. Posted

    Hey, you can contact @zerofiftyone to get your game added to the jam page. Regardless I've added it to my collection to stream. Congrats on completing your game, looks like a really cool concept!

     

    Oh, also you need to tick the windows checkbox on your edit game page on itch.io if you want people to be able to download it through the desktop app.

  9. Posted

    Thanks @Travis! I'm glad you were able to get through everything. I was thinking maybe I could let the radius of the mouse being in the circle on the body be a little more loose since I had similar issues with my l337 gaming mouse, but I guess we'll see if anyone says they absolutely 100% can't get through that level. Heh, my voice isn't usually that calm, I had to deliberately slow down my speech and I actually pitched it down 5% in Audacity to try and get that older councilman vibe going! Thanks again for playing through mate, really looking forward to enjoying everyone's efforts and returning the favour in a couple of days!

  11. Posted

    Post mortem time!

    My game changed significantly from my first post. When I started this WJ I was kind of in a shitty place mentally, so going after something ambitious like a platformer with unique mechanics wasn't a great idea. I ended up staring at my screen for a few days before doing an about turn and focusing on achievable chunks of in the form of mini games that I could string together with a loose, spoken plot.

     

    Making mini games isn't as easy as it looks! I found that every game that I thought of as mini was actually not that mini. I had an idea to put in a Jezzball clone, but that soaked up two days before I realised it was too complicated. After that I focused on extremely simple games (one of which could be argued whether it's even a game) and tried my best to tie them together with the basic story I was developing in the background. I definitely have newfound respect for the Warioware guys. It's not easy coming up with ideas for mini games! Though I guess I was a bit more constrained int hat they had to make sense in the context of the story, but still. Props to inventive, imaginative peeps.

     

    Things I learned:

    1) How to walk away from an idea - I think this was a good one to learn! I was able to walk away from multiple ideas, including my big main one, during the course of this jam. Too hard, too complicated, or not fun are all good reasons not to follow through with something during a jam. Of course, knowing how to walk away is a different thing to knowing how to recognise those things in your own game, but I'm glad I was able to do both.

    2) Even a simple story is better than none at all - I'm actually pretty happy with the words I put together for this one. I used to write a lot of fiction and it felt good to put that old pair of jeans back on.

    3) How not to lean on state machines for everything - I tend to set up every single object I ever create with state machines because they are what I'm used to working with, even for non-AI functions. I did less of that in this project and felt pretty good about it.

     

    Anyway, hope everyone/someone enjoys my game. Big thanks to @zerofiftyone for being the organiser of this event (his game looks ace!) and to everyone in the slack (@Travis and @Mythalore especially) who encouraged me and kept me entertained. Can't wait to stream and play all the other entries! :D

  14. Posted

    Hey, so I've done a bit of an about-turn on this one, as making a platformer and having it do the stuff I wanted to do was proving a little bit too much for me. So instead I'm making half-a-dozen little games that will tell a story as the player goes through them.

     

    I'm aiming for 5-10 minutes of gameplay at the most. Here's a couple of .gifs of the first two games, an osu-alike:

    And a sawing simulator:

    The art needs some work, but I'm happy with the direction the game is going. Mostly I just wanted to tell the story of this clan, so minimal mechanics games work pretty well for that. Anyway, very much hoping I can get it done by the weekend!

  18. Posted

    Game link for all those game players out there (hi Ben_X): https://fifogamedev.itch.io/carvetheeyes. I'll do up a post-mortem tomorrow but for now I need sleep! 

     

    Level instructions! Because I actually want people to finish this dumb game.

    Level 1 - Tickle the giant by timing your clicks when the white circles match the radius of the blue circles. Think Osu or Elite Beat Agents.

    Level 2 - Alternate pressing left and right. Feel the boredom of a young person doing menial tasks.

    Level 3 - Click on the teeth to remove them...slowly. There's a certain order to removing them, and you only get three mistakes before it resets!

    Level 4 - Click on the circle to start flaying, then follow the circle with your mouse. Keep within the radius of the circle! (± a little)

    Level 5 - Alternate mashing the up and down buttons to lift the contraption to the required height so that it can crack the heck out of those bones.

    Level 6 - ???

    ---

     

    I made a promise to myself that I would use the random title generator and go with the very first title that came up. So boom, I'm going to be working on a game based on a gross terminal 7 title, Carved the eyes out of my head.

     

    I did a bit of a braindump session last night, starting when I was already a little tipsy, but even in the cold light of day I think it's a solid idea. I'll spoiler my thoughts here:

    Spoiler

    A game where you are uncovering a giant skull.
    Uncovering is a puzzle where pieces will fall if you don't set it up properly. Falling things are events that you then have to fight or do.
     
    Idea of one big boss made up of small events.
     
    Or an endless landscape of a big boss that you have to traverse. 
     
    Or just have literally the job of putting out the eyes of a boss be a massive undertaking. All the while he is whispering to you, questioning you.
     
    Or a game about reclaiming parts of a giant who is old and wishes to be of use. Each part of him is a resource that your people can use, but requires minigame or something to reclaim. Kind of like a gross wishing tree. 
     
    What does the game play look like?
     
    Puzzles where you need to retain as much of all the things as possible?
     
    Player is part of a clan that acts as stewards for the giants when they die. They fight off any predators that nip at the heels of the old giants and then perform ceremonies to lay them to rest. The giants feel no pain (or at least the player is told that) as their bodies are scavenged by the mountain folk.
     
    Gameplay: side scroller where you fend off monsters at the heels of the giant. Explore landscape of body and harvest starting from toes up while giant speaks to you. Maybe different ages of character? You start as a kid who harvests toe nails as a game, making the giant laugh. Eventually you are the elder who pries out the eyes and you get told that they do actually feel pain.
     
    Defense gameplay:
    Giants defend themselves by turning into stone. You can jump around on them to defeat the enemies.
    Initially jump around on them because you are a kid who likes jumping on things as they enter the village. Have to defend for more and more further out from the village = more time and more dangerous enemies.
     

     

    tl;dr The player will control a member of a clan who have a symbiotic relationship with nature giants. The giants travel to the clan's grounds to die and have their organs be recycled as the clan's buildings, weaponry, base resources. The player will defend the giants from predators that would seek to kill them before they reach their destination. At the moment I'm leaning towards the giants being interconnected platforms that move in a set rotation or pattern, and the fun is jumping around this giant trying to defend it from a bunch of smaller enemies, but I'll have to see if that's achievable or fun. I think it could be as long as the player has enough tools to move around easily.

     

    Anyway, that's the idea. Now to try and figure out how to structure this to be interesting/fun/at all feasible in less than 2 weeks.

  25. Posted

    This looks really great! Weirdly enough I had an entire world that was based on shopping centres/malls planned out for a novel a few years back but then life kind of caught up. It's a rich vein, especially if you bring some magical realism styles into it to highlight the absurdity. Definitely would love to check this out once you've got a build. :)