Dr Nick

Haha, I like this pipe dream! For me a Chill Hell is when there is a smudge on your monitor, and without thinking you reach over and try to rub it off, which of course leaves a bigger smudge, etc...

"Press 'a' to moonwalk" is my new favorite joke in a game!

This game gave me really good flashbacks to my first video game experiences on an Atari 800XL computer my uncle gave us. It made me want to find an old clunky, clicky, plastic joystick!

Sometimes, when I'm fighting the crowds at the grocery store on a busy day, I imagine a giant king of France appearing and screaming at everyone in French! It makes things a little more entertaining. Also, I love this game!

UPDATE: I've submitted and you should be able to get it here: https://sciencecop.itch.io/im-blown-away I really had a lot of fun doing this! As I said below, I pretty much spent the whole time getting the engine to work and the editor to (barely) work, so the game is very brief. If I had more time I might tweak the motion a little bit, it's a little too slidey right now, but I managed to have some tense moments of almost making a jump and getting blown away at the last moment! Thanks to the folks who made this happen, and I hope you all had fun making your games! Hello Idle Friends! After chickening out the last two game jams, I'm going to take a crack at it this year. The other jams have given birth to some amazing things, and this one looks like it will be just as great. If First Age of Extreme were a kickstarter, it would certainly get my support! I have goofed around sporadically with C++ (like once or twice a year sporadically) since high school. A few years ago I found a website with a bunch of basic game dev tutorials using SDL for graphics ( lazyfoo.net ) and last summer I actually got a very basic platformer engine working. I have been building off that for this game. It's pretty much the most obvious and least creative direction I could have gone with the title "I'm Blown Away," but I figured I should do something I have a chance of completing! The basic idea will be to get the friendly robot man up the platforms made treacherous by random strong winds, which can, of course, blow you away. The blue squares will be caves that Mr. Robot can cower in and stay safe from the wind. So far, I think I have the movement and jumping feeling pretty good, and the wind does indeed blow you across the screen. Next I need to design the win states and lose states, and of course, find some art. Anyway, I am hoping this will spur me on to actually finish a game for once! I have a hard drive full of barely started projects and this would be the first thing I could actually show someone. Looking forward to seeing what everyone makes!

Oh man, thanks SuperBiasedMan and phill for streaming the game! It was really interesting to see actual people interact with the game mechanics. It made me realize that the movement system is really just annoying, and not fun. I put in mechanics for acceleration and deceleration, mostly just to see if I could. I guess I thought that a more complex movement system would be inherently better, but I just pulled out Spelunky and it doesn't seem to have any of that nonsense! I just uploaded a new version (BlownAway 1.2.zip) which tweaks the controls a bit. The original version had a system where the player would have to decelerate for a few frames before turning around when changing direction. This one takes out that deceleration time. Also, the acceleration rate has increased. I think it is a little less annoying this way! I don't really think it's worth redownloading, but maybe if other people check it out, they will have an easier time!? If you really want to hear the Win Music, you can just find mp3 in the folder. Thanks again to everyone who played it!

Hey guys, thanks for checking out the game! Sorry for not responding sooner, I've been away a bit. I'm looking forward to the next jam. I think I have a better idea how to approach the process now, so hopefully I will be able to spend more time tuning details in the next game and making something that people can finish!

Thanks for checking it out! I'm glad you were able to beat it, I sent it to a friend to check out and he said it was too hard for him. I was actually going to move some platforms and make it a bit easier, but I ran out of time. One thing I noticed while playing through the game a bunch to test things was that the placement of the caves (which I first chose pretty much completely at random) almost inevitably leads to a few seconds of waiting around with nothing to do right before the last set of jumps up to the flag. At least when I played, I pretty much always reached the last cave very soon after a wind gust had passed. There was never enough time to just continue up to the flag, though, and I would have to wait around in that last cave for the next gust to get the most amount of time possible to do the last few jumps. Of course this really kills the momentum of the game, and it made me realize how carefully levels have to be designed in good platformers!

Yes, I started off just clicking as much as possible, but especially because of the need to reload, I had to start playing more tactically like atte said. This is a really cool game!

I haven't survived through a whole game yet, but I think part of that is because I am just staring at how cool it looks!

This is really cool! It felt like a spooky Doctor Who episode.

Thanks Synnah!

Thanks for the encouragement, Xeneth! The more I work on this, the more I realize the real accomplishment for me will be having a working game engine (with very few features, to be sure). I'm not sure if the game itself is going to be any fun, but maybe next time! I had some students not show up for lessons yesterday, so I recorded some music for the Title Screen, Death Screen, and Win Screen (I am a musician in real life). Not sure if it really matches the theme of the game, but I was bored and I figured I should put something competent in the game! https://soundcloud.com/njefferyviola-1/vieuxtemps-capriccio-lose-music https://soundcloud.com/njefferyviola-1/big-rock-candy-mountain-title-music https://soundcloud.com/njefferyviola-1/idlish-thumbs-theme-win-music

I played around with the single player mode, and it seems really cool! I will have to try it out with a friend sometime. I'm not sure exactly how, but maybe there is a fun way to make the audio player have to identify different musical intervals for the visual player to successfully repel the attack. Might give me an idea for a game for some of my students!

I am really impressed with how good this looks!

This is such a neat idea! It makes me wonder if it could be altered to help with aural skills for musicians (I am a musician and a big teaching nerd). I'm excited to check this out!

Well, I have something playable, and sometimes it even feels a bit like a game! Flying off either side of the screen is game over, and if you reach the flag at the top you win. I have some screen shots, but they are mostly just showing off the art I got from this website: http://opengameart.org/content/generic-platformer-tileset-16x16-background I think my biggest achievement was making very simple tile based map editor (you can see it in the last screen shot). The left side of the screen is the map being made where you can highlight tiles with the arrow keys. The right edge of the screen has all the tiles from the sprite sheet, and if you click on one it will change the highlighted tile to that clip. The "map file" it generates is just a text file with a series of numbers that each represent a tile type, so it's not very sophisticated, but it works. It's a little absurd how pleased I was to get this to work...

Ideas! Maybe you have to find the 'g' in a crowded room, Where's Waldo style! Maybe you have to get the 'g' to the right place in an infuriating slide puzzle, like that old adventure game "Lighthouse." Maybe you can make a twine-type game where you have to convince 'n' to grow up, accept responsibility, and become a 'g' I, of course, have no idea how to make any of these, but they popped into my mind!