BluShine

Just updated with 2 more levels. If I have time after work tomorrow, I might throw some sound effects and music into the game. But I consider the current version "95% final", so feel free to play it and give feedback!

The AI is pretty simple. I start by calculating a "perfect" trajectory, then I reduce the power by 25% so the ball will land in front of the petard and roll into it. Next I add 0-5 degrees of randomness to the throwing angle. And then I simulate the "spin" phase by adding between 0 and 1 bars of left or right spin, and 0 to 2 bars of top or back spin. Top/back spin will usually result in a fairly close shot, but left/right spin will usually miss the petard significantly.

Got a sort-of release version. Only 1 level, and no sound, but everything seems to work. Might see if I can finish up the rest of the levels tomorrow, and maybe throw in some sound effects. https://blushine.itch.io/lord-hoistmas-with-bagblast

Made some progress on graphics. Pretty satisfied with the petard explosion effect. Not quite satisfied with the rest of it, but I've got more important stuff before I do another pass. Anyways, here's some self-hoisting.

Got a full gameplay loop! This gif shows only 1 toss per player, but I can set that to any number. 4 seems like a good match length. So, pretty much all the programming is finished. I even have a simple AI system so I can have some opponents that are more aggressive, more accurate, better at utilizing spin, etc. Gonna spend this weekend working on art, sound, and levels. Who knows how much I'll get done, but at least I've got something worth calling a "game" at this point!

Hoisted.

This project is nuts, and I love it. I just hope it won't be too hard to actually run your game. Maybe package up a zip file with an emulator and the rom all set up? I think you're probably better-off just avoiding near-rhymes like "whoosin", rhyming definitely has some gray areas, and it's hard to objectively say where a true rhyme stars and a half-rhyme begins. If you want to distract and challenge the player, what if you included words that look kinda like a rhyming word but sound completely different? So, alongside "boomin", you could also have "bombin", "bonin", "bannin", "bossin", "burpin", etc. Putting text sprites on the road seems like it might be tricky. If the text exists in the 3D space, it might be hard to read because of the low resolution, especially at a distance. I guess one solution would be to put scaled "target" sprites on the road, and have the text float above or beside the sprite.

Loving these demons. I really hope there's some kind of intro screen for each demon so we get to see that art in the game. Or maybe some kind of unlockable grimoire pages?

Didn't get much done during the week, but I should still be able to finish by Sunday. Anyways, here's the weird controls minigame I came up with. You aim the ball, and then hit space to start charging your shot. Hit space again to shoot the ball. If you time it right when the circle fills the yellow outline, the ball will land where you aimed. The twist is that there's Super Hexagon-style walls, and hitting a wall will add spin to the ball. The longer your shot, the more difficult it becomes to avoid the walls. But skilled hoisters will learn to exploit the walls to add precise amounts of curve to the ball. It definitely needs some transitions, sounds, and effects. And probably a tutorial, too. But I think the mechanic works well enough for the gameplay I have in mind. I'm gonna try to get the petard mechanic finished over this weekend, and implement an actual scoring system. Maybe I'll even get a simple AI opponent working. Once that programming stuff is done, I can spend the rest of the jam just messing around with art, levels, sounds, music, etc.

Curveballs! Something about a curveball is just so satisfying to watch. Anyways, controls are the next step. I'm thinking of some kind of timing minigame.

After making a procedurally-generated pipe photography game for Wizard Jam 4, I'm back for more! I hope ya'll are ready to get hoisted, because LORD HOISTMAS is coming to town. In ancient times, man created a weapon known as the petard. This fearsome explosive was created to destroy walls and doors. But another spicy use was soon discovered: hoisting. 1000 years later, the immortal god-king LORD HOISTMAS rules over the humans. Hoisting has become a professional sport. Every year, we hold the Bagblast tournament, and only the greatest hoister will have the honor of challenging our LORD in the final match. Lord Hoistmas With Bagblast! An explosive bocce-like dystopian pro sports sim with arcade hexagon elements. Play it here: https://blushine.itch.io/lord-hoistmas-with-bagblast Diversifiers used: Hoisted: You can literally hoist yourself by your own petard. Limited Vocabulary: Your only verb is "throw". "You Just Played Yourself 🔑": Every round begins with your placement of the petard. While you are technically competing against an opponent, the real challenge is to throw your balls close to your original throw. A poor petard placement can make this task very difficult. Texture Thrift: Almost every texture in the game is re-used and re-colored at least once.

Released! https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-4/rate/102192 See original post for more details.

Finally have some actual "gameplay" in the game. Pick three photos. The red sphere is displeased. The sphere is pleased by your photos. Your first critic is a floating red sphere. It likes red photos. It likes photos that have very little sky. It likes photos with at least 30 discrete pipes in the frame. Basically, each critic can grade your photo based on 1 or more criteria. For each criteria, they will pick the best photo of your 3 chosen ones (so, your red photo doesn't also have to have 30 pipes). The critic then gives you verbal feedback based on each criteria. I will also have some kind of overall numerical/letter score displayed somehow. How does the grading work? Whenever you snap a photo, I shoot out a 50x50 grid of raycasts to collide with the pipes in the frame. I use this to detect stats like how many pipes are in the shot, what percentage of shot is pipe vs sky, etc. Also, I save a render of the photo, which I can later reference to detect things like color. The "red detection" reads a 10x10 grid of pixels from the photo, and determines whether their hue, saturation, and value are within a certain degree of a reference color. Finally, the critic compares this to a "pass/fail" threshold. So, if 50% of your photo is red, and the critic wants a photo that's at least 40% red, you get a positive feedback message.There's also a bit of leeway in the color detection, so a 100% pink photo will be detected as ~50% red. Here's some debug views where each raycast hit is rendered as a sphere. In the second image, you'll notice that my colliders aren't particularly precise: I just have capsule colliders for each pipe and the flange parts have no collision. It's fast, and it's good enough for a game jam! I'm gonna try to throw together a main menu and finish up the UI, and then I can pretty much focus on adding more content in the form of new critics and new pipe worlds. I also need to put some sound in the game eventually. I'm also not sure yet how to introduce the critics. I want there to be some random element, and also some element of learning what each critic likes. I'm thinking that each critic might have a short "bio" displayed before you enter the pipe dream to take photos. For the sphere it could be "Wants to see lots of big red pipes." Probably something more creative. Not sure how much information would be too much. Anyone got ideas for critics? Dot Gobbler might make an appearance. I think it would like blue (like dots), and hate white (like ghosts). Also, it would like photos with plenty of empty space, because claustrophobic photos remind it of the maze. Are there some 3D models of the Idle hosts anywhere?

You can now take photos and arrange them in a nice little room. Click on the photo you want to display, And pin it anywhere on the walls. My first gallery show: "Tubular Sensuality" Every photo taken is also saved in a screenshots folder. Now that I've got a nice interface for picking photos, I can start programming the critics. That's the last step before I'll upload a fully-playable prototype for ya'll to test out! Still lots of stuff to do after that. I need a title screen, some sounds, and some music. I need to add a shutter effect for taking photos. I need some kind of tutorial or controls screen. Plus, I still want to add a lot more features to the pipe generation. And maybe some camera options: aspect ratio, zoom level, black and white film, other effects.

Lens flare!!! So bright and shiny! And some nice color ramp shadows. Grabbed a ton of effects and threw them on the camera. Lens flare, god rays, bloom, temporal anti aliasing, all that good stuff. I also tried some DOF blur and bokeh, but I wasn't really satisfied with the look, and it didn't play nice with the temporal AA. I may come back to it at some point. Also wrote up a new pipe shader based on Valve's TF2 shader paper. It's got half lambert shading for soft, squishy edges. It's got colorful specular and rim shading. It's got a gradient color ramp for blue shadows and yellow highlights. I'm pretty satisfied with the look of the pipes right now. I'll have tons of variables to tweak to make differently-colored pipe worlds. At some point, I'll return to the pipe generation code to refine the random colors, shapes, and positioning. I might try out some of that complementary color stuff, @voxn I've also been thinking of adding interiors to the pipes, although it would increase the polycount of the pipes. It's a trade-off between quantity and quality of pipes. Maybe I'll only have interiors for the ends of the pipes. Anyways, it's about time that I got started on gameplay. I think that I might have different "critic" characters who each judge your photo in different ways. Color, contrast, composition, number and arrangement of the pipes in the scene, etc. Maybe the critics could be based on the Thumbs hosts? Not sure if I'll try to do image analysis, or just raycast to detect the pipes that you're looking at. Or maybe some combination of the two methods. I'll probably play around with both and see what works. I also need to figure out some kind of UI for this stuff eventually...