Zirrrus

Looking very good already and that concept is very intriguing.

Oooooh, gorgeous gecko!

Top notch mech designs. I dig the pixellated line aesthetic.

Things are still going very slowly, lots of annoying and distracting stuff happening. Making cutscenes is completely new territory to me, so I'm not sure how to quite approach it. Currently all the timing is simply hard-coded in a script but it makes tweaking a bit cumbersome. But it mostly works, so I'll stick with it for the duration of this jam, i think. The car approaches: https://i.imgur.com/jglXaev.gifv This weekend I'll focus on making some plants, they will play a very important part in constructing the environment, and I'm still unsure how to best do it. I also need to cut the scope wayyy down. For now I'll focus on getting the intro sequence on the street done and maybe try to build the radio tower location.

Thanks, everyone! I need these words of encouragement, things have not been going well in the last days. After work I'm often simply not in a state to really do any productive jamming, something I had not really expected. So thing have been going slow as is. But just now I also discovered that the camera control system I have built is actually broken. And then i fixed it. Complaining in Slack has once again worked wonders. Update: With that stuff seemingly working i was able to create the intro 'cutscene': http://i.imgur.com/a5WfzDX.gifv I want to use those 'cinematic' bars to show the player when they don't have control. Pretty happy that I made some progress today, despite that rocky start.

I found this for the brains: https://github.com/45brains/45brains.data The actual website appears to be gone but the brains are listed in the .json files.

So far I've done only programming, so there's nothing to show. Got the subtitle system to a state that only breaks sometimes in pretty specific circumstances, I'll leave it at that for now. Also had to make a character controller from scratch, the Unity one was too convoluted and I need to take control of the camera for the cutscenes. It's still very basic but now I can rotate the player's view without weirdly snapping to a position. With these things done, i can start working on the intro sequence. Not sure how to best coordinate it but Unity's timeline feature seems made for it. Time to learn how that works.

That physical prototyping is

Oh, this sounds neat! The idea description reminds me of that one music game where you have to redirect streams of music bits or whatever...can't remember the name.

This already looks very, very good.

I am very fond of "I'm ruined"

This is very cool. I have zero experience with these voice assistants and no idea what an 'app' for one of those can even do but I'm excited to find out!

I'm stoked!

You can play it now! https://zirrrus.itch.io/the-fresno-experiment - - - I've been tinkering on this since the start of the jam but don't have much to show yet. It's supposed to be a simple horror game, set in the foggy Fresno swamps(which I assume exist). You walk around and are stalked by a terrifying monster while collecting items/clues to solve a puzzle. That's the idea anyways. So far I have spent most of my time using Unity's tree creator to make some trees(which always end up looking way too vibrant and cheery the intended atmosphere): Played around and found pretty good settings for an ominous fog: And the monster: Right now it looks like I won't be able to make the game I had in mind originally but a heavily downscoped version should be possible.

Once again I pretty much forgot about sound. It's a really bad habit, I know... Probably. It's my first first person 3d game and gave me a chance to try out and get frustrated by a lot of new systems, like Unity's terrain and tree creators. It might eventually lose the Wizard Jam theme but there are a bunch of things I wanted to do and just didn't get to. For example some sort of inventory or at least a way to examine objects more closely...you can't check out the credit card in all its glory, which is sad:

This was cool! I have zero context for Frasier apart from it being a popular show at some point in the past...so it was probably even more surreal for me than most people. Very good use of Markov-chains too.

I always love when a game has a great cohesive style, you absolutely nailed that. The wriggly lines make it perfect. Just super fun to play around with.

Just as I was about to go into the red, a lawsuit cost me over 100 million. Ouch. Really cool that you went in such a different direction for this, it certainly paid off!

It's not done but it's something: https://zirrrus.itch.io/the-fresno-experiment The looming showcase weekend game me enough energy to scrape my assets together into a thing I felt was good enough to serve as a proof of concept.

Finished a location: I'll try to cobble something together tomorrow but to be honest I'm not feeling the jam spirit this time around.

Getting that right proves to be quite a challenge. Currently it sounds like a broken electric razor. No real progress today, just built a few new (un)important assets.

Thanks! Both! The distance-based one to properly hide objects and a particle system which moves with the player but creates particles that stay in place so you get a sense of actually moving through the fog. Today I started building the central location:

You are very good at eldritch horror!

Go play the game here: https://zirrrus.itch.io/jau Wizard Jam! I'm getting started a little early because there will be several days where I won't be able to cram in any jamming. This is what I have after a first rough brainstorm: A mining game in the style of Steamworld Dig, the world is made up of blocks, you can mine in 4 directions. Some blocks contain materials - not sure what you're doing with the materials yet, probably plotting the humans'/the robots' downfall. The top of the screen/world has a town where you deposit stuff/refuel/whatever. There also is a Danger Layer which is always visible and is triggered after a certain time. If that layer does not have enough(or not densely packed enough)blocks, it falls down and the Danger Layer moves up. You're gathering materials but at the same time have to avoid turning the ground supporting the town into a swiss cheese. You can spend resources to create scaffolds and such to hold up blocks. Bonus stuff for if there's extra time: - Some sort of story/framing/explanation of what is going on - Upgrades for your mining powers, carrying capacity... - Monsters/enemies/dangers. Might be essential to make things more challenging/fun. I've got a bit of experience working with tile-based games by now, so it doesn't feel too ambitious(...yeah, right). But I'm also strapped for time this jam...

Thanks for the feedback! This feels like a really good project to keep expanding on. But I'll most likely start from scratch and actually plan the systems this time around. @Mythalore Yeah, right now there is just no point to the mining, it just makes you better at mining. Sort of a mining ouroboros. Having some sort of structures to discover underground would be super neat. Building a system that generates more than just smoothed random noise is probably an interesting challenge. The way I ended up implementing the Danger Layer was really lackluster. At that point I had pretty much run out of steam. It wasn't even supposed to just always advance - only when there were enough unstable blocks. The whole stability thing fell by the wayside in general. @Nappi I had noticed that it can be quite fiddly but had no idea what I could change besides the size of the character - to which I was, for whatever reason, quite attached. The movement in general can use some work, it feels pretty jerky right now.