Squawk Squardon

Re-release version! There was a ton of stuff I didn't get in by the deadline so this past week I started fixing things and just kept going. There's sound now! You can actually win the game! You can even exit the game if you win! Please let me know what you think! End of jam update: Play it here: Slyboots Express on itch.io Thanks again to BigJKO for use of Chris' face! Original Post: Hi there! I've been working this past week on building Slyboots Express, a puzzle game in which a dapper agent on a train must listen in on the conversations of train passengers to determine who the slyboots are. The player "listens" by zooming in the camera, depixlizing the text bubbles. This is the first time I've built anything in unity and my first real attempt at building a game. It has taken me most of the week just to get the character model built and animated, and to figure out how to get the camera to zoom in and out reliably to reveal text. There's a ton of work for me to do still and only two days to do it, but I have blind ignorant optimism on my side and I'm sure everything will be fine! There are a couple things I could use help on if anyone has time to point me in the right direction: 1- for the pixelization trick I followed the instructions from this Gamasutra post's 3D Forrest at Night demo, which uses two cameras, with the first camera following the player being used as a low-pixel texture, that texture being put on a cube, then pointing the game camera at the cube. It's working great, except that whenever I save my game project the texture gets dropped from camera one's target texture and I get this message "Releasing render texture that is set as Camera.targetTexture!" it's simple enough to drag and drop the texture back onto the camera's target texture, but I'm worried it may break the camera when I'm ready to export the game. My googling of the issue hasn't turned up anything useful or at least not useful to a unity and coding noob like me. It's been doing this since before I added the camera zoom or follow player scripts to the camera. 2- each time I run the game in editor I get a few hundred prints of this message: "UnassignedReferenceException: The variable animator of controller has not been assigned. You probably need to assign the animator variable of the controller script in the inspector." But the animator IS assigned in the controller inspector window. Again, my googling failed me, and none of the fixes I found applied or fixed the error message. My question on this is, the game runs fine and the animator is doing it's job perfectly despite this error; can I just ignore it? 3- If anyone knows who drew the twitch channel thumbs faces, I'd like to thank and properly credit them for the Chris face that I stole and animated. If they are here on the forum and do not wish for their art to be used in this way I will gladly remove it. Thanks, and good luck to everyone else furiously working to finish their game!

the unity menu went away in the more recent build when I locked the resolution in player settings. There were multiple issues this fixed, as different aspect ratios or resolutions messed up camera behavior, legibility of text, and framing of scenes. it was also supposed to fix the issue of buttons on the intro and outro screens getting too small or going off the canvas, but it sounds like it didn't. I'll have to play around with some stuff and see if I can fix it, or if I can't figure it out I may just remove the button all together and introduce a different trigger for loading the next scene. Thanks again for letting me know about the issue! I'm curious to hear if anyone else has played the most recent build and seen this issue, or if anyone knows about canvases/buttons on canvases and a way to lock them to the game camera so they do not scale with resolution. The initial issue (and what I think is causing the bug for @Ben X) happened because I was trying to position the button near the bottom of the frame below the text, but it goes off the screen, or up over the text depending on aspect ratio of the game window. Edit: Never mind, I was able to reproduce the issue and think I've fixed it. Scaling the canvas to screen size was much easier than i expected using the helpfully named "Canvas Scaler" which I feel very silly for missing previously. There's a couple other things I want to tweak, but the new fixed build will be up soon. Thanks @Ben X!

Oh dear, that's not good. there's supposed to be a grey "Continue" button at the bottom of the opening text screen that you click on. In some test builds the button is off the screen because of resolution differences. I tried to fix this by locking down the game resolution, but it might not have worked. Do you know what the active resolution and aspect ration of your screen is when playing it? Also, thank you so much for letting me know about the issue @Ben X!

The unicycle paths are awesome, but I'm distracted by how super unsettling it is that one clown at each table nods then shakes their head in perfect sync. I feel like they're all going to slowly turn toward the camera after doing so. Do you still need clown art? I didn't have free time to last week, but wanted to help if you still had placeholders in need of silly art.

YESSS! So excited for the next build.

Excited for the sword! That debris falling gif is super satisfying to watch.

I couldn't stop myself. After watching the streams by Phill and SuperBiasedMan I knew I needed to fix things so that players could understand the controls without having to go read the whole itch.io page. Then I rewatched SuperBiasedMan's stream and decided to incorporate a joke he made into the ending of the game. (Thanks for the Idea SuperBiasedMan!) Then I started working on a few bugs that had been bugging me. Then I found out how easy it is to add bloom to a unity game... But the Thumbs are about to stream in two days and I need to stop messing with it. I'm pretty happy with it here, and I'm super please with how much I've learned doing this project. Maybe next jam I'll be good enough at games that I can finish the game by deadline and not tweak it for a month afterwards. https://squawk-squadron.itch.io/slybootsexpress V1.3 is still mechanically the same game that it's been since v1.1. Same puzzle, same dialogues, same train. But if anyone besides the thumbs haven't played it yet and want to try the new version please let me know what you think! (especially if you find more bugs!)

That's unreal dude, congrats! It was pretty surreal watching someone famous play a Wizard Jam game full of Idle references and not getting them. Thanks for showing us the stats, I was definitely curious. After the Markiplier video I saw a marked spike in my own stats from the radiant ripples of your explosion, though my spike was a dozen views and three new downloads, not thousands!

Maybe a "crit my game" thread, where the game maker can specify "First Time Game," or "Veteran," and "Gentle Critique," or "Hurt Me Plenty." This jam was my first time making a game, but I usually prefer tough critique. While there's plenty wrong with my game because I didn't have time or know how to do something, I'd love to hear critique of what I did finish or parts that I may have thought were fine but weren't for players. That said, I don't think it's incumbent on Phill and SuperBiasedMan to spend even more time grading all of our games in their streams. I'm grateful for getting to watch them play the game and have already learned a lot about my game's mistakes from seeing what parts they bounced off of or walked right past.

Thanks for the stream today, that was a lot of fun! Are any others currently planning to stream the jam before the thumbs do later in the month?

Thanks SuperBiasedMan and phill for the streams! Thanks especially to phill. I'm glad you enjoyed Slyboots Express, and apologize for the padlock glitch. I've updated the game description with a work around. I might try to upload another version with an in-game fix for the issue if I have time to figure it out.

For posterity, and for the dozen or so people who played the original deadline version, here is a change log of everything added to the finished version currently on the itchio page. It's mostly art that wasn't quite finished, plus some mechanical stuff that I wasn't able to fix code errors on before deadline: - fixed incorrect cypher page which gave players the wrong lock combination - tweaked pixelizer object resolution to make speech bubble text a little more legible - switched most sprites' filter modes from bilinear to trilinear for a crisper less jumpy look, especially on animations - scrolling background replaced static background - interiors of passenger compartments with different passenger silhouettes - opening and closing text pages with working close game button on the latter. - caboose car as new starting point of game, with locked trunk and dead Breckon. (breckon face emoji also by BigJKO) - working (mostly) padlock using "Gold Combination Lock" asset from asset store (I tried briefly to make and code my own, but the only tutorials I could find were not in English) - background music and train sounds - build versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux I think that's everything. Let me know if you encounter any bugs or weirdness while playing. So far the second version seems fairly bug free except for occasional issues with the padlock not opening if you go back and forth too much while selecting a digit. This was partly why I made "D" return back to caboose, but it still acts up sometimes. Thanks to everyone who has played either version of the game!

Thanks hedgefield! I think the eavesdropping mechanic was inspired by that snow scene demo in the gamasutra post I linked. When I was playing that demo I liked how the little snowy sign posts were only legible if you were standing right in from of them. I knew I wanted to do something with that and the slyboots theme. A puzzle game on a train seemed the simplest way to put those pieces together such that reading a bunch of text logs to find keywords is made somewhat interesting, hopefully. The art style was influenced a little by BigJKO's twitch emojis. I knew I wanted to use those for Chris and Nick because they're great, so I wanted to try to create a body rig that they'd look ok on even if I'm not as skilled an artist. The character animation rig was based heavily on the robotboy sprite animation from the unity standard assets pack, though I ended up doing a paper-doll style animation because I wanted to learn that tool. The art was pretty easy to do quickly on this. I'm not a good painter, but I know how to do things quick and dirty in photoshop. Running everything through the pixelizer thing in Unity let me work fast and impressionisticly, leaving the blur/pixels to hide all the crimes. Duplicate Layer, Free Transform, and Inner Glow did most of the work. As you can see, the sets look much better at 400pixels wide than they do full res.

It's all shiny and new now! there's a background and stuff!

Mac version confirmed working! I need to do the same with my game and add the PC and Linux builds soon.

On Itch.io it's marked as Pc Mac and Linux downloadable, but I only see a .exe in the download. Am I missing a thing?

SUBMITTED! Made it just under the wire. There's a ton of stuff I didn't have time to add. It's honestly not really a complete game yet. It's kind of a mess. But it's my mess, and I'm proud of what I was able to do in a week as a complete beginner. More info to come after a break to catch my breath.

Thanks Zirrus! The bug that you were helping me with disappeared after the crash/rebuild of the scene and I never got a chance to try the fixes you recommended, but thanks again all the same! Edit: scratch that, the bug came back, but the fix you gave me seems to be holding so far!

Crunch Day Sunday morning update: Had Unity crash on me so, not knowing any better, I reopened the program to try and recover the project only to google it too late and realize I'd erased the temp scene file by reopening. :/ Only lost an hour or so's worth of work though, but I'm back on track and now little Chris is on a train! Speech bubble system is figured out and working, now I just need to build the dozen or so passenger conversations into sprite animations. And do all the other things! Woohoo!

Zirrrus, Thanks so much, I will try those things!

I also spent much longer on the suit for the character than I should have, given that it is always going to be too pixelated to see the details.

Thanks! I just pm'd him to ask his blessing. I spent more time playing with the idle animation while learning to use the animator than I should have, but I was pretty pleased with the shifty eyes.