fabian

Thanks all! -- Made as many assets as I could today... ... and put them into Unity for a first look (the ambient sfx are very much placeholder)

Very excited how this turns out! So how is the new FPE? I used the previous version in my Wizard Jam 5 game and it was already very good, curious how the new features work.

I like those colors! Already comes close to the screenshot you posted in your first post. How far are you going in terms of modeling and details?

Thanks zero! --- Didn't have much time today because of my day job, but nevertheless managed to put some style on the menus:

I spend way too much time on my main & pause menu and on my save and load system today. But now it's finally quite robust, though it's probably not coded very elegantly. I'm using playerprefs here to store the current position of the player and the current scene and load that back in when needed. The settings menu was done following Brackeys's tutorials which I linked in a post above and I added that the settings are also now saved into player prefs. Here it is in action (also cloth on the character!): To Do: - tomorrow after work I'll probably do some art assets for the main and pause menu, currently these are all standard Unity buttons/sliders/toggles

I'm closing the votes now, and the winner is: I! I think everyone mentioned it except for one person and I am totally fine with that choice. Though my favorite was G, which nobody mentioned Thanks for giving input That's actually cool, as I don't want to give that character a definitve gender. (I always refer to the character as "him", but that's probably just the German in me, because in German "character/Charakter" is by default a "male" word). ---- Another update: I managed to animate him (idle, walking and running) and - after a few problems with importing - get the animations into Unity. Applying them to the third person controller asset that I use was very easy and worked without problems. They also blend really nice into each other. this is what the animations first looked like. Fabulous, but not really what I wanted

It look so satisfying, when the blocks get more and more damaged Also the particles at the end of the beam add a lot to it.

Looking forward to this one, as the other have said, the art looks really promising!

Decided to tackle the character first as this was giving me a headache. It is now modeled, rigged and - thank god - weighted! I also posed him and did some paint-overs in photoshop to put out some ideas for his texture, maybe you can post your favorite? I have a few ones that I like better than others, but I'm not sure.

I actually thought of that at first and also already had some ideas but I think I would need way more time for that than "two weeks minus christmas" Mayyybeee in the future.. I expect the lowpoly stuff will be quicker to make for me, as there won't be much texturing, no normal map baking and so on. On the other hand the environments probably need to be bigger when the game is in third person so this could backfire at the end when I realize I need more objects in my scenes. Though what I'm most concerned about is the character and his rigging/animation. Haven't done that in a while. Yesterday I experimented a bit with Unity's UI to build a simple menu. Brackeys recently uploaded two videos covering that topic and they are really good! I would definitely recommend them for anybody who's having problems building a simple main menu.

Really enjoyed your WJ5 game, so I'm up for more of that voice!

The game is now available on itch.io! https://fabiandenter.itch.io/transmission-lost ===================== Original post: Hey there, this will be the dev log for my wiz jam game called "Transmission Lost" (named after this episode)! I decided to try something that goes more into the direction of a walking simulator with a small, interesting world to explore and not too much gameplay. This is directly linked to my inability to code (my skills there peak at "using google and copy what other people made") and my ability to do some hopefully nice 3D art. I'll be also using some assets from the asset store that will help me to not only have a functionless level with that standard Unity FPS character and to have some basic "game things". I hope I will figure this all out, as this is the biggest concern I have - getting this all to work together. My plan is to write a short story outline over the first weekend and then do a very basic blockout of the world very early and try to implement the mechanics there. My hope is that I can use the second half of the jam to mass produce art assets and replace the blockout world while maintaining functionality. I do have two weeks off from work starting tomorrow, so in theory I have plenty of time.. But will it work? We'll see! BTW this is my first game jam and also my first game. I do make game art as a hobby, but nothing coming close to a complete game yet (though I'm working on pre production for one with two friends for a couple of months now). So it's not impossible that I'm in tears and despair after a couple of days. If that happens, I hope I can count on your help! I'm also excited to see all the stuff everyone makes! So, let's do this!

If you have something like win rar installed, a double click on the first part should unpack both .rar-archives just fine. Did it freeze multiple times at the exact same point of the game? Did the game run fine until that point? Edit: seems like Ben X already replied to this while I was typing. So yeah, you don't have to manually merge anything. I probably should mention that somewhere at itch.io Thanks! I can confirm that sleep was rare during these two weeks. Unfortunately I had to go straight back to work after the jam, so I had a couple of rough days where I was extremely tired. But so far... worth it

I actually did that and wait for feedback from a friend who will test it for me. On my second computer (which is a mac) it run well, so it'll probably be up sometime this week

Thank you everyone, I'm really glad you enjoyed it! I noticed that mouse-problem too, added that to my list of things I need to fix, thanks for reminding me! The other thing is actually intended, what you hear is a recording that repeating over and over, which is also why Steve is not reacting to what the protagonist is saying. I'll test with a faster run-speed. At least in certain, larger areas it will probably help. Although I don't want to make the player running super fast. Oh I totally agree on the story-part. It's a bit lightweight. At the beginning of the jam I thought about writing something with more depth, but soon I realized that a) I am not really a writer and b) this would be way out of scope for two weeks. But I generally agree that there could be a little more to the version that I settled on. But yeah, I focussed on other areas, tbh Thank you again for you comments and especially for pointing out things that are not ideal. I can learn so much from that!

Thanks for the kind words, really appreciate it! About that mountain scene: I think it definitely needs to be a tiny little bit more clear. It's like you said, eventually players see what they have to do, but they don't know the reason, which is probably bad. I'll try to come up with a reason that will hopefully make more sense, while not being super obvious, because I like the general gameplay idea of that scene and don't want to change it that much. I already got some ideas Thanks again for the feedback! (I am also quite happy and also amazed that your PCs seem to run this fine (?) - as I'm not really the king of optimization... )

Haha... maybe! But I guess it's more likely that I go through all my voice over lines and re-edit them so that they fit. I know I have an angry "Damn!" somewhere. Oh and please let me know if the save / continue system loads you into the correct level!

Thanks for the kind words! I am honestly relieved that the game runs on another computer. I hope the start up issue will stay a one-time issue, maybe others can give feedback if they had a similar problem? Oh and no, you don't have to go back down! There is a little hint somewhere up there of what to do. But actually, this is a point in the game where I'm not sure if I should keep that way, because it is not very clear what (and why) the player should do to progress. If you figure it out, you'll probably think "that doesn't make any sense". Let me know if you figure it out and what you think about it, I'd really appreciate feedback about this specific part of the game (if you don't want to spoil anyone you can hit me up via DM in slack, if you want). About the basketball - i planned to let the protagonist at least say something if he scores (or misses closely). Unfortunately I had no time to implement that. Maybe I'll try it sometime this week Thanks for playing!

Forgot to update here: Transmission: Lost is now available! https://fabiandenter.itch.io/transmission-lost The build is a bit large and there are a few things that need improvement, but it's playable from start to finish ( I hope at least). Hope you like it!

So I'm doing asset after asset in these last days of the jam. There is still a lot of important stuff missing for the final part of the game and I really hope I'll make it in time. Not much else to say without spoiling too much. Back to work! Here is a nice shot of one of the more important props of the game:

I totally underestimated the amount of time it takes to get a voice over / dialog into a game. I made the mistake of requesting a single file from my voice over guy and realized too late that I had to cut it into pieces and assemble it back together. Took me almost a whole day. BUT: Totally worth it. Hearing the voice over in game is amazing, it feels a lot more like "game" than before, and this gives me hopefully enough new motivation to finish this thing over the next few days. There is still a lot to do and I need to do some speed modeling/texturing and I still have to figure out how I want the final scene to look like. But now I'll go to sleep, have to slowly normalize my day/night-cycle for work next week. I second that!

Oh right, I made a logo! Someone in the wizard jam slack made some good suggestions to improve it so I'll probably do it, but here it is in its current form: I also did some graphic design things (for posters and stuff to find and read) and this gif now exists:

Had some sort of mid-jam-crisis over the weekend. It felt like there was almost no progress and also a few things broke for no reason. But there was also some light: I found a voice over guy on youtube who did voice work for some Skyrim Mods and he now is the voice of both my characters. I think he did a fantastic job on those lines and now I need to edit them and put them into the game. Also, out of frustration, I played a bit with garage band on my phone and got a few nice soundscapes. Will probably go back to that when I finally decide what to do with sound and music, but it is a start And then today I made good progress on one of the major areas of the game, which is also nice Those stairs are probably the least important asset that anybody could spend 2 hours in zrbush on, but hey, I got some really nice stairs now! I also just realized, that my rocks almost qualify for the Texture Thrift diversifier as I'm using them ALL over the place, and they are only four different assets

Made some good progress today, especially on the art side Set up my first few scene transitions, blocked out another area and started to build a cave area.

How I wish that I sticked to that order. First the game itself, then the polish... I'm also a huge fan of your ghosts!