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With this being the last Wizard Jam, I am really sad this is only the second one I participated in, but also why I felt it was important to do this one! I am really enjoying the extended time and I have been using it to learn Godot. This is my first time using this game engine other than a couple tutorials to get me familiar before the start of the jam. For this game, I wanted to play around with some dice mechanics in an rpg/roguelike. I spent the first part of the jam mostly just following along this excellent tutorial on making a rougelike game: The second part has been adding my combat system based on dice rolls for different player skills. The the skills level up based on your failed rolls, and the level determines the threshold for success and failure. All skills level up from level 1 to level 6. As an added wrinkle, the roll number or skill level can affect different aspects of the skill's effects. So as an example, for sword attacks, the damage is determined by the roll, while a bow attack has a constant damage but the range is determined by the level. I worry that the mechanics are unnecessarily convoluted, but when I started playing through with both the Sword and Bow skills, it seemed like there was at least something interesting to explore. My ideal next steps would be to add more skills, but at the moment I have been focusing on ironing out some small bugs and cleaning up the code to make it easier to add new skills. With four days left, I am not sure if I'll have time to do a lot more than polishing up this version, but I am excited that it is at a point where I can play through a whole game and you get a sense for the initial idea. Shout-outs: Dice: https://www.kenney.nl/assets/boardgame-pack Tilesets: https://code.google.com/archive/p/crawl-tiles/

The game has been released . Jam entry: https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-10/rate/556421 Game page: https://teljoor.itch.io/piercing-the-4th-dimension _____________________________________________________________________________________ For my final Wizard Jam entry I wanted to do something relatively simple in concept so I can be sure I'll be able to finish it. I enjoy parallax effects and 2D animation, so I thought it would be neat to base it the episode title 'Piercing the Fourth Dimension' and create a sort of obstacle dodging game moving through 3D space with (mostly) 2D objects. I think it will be fun to see what kinds of effects I can create using geometrical patterns and simple movements. I recently got a big batch of game music and sounds from a humble bundle, so I hope I can get most of the music and sfx from that. I guess my basic idea of what the game would be like comes from the 'Ninja Pipe Cleaner' microgame from Wario Ware. Maybe a bit of Thumper and Audiosurf as well, but since it won't be a rhythm game that only goes so far. https://www.mariowiki.com/Ninja_Pipe_Cleaner This is what I started out with on Friday: Basically, the player stays at the same depth and obstacles are created some distance away. It all fades to black at a distance, so it looks infinitely deep. I'm now working on determining some basic obstacle types so that I can start figuring out the gameplay. I think I'll try implementing a way for the player character to reflect a single obstacle once every few seconds. Ideally I'd also like to implement some sort of final challenge/boss battle, and having an active element will make that easier. One thing I'm concerned about is that it is kind of hard to tell at what point an object is at the same depth as the player character, which makes avoiding collisions harder. I've now got it so objects change color when close and fade out when they can no longer collide, but I think I'll need to add something more.

Released, download it here: https://sloane.itch.io/what-remains-of-idle-thumbs Still has a few (mostly visual) bugs, I'll try to iron those out over the next couple of days. *** First time participating since Wizard Jam 4 a little over -- yikes! -- three years ago with that Nick Breckon Cheating Hitman game. We (wife and I) are trying to make something along the lines of Theme Park / Parkitect but instead of an entertaining park you'll actually be trying to build the worst park possible for you are the architect of The Medium Place between heaven and hell. Your job's gonna be to make visitors suffer enough to destroy their souls and send them to hell before they reach the gates of heaven. (Guess hell's paying better for new folks than heaven, idk.) So: Long lines everywhere? Good! People vomiting all over the place? Great! Visitors getting so frustrated they start beating each other up? Even better! Since an "actual" park builder is probably way above our skill level, we're aiming for a more tower-defense-y vibe; visitors will enter the park, walk along a fixed path towards the gates of heaven, and it'll be the player's job to break their spirits / annoy them to death before they reach the exit. Rides will, hopefully, be somewhat Thumbs-themed -- maybe a Cheating Hitman shell game, dot gobblers hunting visitors, a Far Cry 2 coaster with fake lines that never move forward... something like that. Since Good Bye is already taken, we're gonna call this "What Remains of Idle Thumbs" for now, unless we find a better title! I'll try to post updates starting Saturday or so.

Update - jam version here: https://rks.itch.io/decrepit-wizjam10 I'm starting this one a bit early because I'll be out of the country from the 18th - 25th. I'm going to make a simple Rogue-like/Brough-like that centers around item durability. The inspiration comes from the Nick Breckon patreon discord. I requested he play a game called Cinco Paus by Michael Brough because I had been thinking about its game design a lot at the time. I like how it took the idea of item discovery and turned it into the game's core idea. Around the same time some folks on the discord were discussing item durability and how it's almost always a terrible mechanic. So for this entry I'm going to attempt to make a game with item durability that's less terrible. I couldn't find a podcast title that really fit the game itself. So i'll just say this is my GOOD... BYE to Wizard Jam and what Idle Thumbs was. I'm working in Unity and I'm going to start with a code base I've been building for years now, because it significantly speeds up my prototyping process. It has stuff I always seem to need like: database management, object pooling, pathfinding, saving, etc. So i'll definitely have a huge head start with this, but I just want to work on the parts unique to this game and not fiddle with the more generic stuff like pathfinding. I started work on it yesterday. I got a player unit spawned and user inputs that make it move with WASD. The unit's movement is also validated to only allow it to move over a floor tile.

***Update: You can now play the game right here: https://whilefun.itch.io/beppos-hole-in-one-golf I had to start on my game earlier than anticipated, as the new year is going to be a bit hectic, schedule-wise. I've landed on a stroke play style golf game, which I've been wanting to make for ages. Named for Idle Thumbs episode 185: Beppo's Hole. I present: Just a mocked up title screen for now, and I have some prototype golf gameplay from the last few days of work. This intro screen might look familiar to DOS golf game fans The goal of the game is to have mouse-only controls for a fully functional top-down golf game. I hope to have at least 9 holes ready for the jam deadline. Was also thinking of titles such as "Super Expert Pro Championship Golf", "The 90s Were Great, Okay", "Into the Woods", or possibly others. But this will do

I'm going to try and make something in 3D!!! Yay!! ....In Gamemaker 2! Boooo!! So yeah it'll be a challenge and I'll see if I can get anything done at all. What I wanna do is sorta ambitious and probably not gonna be called what I titled this thread. If I get anything playable I'll release it, but I'm thinking this may be a mad longer-term multi-jam project...like something I only mess with when jams be jammin'. Stay Spicy JamsPersons!

Hey all, My piece for Wizard Jam will be in Twine made up with a bunch of Nick Breckon quotes. If you would like to help, just respond with your favorite Nick Breckon quote. I'll try to use however many that I can. Good luck to everyone in the Wizard Jam!

Double Update: Found a game-breaking bug where if you use the hacking tool, then press escape, sometimes you fall out of the level. You need to restart the game to fix it, though just press "continue game" to keep going where you left off! I will be fixing this ASAP. Released an new version with some fixes: -Added "sonic dome" visualization to throwable noise makers to make their effective radius more clear -Fixed game-breaking "hacking then press escape twice then stop hacking" bug -Made tool selection menu stay on screen a bit longer when selecting via number keys (does not delay when you can use tool) Update: The game is out: https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-7/rate/271712 And here's a spoilery youtube video of the game, if you're keen: Hi all, For Wizard Jam 7, I am going with "The Convergence Compulsion" (Important If True Episode 5: https://www.idlethumbs.net/importantiftrue/episodes/the-convergence-compulsion). The game will be some kind of first person walky/puzzly thing involving basic rooms to solve. I chose this episode because 1) Future-Dystopian Robot Garbage and 2) This game idea is sort of a convergence of a lot of games and idea parts into one glued together video game. My core goal of the jam is to prototype the basic mechanics of the game. By that I mean: Build the tutorial levels and see if this is anything at all. This is a game I want to make into a Real Thing™ in the near future, so this will basically be a 2-week proof of concept. I am hoping for some play testing feedback to validate the design and general feel. I want to decide if this idea is something or is it nothing. I want the game to have: Robots and Robotics (because organic things are hard for me to make) Some hacking, bit-jacking, signal-jamming, mainframey hollywood computer stuff Mild stealth elements (distract robots, line of sight basics, etc. Not a full hide in the dark and be quiet Thief system) Smallish, puzzle-driven rooms (get from start to finish in each room, accommodate quick play sessions). Quick Retry (see Hotline Miami, Quadrilateral Cowboy, surely many others) Sliding Scale failure (see https://www.pentadact.com/2015-09-13-things-about-metal-gear-solid-v-spoiler-free/) Sort of like a very lightweight version of Portal (see: Puzzle Rooms) with some Quadrilateral Cowboy-esque quasi-hacking and puzzle solving. With some of the "recon->plan->execute" feel from other games like Far Cries, Ghost Recon, etc. The genesis of this idea is my love for meta-game content in many games such as Far Cry 2 and 3's "Capture the outpost" type stuff, along with some action/tactical/strategy planning feelings from games like Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six. I want to allow the player to look at each room all they want, plan their approach, then try their plan. I want a small amount of RNG/Chaos so that plans can never be absolutely perfect, and have some sliding scale failure modes so that even when your plan goes to hell you might still laugh and have fun. I also want the game to be *just* this stuff. So instead of a 100 hour AAA open world shooter with really great meta game content, I want to just focus on the meta game content. Is this even a real thing? Does it makes sense? I don't know. Some sample intro/tutorial/scenario stuff I've thought about so far: You start in a room. You can see the exit ahead. There is a robotic turret between you and the exit, facing away from you. You have one [distraction device]. Throw the device to the left so the turret looks at it. Run past the turret to the exit. You start in a small hallway in a room and there is a turret looking at you, it begins to shoot at you, but hits the bullet proof glass (hey cool, there's bullet proof glass in this game). You learn that 1) Robots will shoot you if they see you 2) They can see you through glass 3) They cannot shoot through the glass. You move behind a solid wall to get into the main part of the room, and the robot stops shooting. You learn that robots won't shoot you if they can't see you. You get a [hacking device]. You approach a turret from the back so it can't see you, and hack into it, locking its aim at another robot. You undock from the turret and alert it to your presence, it starts to fire. It can't turn, so it shoots the other robot. I've been paper prototyping the levels and "guys" on graph paper with some generic board game bits. I hope to have something to show for it at the end of the 2 weeks. It won't be polished, but I hope it's fun. At the very least I want to know if this idea is worth investing more time into. We'll see!

Happy Holidays! Inspired by this festive season, I've decided to create an Overcooked-style, task management game, where the goal is to get your chores done while keeping the pesky yule lads at bay. In order to keep scope reasonable I will likely only include 1 or 2 types of chores, but am considering adding a twist that will allow you to "cut corners", getting your work done faster, but increasing the likelihood of a visit from Gryla, the child-eating mother of the yule-lads. (source: Important if True 20: Christmas is Cancelled) Edit: Christmas is Canceled has been released and you can download it here - https://squires.itch.io/christmas-is-cancelled The Christmas holiday is upon the wintery Scandinavian countryside, and you've been tasked by your mother with preparing the sausages for the festivities. Unbeknownst to her though, the Yule Lads of lore are more than just bed time stories, and some of them have arrived to frustrate your sausage preparation duties.

This popped up on the internet this weekend: Half Life 3 Jam There is a little over 2 months to build something. I want to make a FPE game (similar to Eyes of Cheatin Hitman I made for WJ4) with a lot of G-Man in it. I bet in the next two months I can add 15-20 hours of work myself. I have a lot of tools already in place for this type of game, so most of the work will be on art/audio assets, level design, and narrative. I don't have any solid ideas for this, but I'm thinking some sort of comedy following the G-Man during his hours away from work. I would love to get a community of people together working on this, and I'm flexible in whatever we make. I do think that comedy is the only requirement for me Any readers interested in picking away at this for the next two months with me?

Cooper's Dreams is live on the App Store. Play Twin peaks on your fucking telephone! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coopers-dreams/id1249820676?ls=1&mt=8 ======== ORIGINAL POST ======== Hi, This is maybe a bit late to start a dev log so I suppose this is going to be as much a retrospective as a dev log. This is also my first post here and my first Wizard Jam, so sorry if this is totally uncool. Anyway, the game I made is called Cooper's Dreams based on the episode of Twin Peaks Rewatch with the same name. In the game you play dream Cooper in the red room and are tasked with using the mic to dictate messages for Dianne. The catch is that you have to speak the words in reverse so you get that creepy backwards-talking effect like in the show. For example, if the word is "spoon" you have to try and pronounce "noops" or somethign to that effect. It's way harder than it sounds as most words don't reverse as tidily as "spoons". At the end of the game I run all your backwards talking through speech recognition and you get graded based on how much the computer believed you were talking english. The core game actually came together pretty quickly. I made a rough prototype that just recorded what you said and spat it back at you in reverse. I played this version with a bunch of friends and co-workers and was already having a good time. It was fun to figure out the word correctly but I found it was probably even more fun (or at least funny) when you got it wrong and the game spits to total nonsense back at you. I decided to lean into this failure-as-fun style and play up the nonsense elements of the game. I added a quote generator that mangles real twin peaks quotes by swapping in random other Twin Peaks related verbs / nouns. I also removed the ability to retry words and instead forced the player to stick with their mistakes. Finally I tweaked the scoring so instead of just a pass/fail the speech recognition will take a stab at what it thinks you said and read it's own nonsense interpretation of your nonsense back to you. Having a game that was playing pretty well so early I was sure I'd be finished with heaps of time to spare. Turns out I totally underestimated just quite what a rubbish artist I am. Progress with the art was super slow as I gradually iterated on my pixel art. In the end I'm pretty pleased with where I ended up but I'm still not entirely sure things resemble their show counterpart. Oh well, it was good fun learning to do something a bit different. I realised I've hung on to the last 5 iterations of Cooper so I made a little before after gif. Really not sure why I though cooper was that wide before. Another thing I'm not really sure about is whether this game will ever see the light of day. It's an iPhone only game (it's tied pretty closely to their audio/Siri APIs) so it's really at the mercy of Apple whether they let the app through review. I've submitted the application to Apple so now I've just got to pray whoever reviews the game at Apple is either unfamiliar with Twin Peaks or has a generous perception of "fair use". I will post an update here when Apple makes a verdict. Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, but I felt like I had to share something incase I'm not able to share the game itself.

Hi! This is my second time participating in a game jam and my first Wizard Jam! I got carried away a little fiddling around and trying new stuff but now I think I can put together something playable. You control a robotic fish and make 'friends' with real fish. Here's the article that inspired the title of this pod (episode 210): http://engineering.nyu.edu/press-releases/2012/03/01/what-makes-robot-fish-attractive-hint-its-moves

Welp, i guess this is my devlog now. hi. I've chosen "The Power of 45 Brains" as my jam title idea doodad. I've also decided to use my in-house(of-one-person) rendering engine with no name. It uses GPU accelerated ray tracing to render geometry. Ray tracing is a simple form of light simulation that has the main benefit of being able to do perfect: hard shadows, reflections, and refractions. This of course comes with manyyy drawbacks, the biggest of which being the reconstruction of geometry which takes some fraction of a second-to a few seconds for a reasonable amount of low poly assets. 30 seconds to a minute for high detail scenes. I hope to implement a better acceleration structure and reconstruction method before next jam so this wont be as much of an issue. But that does mean that for this jam, objects in the game world that need to move will be sparsely updated every so often, so even if the game renders smoothly the game objects with teleport around. Im going to embrace this and try to design the enemies in the game around this. Heres an interesting gfy of my renderer in action Now, with the prefacing out of the way, on to the dev part! Day one: I spent most of day one goofing off rendering @root's low poly nick breckon head in my renderer... But some good things came of this and i fixed a few rendering bugs and added in skinned mesh support to my renderer. dont know if ill even need that but its good to have. So, heres a few images of weird stuff i did on the first day Day two: I need lasers in my game so I started day 2 by writing in laser support to my renderer's volumetric fog algorithm. Which ended up looking something like this: Surpisingly the laser implementation i did worked more or less on the first try, but a few bugs cropped up that needed to be squashed later and they were indeed. Next up i needed a first person laser control mechanism so i did it. (ive fixed the laser lagging behind a bit, it need to be in FixedUpdate) This is trickier than it may look, because the stretched cube placeholder here isnt being rendered by my thing, because, if you recall the game objects in my renderer only update so often which would make for a gun that would be lagging behind, so, its being rendering by another camera onto a renderTexture thats composited onto my renderers output. i think it works quite well! The downside of this is that somewhat ironically in a game with a rendering engine capable of perfect reflections, you wont be able to see yourself. Ill probably have to come up with a reason for this later or maybe not who knows,,, I did some other stuff that cant be shown yet but its coming along nicely i think. sorry if i typed way too much and it was a lot to read.

I'm jumping in here a little late, but I thought it would be worth while to at least share a little of what I am doing for Wizard Jam! I will admit, I have been a little nervous to post anything because all of the projects I am seeing on here are really cool! You all are intimidatingly good! So please, forgive my amateur attempts at game development. My planned game is a kind of homage to Twin Peaks, mostly due to the fact that I am trying to evoke some kind of Twin Peaksy, Red Room inspired vibe. I have used Unity before, but never really made anything with it, so I'm also using this as an opportunity to learn the engine! That said, any tips are appreciated Anyways, here is what I have so far: My level so far. My cool mask. And some sweet, sweet game play. I am mostly cobbling things together so I have a reasonable chance of finishing something in time! After approaching the mask the floor rotates and tips the player into falling straight down into a tunnel with star textures on the walls so it looks like you're falling through space. At the bottom of the tunnel will be a replica of the red room, which I will struggle to make next! Hopefully I can scrounge up some assets that will make it look close enough to the real deal, or make something crappy myself If I've learned one thing so far it's that making games is the world's hardest game. But it is a lot of fun! Thanks for all the inspiration, I'll try to update this if I get a room up and running!

So, I'm making a Twine game, because I'm not very good at any other programming language or art or anything, and I feel most comfortable writing. I'm not sure how I ended up with this? Because it's bad. Also, this is my first game jam. So we'll see how it'll end up. My goal is to create a weird, wacky, multiple choice experience, all focused around whether or not Hamburger Mode is on or off. We'll see how it ends up, but right now it'll likely have elements of both Hoisted and Frug Fructions. There's not a whole lot of logging to do for it right now? But if there's anything I end up doing that seems entertaining I might put it up here.

The objective of the game is to delivering advertisement pamphlets by mail to people who don't want it. The player must travers a small neighbourhood and deliver several pamphlets right to peoples’ doorsteps. The way there is somewhat hazardous, with dogs and robot mowers in the way. The game looks and plays like a classic Zelda game. The player can walk in eight directions, talk to NPCs and must complete missions for them to progress. As I am planning to use a lot of the assets and behaviours from this game in a larger project I am working on, everything will take place in one level. The player can walk around and is only limited by "hard gates". For example, will a street be blocked by a police car, which can be moved if the player helps a suspicious individual in the neighbourhood. Because I want to use the assets later, the world is built to be flexible. The world consists of several sectors. These are one screen in Zelda games. Each sector also holds a set number of squares. To continue the analogy with Zelda, Link takes up one square in the classic games. Each square has a list of possible assets it can hold, for example a hedge or a mailbox. The parameters of the world can be changed and everything within it will follow. If the world scales, the assets will follow and I won’t have to align everything again. By building the world this way I hope it will save time when the detail designing of the level starts. Each number represents a sector. The lines between them divides the NavMesh, with confines NPCs to one sector. The parameters for the game world. Each square's content can be changed. Sector one with empty squares. Sector one with some squares with hedges.

Hey all! I've started work on a tiny Wizard Jam game with the title "Great Play, Dad!" The back-of-the-box summary is this: Impress your kids by putting on the theatrical experience of a lifetime! Unfortunately, it looks like the rest of the stage crew called in sick, so you'll have to work hard if you want to hear "Great Play, Dad!" when the curtain falls! The game will be a single-screen 2D platformer where you play as the only member of a theater's stage crew who showed up for work today. You'll have to perform all the various tasks of the crew: running the sound board, operating the spotlight, changing out scenery, etc. This will be done by running around backstage and on the catwalk and interacting with different stations, responding to prompts coming from the stage (for example: an actor saying "He's got a gun!" will require the player to run to the soundboard and select the "Gunshot" sound effect). Each job will have a small minigame-esque task the player will have to perform in response to each particular prompt. As the play goes on, the prompts will start occurring with more frequency and the player will have to run around to get to them in time or else be penalized (likely with boos from the audience). I'm hoping to go for a Cook, Serve, Delicious kind of increasingly-frantic vibe, with a control system similar to Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. As of now, I've got a simple platformer up and running, using Unity's built-in 2D Platformer assets with some tweaks made to allow for things like ladder-climbing. I've got placeholder sprites in for the backstage environment and the soundboard, and I've set up the scripting for the soundboard interface. I'm in the middle of setting up a GameController to manage when prompts appear, the player's score, ending the game, etc. Hopefully soon I'll have a vertical slice with all of the game's basic functionality, and I'll be able to add more prompts and tasks as time allows. I've had trouble in the past leaving projects unfinished, since I try to make everything perfect as I go and try to do everything myself. I'm making an effort to organize this project into discrete tasks that allow for multiple iterations, so I don't get bogged down with one aspect for too long. I'm also forcing myself to use things like Unity's 2D Platformer package rather than making all of that from scratch, which is what I've tried to do in past projects. I have to keep telling myself that it's better to finish an imperfect game than to give up on a perfect one.

My first proper video game. I've played around in unity before but never built anything from start to finish. Planning on making a really simple game where you walk around at a swimming pool and talk to ghosts. If it goes well I may add a hamburger mode (idle thumbs episode 280).

Hey all, I just started listening to idle thumbs a few months ago and this will be my first wizard jam. I've also never released a game before so I decided to do something pretty simple. The premise of the game is based on a weird event where Takeru Kobayashi (a hot dog eating champion) was in a hot dog eating contest with a bear, link to video. Your job in the game is to try to enable Kobayashi to win via psyching out that bear. The actual gameplay is pretty simple. It is based on Zell's limit break from Final Fantasy VIII, where you are given a series of simple fighting game style inputs and you pick one which then plays an animation and does damage. In my game each move will just increase the time it takes for the bear to eat his hot dogs. I've set up most of the game logic, now I'm just starting to add sprites which has not gone as well as I was hoping so far. I was also hoping to have at least 4 moves plus 1 super move, and I've got maybe 1 or 2 moves I'm happy with so far. I figure I should at least have some reference to the podcast so one of the moves is throwing the endlessly singing bear at the hot dog eating bear. Since I don't know all the podcast recurring jokes I'm just going with silly/ridiculous things that won't require too much art since I'm really bad at art.

Hello! I suppose I am making a Twine game for this Wizard Jam 5. I've experimented (for perhaps a total of five minutes) before with Twine, and honestly have no memory as to how any of it works. But: it has genuinely been a goal of mine recently to make a Twine game, and this Wizard Jam seems to provide a pretty good excuse! I have 0 experience in making video games, a little writing history, and nothing really bar the name of the game as it stands. Looking at, for example, @SeanMay's dev log and I'm liek OH SHIT people take this stuff seriously and put real planning into this. Don't get me wrong, I am amazed, in awe, astounded by the hard work of everyone else; for me, I guess I just don't know where or how to start. I also find recently that due to my own personal depressive tendencies, my will, or attention span, or general desire to do things is somewhat limited. BUT I do know that this is a little life goal, so I guess we'll see how it goes. The Game is going to be a post-modern (barf) game, hopefully in the vein of If On A Winter's Night A Traveller. The book is one of my favourites (above The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, below The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) but it has been some time since I read the book, so I'm really basing it on my memories of said book, rather than the book itself. I plan to employ some of the tricks used by the book (but more explicitly than the book itself) and see where it goes!

Hello, Thumbs! What better way to make your first ever post than to start a dev log for Wizard Jam! "Our Weird Monstrosity" is going to be a pretty simple RPG where the Thumbs hosts emerge from the studio into a completely different reality... of their own crazy imaginings! The game will take place on RPG Maker style traversal maps and a battle system of my own design. It's a pretty loose concept which should allow me to make a bunch of references to the podcasts. Help Wanted (this'll be in the recruiting thread as well): I'm focusing on mechanics and implementation for the first week, by the second week I'll have a list of art assets to create. Now, I could create them myself but they'll look pretty terrible. So, if anyone is interested in helping with this I'll be looking for artists in the second week. (I'm going to very conservative with my asset requirements, and I'm looking for RPG Maker VX style graphics for the traversal and maybe bigger sprites for the battle system). Also, I'm making my own engine in the process, 'cause that's a rational thing to do. Here's a screenshot of my progress so far; Yeah, got a bit to go.

Released: https://pdotjpg.itch.io/super-hollyweedland === Idle Thumbs 296: https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/super-hollyweedland It's going to be a small, chill walking simulator. You'd think the name would warrant something over the top ridiculous, but I had some very calm images come to mind as I was thinking about that title. Using this as an opportunity to learn super basic 3D modelling. Really hoping to finish something despite a full time job and lack of gamedev skills.

For our WJ game, we decided to pick a game that we could finish with our very limited game dev chops. In Kill the Last Alien, four players find themselves at a dinner table towards the end of a delicious cooked alien mochi meal. With three aliens left on the plate, the four players compete to fill their stomachs. The game takes place over a series of rounds, with points being awarded to those quick enough to get the mochi. For now, here's a picture of the mochi!

a while ago I picked up pico 8, made it draw a background, then stopped messing with it for like a year. I'm gonna use this jam as an opportunity to do it again, overhaul the background drawin' thing, and draw pixel art of the back of the thumbs' heads, as well as relearn pico-8 lua. so far I've got my dev environment set up and most of the program rewritten. this is gonna be the year's premier wall-staring simulator.

So this is going to be my second attempt at making a Twine game for Wizard Jam. I'm really excited to get this started. The title I picked, "I'll Kill The Last Alien" spurred me to write a bit of a prologue that will start off the game in some way: ------------------------- We called them Voids because looking at them was like staring at nothing and everything at the same time. It's hard to describe the sensation, seeing a shape that you can't quite comprehend but knowing that it is there, and in all likelihood wants to kill you. And kill they did. This ship was on its way to Gliese 832 c, the closest habitable planet we could find after Earth and Mars were a lost cause...at least the closest one that wouldn't freeze us to death or immolate us as we entered the atmosphere. 16 lightyears away. And we made it almost 10 of those before they got to us. It's been 4 years since they breeched our hull and started to take over. We didn't even realize what had happened until a year later, when a few crew members they had infected decided to flush all the cooling fluid for the jumpdrive into space. We thought it was terrorism at first, when the neutron core went critical and blinked half the ship out of existence in a second. 535,341 people dead in a tenth of a second. We thought losing that many people was our biggest worry. Now, reflecting on it, they were probably the lucky ones. The Void that were on the other side of the bulkhead, the side of the ship that survived, decided to drop the pretense and reveal their true form. They didn't need to hide anymore, now that they had the advantage. We couldn't warp home if we wanted to. Now it was time for them to toy with us. They hunted us through the corridors of the ship, eviscerating vast swaths of people with no hesitation. The number of survivors dwindled. First 400,000....then after a month, we were down to 30,000 left alive on the ship...if living in fear of every moment counted as 'living'. Over time, we learned how to avoid them. They could effortlessly phase through ballistic glass to slaughter whoever was unlucky enough to be in the room on the other side, but putting even paper on the windows rendered them incapable of moving through. We lost another 10,000 people even after that, people unlucky enough to be in the hallway when one of them passed, people who weren't watching the security camera feeds close enough...and probably more than a few who just wanted to die and stop living in constant fear. But then, about a year ago, we started fighting back. And to our surprise, we started winning. It turned out there was a reason they boarded our ship when it was in the darkest, most remote area along our path. UV Light was their enemy. We started developing weapons made out of whatever we could find, cobbling together crude UV "rifles" that would produce a concentrated beam of light. It tore right through them like they were made of wet paper. Funny thing was that the thing that saved us was moving ourselves into the History Park section of the ship. The LED lighting we used for everything else on the ship didn't put out enough UV to stop them, but the ancient incandescent and fluorescent bulbs used in the simulations of environments from the 1930s-2000s put out enough UV to keep the things away. One by one, we started rebuilding. And we stared killing them, getting bolder as we developed our UV weapons with more precision and power. We were down to 15,321 survivors when we realized there was just one of them left. On the far side of the ship, near the bulkhead that saved our lives once before. According to the security cam feeds, it looks almost like the thing is trying to escape the ship...but if these things can't phase through paper, they definitely can't phase through 32 feet of solid inconel-titanium alloy. We all agreed that killing the thing was our only choice. I was the woman unlucky enough to draw the short straw to have to do it. They put me in glowing UV armor and gave me the best rifle they could slap together, along with a backpack full of UV grenades. It's overkill, but we've learned not to leave things to chance. Everyone is watching me as I lay my hand against the 'Open' button to enter the parts of the ship no person other than the Strike Teams have seen for two years at this point. This is my task. I'll kill the last alien. ----------------------------------------- The 'game' itself really serves as just a way to move through a story non-linearly as the player character traverses the ship on their way to killing the last alien aboard. There will be audio logs, diary entires, and memories of what life was like before things got torn apart. So, less game, more interactive fiction. I'll post updates and builds here as I move through the dev process. Also, if anyone would want to collaborate on some art for the game, I'd like to have some visual elements but lack the ability to actually draw. I'm on the IT Slack or you can just message me through the forums if you're interested.