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[RELEASE] The game is published on itch.io. I feel kinda bad that i missed the deadline but what can you do. If you guys play it, say what you think of it, i think the random element is maybe to much on the game, but is still quite fun. The awesome music is by @badatstuff I may update the game through the week to remove any bugs, or fix some small things. If you play it, tell me at what day did you manage to last! Now i'll check what everybody did in these 2 weeks! https://sharedcontrol.itch.io/betrayal-and-manipulation [ORIGINAL] Hey everyone! Cool to see everyone else's devlogs poppin here! I don't know if i will have a lot of time to work on this, but here is my idea for this Wizard Jam: Episode: BETRAYAL AND MANIPULATION (Three Moves Ahead 85) Idea: Some of the people in the city are secretly plotting a COUP against the local ruler. The problem is this city is full of SNITCHES who spy on theirs actions at night and send LETTERS with information to the local police on the next day. You are the MAILMAN of the city, and sympathize with the resistance, so you will have to MANIPULATE THE LETTERS so you don't atract heat to the coup planners. Game: Into the Breach with no combat. Imagine you get a letter saying "I saw some strange movement across the street" sent from a certain adress, and you change the adress to seem like it's accusing another person. Old map of Venice, which is kinda of the inspiration to the world of the game. Goals: - Push this idea further, the example i gave is the only thing thing i got right know. - Make a cool map with interesting ways the accusations can be made. - Not worry much about art and programming, and focus a lot on the design of this thing. - Have fun! NEED YOUR HELP: If you want to contribute with some music tunes, please hit me up!

The game is now released! You can find it here: https://fabiandenter.itch.io/wish-upon-a-star Hope you enjoy and have fun! ------------------------------------------------------- Original Post: ------------------------------------------------------- Hi, thanks for checking out my devlog! What I want to do: For this jam, I‘m trying to do a puzzle game with a few simple mechanics. It will mainly be „getting from point A to point B while overcoming an obstacle“, though I hope it will turn out more interesting than this description sounds! I’ve already got a few mechanics in my head, most of them are moving blocks around in order to create a way for the player character. For this to work, I‘ll need to look up Unity‘s navmesh, but folks in the slack already told me it‘s easy to work with, so I‘m optimistic. It definitely needs to be somewhat dynamic in that it regenerates itself after each action, I hope this is possible. This also means the movement will be point and click, which is something I wanted to do for a long time now. The levels themselves will be quite short and isolated and while I type this I‘m just realizing that I‘m describing Monument Valley without the perspective stuff. So that‘s my new theme prompt now 😄 Goals: - have a dynamic navmesh with point & click movement for the player - have multiple simple mechanics that allow the player to alter the path that needs to be taken to overcome an obstacle - have at least 10 small, isolated levels that contain one puzzle each - code everything gameplay-related myself/ without third-party assets/ of course with the help of Google and other people - make a simple character with an interesting shape - do gameplay first, add bells & whistles later All goals might be slightly adjusted depending on how everything goes. 😄 Good luck everyone!

First time to try to build something non-tutorial for me. Ugliness is expected. My basic goal is to create an unoriginal yet functional 2D game foundation in Unity, building the art and coding on my own. (I'll grab open resources for sounds and music.) I'm hoping this will match fairly well with my limited Unity and Aseprite skills, which mainly consist of some simple 2D tutorials and whatnot that I've worked through in the past month or so. The tutorials have been great, but it's a lot of hand-holding. I think my next step is to just make something functional on my own without following along and doing what I'm watching someone else do. Working Title: CloudWalker I was poking about the podcast titles looking for a theme and saw one called "Living in the Cloud." Boom! Perfect. I'm going with a game called CloudWalker, which will be a 2D Puzzle/Platformer set on clouds. The goal of each level will be to go higher and reach some sort of objective. (If I can weave a story into this somehow it'd be better, but that's a fill in the blank for now.) For a mechanic twist, I want to see if I can play with the idea of what it would be like to have clouds for ground. So maybe standing on a cloud square for x seconds causes the cloud to vanish. Or moving off of a cloud square does the same. And perhaps jumping on a cloud square causes that one to vanish and the two next to it to rise up. I think this will be a good stretch for my very basic Unity/C# skills. I'd like to work in elements to increase the players ability to climb higher (jumping force, the ability to freeze a cloud square to prevent it from vanishing, and perhaps some sort of ladder type tool). I'd also like to work in random elements to remove clouds (lightning, rain, wind). WizardJam 7 Goals Get the player-ground mechanic working with at least 3 player-induced changes: standing, leaving, jumping Incorporate 3 player skill ups Incorporate 1+ ground shifting mechanics due to weather: wind, rain, and/or lightning. Create the player sprite, cloud sprites, and other needed sprites (power ups, weather mechanics, etc.) Build 12 levels of the game Add background music, background art, and sounds Get the whole thing working

Hello everyone! After having to drop out of last Wizard Jam due to unforeseen circumstances, I've been running without a goal for the last month or so. That's why I'm excited to detail a new project, which I'm tentatively calling "The Thumbs Project." Essentially, I'm going to be writing one short interactive story a week, each one based off of a title from Idle Thumbs. There are a couple of reasons I'm doing this: I need practice writing on a deadline, and what better deadline to practice than weekly installments? I need more practice with alternative forms of interactive fiction besides the traditional choose-your-own adventure format, and while there's definitely going to be plenty of those, I'm looking to try and broaden my horizons. Like I hinted at earlier, I felt bad about not being able to complete anything for Wizard Jam, even though I really like the idea of basing games off of Thumbs titles (There's so many good ones!) Right now, the most I can commit to is the first fifty episodes. Even then, that's a whole year of making fun-sized IF, assuming I manage to get it together to put one out every week. If I can do it, and I'm enjoying doing it, we might see about doing more, but right now that's too far in the future to get excited about. What do you guys think? Any questions or advice? Criticism is always appreciated. If you're interested, the first game Let the Games Begin will be going up on my itch.io page tomorrow afternoon (EST) here https://technomagie.itch.io

The Genie of Hoisting is probably going to be about managing an island, simulated really simply. You'll be able to ask the Genie for "wishes" along the lines of "I wish that a plant were in this spot" or eventually "I wish all poo disappeared from the island". I haven't decided how frequently you get to wish. I had a couple days to get it going last week and have been able to chip at it for a few minutes here and there since then. Right now, I have a few entities rudimentarily modeled: - People - Poo - Plants - Meat They eat, they die, they decay, and plant life springs anew from critical masses of poop, just like in real nature (I assume). None of the wish stuff is there, and a lot more needs to be modeled. The events need to be presented in a far more graspable way. Then, maybe graphics?

PING (now released) My Wizard Jam Oeuvre: Devil’s Snuff Box – Wizard Jam 2 (aka Winter Wizard Jam) Cool Blob Future – Wizard Jam 4 Suddenly, the King of France! – Wizard Jam 5 I also helped out on Eyes of Luigi for Wizard Jam 3, primarily making sure that Luigi’s singing was synced with Drake! Source Title: Idle Thumbs Episode 205: LPBs and HPBs [Low Ping Bastards and High Ping Bastards] Background: Growing up, I loved to play submarine combat games, particularly GATO and Silent Service II. Then there was Hunt for Red October, which had me completely entranced with submarine warfare, and particularly the use of sonar for navigation and combat. I’ve been interested in making a game about sonar, but don’t have the bandwidth, team, or knowledge to make a complete submarine warfare game. Enter Wizard Jam and an episode title conveniently containing the word “ping” in it. Surely I can try to capture some parts that I loved in those sub games without just copying a sub game. Well, maybe not so surely, which is one reason why I’ve waited this long to start a devlog. I’m feeling good about the concept now, so I’m finally getting this going! Game: You have been placed in a cobbled together underwater defense system to prevent the incoming assault on your home. Your station is a vertical tube, with the ability to monitor the four cardinal directions with active sonar (pings) and fire torpedoes at hostiles that encroach into your defense zone. Pinging targets and then evaluating which ping hits should be used to create a firing solution is how you must supplement the defense tube’s computer and defend your zone. Gameplay will involve visually evaluating the area through your portals, pinging in the different directions, and then evaluating the recorded data to destroy enemies. Here is a look at the current views within a zone. There will be more elements in the main zone soon, but everything is there to track and attack enemies now. The goal is to create a tense, always busy scenario where you are constantly swapping between viewpoints and performing actions with in-game interfaces. I accidentally settled on an aesthetic of “how I remember Myst.” I am not going to ruin my vision by doing research, but just try to make it have a similar electro-mechanical not-quite-right vibe to it all. I am hoping that gifs and updates that I post will slowly make everything more clear. I plan to have some in-game instructions and other elements to help players grasp what’s going on, which is… How You Can Help: If you are interested in any of the below, please feel free to send something to me. I am on the Idle Thumbs Slack, and I can send you my email address via the forums PM if you’d like. Let me know if you would like to contribute! I would really appreciate it. Candid photo of you, a pet, or someone you know and have their permission to put into a random WizJam game. A picture someone else took is preferred, as opposed to a selfie. I hope to use these as possible decorations in the tube to help keep players oriented. I might apply filters to your photos to make them look older, or similar processing, but I won’t do anything mean. Also, try to avoid having any sort of technology in the pictures… Like you on your mobile phone or draped across a sports car. One person to do voice work. Needs to be someone who sounds serious and commanding. Need not be male or female specifically. Think either a military person or maybe a slightly off-kilter genius/scientist type. Should mainly be a few intro lines and maybe a handful of other sayings. Thanks for reading and considering helping me out! I will start posting updates and gifs ASAP from stuff I have already done so you can get a better feel for this. The game has been released! Please give it a try! https://whogas.itch.io/ping

Game is available here: https://theschap.itch.io/from-earth-to-pluto Overall I'm happy with where the physics model ended up in the limited time I had over the holidays to tweak it. I would still like to get some audio in, and work with the lines I'm drawing and the shaders more. Enjoy! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wizard Jam time!!! Okay, so basically I want to make a golf game, because this is the year of golf games( Golf Story, Everybody's Golf, maybe more) and I found an episode that provided an aesthetic; Idle Thumbs 238: From Earth to Pluto. The general idea is this. I will model an exaggerated solar system in which you tee off on Earth, and must jump between planets and potentially other cosmic entities to reach the hole on Pluto. The physics in general are going to be strange in that you are playing space golf across mass distances, and gravity is all messed up, so I'm just going to model a familiar trajectory, but now that I think of it having things like black holes would give me some other game play options. New game development things I'm going to focus on: Scriptable Objects Materials/Shaders Here is what I have so far. I have basically gotten the power bar working, but there isn't an aim offset yet so that's coming next. Next items:(mostly for my benefit) Accuracy Offset Predicted distance/path before shot is taken UI to select different clubs Forces at play ie. solar winds, black holes, comets... All the art Menus and other UI Other game state stuff

So for this jam I'm going to be revisiting the game I made for the third wizard jam, Rogue Robot Rogues. That game was originally made within a weekend and inspired entirely by me drawing two circles, one small inside the other and thinking what if the big one was some sort of wave. This expanded to the player controlling the security system (or Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics - ICE) for the mainframe of a company, armed with an EMP wave and a turret. In the intervening year and a bit, I have gotten much more into cyberpunk as a genre of sci-fi and after reading Neuromancer it got me thinking what life would be like to work for one of those companies, on the other side of the fight. "Techs down from the arcologies. [Case] supposed that meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral." - Neuromancer The other main issue with Rogue Robot Rogues was the lack of depth in the gameplay with the only verbs available to the player being turning and shooting. For this redesign I'm focusing a lot more on the creation of the ICE itself with the finished experience hopefully closer to a real-time puzzle game, focusing on the performance of the ICE constructs that the player constructs to ice programs. The Team: Art, Design - Me, Sam (@Mythalore) Dev, Design - Harry (@HarryMcAlpine) Music - @Atlantic Sound Design - Toby So far we have the logo above and have managed to resurrect the code I had in progress for the new version of Rogue Robot Rogues, complete with a new art style that I created for NEON Shell as it was titled. Although we will most likely have to rewrite the system to support the new mechanics and update to Unity 2017.2.

For this Wizard Jam, I'm doing something a bit different. As a kind of experiment I wanted to go back to the first solo game I ever made (well.. attempted, I didn't even get close to finishing it), and see if I could remake it in two weeks. I thought it'd be a neat way of measuring the personal progress I've made in the intervening years; and also, it would just be nice to get the game out there and playable after so much time inside my head and in long-abandoned Unity project files. When I think back on the early days of my game development career (then hobby), I think of this game and the various hurdles I had to overcome to get even the most basic stuff things running on-screen. Maybe getting this game done and finally putting it to bed will be cathartic. So this is Concentric. Back in 2014 I picked up a copy of Unity 4.3 with Playmaker and set out to make a tiny score-attack style game. The gameplay was something like a deconstructed Frogger. You control a small circle that can move along the ring you're occupying, or hop between rings. The objective is to collect pickups that spawn in the outer ring, and carry them back to the center of the screen. You had to do this whilst avoiding obstacles. The faster you were able to deliver the pickup back to the center, the more points you earned. Over time the game gets harder and harder until you die. I messed around with this in evenings and weekends for several months making not that much progress, in the way that you do when you're using a project to learn as a primary focus. I abandoned it in the summer of 2014, when Unreal Engine 4 became available and I jumped ship after learning about Blueprints. Below is the only footage I have of the old version. It was so far from being functional, let alone complete: there was no way to take damage or end the game, or progress through the level structure. I often wonder about how it would have played if it was more functional. I ask myself: would it even be fun? Would the controls get confusing when played in real-world circumstances? I hope to find out in the next fortnight. You guys can hang out on this thread and find out with me if you like. (Above: The only footage I have from the 2014 version of Concentric) For Wizard Jam, I'll probably end up making some minor design changes to the game; most notably I'm thinking of structuring the game around set pre-authored levels as opposed to an endless level that gets more difficult over time. I figure that it's an easier structure to get something playable and working early, which is going to be important given the short timeframe.

You're not racist against Warroids or anything. Listen, they had a really rough time in the war. Like, seriously. But it's just this specific Warroid: your next-door neighbour. What's his problem? Why's he gotta be such a dick? (About me: I'm a first-time poster, first-time Wizard Jammer, convinced to do it by a friend as a fun project over the holiday break. Trying to decide if the title is an HR violation if I mentioned this game at my day job, but if it's good enough for the podcast, it's good enough for me.)

Hi all! This is my first forum post, my first Wizard Jam, and my first game jam. I will be trying to make Fight Garbage with Garbage, a short, first-person, bullet-hell game where you use a never-ending spew of trash to battle a colossal garbage can. I will be making the game in Unity, as I have some experience experimenting with the engine. I have plenty of experience with object-oriented programming, and absolutely no experience in modelling or drawing. I may end up asking for some of those mini-contributions that were mentioned in the welcome post; for instance, lots of drawings of miscellaneous garbage. I may not succeed. Either way, the net amount of garbage on this earth is about to increase.

Hello Wizard Jammers! I don't how active I will be with the devlog this time around, but I at least wanted to get something up here as I start up the project. This'll be my second Wizard Jam, my first being Wizard Jam 5 where I made a Twin Peaks first person exploration game. The Meme Scream is to be a first person arcade-ish game. The player will be walking through a crowded area (like a mall or something) and be trying to avoid running into NPC's that are wandering in the direction of the player. The hook is that there is a big phone in middle of the screen that is always fixed in the middle of the view, so using the mouse to look around and change direction will move the phone along with it, blocking the view. On the phone I want there to be a scrolling feed of images. There will be memes and news. Memes are good and must be selected and shared for points (and screams of joy), news is bad and if selected will deduct points. I'm thinking that the feed will be scrolling fast enough that picking memes instead of news will be difficult because of maneuvering through a crowd. Honestly I don't know how well this will work in execution, but we're going to find out!!!

The game is now released and you can download it on itch.io! https://fabiandenter.itch.io/the-world-begins-with-you Thank you for checking it out! ---------- Original Post: ---------- After doing a first person game with attempted realistic graphics for WJ5, I want to do something different this time. Sooo... I'll try to make a third person game with some sort of stylized/lowpoly aesthetic. I haven't decided yet, but I think it's going to be mostly top down exploration stuff, maybe with some short platforming areas. Also something with mazes, because I like mazes. The title is borrowed from Idle Weekend episode "The World Ends (and Begins) With You". In terms of story and atmosphere I want to do something "darker" and personal, but abstract. Think of something along the lines of Inside, but with more color? I don't know yet, still very vague ideas here. Robots will of course be in there as well and you'll be able to speak to them, at least that's planned. Like WJ5 this will be an art-heavy thing for me as I'm still more on the environment art side of things, but I worked a bit on my understanding of c#, so let's see where this takes me. However, I will be using a third person controller asset from the store, but will try to do do the rest of the gameplay myself. I even have a puzzle in my mind that I think I'd be able to code ... at least theoretically. I also already experimented with a speechbubble system and that crashed Unity, so there we go I expect time to be the most crucial factor. Last time I had he whole two weeks off from work, this time it's the last week of the year. But then again it's the week between Christmas and New Year's, so there isn't as much time as I'd like to have. But I'm still optimistic that I can put something together!

Well, the results are in... two days early! Weird how that works. But I can successfully say, with an almost overwhelming majority, that the winner of our poll is the title "The Other Eggplant," so, I hope you like eggplants. Without any further ado: The Other Eggplant Another game by the makers of Hamburger Mode. TO BE CLEAR: This is going to be slightly less ridiculous and over the top. That game was a total and unrequited, yet somehow hilariously charming mess. This is not that. This game has a STORY. And PLOT. And maybe even some sort of strange meaning to be found inside of it. Maybe, though. It's not like this is Citizen Kaine or anything. SO: This game takes place in a small tavern at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. You, the player, are a traveller who was just passing through when a sudden psionic thunderstorm came out of nowhere and was extremely threatening. Fortunately, most buildings nowadays are warded against this sort of thing, so you fled to the safety of this tavern, along with basically anyone else who was around at the moment. The Game: Is a story based game, where you, the player, can take a different action every hour, for 9 hours (from noon to 9 PM) inside the tavern. Actions include talking to the different people who are also staying at the tavern, plotting your course, helping out around the tavern, and of course, napping. That’s just like… That’s a thing you can do. Anyways, there is no specific goal of the game, aside from learning more about the characters and trying to figure out what they are doing. However, at some point during this (probably halfway) some sort of big event will trigger that then means you have to solve a mystery, or maybe go looking for someone who's gone missing. I still haven't quite figured that out, but it would probably be pretty boring to just talk to people with no direction. “Now, Technomagie,” you might be thinking, “That doesn’t really have anything to do with your title and prompt for this here game jam!” Well, you’re right. Anyways, this game will be built in the RPG Maker MV engine, which, if you don’t know, is a game engine designed for primarily making old school Final Fantasy clones. I won’t be doing that. In fact, I don’t think this game will have any combat or dungeon crawling in it whatsoever. I would prefer to have a more visual perspective on this, as opposed to a Twine game. However, it will be important to note that it will be built using primarily images from the base engine, which in all honesty look pretty crappy. Characters: In the next couple of days, I will be beginning to post information about the main characters that you will encounter in this story. However, and I want to put this up here right now for this reason, I'm going to be adding extras into the game as essentially other people you can meet who are just hanging around the tavern. I want people who read this to reply below with an idea for one of these extras, and one or two lines of dialogue that you get when they're interacted with. These can be anything from shameless self-inserts, to dumb one-liner jokes, or anything in between. Think of this as your chance to be wild.

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...

Hold On To Your Binary Utility for the Tethering of Theropods Overindulging in Non-dinosaurs "Welcome to the Isla Mago branch of Jurassic Park, valued member of the InGen family! Here at International Genetics Incorporated, we are devoted to the safety of our employees, which is why management is deeply saddened by your recent and incredibly unfortunate accident allegedly involving the Coelacanth Fish Pedicure exhibit. As per the stipulations laid out in your lawsuit, you have been granted the position of Chief Security Officer and B.U.T.T.O.N. Operator; your personal office is located in the most secure building on the island, and has convenient access to restroom and refreshments. We sincerely hope that this arrangement is satisfactory to you, and would again like to say that we are devoted to your comfort and safety while in our employment." Gameplay The gameplay of Hold On To Your B.U.T.T.O.N. is sort-of inspired by Five Nights at Freddies, and one of my favorite Jam games: Enviro-Bear 2000. Learning from past experiences with mass power outages, InGen has implemented a new, easily-operable failsafe device for this Jurassic Park facility. All of the security systems of the park - fences, doors, cameras, computers - are tied to the same electrical circuit, which is kept active by holding down the titular button on your desk (tied to a particular key on your keyboard). If the power shuts down, the dinosaurs will obviously take the opportunity to escape from their enclosures, gradually wandering into the control room where you and your tasty crew are. Simply keeping the key pressed for the allotted time is easy enough, in the beginning, but as you progress through the levels, more tasks requiring your input begin to pile up. With only one free hand, perhaps you'll need to shoo away an inquisitive compy blocking your view of the security feed, or enter a complicated Unix command to troubleshoot a downed section of fence. Can you fill out your time sheet before the day is out? What if you've had too much coffee and need to run to the little security officers' room down the hall? WHAT DO YOU DO IF THERE IS MORE THAN ONE B.U.T.T.O.N.? Stretch ideas + It might be easier to make this scary with 3D assets, but I don't have the expertise to create them in this time frame, and I'm actually sort of curious what I can manage with just 2D. Plus, I'm not sure I even want to go for much horror anyway. + Initially, monitor will just be a top-down view of the map, with your cameras marking the positions of things in their field of view. If I have time though, I'd obviously want to have a separate view to see the camera feeds directly. + In addition to the powered security, you have a small number of game wardens who try to tranquilize escaped dinosaurs. You don't know exactly where they are though - every minute or so, they'll radio their position and sightings in. So, your map would show the last known positions of the wardens and any dinos they spot, but you won't find out if they successfully subdued them until they make their next report (or they miss it...) + If I do go with the wardens idea, then that adds the additional task of having to tune your radio to their frequency to even get those check-ins. Highly professional concept art attached below

"Akwardness and Harmony" A score capturing arcade where you traverse a map of happy faced and sad faced characters. It is inspired by empathy games such as Jay Tholen's "Dropsy," "Everything is going to be OK" by Alienmelon, and the sword fighting sequences in "Secret of Monkey Island." It is loosely following the theory of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM). More on that at the end. Game Design: The player and NPC's are all governed by an internal mood meter that ranges from happy to sad, with potentially 1 to 5 states of intermediate states, neutral in the middle and lesser extremes of happy and sad. PC and NPCs all share one basic interaction verb, Speaking. Any two NPC's will automatically Speak to each other when they pass by each other. Speaking will modify the mood meter of the two (or more?) adjacent characters. Happy characters will increase the mood of a sad character. Sad character will increase the mood of a happy character. Neutral characters will have no effect. The player can also speak but be deliberate about when speaking. There would be different personality styles for different characters. This would effect how those characters mood meters automatically change over time, and how a character responds to speaking. Different personalty styles would be things such as Optimist, Pessimist, Introvert, Extrovert, or some combination there of. Optimists would have naturally growing moods, Pessimists would have naturally decaying moods. Extroverts would respond well to speaking, but Introverts would have a cool down period where speaking too much actually decreases their mood. Scoring: The game will be in rounds have a time limit and a score system. player can collect points by speaking to happy characters. No points are collected or deducted for speaking to neutral or sad characters, the idea is to enforce the player's happiness through seeking out happy faces and communication. Difficulty modes and level design: The game would have several difficulty modes. These modes are where the character plays the game in the different personality styles. Technical and scope goals: This will be made in Game Maker 2. I've done a few tutorials that should help me get this amount of stuff done, character movement, interaction. I'm a complete novice so I'll probably end up with less that my basic scope goals for the jam. Basic scope: Move player around, speak with people. People stop when speaking. NPCs speak to each other automatically. NPCs do not speak to player. Get points, end time limit. Basic character art with simple color shifting to differentiate stuff. Simple animation cause I can't help myself Intermediate scope: Personality types for NPCs. more art, animation for environments and maybe different characters. Several Levels / Scenarios. Advanced scope: Playable personality types for player. Flavor text reactions. Saved local score board for different modes / levels / scenarios. Concept basis: Cognitive Behavorial Modification (CBM) involves software that feature a grid of frowning and smiling people, and you click on the smiling people as fast as possible in a limited amount of time. The concept is that a depressed or anxious person perceives threats in their environment, in the form of frowning people. By rewarding the user to increase their awareness of happy people in the environment, it is said that the user's outlook on life will become more optimistic. The CBM games I've toyed are dead simple, and I already see an improvement in my outlook on life having used them a little bit. Perhaps only by placebo effect of meditating on the idea, but placebo effects are real effects, self fulfilling prophecies and all. Ludo-narrative Problems: The trick with making a CBM style game is to ensure the game itself enhances the player's positive mood state, and does not actually cause a demoralizing effect in the player, via too much competition, or other strange social implications. In a way many games are already CBM modules, but focus on mood reduction, punishing world of frowning people. The design as I have above described has a potentially problematic implication, that the player is a sort of care taking cheer leader of the NPCs, and by having the player character running around trying to cheer people up, that could be an actually very annoying thing to certain people in real life. My hope is that the personality system could create an empathetic effect giving people space to feel the emotion they need to feel. One solution to help this dissonance could be flavor text bubbles that say things like "I feel better getting that off my chest" and such, to enforce that the happy faces are not literally happy and sad states, but are rather a reflection of a satisfaction state.

Hi everybody. I thought I'd share with you my old-school story-centric tactical role-playing game Call of Saregnar. It is a project I've been working on in my spare time for the last couple of years, and I expect many more years of development ahead. As an introduction, here's my vision: A Mature Story, A Believable World A deep and engaging story with charming characters unfolds over ten chapters filled with murder, mystery, intrigue and suspense. The world is low in fantasy, and magic is rare. Despite that, you will encounter some creatures coming straight from mythology, but giant rats and slimes have been evicted from this universe. In the game you take control of a small group of unique charactes, each with their own backstory, personality and ambitions. As you progress through the world, they may join or leave you and they do interact with each other, giving you clues and directions on your quests and help you unfold the intricate story. 1990’s Old School Look Call of Saregnar features a 1990’s inspired 2D + low-poly 3D look, so you can get immersed into what’s most important: the story and gameplay. Let your immagination do the heavy lifting! Oh, it also features real actors! Freedom to Explore Despite being a story-driven game, the world is always open for exploration, so there is nothing stopping you from exploring the whole map in the very first chapter! Tactical Turn-based Combat Combat is turn-based and each opposing party starts roughly at the opposite side of a grid-separated battlefield. The party that has the initiative, starts first, moving all of its characters. After one side has moved all of its characters, the opposing party gets to move. There are a number of highly-strategic spells to be used in combat, not just damage-dealing ones, so you have to plan accordingly if you want to succeed. Detailed Party Management The characters you play are alive, so it means that they get thirsty and hungry, they feel cold and heat, they can also fall ill and must be taken care of. Fortunately for you, micromanagement is not completely manual as characters will feed automatically, as long as they have the food in their inventories. When you're traveling through snow, it is best to have heavy clothes in your inventory or your characters will fall ill or worse. You'll also need to heal their illnesses manually, for example. Talking about clothing, boots do wear out, so be sure to watch the condition else your characters might end up walking barefoot. You should also regularly take care of your weapons - oiling the bowstrings and swords, repairing armor, etc… – as they get damaged. Character Development While your characters’ attributes rarely change, their skills advance on a per-use basis. Skills can also be learned from a trainer or by reading a book. Encounters In a land as rich as Merrentar, you can expect to run into a variety of events that will affect your journey. These events may go from falling into enemy ambushes, discovering particular interesting spots and places, meeting traveling merchants or bandits, perhaps wild creatures, wounded travelers, a neat trove of herbs, a set of game tracks... all of these events are greatly affected by the various party skills. Unique Magic System To gain divine favor from the gods, pray and give offerings in the form of money, food or other valuables. Divine favor is you magical pool from which you can cast unique highly-strategic spells. Items Although the game has fewer weapons and armors than the average RPG, each item is that much more detailed and fleshed out. Finding new equipment brings significant benefits as the difference between the old and new is now actually noticeable. Grey Matters CoS challenges you to think and pay close attention to everything you read, because often that's the only way to complete sidequests or even main objectives. There are no quest markers or objectives, only a quest log with your past conversations for reference. If you want to know more about my project, visit the game's page at http://www.callofsaregnar.com. Thanks for looking!

Trailer: Quick InfoRelease: October 2018 for PC / Mac / LinuxGenre: Life-SimPre-Alpha Prototype Demo: http://warpdogs.com/were-release/Social: My Twitter (game updates and personal posts) | Game Twitter (game updates + screens only) SummaryMy name is Josh, and I'm a solo dev working on Village Monsters, a life-sim game taking gameplay inspiration from the likes of Animal Crossing and Shenmue, with visual and tonal inspirations from the Mother series.Village Monsters is set inside the world of an abandoned video game. Over time, the monsters that once served as enemies in a generic fantasy RPG grew tired of all the waiting around, and eventually decided to abandon the whole 'bad guy' thing entirely.They've thrown away their axes and fireball spells and now live a peaceful life in a sleepy little village in the 'country'.You are a player booting up the game for the first time in decades, finding yourself as the sole human living among this village of (mostly) affable monsters. FeaturesHere's an incomplete list of things you can do in Village Monsters: Purchase, furnish, and upgrade your very own house. Hang up some new wallpaper! Plant a garden! Sit atop a golden throne you found in the woods! Pick up a new hobby, like treasure hunting, cooking, critter catching, or fishing. Donate your findings and creations to the Historical Society of Monsters Meet a boatload of rambunctious and whimsical villagers with their own personalities, schedules, and problems to solve Experience total immersion thanks to a robust day/night cycle, seasonal changes, dynamic weather, and a packed calendar full of events and holidays Explore a bizarre digital world that’s been transformed by its abandonment Bring back the treasures from your expeditions to decorate your home and village Unravel a unique story through dialog, environments, descriptions, and other esoteric means Enjoy the deep satisfaction of dog ownership Discover a world brimming with lore where every area, villager, and item has context and background Solve mysterious and other quests, and enjoy rewards that can upgrade your house and village Complete a massive compendium full of collectibles and secrets News & UpdatesHey Idle Thumbs duders! I've actually followed Remo, Rodkin & the Boyz for like a decade now, which is weird to even realize, but I've never been one to post on the forum. For the past 5 years or so I've struggled with depression, anxiety, and at my lowest point contemplated some pretty dark shit. Late last year I reached my breaking point and vowed to turn my life around. Since then I've made a lot of life changes I won't bore you with, but the relevant one to this topic is that I saved up a bunch of money, quit my job, and have dedicated myself to achieving the dream I've had since I was 8 years old: make a living from creating video games. Village Monsters is my first attempt at just that, and I've been at it since January of this year.There's a pre-alpha demo that was released last Sunday (07/09/2017) that you can check out. I'd really only suggest taking a look if you're familiar and comfortable with this type of early gameplay, but as you might suspect I would absolutely love any feedback you haveI've begun the 'Long March to Alpha' which will last through the rest of the summer, and you can look forward to weekly devlogs posted here each weekend.Lemme know if you have any questions, comments, insults, or anything else!

Hey first time, long time, and all that. Not much of a dev log, but I just completed my first ever game for Wizard Jam 5 and it's available here: https://professor-dorkface.itch.io/sorrow-and-horror WASD to move Shift to run Mouse to shoot Zombies lurk hoping to turn you into a Far Cry 2 fan. Seek the darkness and escape!

Howdy! I didn't want to post until I was sure I could actually put something together so.... check out this GIF! What's going on there? Why, it's a reality show simulation & management game of course! A little while back I binged hard on Terrace House (check it out on netflix) and so I kind of wanted to do something Sims-like to help teach myself some AI principles. @Mythalore described it on slack as "Big Brother Fortress" and that's just about perfect. Here's the pitch I drafted up before getting started: Not sure where the outer space angle came from but I'm running with it if I can get it in the game itself. From here, I need to build out the activity/waypoint findinga little bit more but I'm happy to have the basics of pathfinding and a set of needs in there already. Wanna help?? Does anyone have interest in doing art, sound, or music for the game? You can sort of see the direction I'm looking for in the color palette of the placeholder art but there's a lot we can do on all fronts if folks are motivated and into the idea. Drop me a line and I can get folks hooked up with the Trello and source control for the project

Game link for all those game players out there (hi Ben_X): https://fifogamedev.itch.io/carvetheeyes. I'll do up a post-mortem tomorrow but for now I need sleep! Level instructions! Because I actually want people to finish this dumb game. Level 1 - Tickle the giant by timing your clicks when the white circles match the radius of the blue circles. Think Osu or Elite Beat Agents. Level 2 - Alternate pressing left and right. Feel the boredom of a young person doing menial tasks. Level 3 - Click on the teeth to remove them...slowly. There's a certain order to removing them, and you only get three mistakes before it resets! Level 4 - Click on the circle to start flaying, then follow the circle with your mouse. Keep within the radius of the circle! (± a little) Level 5 - Alternate mashing the up and down buttons to lift the contraption to the required height so that it can crack the heck out of those bones. Level 6 - ??? --- I made a promise to myself that I would use the random title generator and go with the very first title that came up. So boom, I'm going to be working on a game based on a gross terminal 7 title, Carved the eyes out of my head. I did a bit of a braindump session last night, starting when I was already a little tipsy, but even in the cold light of day I think it's a solid idea. I'll spoiler my thoughts here: tl;dr The player will control a member of a clan who have a symbiotic relationship with nature giants. The giants travel to the clan's grounds to die and have their organs be recycled as the clan's buildings, weaponry, base resources. The player will defend the giants from predators that would seek to kill them before they reach their destination. At the moment I'm leaning towards the giants being interconnected platforms that move in a set rotation or pattern, and the fun is jumping around this giant trying to defend it from a bunch of smaller enemies, but I'll have to see if that's achievable or fun. I think it could be as long as the player has enough tools to move around easily. Anyway, that's the idea. Now to try and figure out how to structure this to be interesting/fun/at all feasible in less than 2 weeks.

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.

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!

Story: Little Kevin did something stupid and is punished by an electronics ban. There is basically nothing left for him to keep himself busy now. Except for the old electronic race track of his father which his parents forgot about... Game Concept: two buttons used on gamepad: analog trigger for basic speed, turbo button for some bonus speed minimalistic 3d graphics perception of race track gets more intense with rising internalization Minimal scope of game: one race track simple story sequence at the beginning basic internalization effects: basic blurring, blending into more realistic graphics and sound some basic track elements: straight track, curves Nice to have: some more complicated track elements: height differences, looping, ... more sophisticated special effects: explosions(!), interesting perspectives, slow motion racing is actually fun multiplayer mode decent assets Background Story: I almost would not have participated in my first Wizard Jam because I had no idea what kind of game to make. Fortunately, my girl friend's dad got out his old Carrera race track for the visiting children. The core loop of pushing the 1-2 buttons was actually really fun. It really reminded me of the Trackmania games. I had an inspiration! It should be possible to make this game in two weeks time. Now I only had to find some episode title which looked good enough for this kind of game.