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Now available on itch.io: George Fan George Fan, creator of Plants vs. Zombies and Octogeddon, was the titular guest of Designer Notes Episode 28. George Fan: The Game is completely inspired by discussion from the episode. Designer Notes has become one of my favorite podcasts, and the George Fan episode is one that I particularly enjoyed. Soren and George had some good laughs, and I figured I could bash together a game out of it. Since I was crunched for time (and energy), I relied heavily on the Unity Asset store, and other free/affordable resources. This was my first jam to really do this outside of sounds, and I definitely couldn't have made a project even this simple without them. Thanks to all in the Idle Thumbs and Wizard Jam communities for holding this jam and supporting each other. Can't wait to play your games! P.S. If George Fan is reading this, I realize this probably seems weird. I apologize for that, but I assure you I just thought this would be a fun jam game to make and play. Also, listening to bits of this episode again made me download Plants vs. Zombies (the first one) again and I am more into it than any mobile game I've been into for years. Can't wait to see what you come out with next!

Il Panino di Brutto Sogno is a sandwich making puzzle game I made for the jam. I didn't really keep a Dev log, but it was really fun to make. It combines the order system of Overcooked with the tile matching of a game like Bookworm. You can play the game here: https://kleinzach.itch.io/panino

Hi everyone! My friends and I are new in game development so we decided to join Wizard Jam 6 for creating a game in the holiday. And the jam is our first jam site in itch.io. The topic that we choose is Idle Thumbs Episode 113 SHOOT THAT PIZZA. Our concept is player must deliver a pizza to each customer by typing a pizza order in time. Finally, We are happy so much when we completed this game. We hope our game can make you fun. itch.io (Win/Web versions available): https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-6/rate/210773 GitHub: https://github.com/seaiin/shoot-that-pizza

This is my first time participating in Wizard Jam, and I randomly rolled Idle Thumbs Episode 193: General Interest. That sounded boring but my brain jumped to there being a literal General Interest who commands securities in battle, and the game concept came pretty quickly after that: So it's a basic RTS, controlled with left/right click. You command your securities to take over other securities by buying them, and securities gain interest every second. So the challenge is in figuring out what order to capture securities and making sure they don't default due to excessive risk. I just released it on itch so it's now available for playing on Windows. There's only 3 levels so I may come back to it later and build out the concept with more variety. My background is as a gameplay programmer for larger dev teams so the programming was pretty easy but everything else wasn't. This is written using Unreal Engine 4 as that's my background. This was my first time doing any modeling, animation, or material work and that ended up taking most of the time. I've confirmed I have no artistic skill, but I was able to model a dollar sign from scratch so at least I understand the process now This took about 24 hours spread over a week. Anyway I've been in the game industry for 10 years but this is actually my first game jam since college and the first one I ever made completely from scratch. So this was fun, and thanks to the organizers for getting this setup! I'm going to write a bit more about the technical side of making a game jam game in UE4 next week, I'll add that here when I've written it for future reference.

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

Here's the itch.io page. You can find a direct link to the twine here. And a tumblr post with the full credits of all my stolen content here. This was fun! I've started a few twines in the past (mostly for Wizard Jams), but this is the first time I've seen something through to what I'd consider a complete state. In the spirit of jamming, the soundtrack (which will only play on PCs, not on mobile) was a pretty rough one-take kind of thing, but I like the way it came out. It takes a while to get to the part with the hot beats, so hopefully people don't play through the twine too fast to hear it!

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.

Hey! My first child is due to be born on the 20th December! Let's see what I can come up with before I become a father! My game is Dunkin' Bronuts, a peanut throwing game for 2 players! Throw nuts into your stash, and catch your opponents nuts so they can't do the same. Most nuts wins! A feature complete but unpolished version is out on itch.io right now. https://gerbilsinspace.itch.io/dunkin-bronuts