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Welcome Idle Thumbs community to your beautiful... Dates: Saturday, November 19, 12:00PST/15:00EST/20:00GMT - Sunday, December 4, 21:00PST/24:00EST/28:00GMT Theme: There is no theme! Rules: We don't need no stinking rules! Just make anything and submit on the Itch.io jam page. You are more than welcome to base your game around a podcast title (this will be a guaranteed diversifier) but that is not a requirement for this jam. Traditionally, people make games in Unity/Unreal/Gamemaker/Twine/etc. but we are open to any and all contributions as long as they belong to the community and attempt at least one diversifier. Video game, analog game, playground game. Hell, make a sweater! The Wizard Jam crowd is a good and accepting crowd. Diversifiers: Small prompts to help shape your design, mix and match what you like instead of following a traditional theme. Check em out! If you'd like to join a team or seek team members for your own idea, check out the Team Builder thread & survey form Resources Wizard Jam Admin Emeriti - zerofifityone, Dinosaursssssss, Spenny - these folks are nice and helpful if you can't get ahold of me here or on the Slack Official Idle Thumbs Readers Slack chatroom w/ helpful #gamedev and #wizardjam channels Hashtag WizardJam Idle Thumbs Random Episode Selector Games Are For Everyone - nervous about making something? this should help ease your fears Helpful threads from the GameDev forum Long standing free music thread How to back up your game projects with GIT Unity newcomer? Study up with a few short Wizard Academy tutorials Past Jams Wizard Jam 1 Wizard Jam 2 - Winter Wizard Jam (RIP) Wizard Jam 3

I am also doing a game in BigJKO's new Cwine engine. It will not be anywhere near as gorgeous as his. I started off doing an adaptation of my Twine game ("The Often Ending Story") to get used to Cwine, help JKO get it to a barebones yet sturdy state and get used to my new (and first ever) graphics tablet. JKO got Cwine to a good Jam state a day or so ago, and I've started to learn to what panel sizes/brushes etc work well, so I'm ready to start on my Jam comic. Thing is, I've done so much work on this test comic, that I think I'm going to stick it in somewhere as a comic on a shelf that the player can pick up and play if they want before returning to the main story at any point. It's a little bit cheaty, as I wrote the original Twine ages ago, but what the hell. So I'm trying to polish that off today, and then get working on the actual story. The only problem: I have no idea what it's going to be about. I was thinking I might make it about the Caillech Bheur, but perhaps contemporise her so I can riff a lot easier. I'm going to aim for a Fiona Staples style of art (though not as good, obviously) with black brushlines and simple shading so that I can bash out cartoony art very quickly and get a relatively big game written (the art for my test comic is semi-purposefully ugly).

Welcome to Winter Wizard Jam! Use this subforum to write dev logs, recruit team members, and chat about #wizardjam. It’s an itchio! Date: November 28th - December 13th Theme: Winter, Winter Holidays. Special Rule: Diversifiers! Pick any combination (or none at all!) from this list of design restrictions to spur your creativity. The diversifiers are: Note: As with the first Wizard Jam, the theme and diversifiers are completely optional. Most importantly we want to get as much of the community involved as possible. If you have never made a game before now is a great time to start! What do you want to do next? I want to join a team! Head to the team building thread and follow instructions there. I want to contribute content to someone else’s game! Head to the team building thread and follow instructions there. I want to contribute my knowledge as a game making expert! Likely the best thing to do is frequent this forum and help people out as they post in their development threads. Additionally, hanging out in the Idle Thumbs Readers Slack may be a good way to provide more immediate help. Some hot tips on how to get started: (thanks Dino!) As a final note, Wizard Jam Prime, with its episode title theme will return some time in the new year, until then, Happy (winter) jamming everybody!

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR BOTH GAMES YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED So I'm just gonna say this outright, I did not like Gone Home. I'm not up in arms about it, I didn't think it was supposed to be a horror game, I just do not like it. It's not a bad game, don't get me wrong, I just don't think it needed to be a game. But Brothers, now that was a game. It starts with that wonderful cutscene showing the youngest brother watching his mother drown and struggling to cope with the fact that he is too small to save her at all. Boom, tone set right out of the gate before you even start playing. It just screams "this game is going to deal with loss." And that theme does keep popping up, in the first major fantasy area where you reunite a troll with his lost wife (girlfriend? I don't know, she wasn't wearing a ring, so maybe he's a deadbeat). Even by interacting with various NPCs and animals in the area you can tell that the brothers themselves are very different people with their own weaknesses, strengths and motivations. But they do share one motive, to save their remaining parent from a painful and slow death from a mysterious disease. When the actual game proper starts the player has to immediately reconcile the differences between the brothers by learning to make them cooperate, work together towards a common goal. By the time you've left the small town that serves as a quick tutorial you've already figured out that all they have to rely on is each other. They're all they have left. Each puzzle is relatively different, but mostly follow the same guidelines. Work together to get to/unlock something. All there is to the gameplay, besides the initial gimmick, is simply variations on a theme. Luckily you're introduced to new areas and small story arcs regularly enough to make the three hours it takes to complete the game pass very quickly. Each new environment is a spectacle to take in and there are new secrets to interact with in almost every area. This is a game that compels you to finish it. It presents you with a story and a several themes to tackle through the plot and the gameplay itself. I connected with the characters, even the NPCs, I wondered at the fantastic landscapes, I I felt like my $15 was well spent. But Gone Home, now that was something else. It starts with no cutscene establishing what is happening but rather a note taped to a door. This is not something I'm complaining about, in the game world it felt very real and plausible, but by the end it felt like this introduction on the porch was only the first of many lumps of exposition sitting there waiting to be discovered. This note on the door did do something right, it set the tone for confusion. The player is curious as to why there is nobody there to greet you when you come home from your trip abroad. Maybe it was just me, but as soon as I started the game I was slightly upset "my family" wasn't there to hear about "my story." This game is about "my story," right? This is our first major divergence. From the very first moment of gameplay, Brothers and Gone Home differ in how you want to consider the plot. In Brothers the player is immediately thrust into the role of mediator between these two characters, forcing them to cooperate and complete the tasks set before them to further their story. In Gone Home you approach a strange house, discover that the (absent) NPCs have a much more interesting story to tell, and then try to uncover their story. From the get go, it's not your story anymore. Some would argue that it's still Katie's story, a story about an older sibling coming home and discovering all that's changed in her family. I couldn't disagree more. Katie isn't given much of a backstory at all, she's just the older sister who came back from a jaunt around Europe. To me, it's very clear that Katie is left mostly in the dark so that the player can more easily relate. I saw in the thread about Gone Home that someone roleplayed the game as Katie and refused to search things Katie wouldn't. By the time he was upstairs he was already justifying going through drawers for more information. Gone Home was never written to be about the players experience, it's about someone else's. The game even takes place entirely in a setting inhabited by the absent NPCs that drive every aspect of the story. Katie has no effect on the plot at all*. Which brings me back around to why I don't think Gone Home is a good itself game. If I'm playing Gone Home for the empowering story and not the gameplay or design, why is it a game? If I went down to my local Barnes and Noble I could probably find at least a half dozen books in the Teen Fiction section with plots centered around a character discovering their own sexuality. If the game isn't about the player, then why not make the story into, well, just that. Was Katie necessary? It would have been easier to write a story about a girl learning about her sexuality without having to insert Katie. Did the act of exploring the house help the story in any way? Well, that's tougher. You could argue that a theme of "discovering new in the familiar" is present in it, what with exploring your family's new house while your parents work out their new problems and your sister uncovers new feelings for old friends. But overall, I'd say no. This story could have easily been written out and at the same time could have more fully fleshed out the relationship between Lonnie and Sam. This is the exact area that Brothers excels in. Regardless of how you play the game, you are the force that drives the characters forward. The plot of Brothers isn't just that of the titular brothers, it's yours, too. By the last levels of the game I'd almost come to regard it as "ours." This post is the product of [3] double Manhattans and the IGN Game Awards *I would like to point out that the house is incredibly well designed.