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Just checking in to say that I'm kind of mostly on track to get this finished by midnight! I'm basically just going to be slamming everything in and hoping it all works, though, so this may end up being a disaster. Game Development.

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The game is (basically) done!

 

DotGobblerCoverSmall.png

 

Download it on itch.io!

 

There are a couple of pretty major bugs in there, which I only noticed 20 minutes after the jam deadline when I finally got around to packaging the game; most notably when you start the game, it fullscreens and grabs the mouse, turning it invisible, which makes it hard to click on any of the buttons. If you alt-tab out and back you should get mouse control back. Also, if you pause the game and return to the menu, it doesn't clear the dots, so when you start another game you'll get a bunch of duplicates. Oops!

 

If no-one objects too much, I'll fix those first thing tomorrow. For now, I need to lie in a dark room for a while and decompress.

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This game is very zen. I made it really far, and didn't seem to die after being ghosted a few times. I found the analog stick on my 360 controller to not always quite go exactly the direction I wanted, but it didn't matter because I was zoning out to the sweet dot gobbler cher cover song and gobbling dots.

 

The animations and that dot gobbler's face are super good. I especially love the ghost walks and their scary frowning faces. Well done :)

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There's a new build on the game's Itch.io page that fixes a number of bugs:

 

- You can see the mouse cursor now.

- Dots are being correctly cleared when you exit a game.

- I also noticed that the ghosts weren't being cleared between levels, so by the time you reached Level 5, you'd have 8 ghosts running around instead of 4.

- Dot Gobbler would quite often run too far into a wall and get stuck. I've fixed that, with quite a noticeable pop that doesn't look great, but keeps him out of geometry.

 

I'll do a proper postmortem soon, but there are a couple of things I want to quickly add first:

 

- Actual Power Pill effects. This was a big one; I didn't get around to animating Dot Gobbler's pill freakout state, or do death animations for the ghosts. Shouldn't take too long to do these.

- Improve the ghost AI. Currently this is garbage; it chooses a direction at random whenever it has the chance, so it tends to just go back and forth. I want to add weightings for directions, and also maybe implement a basic chase AI when you get too close.

- A bit of camera bob on the title screen. Currently it just looks like a still image. I also kind of wanted to animate the characters twitching uncomfortably, as if they're trying to hold a pose, but I don't know if I'll get time.

- Some HUD elements showing you what level you're on, and how many dots you've got left.

 

Hopefully that won't take too long.

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I think that mentioned bug with the mouse is preventing me from playing. Or I'm dense and need a "How to Play." But I really like the meta story: maybe Dot Gobbler shouldn't be played/exist. We've got all this weird forgotten art and broken game fragments that pretend to be a game...but no real game. Haha.

Edit: ah, I'll grab the new version (saw that after I posted).

The 3d render splash image is freaking incredible. Also, that Dot Gobbler theme. Holy crap, was that on a Thumbs episode or?...Where does that come from? It's a revelation. And hilarious. It may sound reductive, but you've knocked it out of the park with the title screen/theme song combo alone!

I love that Dot Gobbler is pretty much the mascot of Wizard Jam. It's got this addictive quality to it, and I was similarly obsessed with atte's dungeon crawly Dot Gobbler. It makes me want...more Dot Gobblers. And like a Dot Gobbler Compilation with some overarching framework/plot that ties them together! Haha, I may be rambling here...

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9/10. Looses one point because i can't input any controls.

Looks and sounds amzing though.

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Yeah, sorry guys, it's controller only until tomorrow, when I'll release a new build with keyboard input!

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Okay, so a new version is up on itch.io, which has all of the features I want to get into the game for now. Here's what's new:

 

- The title screen camera moves around a bit!

- Keyboard controls.

- Power Pills now actually have an effect, and you can use them to knock ghosts over.

- Ghost AI is a lot better, and they don't get stuck in the start rooms as much any more.

- In-game UI showing what level you're on, and how many dots you've got left to eat!

 

So, a few things I wanted to say about the game. First, the awesome music is by my friend James, and you can download the soundtrack here. With vocals by Chris Remo, who was nice enough to record our stupid Cher cover. Also thanks to ZeroFiftyOne for UE4 advice, and the sweet Power Pill screen effect!

 

I had to cut a few things from the game, due to time constraints. A few things that didn't make it in were Ms. Dot Gobbler (I couldn't figure out how to retarget the animations to her mesh, for some reason!), eye movement and blinking, and the amazing Sweat Tech that I had planned. Between-level story scenes also never made it in. Generally I'm pleased with how the jam went, though! I definitely made more of a game than I did last year, because I'm a lot more competent at building basic game systems now. I still probably didn't build the game in the smartest way, considering I spent most of the first week modelling and animating the character before I did anything else, but one of the goals of this Jam for me was to just make a HD Dot Gobbler model, so I figured I'd get that done first.

 

Speaking of which, if anyone wants to download the model, here it is! That Zip contains the .blend file, the exported .fbx, and the texture map in .png format.

 

The 3d render splash image is freaking incredible. Also, that Dot Gobbler theme. Holy crap, was that on a Thumbs episode or?...Where does that come from? It's a revelation. And hilarious. It may sound reductive, but you've knocked it out of the park with the title screen/theme song combo alone!

 

Thanks! Once I realised that I wasn't going to have time for my original adventure game idea, I was pretty much resigned to the fact that the visuals and audio were going to be the game's main focus, so I wanted them to have as much impact as possible.

 

This game is very zen. I made it really far, and didn't seem to die after being ghosted a few times. I found the analog stick on my 360 controller to not always quite go exactly the direction I wanted, but it didn't matter because I was zoning out to the sweet dot gobbler cher cover song and gobbling dots.

 

You have infinite lives; Mostly I just wanted people to be able to get through the game, because there are five levels that get quite lengthy in the end, and I don't think the gameplay is interesting enough to make people start over again. And yeah, the controls feel a bit weird at first, but it's a difficult problem to solve. What happens is that the game's mostly looking for diagonal input, so if you want to go up-right, you push the stick diagonally up-right. If you push the stick directly up, it's half-way between up-right and up-left, so the direction you get might not be one you expect. I think the game would also feel weird if pushing up made you go up-left, because as you move towards the diagonal up-right, you're probably still going to move up-left on screen. This is a problem isometric games have struggled with for ages.

 

Thanks to everyone who's played the game so far!

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This is so good! I love it!

 

A couple of things I noticed:

  • I kept pressing the wrong buttons to move. For example, if Mr. Gobbler was moving toward the left of the screen and I wanted to change to an upwards direction I kept pressing the left key as this is the direction Mr. Gobbler would need to turn relative to his current direction.
  • If I saved one of the Superpills for last I would start the next stage with the Superpill-effect active.

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It's hard to get used to the keyboard controls, yeah. At least with an analogue stick you can push directly in the direction you want to go, but it made no sense to require the player to use diagonal inputs on a keyboard, because that means pressing two keys. In the end I just did what old isometric games did, and map the directions to diagonals, but that gets confusing because you have to remember which of the upward diagonals you're going to move in when you press up. The controls are consistent, but it's still a hurdle that your brain has to get over. Maybe it would be easier if all of the controls were relative to your current heading, but I just sort of hacked the keyboard controls in.

 

Also, oops! I thought I'd fixed that bug, but I think I just fixed when you pause and return to the title when a Power Pill is active. If I do another build at any point, I'll get that fixed in it.

 

Thanks for playing!

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I believe in Dot Gobbler. Sounds, music, looks, all this was great.

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This is hilarious and really well-presented! The splash screen, the credits screen, the sound effects, the power-pill effects and of course the music, all so good and work really well with this weird main character.

 

I couldn't bring myself to finish level 5, then came back here and saw it's the last one! Did I miss out on anything?

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You missed out on being unceremoniously dumped back to the title screen! I misjudged the length of the levels quite a bit. Level 3 doesn't need to be there at all; my intention was that first you face a single ghost with the option of a power pill in level 2, and in 3 you have to face a ghost without a power pill. In Spenny's stream, he says 'Man I need to get one of those power pills again' going into level 3, and I felt bad that there wasn't another until level 4. So, level 3 could do with being removed, and maybe the final level wouldn't feel like so much of a slog when you see that there are 174 dots to collect.

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At times hypnotic, at times slightly arousing and then suddenly terror.

 

Great job!

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I also found the controls a little weird; for whatever reason what helped me get over it was always holding down the direction I was going. This was surreal and funny, I absolutely love that gobbler.

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Dot Gobbler oozes such style (among other things). I was caught off guard by the music, but it was great. Added a lot to the weirdness of the experience. I liked how the levels sorta built out from each other by moving the barriers. And Dot Gobbler's drug fueled rampage against the ghosts was satisfying.

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What can I say but I believe in Dot Gobbler? Nightmare fuel turned into a surreal, chilled out experience. <3 DG. Also I streamed my gobbling over here: 

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Excellent work with the atmosphere in this one! Hilarious and unsettling at the same time.

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Loved the music; especially after collecting the power-up. And loved the animations when 'gobbling dots'! 

 

Nice work! 

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