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Dr Nick

[RELEASE] I'm Blown Away

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UPDATE:

I've submitted and you should be able to get it here:

 

https://sciencecop.itch.io/im-blown-away

 

I really had a lot of fun doing this! As I said below, I pretty much spent the whole time getting the engine to work and the editor to (barely) work, so the game is very brief. If I had more time I might tweak the motion a little bit, it's a little too slidey right now, but I managed to have some tense moments of almost making a jump and getting blown away at the last moment! Thanks to the folks who made this happen, and I hope you all had fun making your games!

 

Hello Idle Friends!

 

After chickening out the last two game jams, I'm going to take a crack at it this year. The other jams have given birth to some amazing things, and this one looks like it will be just as great. If First Age of Extreme were a kickstarter, it would certainly get my support!

 

I have goofed around sporadically with C++ (like once or twice a year sporadically) since high school. A few years ago I found a website with a bunch of basic game dev tutorials using SDL for graphics ( lazyfoo.net ) and last summer I actually got a very basic platformer engine working. I have been building off that for this game.

 

It's pretty much the most obvious and least creative direction I could have gone with the title "I'm Blown Away," but I figured I should do something I have a chance of completing! The basic idea will be to get the friendly robot man up the platforms made treacherous by random strong winds, which can, of course, blow you away. The blue squares will be caves that Mr. Robot can cower in and stay safe from the wind. So far, I think I have the movement and jumping feeling pretty good, and the wind does indeed blow you across the screen. Next I need to design the win states and lose states, and of course, find some art.

 

Anyway, I am hoping this will spur me on to actually finish a game for once! I have a hard drive full of barely started projects and this would be the first thing I could actually show someone. Looking forward to seeing what everyone makes!

 

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Well, I have something playable, and sometimes it even feels a bit like a game! Flying off either side of the screen is game over, and if you reach the flag at the top you win. I have some screen shots, but they are mostly just showing off the art I got from this website:

 

http://opengameart.org/content/generic-platformer-tileset-16x16-background

 

I think my biggest achievement was making very simple tile based map editor (you can see it in the last screen shot). The left side of the screen is the map being made where you can highlight tiles with the arrow keys. The right edge of the screen has all the tiles from the sprite sheet, and if you click on one it will change the highlighted tile to that clip. The "map file" it generates is just a text file with a series of numbers that each represent a tile type, so it's not very sophisticated, but it works. It's a little absurd how pleased I was to get this to work...

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Tools engineering is a super important thing that almost always gets relegated to being a thing you throw junior programmers at in the industry, and as a designer this can be incredibly frustrating when your implementation efficiency, (and thus your burn rate) are directly tied to something that's hacked together or poorly maintained.

 

Having warm satisfying feelings about getting an editor working isn't absurd at all in my world!

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Thanks for the encouragement, Xeneth! The more I work on this, the more I realize the real accomplishment for me will be having a working game engine (with very few features, to be sure). I'm not sure if the game itself is going to be any fun, but maybe next time!

 

I had some students not show up for lessons yesterday, so I recorded some music for the Title Screen, Death Screen, and Win Screen (I am a musician in real life). Not sure if it really matches the theme of the game, but I was bored and I figured I should put something competent in the game!

 

https://soundcloud.com/njefferyviola-1/vieuxtemps-capriccio-lose-music

 

https://soundcloud.com/njefferyviola-1/big-rock-candy-mountain-title-music

 

https://soundcloud.com/njefferyviola-1/idlish-thumbs-theme-win-music

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These are really good! You're like a proper musician and stuff. I like how solo violin is kind of a counterpoint to the game's visual style. I'm all about seemingly-incongruous musical choices!

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I had fun with this! Took me about 10 minutes and 15 attempts to reach the top; I didn't want to let the game beat me. I was actually quite surprised the first time I got blown away. It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that there was a reason why the game was called I'm Blown Away! It was a good moment, and I'm dumb.

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Thanks for checking it out! I'm glad you were able to beat it, I sent it to a friend to check out and he said it was too hard for him. I was actually going to move some platforms and make it a bit easier, but I ran out of time.

 

One thing I noticed while playing through the game a bunch to test things was that the placement of the caves (which I first chose pretty much completely at random) almost inevitably leads to a few seconds of waiting around with nothing to do right before the last set of jumps up to the flag. At least when I played, I pretty much always reached the last cave very soon after a wind gust had passed. There was never enough time to just continue up to the flag, though, and I would have to wait around in that last cave for the next gust to get the most amount of time possible to do the last few jumps. Of course this really kills the momentum of the game, and it made me realize how carefully levels have to be designed in good platformers!

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The wind was too extreme for me. This is a system I don't think i could ever master. Cool concept.

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This looks and sounds really nice, and it's a cool idea. I got within inches of the flag but the character handling was just a little too tough for me to finish it!

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Hey guys, thanks for checking out the game! Sorry for not responding sooner, I've been away a bit. I'm looking forward to the next jam. I think I have a better idea how to approach the process now, so hopefully I will be able to spend more time tuning details in the next game and making something that people can finish!

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I was blown away pleased with this game! I liked the look of it, and it was pretty tough. I didn't even get close enough to see the flag because of how quickly it punishes when you're caught out. The handling was a bit rough though, made me just miss jumps more than a few times. Then again, maybe a robot ought to be stiff.

 

If you want to see the stream of me playing the game, it's here, and all the games are timecoded in the description:

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Hey there! This was actually really fun, although I was severely hampered by a sticky left-arrow (thanks to my fiancee spilling green tea on my keyboard last week :o). But it was amazing how much I wanted to get to the top of that damn mountain! Never did make it, but I'm definitely going to try.

 

I streamed my playing your game, and you can find it at

Congratulations for your successful first game!

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Oh man, thanks SuperBiasedMan and phill for streaming the game! It was really interesting to see actual people interact with the game mechanics. It made me realize that the movement system is really just annoying, and not fun. I put in mechanics for acceleration and deceleration, mostly just to see if I could. I guess I thought that a more complex movement system would be inherently better, but I just pulled out Spelunky and it doesn't seem to have any of that nonsense!

 

I just uploaded a new version (BlownAway 1.2.zip) which tweaks the controls a bit. The original version had a system where the player would have to decelerate for a few frames before turning around when changing direction. This one takes out that deceleration time. Also, the acceleration rate has increased. I think it is a little less annoying this way!

 

I don't really think it's worth redownloading, but maybe if other people check it out, they will have an easier time!? If you really want to hear the Win Music, you can just find mp3 in the folder. Thanks again to everyone who played it!

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