Ben X

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Hey guys!
Bit of an update on the Public Domain Jam.

 

Nicky Case, creator of indie game “Nothing To Hide” and organiser of the Open Game Art Bundle, has donated a $1000 prize to the highest rated game in the jam that releases its code and assets under the optional Creative Commons Zero waiver.
The Engine Co. have also joined, and are offering free Loom Turbo subscription (the premium edition of their cross-platform game engine, valued at $500) to the winning entry of every rating category (best art, best sound, best use of theme, etc.), and are giving a free month of Loom Turbo to anyone who wants to use it in the jam. Just download the sdk at their site and send [email protected] an email.

 

Finally, the top 100 games overall will receive a copy of the Kenney donation pack, a bundle of free to use art and sound assets.

 

There's already been some crazy stories talked about on the #pdjam tag on twitter - I can't wait to see what comes out of it.

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I used Loom at my old job and kinda frequently kept in touch with Ben and... another guy (I can't remember the name I'm the worst!!!). They were both super helpful and awesome whenever I had questions. Then I got laid off the day Iw as supposed to meet them when they visited my employer. Pretty cool! :D

 

I really like that engine as a rapid prototyping tool! It's quick and easy to learn (based on JavaScript) and quick and easy to make changes and immediately see them in game. Sometimes you don't even need to restart the game, you can just see them immediately. I'll vouch for it completely as an awesome tool.

 

...I don't know what all that does for anyone, but hopefully it'll incentivise people to try harder?!

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I originally posted this in "Idle Banter", because I'm a noob and completely missed this board :S

 

Hey Thumbs / Readers

 

I thought about putting this in the "Plug your shit" thread, if it should go there instead, please let me know.

 

Way, way back in ep 130 (around the 49min mark), Chris and Zach had a pretty passionate discussion about Pubilc Domain stories, and Chris lamented that fact that for the most part, new stories and characters just won't be added to the Public Domain any more because of copyright extending beyond the heat death of the universe.

 

Well, there's no reason we can't celebrate the stories that are. An idea formed listening to that ep, and it's been stuck in my head since then. Because I'm assuming that people here on the forums care not only about games, but about stories. So I'm proud to announce it here:

The Public Domain Jam

 

It's a while off, but I thought it'd give people time to think about what stories are important to them and how to retell them.

 

Also, there's a category for the craziest use of the source material, and if ANYONE can come up with something totally insane for this, it's you guys.

 

The original post

 

This started today and the theme is PAPER.

 

Hopefully my girlfriend and I will make something for it, as the family issues that threw a spanner/monkey wrench in the works for us the last time have settled a bit now. The plan is to use this as a way for her to start learning Unity by doing one of those 'recreate this example game' tutorials and then tweak it as much as she has the time/skill for, while I come up with some jokes and art to spice up what will likely be a pretty basic game.

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I've been having a loooot of fun this weekend working on my pd jam game...the theme gave me an excuse to try out something I've been meaning to do for a while now, and so far I'm really digging the results. It's really dumb, I can't wait to show it to people. Thanks for organizing, Gritfish!

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Show it to us, Dino!

 

I'm working on something too! It'll probably be weird and shit, but the idea is take a Grimm fairytale, and twist it up and present it as a Twine-ish Choose Your Adventure comic book thing. I don't know.. The story outline of it was written on the train home today, so this is going to end up being just gibberish..

 

Anyway, I picked 'The Seven Ravens.' and did a sketch yesterday.

 

Bn21ZhOCEAAssCJ.jpg

 

Prepare to be blown.. away..

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I only juuust got it to the point where I felt ready to show my game; here it is, my weekends labor of love: Surfenstein (note: music is placeholder, the friend I think I'll be working with is out of town until tonight.)

 

Lookin' forward to seeing your game soon BigJKO :)

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I only juuust got it to the point where I felt ready to show my game; here it is, my weekends labor of love: Surfenstein (note: music is placeholder, the friend I think I'll be working with is out of town until tonight.)

 

Lookin' forward to seeing your game soon BigJKO :)

 

 

Cool! Love the hand drawn look! Controls felt weird at first but I got used to them pretty quickly.

 

I ran into one bug, right before going off the jump which had a shark on it (I think it was a jump), my surfer totally stopped. Once I jumped the game carried on as normal though.

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Haha, man. That is quality game! Radical surfenStein!

 

The music slowed weirdly down at some point? Maybe it was just my imagination.

 

BACKFLIP!

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The music slowed weirdly down at some point? Maybe it was just my imagination.

 

Thanks!

 

Yea, the song is Miserlou which is definitely not public domain. I'm waiting on a friend who's said he'll make me a little surf rock tune to use but needed something temporary...I was using an unedited version of the song, but I thought slowing it down and adding some echo would make it more gothic horror?

 

Anyway there's another online jam coming up that sounds interesting, the Space Cowboy game jam, organized by Venus Patrol and Juegos Rancheros. I have an in-person jam the weekend of the 30th so between public domain and that I donno if I'll make something for the space cowboy one, but it's a fun theme and memorial day is coming up so who knows.

 

http://itch.io/jam/space-cowboy-jam

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Anyway there's another online jam coming up that sounds interesting, the Space Cowboy game jam, organized by Venus Patrol and Juegos Rancheros. I have an in-person jam the weekend of the 30th so between public domain and that I donno if I'll make something for the space cowboy one, but it's a fun theme and memorial day is coming up so who knows.

 

http://itch.io/jam/space-cowboy-jam

I am so Into This. The first jam I tried to work on with people from here kinda fizzled out (no disrespect meant to those involved, it was my fault too) but if anyone wants a design/music/sound collaborator to make something for this I'd be so down. I just finished uni for the year, whoooooole lotta time on my hands!

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Really, a game jam that overlaps July 4? Thanks.

 

Other than that, love that concept.

 

Might clobber something small in gamemaker or use it as an excuse to try a 2d game in unity. 

 

First thought: Mechanical Bull Riding, in space.

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Some cowboy doodles, need to learn to use restraint on colours. Also needs more space.

 

cowboydoodles.jpg

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Fuck This Jam 2014 (May 31st - June 6th, 2014) is a gamejam that challenges you to make a game in a genre you hate. As developers, we're all being told to make games we love playing, or games we love making. Genres we know the in and outs of, genres that we research before starting on a game. We ask you to do one simple thing: spend one week making a game in a genre you dislike, a genre you don't care about and a genre you don't know about.
If you love making arcade shooters, why not make a thoughtful puzzler? If you love narrative adventure games, why not make a third person shooter? The less you know, the more likely it is that you'll make something new and interesting.

 

Through utter ignorance for conventions and hate for the established rules of a genre, beautiful things can happen.

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Well, I ended up having almost no time to work on my public domain jam game after the weekend, but I got a song from a friend and overall I feel alright about what I put together. It's not exactly in the spirit of the jam, given the tenuous connection between this game and Mary Shelley's vision, but it was a good excuse to make a dumb little thing that I think is moderately fun. I ended up releasing it under CC0, cause why not, so there's a link to a github with the full source on the itch.io page.

 

http://dinosaursssssss.itch.io/surfenstein

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Haha, I love your game Dino. My hands are all over the keyboard when playing it, which is pretty fun.

Despite desperation towards the end, I actually managed to finish my entry. A Mignola-style comic book Twine game (Cwine) based on the Grimms fairytale "The Seven Ravens." When I say based on I mean I murdered any spirit left in that story and made it awful, but hey.. Look at the pretty pictures, everyone!

panel_09.png

www.diesiebenraben.com

Also, although there is absolutely no value to this, the game is almost like an MMO if you share your unfinished story's URL and "play" through it together. Boom! Nailed it. (In theory.. I haven't actually tried this.)

EDIT: Oh, sweet. I should've done some playtesting before putting this out. A lot of people miss the fact that you can click on the speech bubbles. So, yeah.. to advance click on the orange-tinted things that pop up every once in a while.

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When I say based on I mean I murdered any spirit left in that story and made it awful, but hey.. Look at the pretty pictures, everyone!

 

They ARE very pretty. I liked some of the dialog as well, and I think you were able to tell the story you wanted to very concisely so even with its brevity it feels pretty complete. Also I got a chuckle out of that "the goat" line. I think the only feedback I have is that it was a little unclear initially that the panels were interactive, and that clicking different things branched the story (maybe partly because I looked at the URLs and wondered why they were identical). And once I knew that the yellow-ish color indicated interactions, there were a few places where other elements of the image had similar enough coloring that I thought they were clickable as well. None of that really negatively impacted it though, I just thought it could have been a little more clear. Nice job!

 

edit: ha, just saw that you also got the same feedback in IRC while I was driving home.

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That Raven game was awesome. I wish it branched a bit more (even though this is obviously a lot of work to do) but you certainly nailed the Mignolia style.

 

Also not sure if this was an issue for anyone else and it may not be solvable even if it was an issue, but the experience was a bit roughened by the slow loading of the images that gave me placeholder graphics. It ruined the look of the page.

I didn't explain that well so I can grab you a screenshot to show if you don't follow me.

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Not that I could change it now for the actual entry, but a screengrab would be very nice! What should be happening when it loads images, is you first see the text just floating, then the speech bubbles and then the panel. Is that what happens? That's a result of not having enough time to put any sort of load indicator or something and hide anything that has loaded until the rest is loaded, if that makes sense..

There's a lot of rough spots, but any feedback is appreciated because I might put some time into this sometime in the future, with a new story and some more time to make it branch more (maybe also come up with ideas with regards to the fact that all of the stories exist persistently on the server, via the URL, and can theoretically be played together..)

And thanks! Thanks so much for playing this!

Some good, quality feedback: C5v5CRE.png

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Yeah, it is pretty much what you described. The text loads in a bunch down in the corner, I did a screenshot for you here:

 

post-34425-0-97813100-1401024198_thumb.png

 

The also this was just me highlighting that the speech bubbles you click disappear and then it takes a moment for the new one to appear.

 

The sharing of URLs could be particularly interesting for me as a way to link to a friend and ask them what choice they'd make in such a scenario. Or, if they'd already played a bit I could show them how my path went different to theirs. I think similar to how people enjoyed The Walking Dead's bits at the end where they say X% of people made this choice, focusing on the social idea of that and giving people a reason to interact about it would probably be a good way to go.

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I think there might be some way to make it start loading all images at startup, instead of when the user clicks the speech bubbles. Then there should be less popping, unless you blaze through the thing immediately before it can load the images.

Those are some solid ideas for the resistant URLs. The sharing thing would be more interesting if the story branched a lot more and had some randomness, making each story unique to a certain degree.

I'm really interested in returning to something similar to this some day. It's a fun way to do comics! For now I'll leave it as is, and then make some fixes to it once the PDJam voting period is over.

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Yeah, I imagine there's some way to fix it, just pointing it out so you've got the heads up.

 

I think varied text is the easiest way to add flavour without any new pictures. Also maybe if you make the comic digitally you could layer the panels so that you can swap characters for one another, or different props for each other and get multiple versions of a similar panel.

(it may have become noticeable that I like tackling creative logic problems)

 

If you do another make sure to plug it here somewhere, I'd like to see where else you go with it.

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Uh so I sat down to do some work on my space cowboy game since they extended the deadline a couple days and in an effort to make this more cowboy-y, went to find a cowboy hat model online.

 

uEyFYeO.png

And the description from the Turbosquid page:

Free coyboy hat!

Subdivision surfaces
Only quads
Special surprise as well!

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@Dinosaursssssss 

Holy shit. That's awesome. So if I see that hat in someone's game, I'll assume that they confessed the sins they have done to Christ and asked Him to forgive them.

 

@ BigJKO 

I think your game has a really accessible format. Accessible from the perspective of the player. That is, of course, that they know that they can click on things. 

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