Wizard Jam - Idle Thumbs Game Jam Interest Gauge / Chit Chat corner

[Spenny]

I often recommend Construct 2 as a game making tool for newbies, but its been years since I last used it.  Would there be any interest in watching a stream of me navigating the intro tutorial and then maybe trying to add additional features that the viewers come up with, interested?

[Salacious Snake]

I'm down. I've wanted to make a twine game for ages, but I've never quite gotten motivated enough to try it. Peer pressure should help!

 

Maybe I'll make some annoying music to go along with it.

[Hermie]

I'm down. I've wanted to make a twine game for ages, but I've never quite gotten motivated enough to try it. Peer pressure should help!

 

Maybe I'll make some annoying music to go along with it.

 

This is me too! Though easter is a bad timing. I will probably be able to hang around in the second half and do some feedback and/or light contribution.

[Dinosaursssssss]

This is me too! Though easter is a bad timing.

 

Yeah, I'd like to do April 10 - 24 to get a little out of the way of Easter. I think I mentioned this date a couple pages ago but it was the last post on a page so I don't think anyone read it.

 

Anyway I put those dates in the op along with some other stuff (people willing to help / looking for teams, free tools, theme stuff)

 

Ooh, and Ludum Dare is smack in the middle of those dates (April 17th - 19th).

Edited March 13, 2015 by Dinosaursssssss

[bakelite]

I'm terrible at working within time constraints, but I'll try to make something.

[Deadpan]

For people who want to make Twine things I can even offer a little bit of guidance.

[SuperBiasedMan]

This is useful site for anyone who is interested but feels totally inexperienced and unsure where to start:

http://www.sortingh.at/

 

It basically tries to figure out what kind of game you'd like to make and then helps set you up with resources that will help. Obviously there's plenty of people here who'll also help with more specific info, but if you're a bit unsure of where to even begin this site might help set you on a path and then feel free to ask people questions on here!

[root]

I would like to participate too, if anyone is willing to noodle with UE4.  I'd like to teach myself the asset creation/import pipeline for the Unreal editor, so making some relatively simple 3d environmental art for whatever someone is putting together would be ideal for me.

[Dinosaursssssss]

By strange coincidence, the Giant Bomb forums are also running a jam soon! Its ending the week before I'd like to run this one (they end the 5th, we'll be starting the 10th) so if you're overflowing with video game podcast based game ideas you can do both.

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/organizing-a-giant-bomb-game-jam-1766467/

[Patrick R]

I have an idea for a falling block puzzle game that's "Dance of the Treasure Goblin" and a "Cesar's Day Off" sort of idea for "On Blade". I have zero skills to implement them, so if you're interested send me a message I guess?

[clyde]

I have an idea for a falling block puzzle game that's "Dance of the Treasure Goblin" and a "Cesar's Day Off" sort of idea for "On Blade". I have zero skills to implement them, so if you're interested send me a message I guess?

 

How do you imagine the falling blocks?

-Is it 2d? 

-Are there matches?

-What happens when they match?

[Patrick R]

2D. Color matching 3 or 4 gems (depending on the block size), like

(with a similarly sized playing field as Columns), except that the goal isn't just to keep the screen from filling up (though a game over will occur if that happens), it's to match the colors in a specific order. There is an ideal order, which the player can see visualized on the side of the screen, and the goal is to get that order 100% (complicated by the fact that the order of gems falling is randomized). After making a certain number of matches (say, ten to fifteen) the board is completed.

 

The order you matched gems will correspond to an order of dance moves that the goblin performs for a panel of fantasy judges. This panel of judges will give it/him/her/them a score, figure skating style, based on how close to the ideal order it is. The % of the ideal order the goblin achieves corresponds to how much the floor of the board has risen. If it gets a low % than the floor rises more and the next round will be much harder because there's less room to maneuver and the player is more likely to fill up the screen. If it's 100% than the floor doesn't rise and only change for the next round is that the blocks fall slightly faster.

 

The theme is fantasy and different rounds have different fantasy race judges, different environments. Maybe there's some light story stuff in between about the hard-knock world of high fantasy dance competitions. Everyone tells the goblin it/he/she/they has no chance because goblins aren't graceful like other races (maybe it/he/she/they has an elven rival). Maybe it's basically a high fantasy 8 Mile about fancy dancing. Maybe the player has to do some basic Space Channel 5/DDR music game stuff during the dance sequences to earn bonuses, maybe it's satisfying enough to watch your little goblin dance it's/his/her/their heart out. Maybe this is too much to bite off for a game jam.

[clyde]

Thanks for getting more specific Patrick. Reading the description, it seems like this is a good opportunity to give folks an idea of what would be involved on the game-engine side of a project like this. I would say that I'm an intermediate game-programmer who works pretty much exclusively in Unity. There are many, many ways to do any one thing in programming and having only been doing it for a year, I'm aware of only a small subset of the tools and techniques available. Other more experienced programmers have many more tools and techniques that I may not be aware of. Also, Unity is set-up in such a way that some specific things are very easy while other things take much more effort; use of physical forces, basic 2D and 3D movement, lighting, 3D camera-perspectives, audio-integration are all things that can be done very easily. There are even ready-made first-person and third-person controllers that you can just drop into a gameworld and start walking around in minutes (if the world has physics applied). So even though 3D exploration is more complex than a match-three game, when working in Unity a 3D exploration game is much easier to program than a match-three game because much of the 3D-explorer work is already done for you. I mention my skill-level and the tendencies of Unity because I don't want this to sound like a conclusive opinion, this is just where I'm coming from with my current ability and tools; someone else might be familiar with some match-three tool that makes all this effortless. Still, it's totally possible, I just want to break down the different things you mentioned by how much time and effort they would take. That way folks who have little experience in Unity can get an idea of how to evaluate and prioritize features. As an additional disclaimer, there are people here who probably know of tools and techniques within Unity that would greatly reduce the amount of effort; my opinion on this is not conclusive at all. 

2D. Color matching 3 or 4 gems (depending on the block size), like

(with a similarly sized playing field as Columns), except that the goal isn't just to keep the screen from filling up (though a game over will occur if that happens), it's to match the colors in a specific order.

 

This

demonstrates how to build a match-three game in Unity. I'm not posting it to say "If you want it, then make it." I'm constantly reminded that we all have limited time for getting good at shit, and every time we decide to learn something new, we are giving up time for another activity. I'm posting that series because it can provide a sense of what level of detail needs to be put into a system for a game like this when using Unity. As a bonus, it is an excellent tutorial for beginners, so maybe someone will see it and realize that game-programming is an activity they would like to replace smoking cigarettes with. 

 

An conceptual break-down of this project would be more like this:

-Create a  grid of gameObjects and assign colors to them. 

-Create a system for selecting gems and displaying that those gems are selected.

-Create a system that allows gems to determine if the two selections are valid (typically this means that they are side by side, but they still have to be able to get a list of all available neighbors).

-Create a system for switching places when two valid selections are made.

-Create a system that instantiates new gems and drops them into the board.

-Create a system that checks for whether or not a match is made.

-Create a system that checks to see if the board has filled up.

 

Now let's consider the goal of matching colors in a specific order rather than checking neighbors to see if they are the same color as themselves. 

 

 

There is an ideal order, which the player can see visualized on the side of the screen, and the goal is to get that order 100% (complicated by the fact that the order of gems falling is randomized).

 

The ideal order would probably be a randomized two dimensional array (also know as a grid), this is not very hard to make. The way we make this is to create a loop for assigning all of the x values on a grid and then put a loop that assignis all the y values inside of the x-value loop. It sounds hard but it's not. Displaying that grid as small, non-selectable, non-movable gems would also be pretty easy since we can use most of the stuff we made for the playable grid. Since the grid are the same size (assumably) it also wouldn't be very hard to iterate through all the gems in one grid to check and see if they match gems of similar placements in the second grid, especially because the x/y values would assumably be the same. So when one grid checks to see if the gem at position (5,8) is the same color as the gem in the second grid, it will be checking for (5,8) there too so not much logic is needed for the check.

 

After making a certain number of matches (say, ten to fifteen) the board is completed.

 

This is super easy. I could just make a integer-value that increases by 1 everytime a match is made. I would tell it to check to see if it has reached the maximum-value that I have assigned it each time it adds one to its own value and if it reaches the max (or goes over) the completed-board part of the script could run. 

 

The order you matched gems will correspond to an order of dance moves that the goblin performs for a panel of fantasy judges. 

 

There are a couple of necessary systems here:

-We have to keep track of the order in which we match the gems. Not too hard, just an array of values that we populate each time a match is made.

-Draw a goblin and probably a stage of some sort.

-Create an amount  of goblin dance-moves (as many as we have colors? ) This step could be infinitely complex or stupidly simple. For instance, a dance move could be a 2D  sprite rotating or rising up or shaking or changing size; those would require very little time and effort to write, but we would be writing a new system for each of those moves. Alternatively, if you are talking about a goblin doing teh lawn-mower or the sprinkler, then that would be a matter of firing off a sequence of animated sprites which is not difficult at all for the programmer, but can greatly increase the number of goblins that need to be drawn. 

-Impliment the reading of the array and firing off of the dance moves in such a way that they don't all happen at the same time or interupt each other. The easiest way to do this is probably to use coroutines. I can do it, but I  rarely use them so it would take me a while to figure out how to use them again, they have particular syntax which is not intuitive for me. The basic idea is that using a coroutine, you can tell the methods to wait until another method has completed. 

-The fantasy judges would need to be drawn.

 

This panel of judges will give it/him/her/them a score, figure skating style, based on how close to the ideal order it is. The % of the ideal order the goblin achieves corresponds to how much the floor of the board has risen. If it gets a low % than the floor rises more and the next round will be much harder because there's less room to maneuver and the player is more likely to fill up the screen. If it's 100% than the floor doesn't rise and only change for the next round is that the blocks fall slightly faster.

 

The theme is fantasy and different rounds have different fantasy race judges, different environments. Maybe there's some light story stuff in between about the hard-knock world of high fantasy dance competitions. Everyone tells the goblin it/he/she/they has no chance because goblins aren't graceful like other races (maybe it/he/she/they has an elven rival). Maybe it's basically a high fantasy 8 Mile about fancy dancing. Maybe the player has to do some basic Space Channel 5/DDR music game stuff during the dance sequences to earn bonuses, maybe it's satisfying enough to watch your little goblin dance it's/his/her/their heart out. Maybe this is too much to bite off for a game jam.

 

I might come back to breakdown that part later. Either way, I think this might be a useful post for understanding what takes time in Unity and what doesn't. I'm not trying to say it's a worthwhile idea or not a worthwhile idea, I just want to point out where the labor goes because time spent doing one thing can be spent doing something else and if you know what takes more time while conceptualizing the game, then you can evaluate cost/benefit more accurately. I hope this inspires y'all rather than discouraging you. Like I said, some things can be done in Unity incredibly quickly, and folks using other game-engines can do other things much faster (or slower). Personally, seeing how fast a walking-mechanic in a crudely drawn 2D environment is inspires me. The same could be said for randomizing sounds, objects, colors, lights, and applying physics to anything. A lot can be done very easily and everything can be done if enough time and effort is put into it. 

[Patrick R]

That post was awesome. I doubt I will have the time to make it myself for the game jam but it absolutely gave me a better idea of the kind of preliminary work that goes into a even a game I consider "simple".

[clyde]

I still feel that I haven't managed to communicate what is simple to implement. Again, it's difficult to do because it varies from game-engine and programmer. I am considering making a couple of Unity-builds that take very little time in hopes that folks who aren't familiar with Unity can get an idea of what aspects of a game can be taken for granted because Unity does them for you. It's like trying to explain what a musical step-sequencer does and doesn't do to someone who hasn't used one before. The things that the application does for you make some types of music easier to make and some types remain difficult. I think it would be fun to make a pu-pu platter of Unity-structures for people to sample from for ideas.

[clyde]

I'll need some place-holder art-assets for my pu-pu platter of demos. If any of y'all have image-files or sounds that might inspire further developments, give me some links.

.png and .mp3 are preferred, but not required.

Scribbles and fart-noises are fine.

[Spenny]

The puzzle game is one of those gotcha! genres in game dev. From the outset you're dealing with a "simple" game right, as you yourself can easily internalize what it means to match 3 say, but when you go to actually implement it you realize that writing code for it is complex because of its nature as such a raw representation of rules. I think platformers are a similar gotcha! because so many of the earliest games (Mario) are platformers, but if you were to code one from scratch you realize there are a lot of components involved. These are both lessons I learned the hard way. 

 

Choosing the right engine can help with any genre though.

[Deadpan]

Scribbles and fart-noises are fine.

 

And that's why skeletons (of games) fart like that.

[Vasari]

The puzzle game is one of those gotcha! genres in game dev. From the outset you're dealing with a "simple" game right, as you yourself can easily internalize what it means to match 3 say, but when you go to actually implement it you realize that writing code for it is complex because of its nature as such a raw representation of rules. I think platformers are a similar gotcha! because so many of the earliest games (Mario) are platformers, but if you were to code one from scratch you realize there are a lot of components involved. These are both lessons I learned the hard way. 

 

Choosing the right engine can help with any genre though.

 

Doing a game design degree, this is exactly what people thought about point-and-click adventure games. "Everything is just stuff you click on, so I just have to make the art and the story, right?" I know loads of people who tried to build one, before they realised that what it actually involves is creating unique code for interacting with every object. Personally I'd say the easiest style of game to get started with is a top-down shooter or exploration game. There's no platforming or gravity, no complicated menus or inventory screens, and no serious logic. You start by making a character move around, then make walls with collision, enemies that follow the player, and bullets that shoot out from the player and disappear when they hit a wall or enemy. 90% of the game is creating, moving and destroying sprites. Obviously there are a dozen ways to make it more complicated, but it's very easy to reach the stage where you've made something fun.

[Synnah]

I'm down for this, given that I've been looking for a way to basically force myself to learn UE4 for a while now. Using Idle Thumbs titles as inspiration flooded me with ideas, too! 'Nineties Cockpit Freakout' is one of my favourite titles, and I have a pretty solid idea for it already. I also like the idea of using 'Dot Gobbler' to remake the C64 game with the story that they made up in the episode. But maybe 'Shambling, Goofy' would be a good way to start the Twine horror game I've wanted to make for a while. Options!

 

So yeah, I've got a tiny amount of experience with UE3 and UE4 already, but I'll happily accept any help that's available. I kind of want to try to do everything myself; It's basically possible to make a game in UE4 without coding, so I'll avoid it if possible, but I've got a Software Engineering degree in my distant past, so I can probably figure things out. I'm going to give Blender a shot, too; I've done a few things in Maya before, so I have a foundation to build on, but if anyone is familiar with it, help would probably be appreciated. I've got music and audio covered.

 

Speaking of which, I'm happy to lend my knowledge of Ableton Live and FL Studio (It's been a while since I used the latter, but I can always install the latest version and get up to speed), along with Sound Forge and Audacity. Or if you want to make some C64 music with GoatTracker! I don't know if I'll have time to do audio for someone else's project, but I'd like to. I'll see how much time I've got!

 

I'll need some place-holder art-assets for my pu-pu platter of demos. If any of y'all have image-files or sounds that might inspire further developments, give me some links.
.png and .mp3 are preferred, but not required.
Scribbles and fart-noises are fine.

 

Here's a bunch of sound effects I made with my mouth for an old TIGSource jam; .wav format. I don't remember if they're any good or not!

[tegan]

"Shambling, Goofy" sounds like a good thing to find in the options menu of Zombie Hawk's Pro Skater.

[zerofiftyone]

"Shambling, Goofy" sounds like a good thing to find in the options menu of Zombie Hawk's Pro Skater.

 

Ha, so true!

[clyde]

I put this together in a couple of hours this morning. WASD and controller should work. Press "R" to restart if you get stuck or fall off. The frog is drawn by Simbiotiqu.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/odds-and-ends/2015+Wizard+Jam/buildAgain.html
I'm going to try and do more of these little projects to give y'all an idea of what type of things can be done quickly in Unity. There are certain standard assets and scripts that make things like this very easy to accomplish when you know where things are.

Also, I didn't limit how much... exponential growth can occur, so it will eventually crash after a while (I think).

[Akidu]

Hahaha clyde that frog was fantastic. nice. 

 

I guess ill repost this, I put this together recently as an interactive demo thing for a sound job at a gamestudio. The sounds not actually that great but I was hoping they would see how willing I was to dedicate time to something. https://www.dropbox....GtjEFbCJwa?dl=0 Its pretty much entirely based on googled scifi pics because im no artist. 

 

Iv since learned the audio is kinda broke. certain noises are glitched out a little(passingships) bit which bums me out. At the time i was working on this I thought it was just my soundcard and would work on other pcs.. 

[Brett E]

I'd like to help out. I mostly art but also have some experience of playmaker (unity visual scripting).