SA GameDev Challenge X - Vote For Your Favorite Dingus

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Who shall win the Community Choice Award?! This poll is closed.
Zero-Grab Kitty	13	10.57%
Go Fish!	4	3.25%
Sub Optimal	1	0.81%
All Senior Citizens Should Have Life Alert	15	12.20%
PZZL	8	6.50%
Coinless	1	0.81%
Conservation of Momentum	2	1.63%
Echo	4	3.25%
Critical Admission	4	3.25%
VectoRocket	9	7.32%
Impulse	34	27.64%
Sandlot Basenoball	1	0.81%
Slam Fighter II	27	21.95%
Total:	123 votes

[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

Japanese Phone Box posted:

I failed, but I'm looking forward to the december jam.
Hopefully life doesn't get in my way again.

Speaking of when is the winter jam supposed to be? It's something I'm looking forward too but I have a bunch of travel in December.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2015 00:53

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 15:42

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

SharpenedSpoonv2 posted:

It's tentatively scheduled for next June, I believe.

I thought there was talk of one happening around the Winter?

Good to see Slam Fighter getting a lot of community votes though, I put in mine for Impulse myself but I'm just terrible at typing games (and also I'm a sucker for any game that has a really well implemented Shotgun).

# ¿ Aug 11, 2015 21:19

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

Chernabog posted:

I got you. But then TheOrange made me question myself.

Yeah, I was being dense there, my bad. Looking forward to doing another game jam though, Ludum Dare might be fun but I'm not sure I want to stress myself out with a 72-hour jam before a bunch of travel.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2015 00:53

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

That was the main issue I had with Slam Fighter myself, I'm sure a latency timer (or a practice mode) would be a huge help. I also think you guys should add a window scaling option, there's some really gorgeous sprite work but it didn't want to work full-screen for me (DPI scaling on Windows is probably the cause), leading to playing in a tiny window where I couldn't see all the details in their full glory.

JonTerp posted:

Octo-jam is in October! Perfect small ~byte-sized~ game jam! :V

https://github.com/JohnEarnest/Octo

This sounds really interesting, I might have to check it out, thanks!

# ¿ Aug 12, 2015 22:55

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

sighnoceros posted:

Glad you liked it! Yeah the shotgun is definitely a bit OP but I think only if you have good control of your movement. Really new players tend to get stuck in a corner and just shoot at enemies coming at them. Then they learn about the grapple hook and hook onto nests and shoot them with the machine gun. Then once you get good at moving around you can zip from nest to nest, slide right up close and blast it once with the shotgun at point black and move on to the next while barely stopping at all. I tried to balance the game in such a way that even the first two groups of people would be able to last a while and not feel too frustrated, but when I go back to it I definitely want to start rewarding more of the advanced gameplay as well.

Out of curiosity is there ever an end point to Impulse or just once you die? I think I got up to Wave 9 myself before having to step away for other things but I've been meaning to go back to it. Just curious if you went procedural on it and if that helped you guys out or caused any difficulties.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2015 23:04

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

Xibanya posted:

Thank you!! A lot of love went into those little piles of pixels even if the results ended up teeny.

turns into...

...only like 115px tall... Of course the game's resolution was always intended to be 640 x 480, just like the classics. Can you give me more info on your setup? Fullscreen has worked on all four of the computers on which I've play-tested the game.

As for a practice mode, did you try the tutorial? Barring that, I know I used hotseat vs. mode to practice myself. I would say I'll mention the window scaling to my dev but I know he lurks this thread so he probably already knows.

But yeah the latency thing and maybe some kind of setup wizard I think will win over anybody who isn't already. This weekend I had a huge shock when I tried to play the game on a bluetooth keyboard and uh...well, the results weren't pretty, I'll leave it at that.

Speaking of this weekend, we showed some non-goons several of the entries in the contest. It was interesting seeing what our friends thought were the funniest entries vs. what Ziggy Starfucker and I thought were the funniest, particularly since a lot of the games were deliberately made to appeal to ...local flavor? I'll put some observations - not as actual critique since I know everybody was quite aware of their target audience.

Was a little bummed out that our pals were not suuuuper amused by Cinder. They did think it was funny -- they liked the skeleton DDR, Cosby joke, golddigger jokes among others, but while Ziggy and I were in stitches over "This cat is horseshit," our friends' reactions were a bit more subdued.

Fired up what.exe -- honestly I didn't think that our non-goon friends would find this game that appealing since it's so aggressively inscrutable, but they ended up playing through it multiple times and really enjoying it! Out of the games we saw that night, I think this one got played the longest, and that's counting Slam Fighter II!

Our "normal" friends LOVED Sub-Optimal and I think they will add it to their regular rotation of games.

They also liked No Chute, I'm sure they will revisit it. I think one of my friends remarked that the birds in the game are secretly coordinating to kill the player character - not because they're in league with the witch, they're coordinating to kill you just because birds are assholes.

Everyone loved Zero Grab-Kitty for its aesthetics but our friends didn't stick with it as long as I thought they would because they got kind of frustrated. But I'm pretty sure it's not a flaw with the game, my friends just need to git gud.

Ziggy Starfucker fired up An Video Game to a different group of non-goon friends on a different night and I was giving him sideways eyes because I thought our friends wouldn't really get it but they ended up loving it so much that I think we did 2 playthroughs and we ended up discussing the game, it's characters, it's narrative, for at least 20 mins afterward.

E: how could I forget! Our friends also went through a few levels of Critical Admission which leads me to what might be a useful comment for the team that made it! Our friends really enjoyed it and got a big kick out of how irreverent and shamelessly gross it is, but the friend who was actually playing the game got frustrated because it looks like they left the scalpel either in a patient who was sent away or buried it under the pile of stuff. They said they'd like some sort of means of getting a new one easily if they lose the old one since it's such an key component of gameplay.

I had to go back to it, it's not so much that it breaks in fullscreen just that all the windows on my monitor lose their scaling until I log out and back in, there is some blurriness and stretching in the fullscreen mode as well but I assume that's pretty much unavoidable. I'm using a dual monitor setup (4k on one, 1080 on the other) with Windows 10 which is why I have the scaling turned on and a number of other programs that go full screen cause all kinds of issues with it.

That's really interesting about the art though, does that mean that the animation is preserved in a vector format as well if you really wanted to go back to it? I assume there's a bunch of cleanup and lighting you have to do on the pixel art though that might not be present.

I did try the tutorial and I had issues there as well, for what it's worth when I tried turning off the sound and tried hitting it based on visual cues I did a little better but I could never get the first letter in a set, it kind of kills the rest of the game to play it that way though. A time adjustment might help, I don't really have another game like it that I could test to see if it that's an issue with my setup or not though. To some extent being able to see the pattern as it comes up on the UI might help a ton as well, just following the black circle seems to work sometimes but never felt entirely consistent.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 00:30

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

Xibanya posted:

Whoops, looks like I missed TheOrange's post!

Have you recently upgraded to Windows 10? I noticed that I was having fuzziness issues (chiefly in Photoshop) immediately afterward that weren't fixed until I redownloaded the latest video card drivers for my machine. If that's not the case, I definitely will investigate this further with my dev.

Most of the art I did in the beginning is indeed preserved in vector format since I knew I would probably end up wanting to adjust the size. For the first three weeks my technique was
1. draw the pose and scan it in/draw the pose in photoshop
2. make vector of drawing in illustrator and lay down flat (solid) colors
3. import image to photoshop, scale down, do highlights/tints, and cleanup (particularly the outlines, since those pretty much HAVE to be done by hand)

So that left me with a week to go and Fumi, Bunny, and Serghei complete. This method is rather time-intensive as you may have gathered, so during the last week my animation technique shifted to this:

Make a rough of what I want to see, then cleanup.

Still, in one week I managed to get done what had previously taken me three, which means I really managed to improve! B. Stag was the last sprite to get done and all of his stuff was done in two days (although you can kind of tell it was a rush job.)

I see what you mean, I think the latency adjustment will really help. That and we might want to look at other libraries/means of synching the music with the video. Ziggy Starfucker had some impressive skills growth on this game too, since he had never before made a rhythm game or had to deal with syncing audio before, so given the fact that this is the first game of its kind for him, he deserves mad props.

Yep, Windows 10, if it's locking to 640x480 then it might be a graphics card scaling thing.

Sounds like one hell of a process for making the art, at least it sounds like it sped up as you got more used to it. The thought of using Illustrator to help make pixel art is kind of intriguing though since you get the fallback if you need it.

I want to try my hand at making a rhythm game one of these days but it sounds like there are a number of technical hurdles. Personally I'd suggest that maybe having the circle go behind each letter on a smooth scroll rather than the blips.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 01:08

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

sighnoceros posted:

Edit: I didn't mean to write that much. Guess I have some stuff ready for the site when the post-mortems are added.

Hah, no problem, was a really interesting read. If it's any consolation I think the arena shooter aspect worked in the games favor as part of the jam. Campaigns can work but they often feel unbalanced or super short given the amount of time you have, it's something I regret doing with my game but I'm not sure how we could of made it work otherwise.

Polo-Rican posted:

If there's a winter game jam I'd argue that it should just replace the summer game jam. This game jam always gets like 1/4 the attention it rightfully should because a lot of poo poo is always going on in the summer. By this point in 2015 there are like 20 active users on the something awful forums and I'm not sure if that audience can sustain two yearly game jams.

I kind of get this sentiment but if anything I think the jam itself should just be less attached from the forums, the person that did our art (Larry) isn't a forums member or has any real interest but I got him to join on just by the fact that it was a month long thing and lower pressure than something like a Ludum Dare. At the same time opening it up further could bring in more people and thus more games to judge as well. Was actually a bit surprised when someone I talked to at a random meetup had heard about this game jam in particular though.

Xibanya posted:

That's a really good idea -- I think Ziggy mentioned trying a combined approach - the pulsing beat-balls (or whatever they are) along with a scrolling indicator. We're totally swamped just improving what we have right now because blinkeve1826 is going to show off the game in public this weekend and we want to get her the best build possible before then, but once we finally have a chance to breathe, we can start looking at more in-depth revamps. (For my part, I'd love to redo a ton of the sprites from the ground up!) In the week and a half since the contest ended we've still been working almost as hard on Slam Fighter II as we were during the contest (with more food and sleep time allocated, of course)! This game is getting a life of it's own and I'm completely obsessed now.

That's cool, looking forward to seeing where you go with the game. Even though people in the thread have generally been pretty kind I feel like the online feedback has been more valuable in it's criticism than some of the stuff I've got from showing off in-person.

Nanomachine Son fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Aug 13, 2015

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 02:38

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

dupersaurus posted:

To those that have played Basenoball, could I do some brain picking? I'm working on figuring out how to redo the numbers, and while I don't want do think too deeply before getting the final review, I have some notions:

* I agree with the Gong Show that the numbers being run need to be more transparent, although I don't know by how much (I don't view the players seeing it as a dice thing). How much would you like to know about how the calculations work?
* Viewing the math as die rolls instead of trying to figure out an algorithm to turn stat values into a probability roll will likely be easier. Would also be easier to communicate to the player.

With that in mind:

1) Roughly stay the course with the current system, just fine-tune the numbers and math. Add a visual indicator to show what's happening, something like a bar that shows the base chances for each player, and how different actions will affect it.

2) Something involving a bunch of d6s. Perhaps something like each player gets X die (where X is their skill value), rolls, then picks the top Y die (where Y is the number of die the least-skilled player has) to do math with. Success is summing up the rolls, +/- modifiers.

3) Use dice, but a system like Quarriors or Dice Masters, where the faces are a combination of numbers and symbols, and the symbols have some special meaning beyond simple crunching numbers. Not entirely sure how this would work out, but maybe something like some faces are numbers and you sum your numbers, and any symbols you roll have special effects. This may be too systematic, though, making it a dice game involving baseball rather than a baseball game using dice.

Does any of that sound particularly compelling?

I know it's not the most direct comparison but if you could provide a percent like some poker games then that might help a little? If it's something I can directly relate to some kind of resource I'm spending as well then that might help as well. 2d6 isn't that confusing but if I'm comparing it across a list it might make it a bit more tedious. In general the only problem I ever have with a game displaying too much info is if it feels like it's making the decision for me or if it's a very occasional choice in the vein of an FTL.

For what it's worth I only briefly played through Baseonball and it was before you had the final graphics in so my opinion isn't the most valuable.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 04:48

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

GlyphGryph posted:

Would anyone be interested in seeing more work put into Broken, or is it more of a "played it, got the gimmick, game was frustrating gimmick was neat but wouldn't play again" sort of thing?

I still think the basic mechanic of having the game world be paused but come alive as you activate it is good, I think you really just need to work on the general platforming physics and do something about the knockback. I was able to play it up until the 2nd level but I honestly couldn't see what I was supposed to do in order to progress (series of platforms you activate with a switch), my best thought was I needed to time something with the knockback and the enemy but that seemed way to finicky to be pulled off reliably.

I think it's a problem I've had with puzzle platformers in general though where they eventually ask you to pull off something more mechanically complex than it seems to be the 'right' solution. Things like having to start back from a far away checkpoint or wait for a slow moving platform can get really tedious, especially when the basic gameplay feels more stiff. That part though might be my own personal gripe with games like Braid and Limbo however so take that for what you will.

Nanomachine Son fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Aug 13, 2015

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 05:25

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

GlyphGryph posted:

The platform puzzle just involved paused when the platforms were low enough to reach. You ride the first platform up to the second, and then the second up to the third.

But yeah, the physics were... not the ones we wanted. Personally I ended up enjoying many aspects of the knockback (I thought it was fun to throw your way to victory to quickly get by several parts), and I wonder if the problem wasn't so much the knock back as the design of the first areas that lead the player to be knocked back so much? A more gradual ramp up in difficulty I think would have helped a lot I think. Do you think the knockback might not have been so bad if you had an easier time avoiding it to begin with? If it's just "no, the knockback is bad even if rarer", how do you think it should work?

The game itself was originally supposed to be three times as long, and there were supposed to be two "lead ups" to each of the element you saw in the game. The knockback also wasn't supposed to apply to the sides of lift or carriers, turrets, or the back of trucks. Just... a lack of time. So those would probably be the major things I'd change if I went back and put some more work into it.

Also, for those asking about the music, side effect of putting the credits at the end, hah, it's a free/open source piece by Alan Singley.

Wait, I could re-pause things or it was a one-time shot? I would say that's maybe one other annoyance I had with the game is that if I activated an enemy on the first level I had to start over from the beginning since I couldn't avoid it on the platforms.

I think you have the right idea in general though, I think at least part of the problem with the knockback is that it doesn't seem relative to what hit you and you lose control for a pretty long while. I think by solving the hitbox problems on the platforms you'd avoid some of the more annoying moments though, maybe some way to regain partial air control if it exceeds a time duration would be nice but it might not feel appropriate.

Music wasn't bad, just for some reason any kind of light jazz-like music reminds me of United flights for some reason. At first I wasn't sure if it met the theme as well but I preferred it to some generic electronic beat that would of made it feel like it should of been fast paced.

dupersaurus posted:

I'm going to try to back the complexity down some, it got out of hand pretty quickly (turns out baseball is hard). Part of the idea of going to dice was that maybe a dice system would be easier to balance, but the more I think about it, the more I realize they have their own quirks.

Yeah, I think I wouldn't mind some more simple decisions in baseonball just due to the fact that if you're playing a full 9 innings then it would involve a pretty significant number of turns.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 22:00

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

GlyphGryph posted:

You could re-pause things as many times as you wanted, that was in fact the core mechanic and the intended solution to the (few) puzzles. Was that... unclear?

No, I must of missed that part entirely, that's probably my own fault though, if it was in a text box then I probably just skimmed over it. Would of certainly made the second level much, much easier.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 23:51

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

Afal posted:

Really disappointed in the feedback. I would have at least thought that splitting the games so only one judge looked at the game would mean that you'd have some more detailed feedback but I guess if you end up with a judge that ends up not liking the game (even if other judges could have things to say about it) then I guess you're screwed.

I'd be lying if I didn't say I feel like our review didn't have much depth, but I understand that there's only so much you can say. I feel like it's been better this year than in most but getting feedback on your work in general is kind of tough.

The big thing that I've taken away from the stream / review on Unarmed though is that my own biggest gripe with the game (I think the shield mechanic was too clunky, slow, and ineffective) hasn't been something I've seen other people taking issue with. The only common complaint I've seen personally is the difficulty which I think stems from our primary mechanic, but it's not the only reason why.

I might give a post-mortem a shot but I don't want to do a disservice to the rest of my team.

Congrats to the winners though, I'm actually kind of surprised by some of the winners, certainly there's some games I overlooked (Fishin' Hole, Zero Grab Kitty, Echo) that I should give another shot or play further.

Nanomachine Son fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Aug 15, 2015

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 04:05

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

Heisenberg1276 posted:

I'm really pleased with how well Critical Admission did - and we got a lot of great feedback Thanks everyone.

Well done to all the other winners and runners up, this years competition was tight - the quality seems to be really quite high.

Also thanks to all the organisers and judges - I feel this year's jam went very smoothly, the website worked great, and the grouping and review system means at the very least every game gets a review from someone who has really tried it. The gong show and judging were both very interesting too (though the judging was too late for me to finish). I don't know if I'll be back for the winter jam yet (it might be a little too close to my thesis submission), but I'll definitely be back for the summer jam next year.

Honestly I hope you keep working on Critical Admission, I'd kick in a couple bucks for a more fleshed out version I could play on my iPad.

And yeah, the organization and overall quality of the jam this time has been really impressive, I hope it takes off beyond just these forums.

Edit: I tried the new Slam Fighter build by the way, it does seem to work a little better but I probably need to adjust it a little more to make it work perfectly.

Nanomachine Son fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Aug 15, 2015

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 08:58

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 15:42

Nanomachine Son: Jan 11, 2007; !

Afal posted:

Unarmed

Things I liked:

Short and sweet puzzle game

Thank you for adding cheats cause I didn't want to deal with that loving wizard

Liked the goofy skull chat

Things I didn't like:

God this game is not suitable for trackpad users

I should have an actual desk so I can use a mouse

gently caress the wizard

Stars Awarded For:

Style (Does the game look good?): Cute simple style.

Control (Does the game control well?): If you use a trackpad it's awful. With a mouse it's a lot better. I imagine that a controller is the highly recommended suggestion/

Damage (Is the critical omission clear?): No Sword?

Agression (Is the game well polished?): I can imagine a longer version of this game would do well commercially

Bonus (Does the game fit any of my bounties?): no idea. There seems to be a locked door that I have no idea what it's for

Final Score: 3 out of 5 stars

Yeah, trackpads are not the best method haha. I actually found the game pretty easy to play with a controller, switching sides is a fair bit easier when you can just do it with the right stick. Also as the rear end in a top hat that created the wizard it's given me a number of thoughts about how to balance difficulty, he should spawn more flying skulls and they should move faster right?

Thanks for taking the time to go review all the games though and congrats to Impulse it looks like?

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 01:39

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