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I hope the Spirit of the Jam is an actual ghost  Looking forward to the announcement.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:31
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Same except most of my weekends are also booked. I should really scope myself like I'm doing a one week jam. Which really means scoping myself like I'm doing a weekend jam with some time to polish.
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Jul 5, 2017 21:14
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It's totally bootlegging, I swear!
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Jul 9, 2017 19:36
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So this just made it into my code:code:
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Jul 12, 2017 04:38
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Options! Some of them even work temporarily! And a lesson learned late: think about your target resolution before you start making your assets. I'm likely going to continue rolling with 1024 x 600 because I didn't spend five minutes of thought upfront.
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Jul 13, 2017 06:32
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Startin' to look like a game! https://vimeo.com/225512186 Also one week in and not done with the core mechanics. But happy with the results of juice-as-you-go!
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Jul 14, 2017 04:59
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I know what's happening code-wise but in my mind's eye that guy just gets really angry. Have him turn red if he changes directions too many times in a second.
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Jul 14, 2017 06:43
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Spent all morning trying to come up with a directed acyclic graph relating a hodgepodge of tacked-on ship components to their apparent path back to the ship. Got it to work most of the time, but eventually an island would be created and muck everything up. Spent about 20 minutes replacing all of that with a Monte Carlo simulation. Now when a component disappears, its orphans pull in in an intuitive manner 99% of the time. Remember kids, it's a game jam: Good Enough is good enough! I think my coworker just bought that game on the Switch. Impressive, since yours isn't finished yet. Must've been a bootleg.
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Jul 15, 2017 20:34
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I've legit spent the better part of my activity for the last two days trying to nail down pausing. It was all well and good until I decided I wanted my options menu to be fetchable in-game. Then things got dicey. Let us not generalize this code.
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Jul 22, 2017 03:16
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https://vimeo.com/226572237 Initially I was going to have these prioritize targeting the player, but I like the free-for-all chaos that ensues. Now I've gotta tweak the spawn rates so that this is a thing that actually happens.
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Jul 22, 2017 19:17
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Make sure that kind of art is featured prominently on your game's page because I will totally play games with that kind of art.
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Jul 27, 2017 18:28
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Just a friendly reminder to start testing the release builds of your stuff, as they may behave differently than the development builds. Also we're to the point where minor changes to splash screens break in-game interactions in unfathomable ways. But there are just a few more cards to put on this house...
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Jul 28, 2017 02:09
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The first post and the subheading for awfuljams.com state the competition as running from July 7th through August 1st. I know we got the 7th and based on the wording I'd expect we get the 1st. But the timer implies that the event ends with the end of July 31st (or maybe I can't do timer math). Are these due Monday or Tuesday? I'd expect to have Tuesday (the 1st) to do last-minute work, but it'd be good to know if they're actually due by the end of Monday (the 31st). Edit: I'm dumb but my question still stands. Hammer Bro. fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 18:08
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Thanks for that; I'm less personally worried since now I definitely get the Monday I'd planned on. But I'd still like the ambiguity with regard to the deadline resolved. You'd think, given how frequently my day job requires dealing with the intricacies of dates and timezone representations, that I'd know how to read a calendar by now.
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Jul 28, 2017 18:18
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I just found out that my release builds do not work in any capacity, so my jamming will indeed be happy for these next few days. Test your builds, people.
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Jul 29, 2017 18:50
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Do the judges see the submission page, or do they just grab the judge builds blind? My page ended up being much more informative than my in-game "tips" screen, and while I know that in practice nobody reads anything (still gotta figure out how to deal with that), I hope that the judges at least in theory have a chance to scroll past that stuff.
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Jul 30, 2017 20:21
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Ugh, agh, augh! Done! May I present to you: Thriftynauts! I don't know how many hours I put into this little project this month, but it's probably more than I've spent in some entire years of hobby-devving. To that extent I'm already a winner. And also dead on the inside, wugh. I haven't played any games other than this in the last three weeks. And I've played quite a bit of this. Though to its credit I'm still enjoying every time I end up with a wildly imbalanced ship. I'm far too tired to provide a proper retrospective, and likely too lazy, but some key takeaways are:
https://vimeo.com/227846471 Aaaand it's bedtime!
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Aug 1, 2017 06:12
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I played some games! Bootleg Bernie -- My mic wasn't working when I recorded yours, which was a shame. I had a decent time punching people although I didn't realize I was supposed to be handing out flyers, recorded the whole album and only got caught once, and got walked in on while recording twice by people who didn't seem to want to walk away when I kept telling them that I was recording a thing and had no intention to pause so now they're gonna be Internet Famous. Broken promises all around. Good sound, fun although my tendons were achy before the clicking minigame, desirable playtime. Though I tried to skip the credits toward the end by pressing Enter and that just restarted them. Bootleg Miners -- This is the one where I realized sound wasn't working, so it also didn't have sound. I was sad that I couldn't appear to tool around with the siblings, but got a laugh out of the cart-hunt game. Though the carts only ever came up one at a time (instead of two), and I'm not sure if it went anywhere because there wasn't any obvious means to pick up the pace, so when I noticed my sound wasn't coming through on wave two I kinda wandered off. Love the noise Gus makes when he rustles up, though. Soul Castle https://vimeo.com/228013449 b00tl3g kr3w (Should've known that was one of yours.) https://vimeo.com/228013217 BAT-MAN https://vimeo.com/228013545 Often at reduced resolutions 'cause I have bandwidth quotas.
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Aug 2, 2017 06:18
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SharpenedSpoonv2 posted:
Dang, I know somebody who really wants that. I think there may be a bug with regard to embedded video on awfuljams.com. Any time I view my page it does not show the embedded video, but whenever I go to edit it the embedded video shows up just fine in the preview section. This persists across a wide range of browsers and OSs.
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Aug 2, 2017 22:29
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The winner of Best Game Page will receive a Steam copy of Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator!
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I fell into the usual trap of balancing the game around how I played it, which ends up with a lot less Junk than most people because I realize that Derelicts don't drop Junk (I should've made that more explicit) and also I can let the base get hit a lot in order to deliberately relieve some junk. Though I am happy with the aesthetic -- it came across to me as fairly meditative. Yes I hope to go mad with power, but the 15-minute-blocks of playtesting melted away in quick succession. Also Krita paintbrush effects were a life-saver. Biggest retrospective tip o' the jam from me: Carry a notepad. I picked up a tiny little pocketbook with a tiny little pocket pencil and made sure to have it on me at all times. Which is good, because I'd be in the darnedest of places and I'd have some sort of very important thought. There was precisely one that I didn't write down because it was so blindingly obvious that it didn't need writing. I may never know what that idea was.
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Aug 4, 2017 02:23
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Jo! You're not alone! I also had no idea how to score points in Fast Forward Record Rewind. I actually didn't even realize you could leave the recording device unattended. Fast Forward Record Rewind https://vimeo.com/228314404 Tamale Drive https://vimeo.com/228314067 DMCA Takedown - Seize and Desist https://vimeo.com/228314265 About out of upload quota for the week. Not sure when those reset.
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Aug 4, 2017 04:02
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Last one, I promise! (Because then I'm out of space until Saturday.) SimShine. Also known as: I am bewildered! https://vimeo.com/228316427
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Aug 4, 2017 04:29
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I feel your pain and honestly I still had a good time -- letting me continue despite "failure" was a smart design decision that I think all games should make these days. Like, to the extent that RPGs should just have a Movie Mode that just advances the main plot if you don't feel like doing things and adjusts your stats accordingly for when you dip back out into gamey mode.
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Aug 4, 2017 06:06
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SimShine I was pretty far gone by that point in the evening anyway -- had a rough bout with insomnia the night previous and was just waiting for the clock to strike a reasonable bedtime, so I may've been out of my head. But the video was scaled down in post-processing; I played the full thing at a reasonable resolution (about 3x that of the video). Though it's frustrating as it is as a game designer, we've got to find ways to communicate the desired information to our players without explicit turotial text. People just don't read it, myself included. I did watch this video a second time and figure out where I missed a click with the one holdup -- everything else would start producing automatically once it got ingredients but I put less than five ingredients in the one factory so it didn't start (I think) and I definitely caught myself hovering over the pause button without hearing my mouse click, though mentally I thought I did click there. But let's think about the game design: is there a benefit to having what an individual factory (for lack of a better term) produces be hidden information? Presumably not, since you already had a help screen that detailed what could take what. In general modern design philosophy shies away from memorization, for which I am grateful, so a reasonable step might be to color-code components: if you have a specific factory selected, tint everything that can't go into it in red and everything that could go into it green. Or perhaps more colorblind-friendly alternatives. Make it so the player can't possibly overlook the information you want them to have, but don't shove it down their throats or stop them from doing what they want to do. Too often, tutorials are perceived as holdups to the fun part. Most of the time they're right -- I almost didn't click on the tutorial button at all even though I'd never played your game nor Factorio. Tamale and others: You're welcome! I definitely enjoy thinking about and discussing game design in abstract, so providing feedback and receiving responses on it yields interesting insights and mental trajectories for me. Plus the whole unprepared & unedited thing means it doesn't take me much more effort than the time spent actually playing to create the videos. It's not the most information-dense medium (well, the signal to noise ratio is poor), but I'm keenly aware that content creators have vested interest in this kind of feedback and are willing to put up with a less-than-tight package. One really good idea I learned from a UI class long ago was to find testers, sit in the same room with them when they're using the product, and make absolutely clear to them that you won't answer their questions or respond in any way during the session. I keep failing at that last part, but it's a fantastic way of figuring out what actually happens when someone uses your product. Of course, none of us have time to do that when we're busy developing our games. Both for others and for ourselves.
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Aug 4, 2017 22:41
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I didn't see too much Gong Show, but the first judge did a good job on advocating on behalf of the games -- giving Jon a little guidance and motivation where he thought it was warranted. It seemed like he spent a lot of time with the games, even the awkward/difficult ones. Obviously we can't demand that of our volunteers, but kudos FirstJudge and anyone else who spent extra effort trying to better understand what we spent a bunch of effort trying to create. I think that kind of judge advocacy would go a long way to alleviating these kinds of complaints. I also got ripped pretty good on the Gong Show, sometimes frustratingly so but always understandably so. I knew people were unlikely to read optional instructions and I don't think mandatory instructions are great game design, so I opted for an audio narrator that would say important things once. I think he was too opaque, but also I realized as soon as I tuned into the Gong Show that that form of instruction isn't going to work well in a group environment where everyone else is talking. Though I did want to yell through my monitor when I got an, "I wish there were more enemy variety." It happens around the five minute mark! It's mentioned in-game and out-of-game! I even put a variety of enemy types fully-engaged-in-combat on the splash screen so you'd know there was more! There's an options slider for upping the intensity! Such is life; lessons learned (or at least noted). On the plus side I got entirely unexpected praise about my end-of-world background image. And a crash that I genuinely have no idea what may've caused it. I spent so much time testing. So much...
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Aug 6, 2017 17:09
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Thanks for the thoughtful words! I definitely failed in that I thought I addressed those potential complaints, but obviously not well enough that end-users know about them. Intentions in bold:Giggs posted:Thriftynauts So the takeaway that I really need to keep taking away is make everything obvious. The tricky part is making things obvious without forcing it down the player's throat -- I'm still of the opinion that forced tutorials are a bad idea. One just needs to cleverly design the early gameplay such that everything important is demonstrated in an engaging way.
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Aug 6, 2017 20:05
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). Bad wording on my part, thanks. They only help when moving. The other main issue is that it’s very difficult to choose not to take on junk when you really don’t want it. The things I mentioned previously led me into having a wildly sprawling ship and so when I managed to finally kill something, they were almost definitely on top of some part of my ship and I took on whatever they dropped. This is what I had the hardest trouble getting across -- let the base get hit. You wouldn't be forced to pick up parts if you weren't overlapping the base, and the base will accept junk once it's at <= 90% health. So when you have too much junk, fly away for a minute or two. When you come back and the base is low, you'll drop off all those unhelpful junks and also heal the base up. It's one of the few meaningful gameplay decisions one can make, but it's totally counter-intuitive to everyone but me, as everybody hugs the base's face as soon as there are enemies on it, and there are never not enemies on it.
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a cyberpunk goose posted:Okay, well some feedback then: it'd be cool if it was this way, or had some room to be this way in some cases. I believe the scalable answer is for everyone who wants their game to be reviewed to themselves review the games of others. It's mathematically likely that if everyone who made one game did two reviews then they'd get at least one review of their game. I agree there are some peculiarities about the Gong Show but one needs to be careful when making demands of unpaid volunteers. A lot of the perceived problems with the Gong Show are consequences of the fact that getting to know a game takes time, and spending time on multiple games in a tight window (and I mean even the week or so allocated to judging) is exhausting. That being said it wouldn't hurt if the AwfulJams site had a means of tracking and sorting by how many times a game had been reviewed outside of the Gong Show. It's not a perfect system in that sometimes you'll get a really lazy review and that'll count, but it helps for community-conscious reviewers who want to spread some love to the overlooked.
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Aug 8, 2017 00:18
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a cyberpunk goose: Reading back through (what currently exists) of your recent posts, I think what you're advocating for would be better judge feedback. I (and others appear to) believe that this is mutually exclusive from the benefits provided by the Gong Show, and perhaps have been hasty/dismissive in responding to your points as they were worded, though not as they may have been meant. One of the biggest benefits of the Gong Show is getting feedback from a completely uninformed end user: JonTerp deftly fulfills the role of the unwashed masses and gives us unbiased feedback. As others have stated, this feedback is valuable because it's most representative of how 100% of the userbase would respond to these games were we intending to release them in the wild. The things you're asking for are reasonable and I think most of us would agree with them, except for their inclusion as part of the Gong Show. Of course we'd like someone to spend some time discussing the merits and failures of our game even if those failures would normally be offputting. We'd like some amount of effort put into analyzing and responding to these games because of the effort we put into them, even if the analysis itself may be initially painful. But I'd argue that's for the judges and the community to do: if Jon gets information in advance or even too much prompting then his feedback becomes tainted. I actually make an effort to see as little Gong Show as possible and to avoid reading reviews about any of the games I haven't played, because it prevents me from providing this specific form of genuine feedback to those games in the future: you only get one first impression, and as someone with vague fantasies of eventually releasing a thing to the public, unbiased first impressions are extremely valuable. How many of these AwfulJams have you participated in? I think another part of the problem is that we're picking up the statements that you're making and carrying them to their general conclusion, but not communicating any of the steps along the way that historically result in these opinioned responses.
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Aug 8, 2017 01:14
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a cyberpunk goose posted:You suck and this sort of ultra rigid criteria for discussion blows It's a difficult message to communicate, but one funny thing about humans is they can perceive what is felt even if it hasn't been said. I would actually like to have the conversation about how to improve the format in a manner that's acceptable to all parties, though I feel special consideration must be given to those who are burdened the most (the judges / streamers). In aggregate, your actions even before this point create the impression of one who would rather be offended than further a cause. Which game did you submit? If I haven't done so already, I'll give it a play-through when I next get around to recording some runs. Maybe Tuesday if I'm lucky. SharpenedSpoonv2 posted:The team with the best game page will win a Steam copy of Shhh! Quit reminding people! I did the majority of the work on my page before this prize was announced and am totally neglecting it because of a firm belief that it'd be against the spirit of the deadline. Definitely not because of laziness. Edit: Dieting Hippo posted:That's why I'm going to volunteer doing a stream a few nights this week for chilling and discussing some games from the jam, tentatively called Jamflix and Chill. Beautiful! Thanks for stepping up. That sounds like a wonderful solution to a myriad of situations -- lack of reviews, poor implicit communication between developers and end users, a heavy burden on too many people, etc. The nice thing about a community activity is that its shortcomings can be addressed by the community. And honestly I feel like all parties benefit from doing so. I certainly learn a lot by absent-mindedly articulating vaguely game-development-oriented thoughts while distracted by the submitter's shinies. Hammer Bro. fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 01:27
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Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator
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a cyberpunk goose posted:Next year I'm going to also contribute to/champion/participate in a thorough per game critique stream similar to the one Giggs is proffering on a per request/recommendation/arbitrary basis. Anyone (inc JonTerp Why wait 'til next year? There are plenty of people still itching for reviews, and you will feel better about the events of this year's review-oriented-activities if you've demonstrably objectively improved the situation.
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Aug 8, 2017 07:01
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) will be welcome to join. This can also function as a critical mass for the rare MP-only/heavy game entry, I can wrangle irl friends for same-screen combat games too (see: OVERREACH)
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Two more quickies and now I've got to put the gummy worms away. Sherlock Holmes and the Three Mysteries https://vimeo.com/228917093 DUM II: Heck on Earf https://vimeo.com/228917204 Even though they're sour.
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Aug 9, 2017 05:34
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Afal posted:lots of good reviews Kudos for the multiple and thoughtful reviews; it's interesting seeing others' takes on games I have also played. I thought I was over my failings in Thriftynauts, but clearly I am not. I think if I ever do something that's contrary to classical conditioning in the future, I'll have to be absolutely ham-fisted about it. The base accepts scrap after it's been damaged a bit -- the one meaningful decision you can make in any given run-through is to leave the base a bit and let it take damage when you have some scrap you want to ditch. That also provides the opportunity to harvest more distant derelicts. Also, that's about the peak of my drawing ability. Clearly I stopped pursing art in middle school, though at least a second-hand drawing tablet allowed for smoother lines this time around. Last jam I had to scan everything.
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Aug 13, 2017 12:26
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Are the results posted somewhere for us to read? I checked awfuljams.com's main and games page, as well as the first post of this thread, and to some extent the twitch.tv link though half that site doesn't work on my browser. Or is that coming out in ~8 hours when the timer ends?
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Aug 14, 2017 18:18
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SharpenedSpoonv2 posted:So if you want to air any grievances about the site as-is, or tell me how awesome I am and give me encouragement, hit me up on Minor site suggestion: think you could add a way to sort the games randomly? I don't generally play all of them but do want to review a few and as other have noticed, often the most popular ones also receive the most additional attention. That could be partially because they're at the top of the list or have subconsciously eye-grabbing banners.
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Aug 15, 2017 16:01
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SharpenedSpoon made a post a little while ago with this, if that's what you're after: http://www.awfuljams.com/awful-summer-jam-2017/winners. Not sure if there are direct links to it elsewhere, but it was what I was looking for.
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Aug 15, 2017 23:09
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