[SA Game Jam 2017] Truth Be Tolled

- SA Game Jam 2017
- Truth Be Tolled
- 2 Students/ 1 Hobbyist/ 1 Diverse
- 48 Hour Entry

Members:
Andrea Hayes - @PartyPanda
Bracken Hall - @Bracula
Benjamin Crooks - @BenCrooks

A tax collecting, resource managing, people handling, tower defense game that revolves around the politics that take place at the gates of a kingdom.

Here is our submission: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9E6sMTMbFkJcFpRVUtaR2loODA/view

5 minutes before the cut off >.< PHEW!

We carried on working overtime to squash some last-minute bugs. Bonus 2-hour-late submission for your enjoyment!TruthBeTolled(Windows)

Comments

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    Should we let this level of sass into our Kingdom?
    Can the club even handle me right now?
  • image Maybe we should't let that amount of sass into the kingdom...
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    BRING OUT YER DEAD!
  • Wow that looks lovely, cannot wait to play. Amazing work so far.
  • That looks awesome - well done so far :D
    You guys are going to start giving me an inferiority complex!
  • The art looks amazing! Can't believe that was done so quickly!
  • Top class work as always guys, Dream Team :D
    Thanked by 2PartyPanda BenCrooks
  • We've found a bug when it comes to upgrading your defenses. We're working on it now :) Will upload a new build in the comment section if anyone is interested in playing the fixed version :D

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  • Well...one bug led to another - as they do. So here is our final build, well over the deadline, but well worth fixing.

    Thanks for playing!
    Thanked by 1Sean_Goncalves
  • edited
    Aaaaaand here is a Mac Build for those of you without windows. It's untested, so please let us know if there are any deadly bugs that we need to look at. Sorry for offering this one up so late. <3

    Time to sleep
  • edited
    This was excellent. Had a good chuckle at the dialog. The art is amazing. I upgraded to archers and now I'm just waiting for the dragon to arrive.

    Edit: What tech did you use for the branching conversation?
  • We did a little more work on the game within the 72 hour jam time frame and squashed even more bugs. Here is the link to the itch.io page for anyone interested in updates: https://bracula.itch.io/truth-be-tolled

    @konman - We used a program called Yarn which works really well with Unity. I wrote each character's dialogue in Yarn and then put the content into a Canvas in Unity :)


  • @konman , you specifically need Yarn to edit your dialogue and plot the branches/ nodes etc. The library for Unity is called Yarn Spinner, which you need to include in your project to interpret the Yarn files. It's a little dense, but I was really happy with the result once I got my head around it.
    Thanked by 1konman
  • Good job on the art guys. The main menu was really unresponsive though. I had to click on the play button multiple times before it transitioned into the game. Maybe I was slow but it took me a while to realize that I was playing the gate keeper and not the guy with the dead bodies. But once I figured it out it was pretty fun to play. Well done!
  • Hey @flobar , thanks for playing!

    I just wanna know which version you played? And if it was windows/mac. We had some issues with mac early on, but they should be fixed in the latest build on itch.

    Thanks for the feedback though! Glad you enjoyed it
  • @Bracula I tried all version you have on this page. I'm using a pc.
  • Awesome game homies :D I finally got around to giving it a go; haha the King has one really persistent girlfriend, was there everyday trying to get in, no gold no entry :P . But yeah all in all it seems super solid I didn't seem to encounter any bugs or anything to report on in that regard, and I think you guys have a super solid base to work with if you want to take it further more variety of people and storylines and so on. but its really cool as always. Good Job :D
    Thanked by 2PartyPanda Bracula
  • edited
    Thanks @Bracula for the info on yarn. I am very interested in narrative design and have some basic exploration into the field using Twine. (Info was gleaned here on MGSA, specifically from a game called "The Maker's Eden" by a studio called Screwy Lightbulb (rustybroomhandle and co).

    So it is always interesting to see how people use other technologies in the narrative field.
    Thanked by 1Bracula
  • Hey @flobar , that's really weird. It seems inconsistent then - which makes the issue difficult to track down. Will definitely look into it though. Thanks for getting back to me. Sorry it gave you trouble
  • Well done on your game! It's really cool.
    The art is awesome! You guys managed to put a great amount of character is so few pixels! It is really impressive! I also really liked the dialog.

    Just some tiny bits of feedback from my side. I feel like the characters walk a bit slow, it was a bit frustrating waiting for them to arrive. I feel like speeding them up ever so slightly would really help, either that or a simple backing track would have maybe lessened the frustration. We managed to find a treasure trove of useful sounds on freesound.org . Just my 2c. Definitely, going to play some more of it :)

    @Bracula I would love to hear about your experience with Yarn! I have been meaning to play around with it. It seems very useful! Did you find any good tutorials or resources for using it? Or did you just use the documentation provided? Since you say it is a bit dense and takes time to get your head around it, would you be willing to share any code snippets that may ease the path for others trying to play around it? Worth a try... ;)

    Once again you all did a mighty fine job!
  • @blacksheepZA thanks for playing and for the awesome feedback!

    We had actually planned to have it so that there was a feeling of slowness, and patience to the game, but there were a few mechanics that we didn't have time to implement to complete that idea. Music and sounds definitely would have helped, and I think we'll definitely have a look at updating that in the future.

    As far as Yarn goes, @PartyPanda was in charge of the actual writing of the dialogue and the network of nodes for interactions, which - as I'm sure you know - is basically done in Twine. It works much the same on that end, with a few minor differences. The difficulty came in with the integration into Unity. Unfortunately there were no good tutorials to help with that, and the documentation is largely fragmented and unfinished. I managed to figure my way through it by playing around with the Yarn Spinner Unity package demos in a separate project, and then transferring that into our jam project when I got the hang of it.

    I'd be happy to share some tips and tricks I learnt during the jam, but I must admit that there is still plenty I don't understand about it. For the most part, I used the example scripts provided in the package and just edited various functions to suit our specific needs. I'll post some snippets here once I've cleaned them up and figured out a practical way to explain them, but in the meantime I highly recommend just downloading the example project to get a fundamental understanding of the system.

    If you have any specific questions, don't hesitate to ask, and I'll try to explain as best as I can.

    Thanks again for playing!
    Thanked by 1blacksheepZA
  • Gave it a go. Some reflections.

    What I liked:
    - The dialog was well done
    - The easter eggs were awesome (Monty Python!)
    - The art was wonderful and well balanced
    - It seemed my choices would have consequences.

    What I felt meh about:
    - The time between people heading to the gate, I felt the animations and game speed was a bit too slow. I felt like I was waiting more than interacting. Maybe it was by design, simulating a guards boring job.
    - I didn't see the consequences of my choices :(

    What didn't work:
    - After playing for a while no more people came to the gate, at first I thought it was a fluke, but I left the game running, but no one pitched up.

    Fun idea, would be interesting to see more.
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