Myself, @Steamhat and @Mexicanopiumdog made a jam game called Mimesis, in which you play an alien parasite who can latch onto, possess, and finally dispatch guards in a brutal display.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though I definitely overscoped, and got pretty burnt out and tired towards the end. Still, it remains kinda fun to pounce around and murder guards!
The idea for core gameplay moved between platforming, stealth/timing, and puzzle mechanics, so there are still plenty of little features from each of those areas I wanted to implement. It's also buggy as hell! I need to work on my 2d character controller fu.
And of course, many thanks to @BlackShipsFillTheSky and the Free Lives crew for hosting! I had an awesome time. I would've liked to playtest everyone's stuff some more, which I think is another case for taking on a smaller idea next time and not being rushed the whole weekend. Anyway, great fun was had. Thanks guys!
I'm most likely responsible for Mimesis' feature creep, i sorta did it to myself for art and animation, End result wasn't totally Polished, but pretty cool.
And, I expressed it in person several times, But thank you Free Lives and @BlackShipsFillTheSky for all the great things that happened this past weekend.
@Tuism I liked the arcade feel. That drop into the action from the get go feeling is exciting. The Rockets and explosions were great and I loved how reckless and tempting they felt. I see what you mean about limited time and art, but it was still fun regardless. In that regard I would say you have a fun dynamic exciting prototype on your hands.
You play by writing a story about a battle, and that battle plays out as you write it. It's a bit experimental, and I think the idea works, but it needs a lot more options/possibilities to make it exciting because it becomes repetitive fairly quickly.
@Nuclear_mosquito just export it, don't worry about testing, if it fails someone will say so. Rather take the chance that more might be able to play it than not :)
@Pierre thanks! Honestly I'm not sure. I'll see what comes back from the whole thing. Personally if I'm going to work on it further it'll have to be dialed back a ton and be much more focused. Right now the "enemies" are just randomly shooting and being stupid, which is uninteresting. Broforce could get away with it by giving them a really limited range of options and with level design and destructible environments. My little thing is simply too stupid for the whole criminal/civilian dynamic. I think, anyway.
In Inkling you have to survive against ever increasing waves of red blobs. Be careful though, every action you take will cause you to lose a bit of yourself, fortunately you can retrieve your lost bits and perhaps even grow in size. Each completed stage also brings rewards with it in the form of upgrades!
I didn't have nearly as much time to work on this as I was planning, so a bunch of things were left in limbo. Overall I'm pretty happy with it.
Experiences: Unfortunately my entry did not teach me anything new in terms of development. I did however keenly feel the lack of an artist, and I feel that combined with me being horrible at social media stuff made it impossible for me to compete with other entries for attention. I also had the opportunity to play with a bunch of things in Unity 5 (Unity 5 left a lot to be desired in certain new features). And I also had a chance to show off a bit of Celestial's release manager (though people didn't take kindly to my insistence of a windows build ;P). It seems most people found the game too hard, and most people don't even reach their first opportunity to upgrade :/ definitely design flaws littered throughout.
For next time: Ideally I would like to team up with an artist, and a sound guy would also be a welcome addition. Failing that I might finally force myself to learn modeling. I need to put much more effort into progress updates, this goes for everything, not just jams :P
I have played and rated some of your games, I'll make sure to get to the rest this evening :) Well done everyone who participated!
Okay here's some words I'd like to say about the ones I played:
@Pomb - Knights of the Turntable: The amount of polished graphics in this is insane, from the way the horses canter to a stop, to the fresnel shader and the way the lances wave around realisticly, the graphics are too awesome. The gameplay however got me bored after about 5-6 games once I figured out holding down the button to guard yourself. It needed a lot more depth in terms of gameplay.
@Tuism - MechCop 2875: I loved the story/roleplaying feel it gave you starting out as a human, the little bit of dialogue, in your garage with a bunch of mechs you can get in and drive - felt like the beginning of a good story-based action game. Once I got in the mech however, I couldnt for the life of me figure out what differentiates a civilian from an enemy. The different coloured civilians really threw me off, because I never caught a decent glimpse of the enemies hiding inbetween civilians, and the bullets just seemed to come from "the crowd of people" so I just ignored the warning and slaughtered anything that moved. The other frustration was getting blown up by one little handgun bullet - it's a mech! it needs to be pretty tough! But I feel there is some potential here.
@Fransciosvn - Symmetric Torpedo - Took me a while to get it, and I still didnt understand what makes a pattern symmetrical or not - I was trying to mirror the red dots horizontally and vertically but it didnt seem to be affecting the score in a way I would have expected. The interface was surprisingly awesome, minimal but very appealing! The sound however was very jarring. I get that you were trying to get tension going, but the alarm sound was horrific after you hear it for more than a minute.
@Bensonance - Quiver of Claws - Liked the art style and animations, very cute, but game seemed inordinately hard. I ran out of arrows before the 2nd or 3rd hyena and could not progress from there.
@TheFuntastic - Adventures in Spacetime - The graphics are pretty appealing, nice use of light and shadow, but I felt the game was held back by the horrible character control. On my keyboard at least, the movement was way too sensitive and didnt have any ramp up or ramp down on the keys so I often fell off the ledges. As for the actual game, I am a bit baffled by it and never cleared the second level. It seemed a bit clunky that the gun both manipulates the block and grows the gravity fields at the same time, I feel there must be a better way to divide these controls. As for the gravity fields, I expected them to affect me as well, so it was a bit of a brainf**k trying to move the yellow block up the side of a wall while trying to jump on it. Perhaps a more gentler difficulty curve? Gradually introduce the fields and what they are supposed to do. Intriguing idea though.
@Nitrogen Thanks for playing KotT and giving some feedback! There are quite a few comments on the simplicity of gameplay which doesn't worry me too much as this was intentional for a few reasons.
Historically our scope of gameplay has always gotten away from us and we knew before hand we wanted to take on something mechanically simple and in fact spent a lot of effort in making sure it stayed that way! It also seems to us that the people playing jam games only do so for a few minutes. We wanted something that gave a really entertaining experience that only needed to last that short period. We also had Super Friendship Arcade in the back of our minds.
It's funny you say you got bored after figuring out how the guard mechanic worked even though it doesn't have to do with holding the button. I think this again speaks to how difficult it is to convey even very simple mechanics in such a short period of time and is something that still alludes myself.
Ultimately the end result IS a very simple game of chicken. Building up speed leaves you vulnerable and securing your guard lowers your power. We hoped this simple, but conflicting goal, is something straight forward enough to understand in two or three play throughs while giving the players something they can out-execute each other on.
@Kalekin I totally get what you're saying about simplifying your gameplay goals. I think this brings up an interesting effect - I believe that the fact that your graphics were *so* polished made people want to invest more in your game. If the graphics had been simple 2D sprites, I dont think you'd have got half the complaints about it being too simple... It's an interesting result.
How was the guard mechanic supposed to work if it doesnt involve holding down the button? I watched the AI player and noticed that you use the last 2 seconds of your run to hold the button down to get your guard going. Is that not the entirety of the mechanic?
PS. I totally missed the "Breakdown" section of the game menus because 1.) there was no way to get back to the menu once you were done playing and 2.) I saw "turntable" and I saw "breakdown" so I assumed it must be an additional gamemode - like a danceoff competition or something xD
@Nitrogen - thanks for the comments! Yeah the civilian vs criminals thing was really really thin and unfleshed-out. I simply had put too much time in too many systems for any of them to be complete, that was definitely a big mistake. The RPG-like feeling is definitely a thing that could be capitalised on, but again, I just didn't have time. Thanks for playing! :)
You ran out by the 3rd Hyena? :O There's a pickup of arrows right before that so you should have at least 5 arrows to deal with the 2 Hyenas :/.
haha That said, yeah I've got the feedback the people run out of arrows (haven't figured out a real game design decision to fix that yet, because I hate infinite ammo), so I'll just buff the arrow drops a little :). It's actually a mix of being too easy and too hard at the moment. The enemy arrows do too little damage to you to be threatening, but you also run out of your own arrows too quick. :)
Hey @Bensonance I haven't played your game yet but it looks really good. If you run out of arrows is there at-least an alternative way for you to kill the Hyenas?
You ran out by the 3rd Hyena? :O There's a pickup of arrows right before that so you should have at least 5 arrows to deal with the 2 Hyenas :/.
Haha, a lot of that was experimentation - how to shoot, how to charge up a shot, how to aim, so a fair bit of those got wasted... Plus I'm a rubbish shot it would seem!
So people kinda get stuck. I made that decision just to encourage people to A) conserve arrows B) make sure their shots were worth it. A lot of the enemies are lined up nicely (in 2s or 3s) to be killed with one shot, again to encourage this.
I knew this wasn't the best design decision, but It would be okay for the jam.
One of the things I might do is have all the unconventional arrows be infinite, while the traditional arrows are limited :).
Ye there is a few ways to work around it but most games I have seen have 3 ways of dealing with things. 1- Certain types of ammo are infinite 2- A melee weapon that cannot be dropped (even if its fists) 3- A ranged weapon with infinite ammo (usually a pistol)
Why not make it possible to pick up your arrows if they're sticking out of terrain? And then, in order to allow players to experiment with how the shooting works, put them in a fully-boxed in "room" right at the start that they can only exit if they hit a target on a wall to open a door. You'd probably have to also make arrows that were stuck in the ceiling fall out after a little bit so that players could still pick those up (which could also lead to awesome drop-arrow kill situations, mwhahaha).
Or, completely alternate solution: Still allow players to pick up arrows, but make the screen wrap around so that arrows can't be lost out either of the sides.
@Zaphire Yup, familiar with those solutions, but all of those really give you an infinite ammo of some type, which means you're less conservative about your ammo :).
@dislekcia Yes! That was exactly the decision I wanted! You actually can pick up arrows, and they do stick out of terrain :). But the collisions are a bit wonky, so often arrows will disappear completely :/.
Yeah, both your and @Nitrogen's expanded feedback make it clear I need a space for experimentation at the beginning of the game :).
Yeah, gonna have to tweak the collisions to make sure the arrows stay in the room. :)
I adore the idea of ceiling arrows falling out! :D
Had a great time building this game while many amazing games leaped into existence around me at freelives, who did an amazing job at hosting everyone. Super excited at everyone's own take on the 48 hours. So here's Dimension Runner. Big thanks to @Steamhat for his alien animations and @Elyaradine for the human animations!
PS. I totally missed the "Breakdown" section of the game menus because 1.) there was no way to get back to the menu once you were done playing and 2.) I saw "turntable" and I saw "breakdown" so I assumed it must be an additional gamemode - like a danceoff competition or something xD
Haha. I suppose in hindsight, given the name, we could have used a less ambiguous heading for our rules.
The guard is simply reset every time you tap to increase your speed and takes a brief period of time to build back up. The hope was that by introducing the "guard beats unguarded even if unguarded is faster" we could turn the simple button mash into a game of chicken where players would try squeeze as much opportunity out of the power buildup phase while not overcommitting and leaving themselves vulnerable.
You make a very interesting point in relation to the visual polish vs game depth... Perhaps a smarter approach would be to strike a better balance between the two. I'll remember that for next time, thanks!
I totally missed the guard thing. What happens if both players are guarding? Also I noticed that there are rounds when the tip simply misses because... Physics? So that's pretty much purely random?
Both guarding - speed wins Both unguarded - speed wins One guarded one unguarded - guarded always wins (faster unguarded players will still lose)
I think the reason hits sometimes don't take place is because there may be a few frames between the point in time where A's lance intersects with B and the point where B's lance intersects with A where the victory state is switching between the two. Essentially at the point of each separately timed impact, each respective player is thought to be losing and so neither will hit.
Some words on our process are up here for anyone that's interested.
Before sharing Snow Cones with everyone, we hoped to get a post-jam version up. There's a lot of content that was created but left out because of time constraints. We're still hoping to work this all in, but for now hope you'll enjoy how Snow Cones turned out within the 72 hour we had.
Comments
Myself, @Steamhat and @Mexicanopiumdog made a jam game called Mimesis, in which you play an alien parasite who can latch onto, possess, and finally dispatch guards in a brutal display.
Play Here
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though I definitely overscoped, and got pretty burnt out and tired towards the end. Still, it remains kinda fun to pounce around and murder guards!
The idea for core gameplay moved between platforming, stealth/timing, and puzzle mechanics, so there are still plenty of little features from each of those areas I wanted to implement. It's also buggy as hell! I need to work on my 2d character controller fu.
And of course, many thanks to @BlackShipsFillTheSky and the Free Lives crew for hosting! I had an awesome time. I would've liked to playtest everyone's stuff some more, which I think is another case for taking on a smaller idea next time and not being rushed the whole weekend.
Anyway, great fun was had. Thanks guys!
And, I expressed it in person several times, But thank you Free Lives and @BlackShipsFillTheSky for all the great things that happened this past weekend.
Once again I'm blown away by the high standards and originality of our peeps! :D
The Rockets and explosions were great and I loved how reckless and tempting they felt.
I see what you mean about limited time and art, but it was still fun regardless.
In that regard I would say you have a fun dynamic exciting prototype on your hands.
Will you be working on it any further?
You play by writing a story about a battle, and that battle plays out as you write it. It's a bit experimental, and I think the idea works, but it needs a lot more options/possibilities to make it exciting because it becomes repetitive fairly quickly.
@Pierre thanks! Honestly I'm not sure. I'll see what comes back from the whole thing. Personally if I'm going to work on it further it'll have to be dialed back a ton and be much more focused. Right now the "enemies" are just randomly shooting and being stupid, which is uninteresting. Broforce could get away with it by giving them a really limited range of options and with level design and destructible environments. My little thing is simply too stupid for the whole criminal/civilian dynamic. I think, anyway.
In Inkling you have to survive against ever increasing waves of red blobs. Be careful though, every action you take will cause you to lose a bit of yourself, fortunately you can retrieve your lost bits and perhaps even grow in size. Each completed stage also brings rewards with it in the form of upgrades!
I didn't have nearly as much time to work on this as I was planning, so a bunch of things were left in limbo. Overall I'm pretty happy with it.
Experiences:
Unfortunately my entry did not teach me anything new in terms of development. I did however keenly feel the lack of an artist, and I feel that combined with me being horrible at social media stuff made it impossible for me to compete with other entries for attention.
I also had the opportunity to play with a bunch of things in Unity 5 (Unity 5 left a lot to be desired in certain new features).
And I also had a chance to show off a bit of Celestial's release manager (though people didn't take kindly to my insistence of a windows build ;P).
It seems most people found the game too hard, and most people don't even reach their first opportunity to upgrade :/ definitely design flaws littered throughout.
For next time:
Ideally I would like to team up with an artist, and a sound guy would also be a welcome addition. Failing that I might finally force myself to learn modeling. I need to put much more effort into progress updates, this goes for everything, not just jams :P
I have played and rated some of your games, I'll make sure to get to the rest this evening :) Well done everyone who participated!
@Pomb - Knights of the Turntable: The amount of polished graphics in this is insane, from the way the horses canter to a stop, to the fresnel shader and the way the lances wave around realisticly, the graphics are too awesome. The gameplay however got me bored after about 5-6 games once I figured out holding down the button to guard yourself. It needed a lot more depth in terms of gameplay.
@Tuism - MechCop 2875: I loved the story/roleplaying feel it gave you starting out as a human, the little bit of dialogue, in your garage with a bunch of mechs you can get in and drive - felt like the beginning of a good story-based action game. Once I got in the mech however, I couldnt for the life of me figure out what differentiates a civilian from an enemy. The different coloured civilians really threw me off, because I never caught a decent glimpse of the enemies hiding inbetween civilians, and the bullets just seemed to come from "the crowd of people" so I just ignored the warning and slaughtered anything that moved. The other frustration was getting blown up by one little handgun bullet - it's a mech! it needs to be pretty tough! But I feel there is some potential here.
@Fransciosvn - Symmetric Torpedo - Took me a while to get it, and I still didnt understand what makes a pattern symmetrical or not - I was trying to mirror the red dots horizontally and vertically but it didnt seem to be affecting the score in a way I would have expected. The interface was surprisingly awesome, minimal but very appealing! The sound however was very jarring. I get that you were trying to get tension going, but the alarm sound was horrific after you hear it for more than a minute.
@Bensonance - Quiver of Claws - Liked the art style and animations, very cute, but game seemed inordinately hard. I ran out of arrows before the 2nd or 3rd hyena and could not progress from there.
@TheFuntastic - Adventures in Spacetime - The graphics are pretty appealing, nice use of light and shadow, but I felt the game was held back by the horrible character control. On my keyboard at least, the movement was way too sensitive and didnt have any ramp up or ramp down on the keys so I often fell off the ledges. As for the actual game, I am a bit baffled by it and never cleared the second level. It seemed a bit clunky that the gun both manipulates the block and grows the gravity fields at the same time, I feel there must be a better way to divide these controls. As for the gravity fields, I expected them to affect me as well, so it was a bit of a brainf**k trying to move the yellow block up the side of a wall while trying to jump on it. Perhaps a more gentler difficulty curve? Gradually introduce the fields and what they are supposed to do. Intriguing idea though.
Historically our scope of gameplay has always gotten away from us and we knew before hand we wanted to take on something mechanically simple and in fact spent a lot of effort in making sure it stayed that way! It also seems to us that the people playing jam games only do so for a few minutes. We wanted something that gave a really entertaining experience that only needed to last that short period. We also had Super Friendship Arcade in the back of our minds.
It's funny you say you got bored after figuring out how the guard mechanic worked even though it doesn't have to do with holding the button. I think this again speaks to how difficult it is to convey even very simple mechanics in such a short period of time and is something that still alludes myself.
Ultimately the end result IS a very simple game of chicken. Building up speed leaves you vulnerable and securing your guard lowers your power. We hoped this simple, but conflicting goal, is something straight forward enough to understand in two or three play throughs while giving the players something they can out-execute each other on.
How was the guard mechanic supposed to work if it doesnt involve holding down the button? I watched the AI player and noticed that you use the last 2 seconds of your run to hold the button down to get your guard going. Is that not the entirety of the mechanic?
PS. I totally missed the "Breakdown" section of the game menus because 1.) there was no way to get back to the menu once you were done playing and 2.) I saw "turntable" and I saw "breakdown" so I assumed it must be an additional gamemode - like a danceoff competition or something xD
@Nitrogen - thanks for the comments! Yeah the civilian vs criminals thing was really really thin and unfleshed-out. I simply had put too much time in too many systems for any of them to be complete, that was definitely a big mistake. The RPG-like feeling is definitely a thing that could be capitalised on, but again, I just didn't have time. Thanks for playing! :)
You ran out by the 3rd Hyena? :O There's a pickup of arrows right before that so you should have at least 5 arrows to deal with the 2 Hyenas :/.
haha That said, yeah I've got the feedback the people run out of arrows (haven't figured out a real game design decision to fix that yet, because I hate infinite ammo), so I'll just buff the arrow drops a little :). It's actually a mix of being too easy and too hard at the moment. The enemy arrows do too little damage to you to be threatening, but you also run out of your own arrows too quick. :)
Nope :').
So people kinda get stuck. I made that decision just to encourage people to A) conserve arrows B) make sure their shots were worth it. A lot of the enemies are lined up nicely (in 2s or 3s) to be killed with one shot, again to encourage this.
I knew this wasn't the best design decision, but It would be okay for the jam.
One of the things I might do is have all the unconventional arrows be infinite, while the traditional arrows are limited :).
1- Certain types of ammo are infinite
2- A melee weapon that cannot be dropped (even if its fists)
3- A ranged weapon with infinite ammo (usually a pistol)
Or, completely alternate solution: Still allow players to pick up arrows, but make the screen wrap around so that arrows can't be lost out either of the sides.
@dislekcia Yes! That was exactly the decision I wanted! You actually can pick up arrows, and they do stick out of terrain :). But the collisions are a bit wonky, so often arrows will disappear completely :/.
Yeah, both your and @Nitrogen's expanded feedback make it clear I need a space for experimentation at the beginning of the game :).
Yeah, gonna have to tweak the collisions to make sure the arrows stay in the room. :)
I adore the idea of ceiling arrows falling out! :D
So here's Dimension Runner.
Big thanks to @Steamhat for his alien animations and @Elyaradine for the human animations!
The guard is simply reset every time you tap to increase your speed and takes a brief period of time to build back up. The hope was that by introducing the "guard beats unguarded even if unguarded is faster" we could turn the simple button mash into a game of chicken where players would try squeeze as much opportunity out of the power buildup phase while not overcommitting and leaving themselves vulnerable.
You make a very interesting point in relation to the visual polish vs game depth... Perhaps a smarter approach would be to strike a better balance between the two. I'll remember that for next time, thanks!
Both guarding - speed wins
Both unguarded - speed wins
One guarded one unguarded - guarded always wins (faster unguarded players will still lose)
I think the reason hits sometimes don't take place is because there may be a few frames between the point in time where A's lance intersects with B and the point where B's lance intersects with A where the victory state is switching between the two. Essentially at the point of each separately timed impact, each respective player is thought to be losing and so neither will hit.
A few things were left on-site however, so contact me if you're missing anything from that weekend.
Long over-due, but here's what Team Lazerbeam ( @Merik, @Jaysong and I) whipped up for LD32.
SNOW CONES!
Some words on our process are up here for anyone that's interested.
Before sharing Snow Cones with everyone, we hoped to get a post-jam version up. There's a lot of content that was created but left out because of time constraints. We're still hoping to work this all in, but for now hope you'll enjoy how Snow Cones turned out within the 72 hour we had.