test

And streaming for the first time too on Facebook for my friends.

GM2, Cakewalk Sonar, Grand Theft Marmot Sound Effects Generator

It's happened a lot-- there's a theme or two in the final round that you really find boring or tedious, and you immediately sigh in disappointment when it wins, but those are the ones that make you think the hardest, and they always result in a game that isn't something you'd normally sit down to make. I think that's the best thing about these events.

Mega excited about the idea my girlfriend and I came up with. It's 9:30pm here in Chicago. She's hard at work drawing, and I'm coding some basic game mechanics and procedural art effects that are part of the actual gameplay. Usually I sleep after brainstorming on the first night, but starting early this year gives a chance to tackle some things and get your brain subconsciously thinking about the actual creation you've started making.

Having lots of fun. Thank you all, for being a part of this.

TLDR; 7 game jams went amazing, last one was the greatest disaster imaginable, hope this one goes better.

Did 7 game jams before, which all went spectacular. Tiny hiccups here and there, but overall, some of the absolute best experiences of my life.

Then did LD42.

• Streaming software suddenly stopped working properly after running fine all week

• Backup streaming option on a laptop stopped working for a different reason (was also working all week)

• Various files vanished, Trello stopped working right, Twitch stopped working right, FB Live stopped working right.

• Countless pieces of software broke for the first time in strange ways

• The second we started actual work, our artist's laptop just didn't turn on. First time that's ever happened. Had to actually open it up to fix it.

• Internet went completely out, not common, so went to second location.

• Internet went completely out at second location, for the first time ever there.

• Somehow a large bug (probably a fly) got into the top part of my water bottle, and I drank it and then spit out a half dissolved thing and got queasy and couldn't stop thinking about it the entire weekend (or any time I used that water bottle again. Finally got a brand new, totally different one last week, since I still couldn't shake that feeling of it in my mouth.)

• While typing, suddenly I felt a stinging sensation on my hand. I looked down and there was blood on my hand. ZERO IDEA WHY. I washed it off, applied antiseptic and bandaids, but it kept hurting more, and also started bleeding more. I ended up with a huge scar on the top of my hand.

• Our artist burned herself while cooking on Saturday night and ended up with the IDENTICAL scar on the same hand.

• All of this so far happened on Saturday, and we basically had nothing done on Saturday night (usually it's almost done at that point and we polish and tweak for the rest of the weekend). We were really, really distressed from everything happening, and we should have just stopped and cut our losses, but we wanted to push through and prevail. So I stayed up late to get SOMETHING done, in terms of a prototype for some of our ideas, and all it resulted in was lots and lots of boilerplate code where I somehow forgot how zero indexing works (?) and typed this for every single for loop:

(int i=0; i < length-1; i++)

I didn't realize this until actually after the jam, and couldn't figure out why there were all these weird bugs with the last element of every array.

• There was actually more stuff that weekend, weird personal stuff, for everybody involved, that came out of nowhere.

• The game idea we did settle on, in that state of distress, was actually a really really good one, but it was one that we actually thought we wanted to develop into a full, long term project game, and for some reason in that state of confused distress we just started working on the actual code of that game, instead of making a fun prototype of it. Fully extensible in every way, procedurally generated, online and offline multiplayer, single player vs AI, an extremely complex graphics system... We actually implemented all of those systems (minus the AI) over the weekend, but didn't get around to actually making any gameplay with them yet. It got put aside, to eventually have each system reconstructed properly and build it up again from scratch, but is still on the to-do list while we finish a different game.

Here's the timelapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGHyfBBTvBc

So, might do something particularly easy this time, to recover :)

I'm glad a lot of people played our game, but our ratings suggest that it was not liked by any standard. Much less than any other game I've made. Thinking it was my best game jam game yet, I wanted to find out what the disconnect was between my friends/me and everybody else, learn more about gamers that are outside of my personal group of friends, and learn more about good game design. In a comment thread somewhere else, The Omicron Fleet creator @cerno-b gave us some very valuable feedback regarding our game's ratings, which I think I can summarize with one of the paragraphs he wrote. He asked me to make this new post to further discuss my game.

I think what happened is that people started your game, played around with it a bit, failed to make any progress and gave up. Since they did not experience the whole game, they left a lackluster comment and gave you a mediocre rating. This could also explain the low score in music. They simply did not play the game long enough to appreciate it. It is possible that the one single flaw of somewhat unpolished controls brought your whole game down, which is a pity since you nailed the theme, the graphics were very pleasing and I mentioned how much I liked your score.

I'm not good at games, physically. I have a neurological disorder and don't have any fine motor control in my hands. I'm very clumsy and don't like games that require any skill. But I have always liked what people consider REALLY DIFFICULT games. I love Cuphead, 1001 Spikes, and every brutal puzzle game I can get my hands on. I don't think those require skill, just thought. The act of stopping for a second before hitting restart. The thing that has fascinated me the most about games, since I was a kid, is a non-verbal narrative you can establish with a player, which can lead to them realizing that if you were able to establish this logic-based narrative with them, that they might also share that bond with the rest of society. That last part is the moving thing about games to me, not the explicit gameplay stories themselves. Jonathan Blow gave a really amazing talk about this at PAX East a few years ago where he actually mentions two of my favorite games (and his game The Witness is my official favorite game):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwBl7Rnkt78

That narrative can really only be established if you can't complete something thoughtlessly. If you can beat a level through physical prowess alone, you haven't been captured in conversation.

Now, all that being said, and explaining the type of games I'd like to make-- that doesn't by any means suggest that I succeeded. Even if for some reason my game is now more fun to somebody after explaining that, a game shouldn't require an explanation like this to achieve entertainment, or even validity. Those other games I mentioned have 90%+ ratings on Steam and don't require any explanations. Clearly, I'm missing some elements here.

Our entry for "Sacrifices Must Be Made" was a game where a trio of stuffed animals trapped in a lab must try to escape. Each animal controls differently. One is well rounded and perceptive, one is faster/agile/better at jumping, and one is slow and stable. But the characters need to lose weight in order to outpace evil robot sentinels. You have to make a decision to rip off either their legs (able to only jump), their arms (much worse balance), or tear out their eyes (obfuscated visuals.) I was hoping some fun would come from trying to figure out which combinations were the most effective, since the character qualities AND the effects of the sacrifices are listed in game during your choices (and feel like I'm beating somebody over the head with what decision to make), but I also wrote the strategy guide on the itch.io page, which explicitly tells you the easiest sacrifice to make.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUTThEnC-XE

Regardless of any combination, I did keep the controls as responsive as possible, with almost no ramp up time to full movement velocity, and very little ramp down time after releasing a movement key. The instability sacrifice does create small random movements and slightly randomizes the velocites of all movement, but this is attenuated enough by the one character's stability that it is the best sacrifice for that character. Ripping off the legs does significantly increase accuracy and handling with the jumping mechanics, and the visual obfuscation is much less intense on the thoughtful character. We didn't try to purposely make it difficult at any point-- you have infinite lives and can either restart a level by pressing Ctrl/Alt/Gamepad B, or choose a new sacrifice by pressing Y/PgDown. Without key presses, there's only about 2.5 seconds between making a lethal mistake and being back in the level. We just wanted it to be impossible to thoughtlessly plow through and actually require some consideration and analysis of the interactions between explicit character stats and explicit sacrifice nerfs. (I would have preferred for the player to think for themselves what effect tearing off legs or eyes might have, as I think guessing those correctly would provide a profound sense of achievement, but seeing as how most people were still choosing incorrect combinations, that's the furthest thing from possible I think.)

During the jam, I'd post builds on Facebook and a few friends were beating it with the harder combinations in just a few lives (on the more difficult jam level vs the level we put in our next day non-jam version after we started getting complaints on LD about the difficulty), but we generally only made it slightly easier here and there from then on. Like I said, I'm terrible at game controls, but the gameplay on our trailer is a single take where I beat the game in one life, and was the first take I tried recording. It doesn't strike me as a difficult game, but even if it was, I'm still baffled as to why we got such low scores in every category, especially since we provided cheat codes to play all the characters, and a trailer that showcases the entire content of the game. Is part of this because people who know me personally already know what types of games I like playing and making and then approach new games of mine differently? I don't want this to come across as somebody receiving criticism of an element of something they've made and then saying "well, I meant to do that", but hopefully I've explained what I wanted to succeed at doing and I want to get more input about how I missed the mark on that.

I'd like to take this opportunity of receiving a bad score to learn more about what else went wrong though too. I am incredibly grateful for the few people who put a lot of effort into their feedback, specifically @cerno-b and @birdwards. I know quite a few things that could use tweaking, but if difficulty is the element that caused a disaster, I'm very interested in learning more about how to make a game both fun AND impossible to beat without minimal strategizing.