Brackeys Game Jam 2023.1

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Updating after Jam?

A topic by BerryBush Games created Feb 21, 2023 Views: 424 Replies: 17

Viewing posts 1 to 12

BerryBush GamesSubmitted1 year ago (1 edit)

So just want to check in on the rest of you guys and see how you feel about this? Any plans to update your jam project once ratings are finished? I'm personally going to go squash a couple of bugs I found during development that got pushed back due to time. It would be interesting to hear what you plan to add, change, optimize, etc once you are able to put your patch 1.1 updates if you catch my drift.

For ours: Definitely going to fix the menu interaction (controls work but there's a "dead" onscreen x on the notes window that snuck its way in with no functionality, and going to do some optimization and text layout changes. I really underestimated the time it would take to make builds too so I'll be going through and removing any unused assets and cleaning up the files. Probably going to add a main menu and proper credits scene as well,.

Anyone else got some post-launch updates planned? I'd love to hear your ideas!

Edit: Here's ours if anyone is interested!
Vale (Farewell) by BerryGood Games!

Mathieu SchmerberSubmitted1 year ago(+1)

You raised a good question !

Seeing your team planning on expanding, I'm getting curious, I'm writing you game down so that I can play it tonight.

On my end, planning on squashing a bug that makes my game unable to replay, unless you refresh the web page since this is very detrimental to gameplay. At first that was everything I planned on doing, but for some reason (and that's amazing) my game has been played litteraly hundreds of times and seems to provide fun to people. So I may update it into a more stable and bigger project. I think I'm going to rethink a whole part of the game design to make for a better balancing, as well as making a mobile version since it seems to be fitting well the medium :)

Here's my output if you're curious: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-9/rate/1932730

BerryBush GamesSubmitted1 year ago

I 100% think your game would do very well on mobile- and if you do port it please let me know because I found myself having quite a lot of fun playing it! It feels very polished by the way- sound, animation, and gameplay were all very smooth and felt very professional. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the balancing by the way- that's always one of the hardest parts for me to wrap my head around. I'm one of those players who will backwards longjump my way into and out of problems, which makes it very hard to tell when I am setting the technical bar too high or low for the playerbase (doesn't really apply to Vale though, being that it was a narrative).

Speaking of! Huge thanks for checking it out! It's got those couple kinks I mentioned, and the ending is a jarring end (you'll see what I mean haha, no it's not a bug), so it has a way to go but this was our groups first game release and I feel pretty good about the direction it took.

Oh- and also if you add more abilities to your game you gotta keep rolling with the puns now! You set a high bar gotta keep it going, haha. Had a good laugh at the names.

Mathieu SchmerberSubmitted1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

I'm soo curious about your game, can't wait to try it out tonight, but now I've been writing feedbacks on itch since this morning, and I'm still getting paid by my company so I need to stop slacking off x) (gosh I love remote)

I'm happy that the game was fun to you, means a lot to me as I never really shared that much with the community for years of game dev. I'm actually starting this JAM to feel like being a community guy hahaha so you may see me around this week quite a lot !

Let's keep in touch :)

Edit: forgot to talk about scopes haha. It's obviously a challenging question to tackle, since to me it solely depends on your experience. At my beginnings making a JAM with two moving platforms and a player that can jump was almost everything I could handle in two days, but with time and experience you'll find better and better workflows. To this day the best thing I found for JAMs is to create content based games. It's tricky while programming, but that's what I like since I'm a software engineer. The essence of it is to find a system, for example a combat system, and making it as modulable as possible. This way no matter the time constraints you''l be able to create content quickly and even polish it. If I take my game a an example, I have all this that's modulable:

- Input system, it's decoupled so my players and AIs can all extend from it, this way coding new AIs is really quick as I don't care about handling their movement but just their "way of thinking"

- Upgrades, every entity have some kind of "Module pool" and each module is an actual self centered ability that can be attach to anything. So ofc the player get have dynamic modules at runtime, but I also give my enemies and allies modules in the same way so I don't have to handle any kind of specific attack system. Everything is based around the player.

When scoping my game, if I have entities other than the player, I like to make the player not standing out. Essentially in my game, the player has the exact same component as any other entities, the player has just the ability to gain more modules but that's it. And that's all, that's how you may obtain a rather polished game in 3 days like me. Creating a new module is a matter of 15min max if I have to extend my module, and an AI would maybe take 20min, all that's left is spending time balancing and polishing the game, which in the end takes the most time.

BerryBush GamesSubmitted1 year ago

Oh that's a nice way to look at it! I quite enjoy that you have built yourself a modular framework for quick prototyping and rapid development- and honestly that's a really good idea. One of my personal projects right now is template creation, making control schemes, camera schemes, interactable systems, etc in a versatile way where I can piece the "blocks" of code together to create a way to test concepts quickly and start putting a higher amount of playable prototypes out in a short amount of time, seeing which have the best impact or gameplay and figuring out which ideas to devote more time to! (Nothing quite like the feeling of designing a game for a while and then realizing the harsh truth- that it isn't fun!)

Feel free to reach out any time I'd love to chat concepts and anything you feel like. I'll probably open a guest chat channel on our company discord at some point for developers to chit chat back and forth if you'd be interested. It would be nice to have a community of like-minded people who are interested in the design process!

Mathieu SchmerberSubmitted1 year ago(+1)

Putting some effort in your workflow is definitely worth it, I tried putting a library together from a variety of my projects so that I don't have to re-code every extentions and tools from one project to another and it's definitely a lot of time saved.

I'd love to chat about design concepts with you in the future your idea sounds great !

Feel free to add me on discord: Nawlian#1487

Also now that I'm off work, time to give a try at your game :D

VoyageSubmitted1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

It's difficult for me. I'd LOVE to re-implement the things I had to take out. Originally, the level changed in stages according to the machines you built, but it increased the size of my game to over itch.io's limit of 1GB. So a post-update for me would involve optimizing the game as much as I can to take down the size, and clearing out the minor bugs that have appeared in the game. There seemed to be a bug where two UI texts were able to overlap each other, and you can apparently keep building machines forever even though they are already built.

The latter isn't game-breaking, it just means the player might accidentally sink their scrap metal into a machine they already built :P

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-9/rate/1933275

TheWrongJohnSubmitted1 year ago(+1)

Thank you for the question/topic. Yes, I think I will at some point after playing as many games as I can here. My game development comes in fits and bursts when I have down time in life/work. Anyway, from the comments on my game I have made a list of the things to work on!

Controls
Power-ups
Multiple tracks
Death animation
Better sounds and volume balance
A tutorial level explaining the rules/objectives

BerryBush GamesSubmitted1 year ago

Played your game and really liked it! I think power-ups and multiple tracks will add a lot of versatility and really like the idea of the quality of life changes too! I feel like it would be a really fun party game, with 2 or 3 cars on a bigger map, and might be a really good fit for mobile! I'm just imagining sitting there vs a few friends as the match becomes faster and faster trying to see who can live longest, haha.

TheWrongJohnSubmitted1 year ago

Great thanks for the ideas!

DoriensSubmitted1 year ago (2 edits) (+1)

I am an aspiring indie developer, and I am currently working on my first game. However, I want to test around the store/monetising system before releasing it.
This jam was the perfect opportunity for me get this started, and force myself with a solid deadline. Even though the concept is not novel, I am quite happy with the progress I was able to made considering that I didn't have much time last week to work on it, and now I am fired up to continue!!!

So, now the goal is to polish and add content to the game for futur release!

Here are the things I am working on for this entry:

Adding settings screen
Adding a colorblind setting
Add some animations for the robot (moving eyes, idle animations...)
Rework the colors, as some are too similar (red and orange... bad choice)
Rethink the robot color switching mechanics to make it more interesting (maybe being able to use it two or three times in a level)
Add levels
Put game on stores!

Here is the game for those interested :)

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-9/rate/1932954

FunkyParrot1 year ago(+1)(-2)

We recieved a lot of feedback, thank you all!

Here are some major things we are going to develop in future:

1) We will do our best to improve combat mechanics

2)Redo some assets add some smooth animations

3) Add ton of new weapons, upgrades and combinations!

4) Add new playable ships

5) Create pirate HUB

6) Make a completely new mechanic, which will be described in our topic in the nearest future!

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-9/rate/1921973

Alex CalvelageSubmitted1 year ago

We plan on updating our game post-jam for sure. I've already made tons of bug fixes and added features like audio volume adjustment and fixes to monster spawning behavior. As well as how they resolve collisions between each other. We're currently planning out what new weapons/upgrades to add.

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-9/rate/1933498

BrallexSubmitted1 year ago

I will most definitely add some features that I didn't have time to add to my game.
This was the first time I participated in a jam as a married, full-time web developer, so it was hard for me to manage my time and schedule.
What I would add is:

Musik & SFX
Point system
Ending
Slowmotion when you die (making it obvious that you change to the killer)
Camera shake
Particle effects/explosions
Different types of ships/weapons
Pick-up items (maybe for changing/upgrading ships/weapons)

I would guess there's a lot more I could add to polish up the game, but these are some of the things I myself did try to add within the time limit or stuff I have gotten some feedback about :)

Suspended account1 year ago

Show post...

I plan on adding to my game after the jam ends too :)

There are bugs that i overlooked because i played the game so many times and clicked exactly where it works but people have difficulty on clicking at ending doorway(kind of cube).

Can you take some time to look at my game and provide some feedback too :)

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-9/rate/1933154

here is the gameplay video:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Co2JF9hgO-w/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

James SonneveldSubmitted1 year ago

There were definitely a few quality-of-life improvements that some people suggested which I somehow overlooked. My intro cutscene was not skippable and during playtesting, I never once thought that that might be an issue, even though I must have sat through it at least twenty times.

I also found that the web build was significantly slower than the downloadable build, most likely to do with the meshes, which were fairly unoptimized. Time constraints however, forced me to put that on the bottom of the to-do list just so I could have a finished game.

Two things I'll consider fixing once the jam is over.

Here's the game page in case anyone is interested.

Rate I Forgot the Bus Again

Dacow1707Submitted1 year ago

Here is my first game jam entry: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-9/rate/1932821
I am also updating the game and waiting to upload a new version once the rating period is over. I also posted my planned changes on a devlog on the games page.

KevEatsCheeseSubmitted1 year ago(+1)

I do intend to make updates based on player feedback. My attention span is too short and I also have plans for other games so content updates will not happen for some time, if ever.

The updates I'm planning to make so far include:

-Making it easier to clean up the cards on the board

-Adding a way to view the recipes if you get stuck

-Replacing the board art with some nice environment artwork in the same style as the card art

-Updating the crafting progress bar to make it more clear when a craft is happening

-Fix various minor bugs

Don't mean to come off as plugging my game but if your confused about those comments and want to know more, here's the game: https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-9/rate/1933107