GMTK Game Jam 2019

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GMTK Game Jam 2019 community

Tech thingy!

A topic by dzamani created Aug 07, 2019 Views: 256 Replies: 12

Viewing posts 1 to 8

dzamaniSubmitted5 years ago (1 edit)

Hey everyone,

Let's start a thread about questions on how to do things but specific to the games you made. So for example if you asks us how we did the animations in our game I can say we used DoTween and cheated our way into cheap / fast animations haha

You can also talk about things that nearly got in your game but you had to give up.

I tried to make biomes in our level selector in order to group the levels together, I failed miserably because it was going to take more time than we had. #sadnessMyOldFriend

How about you all ?

PS: be techy, we wanna know the exact logic behind your features!

PS2: Our game https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462077

andidebobSubmitted5 years ago (1 edit)

Well I don't really want to repeat myself, but you can read in my Post-Mortem about how I built a system for my 'Choose your own Adventure'-Game which lets me expand the stories pretty effortlessly. If you have any questions, please ask. Also @dzamani a link to the game you are talking about would be great!
https://andidebob.itch.io/your-story/devlog/93788/making-of-your-story

dzamaniSubmitted5 years ago

Here you go!
https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462077

I will read your postmortem, thanks!

Team TerribleSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

We built a 3D game full of 2D mini games, where the player is the only crew member on a spaceship and must run around keeping the shields powered, dodging missiles and charging up the gun.

The most awkward thing was controlling the game events to keep communication clear and not overloading the player with information while keeping the feeling of panic. I'm not sure we pulled it off perfectly but it works for the most part.

We used UE4 and I implemented an event queue in C++ built of inline instanced UObjects. We could then have Blueprint derived classes that provided the functionality for the event and declared when the queue could move on to the next. This allowed us to gate events by dialogue, world effects, player location etc on a per event basis. It made all the game logic very modular which was great for us as it minimised changes in one system breaking another.

You can check out the game and the project source on our game page.

If anyone has the mad inclination to open the project you'll need UE4.22.3 and VS2017.

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462790

dzamaniSubmitted5 years ago

Woah it looks like you went deep into that system, would you say it could not have been the same game with hardcoded communication (a lot less modular than what you did)?

AndrewSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

I've built my roguelike game on Love2d engine, but instead of using the Lua programming language, as you would expect, I've used a dialect of LISP, the second oldest programming language. Yeah, I'm that tech geek :D

The dialect I've used called Fennel, and it is already proved itself to be a good choice for a game jams, see, for instance, those games: Gravity: Fall, Frog Collect Cheese, EXO_encounter 667 (that last one even managed to win the game jam it was written for, Lisp Game Jam 2018). Basically Fennel is just a layer of LISP syntax over good old Lua, so you still can cut yourself with its sharp corners, e.g. its awkward associative arrays called tables. The advantage Fennel gives is that the code you write becomes quite easy to navigate and hack on, because, well, it is mostly parentheses (they abbreviate LISP as Lots of Silly Parentheses for a reason :D). So for my game it allowed me to implement quite a large amount of mechanics I've never done before - a random maze with doors, items, item durability, different mob classes, ranged and close combat weapons and some others :) And all it took was just around 25 hours (I use IDE plugin that measures the time I've spent coding, lol).

I do recommend to at least take a look on that tech stack. Oh, and you can use the source code of my game as the example (look for *.fnl files).

Oh, and if you have a chance, please rate my game https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/460262 :3

PedroleumSubmitted5 years ago

In my game I really wanted to include an online leaderboard, as it feel like an arcade game so that you'd want to compete with other people. The only problem is, I had no clue how to do this, as I've never used online features in a video game. I probably had enough time to learn about it, but I had a lot of other stuff to do.

Heres my game if you want to see it:

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/461710

dzamaniSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

There is a LOT of ways to have your leaderboard go through keywords on google like "game backend" "services". I think Unity Services could also work, but yeah big chunk to do that for a gamejam.

BuendiaGamesSubmitted5 years ago

Our game was kind of easy but has some interesting stuff...

1. The color of the background changes little by little as you go down, and it's done in a procedural way!

2. The BIG FISH you have to take has a basic lightning shader I did. It is the first time I write a shader without copying all the code from the Internet, so I'm very happy.

3. And the code is free in GitHub! So you can take a look to it to learn the details :)

Take a look to the game: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/461782

dzamaniSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

First time writing a shader can be real challenge, glad you could do it!

Colin EUMPSubmitted5 years ago

Any artists/visual designers that haven't heard of additive blending yet? It's really useful for making things glow. Also, it doesn't overwrite what's behind it quite as much as normal blending (unless you hit white) so you can make new shapes by layering without having to fiddle as much with transparency. I recommend it for any visual aesthetic that needs things to light up in a dark atmosphere or dark area. Also, you can expect some way of trying it out in any image editor that isn't just paint or built-in to game maker studio (though I actually don't know if studio 2 lets you do so). Just remember to place a background color (preferably a really dark one) so that you can actually see what you're doing.

I used it for the entire background (which is randomly generated), for the river itself, and for the fireflies and their reflections. https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/460395

JodacamSubmitted5 years ago(+1)

Our game in terms of overall programming wasn't to complex, but because all the stats depends on the same values we have to make a lot of different curves and mathematics ecuations with logs ands Ln and also a lot of lerps to cap some values ha hahaha. We use Unity so the math library was friendly to use, but the lines of code alwais look like "float f=Mathf.lerp(baseValue,topValue,Mathf.logn(VALUE/Matf.e))"

It was fun to balance hahahaha

Here is the game if you want to check it out

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/461305

dzamaniSubmitted5 years ago

Curious about those equations and other things would mind giving a specific example ?