EDIT: I'm an idiot, disregard most of this. For those who are coming in and wondering what's going on here, basically I assumed they got bored with RiftBreak after a minute or two while in fact the intent was to only show a short segment.

This is a straight copy of the comment I've posted on YouTube. I wrote this under the assumption that you stopped after playing the section shown in the video; I'm not sure if that's true given your comment here.

Developer of RiftBreak here. Thanks for giving it a shot, even after suffering through the giant download, license key, and other (deliberate) annoyances.

Although... I must admit I'm kind of disappointed you gave up after less than two minutes of gameplay. That's barely scratching the surface; there's far more to the game than the plane VN/negotiation section. Without spoilering it too much, all the screenshots on the page are actually in the game. You're probably pretty busy if you're trying to play all 70-odd games, but if you have the chance, I humbly ask you to give RiftBreak another shot because it might surprise you.

Use the 1.1.0 version, though, because the 1.0.0 version is known to hardlock some PCs.

Thanks for playing!

I think Ja Wizardman was still the more ambitious project albeit in a different way. I'd say what you attempted was more work but this might have been more risk. I'd done some experimenting before the jam and went in about 90% sure it would work, but it's still quite complex which means there are more chances for project-killing problems and game-breaking bugs. Testing it was probably the worst part, with limited time and only a few machines to test on (development laptop, gaming desktop, and a virtual machine).

I've talked about it in my postmortem but this is something I've thought about doing in the past. SBIG Jam seemed like a good place to try it and I could still submit something if it didn't work out.

In testing we found that dashing through that level is the fastest and easiest way to beat it.

The Library knockoff level is actually copy/pasted 4 times. There's a trigger in the corridors between that disable the previous section and enable the next one. I thought about adding the "Loading... done" text but ran out of time to do it.

It still has performance issues even in version 1.1. I think I know why it's slow in general and I think I've partially fixed it, but performance seems to get worse as you move through the level and I have no idea why. The components were never meant to be used with a lot of NPCs at once, but Shattered had a level that ran badly but acceptably with more on screen than this so I don't know why it's so bad here.

I think I've mentioned this before in other responses but the tedium factor is something I was kind of really on the fence on. I don't like tedious games and I know some people are turned off by this also, but I wanted to play with making the game so bad it's good in that the moment-to-moment gameplay sucks but the overarching promise is enough to keep you playing.

I really regret not doing an ending song last year (I did one for TWAT but not for Beach Defend 2000) so it was pretty much at the top of my list of things to include. I made that by singing along to a karaoke version on YouTube and I'm kind of amazed it synced up to the MIDI that well.

The drawings are somewhat inspired by the style of your games although I can really only draw one style. The drawing of the female character was my attempt to draw a certain physically impossible pose that seems to be common in comic books. I struggled a lot with it because I kept trying to figure out where things went and nothing made physical sense. Frank Mallone was challenging for a different reason; since he doesn't have facial features in the game I had to fake it. I also reworked the gun a little bit though I don't remember why.

I'm looking forward to Ja Wizardman, and I've been looking forward to the next installment of OUT OF ORDER since the first one was released.

Thanks for playing!

I talk about some of my inspiration in the postmortem and I'll be adding more posts with some of the technical details soon. It was pretty stressful trying to get it all working but I think it did work out in the end.

It'd definitely not a quick experience (and some parts are designed deliberately to be tedious). If you have a change to do so later, give some of the other chapters a try. Few of them have actual gameplay but there are several easter eggs.

Thanks for playing!

(spoilers ahead for anyone else reading this)

Technically, it's probably the most complicated game I've ever made, possibly the most complicated software project I've ever made. It was a risk but I'd done some proof of concepts and some thought experiments in the weeks and months leading up to the jam and I was 90% sure it would work.

I can definitely see where you're coming from. One of the core concepts I was working with was to build a game that made you want to keep playing and pushing forward while also disappointing you at every turn. I was trying to play with the so bad it's good, um, -ness, by promising an epic game and then handing over tedious, broken garbage. I may have gone too far in that direction- as you've said and I think I've brought up in some feedback on other games there's a point where it becomes too tedious to press on.

The tedious quest in the RPG section evolved organically, while the annoyingly repeated FPS level is actually based on a real level from Halo which I'd played

I think more shorter segments might have made a better game but I was really pushing it, time-wise, with the three segments I did. There's a certain fixed cost to creating each segment which making them shorter would not have reduced. I could have maybe squeezed one more in if I pushed it but five was right out.

You're not the only one to report an actual crash. It's unfortunate but I'm not surprised that these issues are popping up; there's a lot that can go wrong and testing this mess was a nightmare. The upcoming version 1.1 will fix some of the issues.

I'm planning to go over some of this in more detail in my postmortem which will be posted after the jam is finished (hopefully sooner than later).

Thanks for playing!

Building a game that juggles engines like this is something I've been thinking about doing for a while but I decided it would be a good fit for this jam. It was really tight timing wise and I made some deliberate decisions to limit scope and sidestep some of the harder technical problems.

Thanks for playing!

The weird transitions are because of how the game is implemented. I'll go into the technical details in my postmortem but basically every component- menu, game over, cutscenes, chapters- is a separate executable. When you go to a chapter from the main menu, the main menu program exits and the chapter program is started.

Thanks for playing!

There are a few things I wanted to do this time around that I didn't hit last year. One of them was to make a "big" game that gave the player a sense of epicness and adventure, and the other was to set the player up for something amazing and then disappoint them horribly.

I'm planning to talk about some of that in my postmortem, which will be out some time after the voting period ends.

It's part of the experience ;)

Thanks for playing!

I went in wanting to build a "big" game with a sense of epicness and a sense of adventure- and also one that's hugely disappointing at every turn. It was never intended to be finished either.

That's not how I actually implemented the modifier, or at least not how it was intended. Read the conversation with the conductor closely. In retrospect I think it was too subtle and I should have emphasized it a bit more.

Glad you had some fun with it!

I think I mentioned this in the Discord, probably before the jam, but I had a few broad goals in mind this time. I wanted to overpromise and underdeliver, I wanted to build something big that would give players a sense of adventure, and I wanted to not finish or at least "not finish". I think I succeeded in all of those.

The exact structure here is something I'd been thinking about for a while though previously in the context of a potential collaborative project. It made perfect sense to do for this jam, with a bit of jankiness added, though my estimates put it as being really tight in terms of timing. It would have been a better fit for a two week jam, but I decided to just roll with it anyway since not finishing a game isn't the end of the world for SBIG Jam.

I'm planning on doing a postmortem where I'll talk about this in more depth and without trying to avoid spoilers.

That part actually came built-in. The near-pointlessness of it (there are double battles in this but they are very rare) is something that came up during testing and I decided to leave in given the nature of the jam.