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XCVG5 years ago(+1)

This is probably the best looking game of the jam, might have done the modifier the best, and is probably one of the more coherent.

It definitely has the look of a PS1 (or, to me, more like early Glide) game. Low res, limited palette, no filtering and awful draw distance, check. Well... almost. I don't know if it's a bug or I just didn't notice it the first time, but the second time I fired up the game the facade dropped a bit. It had very modern looking motion blur and I could tell that the pixels were done with a postprocessing effect. Kind of a shame, too, because the first time I played it I was blown away by how retro it really looked.

The framerate also varied a lot. That might be my computer's fault; I'm not sure if it's actually running on the dGPU or not.

The stealth music feels really out of place. I don't know if it's a reference to a specific game, but it really threw me off.

The gameplay is eh. It's rough but it (mostly) works. Normally I'd say that it's off to a good start but for this jam I think it's probably the worst place to be. My favourite games in previous years were the ones that played well but were awful in other ways, or had horrendously weird and awful gameplay but were still somehow fun.

With no HUD, no menus, no pause, and no checkpoints, it felt really incomplete, like a prototype. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing for this jam. I did find having to start from the beginning every time very frustrating, and never reached the end.

I don't know. I think it's actually really well done, especially in terms of being a retro game, but I found it kind of boring to be honest.

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cubehero5 years ago

Thanks, I'll take that a positive, even if I never know if that's the case with this jam!

This is actually made on Unreal Engine 4, I spent a decent bit of time figuring out how to downgrade the graphics in the engine to get close to that look! Especially the simulation of affine texture mapping took me a while to integrate because I missed a step (more like a tiny label on screenshots) in the tutorials people had written about it, another thing learned about UE4. D:
I'm surprised there are framerate problems with the low polygon (I think? By today's standards, at least) models and aggressive culling distance, but you're not the only person to report it. I wonder what's going on, there.

The stealth music was a random idea I had because I felt the game was still a bit too "earnest" for the jam and wanted to put some more jank into it. I tried it out, saw that my stealth walk animation actually somewhat matched the beat, and just kept it in.

It's weird how the three times I joined this jam, I had different project themes every time. The first one was just as much meme as I could put into it, the second a super overscoped game that was mostly based around making a "lame" concept out of a cool setting, and now this one was mainly just "I kind of feel like trying to animate my own 3D character". I actually got enough Blender knowledge to do that during the time of the jam, so while I do kind of agree that the meme/jank level could be a lot higher and more fun, I at least learned a lot! I do kind of want to go back to just making a huge meme game if (hopefully when) there's an SBIG 2020.

That also goes into the other point of no menus and UI, I basically just decided to put the time elsewhere since I'm still not super comfortable with UMG widgets and stuff. I should go through a coherent Unreal Engine course some time so UIs aren't arcane magic anymore.

I'm a bit sad you found it boring, but I guess not all games are for everyone! With more time (maybe) resulting in a better level and more enemy types, it might have been more fun, too.

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XCVG5 years ago

While the faux-retro isn't perfect, it's fine for a jam game. Getting a perfect look takes a lot of time, and this was a one-week jam. Downgrading graphics can be difficult. I'm quite familiar with Unity and I wasn't able to get Beach Defend 2000 to look quite the way I wanted it in the time I had.

I tend to like really bizarre, weird games, especially in this jam. The epitome of a "so bad it's good" game, in my mind, is one that makes me go "WTF did I just play" but also "let's do that again". I actually feel that every game I've made for SBIG Jam, including this year's entry, has been too conventional. I think next year I'll try to do something really weird.

How is Unreal's UI system? I have mixed feelings about the one in Unity.

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cubehero5 years ago

I imagine look-wise it might be better to just go for older engines from the start, but most of those are so unwieldy, inefficient and sometimes just straight up horrible to use. I actually tried manually setting a low resolution in UE4 first, but since that always screws with monitor layouts and the like when fullscreen, I thought the postprocessing option was preferable.

Yeah... I still fondly remember things like "I am the Intergalactic Wizards", just really bizarre stuff. I'd currently like to try something more out there for 2020, but who knows how I'm feeling next time the jam hopefully rolls around. While I learned a ton both with Cyberpunk Helpdesk and this game, it should be an interesting experience to just try to do something as weird as we can muster.

I have little Unity experience and don't actually know how to even do a healthbar in Unreal without looking it up, but from what I've seen, the UI system in Unreal actually seemed pretty robust. I've just not learned how to use it yet, which made me skip a UI entirely!

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XCVG5 years ago

I've built some games in GZDoom (my entry last year, TWAT, was one of them) but I'm moving away from that engine for exactly that reason. What I've found is that with retro engines, there are hard limits on what you can do, at least while maintaining your sanity. GZDoom is about as flexible as it gets, but it still doesn't support (for example) skeletal animation, video playback, or a robust custom GUI (ZScript might have changed the last one). If you need any of those you're straight up out of luck. It could be an interesting challenge but it's not my thing.

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cubehero5 years ago

Oh yes, I remember TWAT, I played it and the final boss killed me as I ran out of ammo (it must have been very close to death itself). :D

I also experienced older engines to be a lot more prone to parts of your project just disintegrating (map data, mostly), kind of, or simple things taking forever to do. Though using something like the Build engine (if there's even a "generic" version of that around, I haven't looked) for a jam game might be a fun change some time!

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