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Damon L. Wakes

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A member registered Jul 24, 2017 · View creator page →

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Got it.

Thanks!

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Rot13 because I can't work out how to add a details tag of my own: Ab. Gur whzcfpnerf pbzr jvgu gur ubhfr.

How did you do that, by the way? I've managed it on a game page before but the option to type in HTML doesn't appear in these comment text boxes.

I like the abundance of GDevelop jams. The timing doesn't always work out for me so knowing there's bound to be another one right around the corner really takes the pressure off.

I'm using Firefox in Ubuntu. Your screenshot looks like it's from a phone so maybe it's different depending on the browser/device? If anybody else runs into the same issue then that may make it easier to pin down.

The PDF version looks fine, but I notice that in the online viewer the zine seems to be missing chunks:

Ah, sweet! That does feel a bit more forgiving (or possibly I just got better at anticipating where things would bounce since my first playthrough). I went from "bruised banana" to "banana boss!"


It's a great effort for two weeks - I hope it does well in the jam!

Simple but neat! I'm impressed by the variety of bosses. A slightly more generous hitbox for the goal would be nice given that it's very easy to lob a banana at it and have the ricochet hit you in the face (which is compounded by the fact that you probably want to be pretty close when you throw the thing in the first place).

I didn't like to bring this up while the jam was running, but please don't spam other devs' games begging people to play your own. Especially don't beg for "really GOOD" ratings: in a lot of jams there are rules against telling people how to vote so it's likely to get you disqualified.


I appreciate that it's hard to organise people to have a go at multiplayer games in particular, but this kind of thing is going to put them off more than it's going to help. Try offering a time you'll be online to play against every day. Try getting in touch with other developers who've entered multiplayer games and asking politely - once - if you can find a time to play each other's games together so there's a chance to rate them. Make it easy for people to have a go, don't just post "plzzzzzzzzzz" everywhere you can think of.

Really glad to see that this got 2nd prize for the jam. I didn't get around to playing everything myself but this was definitely one of the highlights. Congratulations!

GG

I think I ran into that looping tyre sound bug once myself, but it was in a multiplayer game where I'm pretty sure the host got disconnected. The sound in general does seem to be a bit much, though I think it may be another one of those things that's cropped up because I was well used to steering the car before I even added it in: I suspect it's much more grating if you're frequently taking more than one full circle to make a turn, rather than hearing it only briefly on each corner.

A bigger track is a neat idea. I did consider it while making this (particularly as the Kenney racing pack seems to include assets for wider corners), but by that point it would essentially have meant building a new one from scratch. I'm also not positive how it would affect the gameplay: chances are it would mean less running into walls, but it might also offer rather a long way to drift off course. But if I added more tracks to the game, having some wider options would be one way to increase variety if nothing else! The balloon battle idea is an interesting one too. I feel as though it would probably require weapons/powerups that might mean a departure from the two-button control scheme, but at the same time I can imagine forcefields, orbiting drones, melee weapons popping out of cars - the sort of thing that might be activated on pickup and then simply remain in play until it timed out.

Ah! I was wondering if anyone would ask about the controls. Part of the reason is that I felt as though if I went with WASD or arrow keys, people would end up trying to turn left due to muscle memory: every other game of this sort allows it, so I wanted something substantially different so players wouldn't have a finger hovering over a useless key out of habit. As to why "A" and "M" specifically, I type on a Dvorak keyboard and those are the two keys that are positioned the same as on a QWERTY keyboard.

If you want an easier option in the short term, GDevelop can produce an .apk file you can just slap on Itch for people to download. It's unlikely to get as much traction as a game in the app store, but it works just as well.

This game is simple but neat! I like that the buttons have some "weight" to them so they'll keep sliding after you let go of left/right. I did notice that the objects seem to fall in the same place every time, though, so you can pretty much just squat where the hearts drop and never have to worry about getting hit by a crate. Some sound would help it feel a lot more lively, and I wouldn't mind a more exciting background as well. Still, not bad for 48 hours!

Yeah, a couple of people have mentioned that. I think because I got the hang of it while testing, I didn't realise that people would take so long to get around the track when picking it up for the first time: based on the fact that the game has more ratings than leaderboard entries (and that the slowest recorded times are in the region of four minutes), it seems a fair number of players don't manage the full three laps at all. Once you can get round the corners reliably, it takes less than two minutes to finish. I'd quite like to expand the game, though, and will definitely throw in a one-lap practice run if I do.

I like this - and I was impressed how many rocks could be on screen and still offer a chance to avoid them! My guess is that there's a certain element of luck to this at some point, but a good player should always have a significant edge over a bad one (especially if they can make full use of the dash - I found myself inching around far more slowly). I'd like a little more sound and I feel as though some dust or something kicking up when the boulders hit the ground would be nice, but that sort of thing would just be the cherry on top. This makes great use of the theme and I hope it places well in the jam.

This is really cute. The camera is a bit buggy, as others have said, but what I found I really missed was checkpoints: I don't really want to take another run at the fairly trivial spider chase to take another crack at avoiding the foot (which seems to come down so quickly I've got very little hope of avoiding it - or at least would take more tries learning to avoid than I have patience for without a checkpoint). Love the take on the theme, though!

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I love this take on the jam theme. It's great to see something with LOADS of buttons that nevertheless obviously matches the "only two buttons" prompt. Obviously it's pretty simple (and I agree that the difficulty could be tweaked), but it works well! There's more to this than the extremely common card-based memory game that it initially resembles. Given the simplicity of the gameplay I wonder if there could be more in the way of sound, particle effects, etc. - I want a little trumpet fanfare when I hit those two buttons and a WHOMP WHOMP if I hit the wrong one! - but since it seems you're planning to do more with this you could always add that kind of success/failure feedback later. Even in its current form, I think it's one of the stand-out games of the jam for me.

I really like the two-button control scheme for this: it feels as though the character can do everything you'd expect, but with just those two buttons. It's very intuitive. I'm less keen on the graphics: that font on that background is virtually impossible to read. (I also notice that the text at the beginning seems to slip off the bottom of the screen, which I found happening in my game as well to an extent - it seems as though it might be a common GDevelop issue so if you ever work out what's going on there I'd be keen to hear about it!) The sound does the job and there's certainly some innovation here. My one other quibble is that I'm pretty sure I got a game over when an enemy spawned inside the player character, but it's fun all the same: it's hard to fault a jam game over something little like that.

Definitely a solid take on the jam theme, but I feel as though there are several little tweaks that would really help polish it without too much trouble. The main thing is that there's a lot of empty space behind the car. I feel as though I want the car to sit at the bottom of the screen so there's the most space possible above it to see skeletons coming. As it is, they're coming pretty quickly and only have a short distance to cover before they hit the car (which doesn't move particularly fast). On top of that, the fact the car rotates to face the direction of travel means it typically makes for a pretty big target. I feel as though you could keep the car facing the top of the screen - maybe even with the background scrolling as if it's driving down the road - and that would make for a slightly smoother experience. Sound would also be nice to have, but hardly essential for the basic gameplay. Ultimately, any game you get out of a 48 hour event is great going, and this one feels pretty finished. Good job!

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Haha! Yeah, sound was something of a late addition to this: I'd definitely rework it given more time, but the tyre noises as they are now already took a good chunk of an hour of the jam. Both they and the engine noise have to run for however long the button's held, which involves multiple audio events that (without better planning) make it harder to tweak pitch/volume etc.

The graphics are amazing - I love the breakdancing animation. Very impressive for 48 hours. Obviously the actual gameplay isn't all that complex (and as others have said, 200 seems a rather high target - I found the music wrapped up before I reached that), but it fits the theme for sure.

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Haha! We both went with essentially the same control scheme for the two buttons theme. It's interesting how different the games are, though! I liked avoiding the bombs in this. It feels nice and complete, especially for a 48-hour effort. I managed to have a go at the multiplayer, which didn't seem to add all that much in itself but seemed to work really well. The game as a whole stuttered a bit but that may have just been my connection. Nice work!

I feel as though this desperately needs the platforms visible on screen before you have to make your first jump: there isn't reliably enough time for a second which makes the very start feel like a bit of a lottery. That said, it has the potential to be a fun physics game and I see how it matches the theme.

This doesn't strike me as a particularly solid response to the jam, but if you managed to get multiplayer working in 45 minutes then that's great going! I do like the little character, and the wall-jumping is nice.

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After exploring some more of the jam games, it looks as though THIS is the Weekend Jam #3 game that should be rated and the one I'm commenting on now was probably submitted to the jam by mistake, since it was entered to GDevelop BIG Game Jam #5 months ago and isn't even eligible for this one.

Please do let me know if I've got the wrong end of the stick here, but my guess is that you'd probably rather people were leaving ratings/comments on the other submission page instead. If that's the case, hopefully this will help steer them over there!

Obviously too late to be any help for this jam, but from the main page:

Acceptable use of pre-existing code:
-Reuse of UI
-Reuse of private extensions
-Reuse of short snippets of events (Juice effects, for example)

Not acceptable use of pre-existing code:
-Reuse of an existing project with changed art assets
-Reuse of an existing project with minimal changes
-Submission of a project worked on prior to the jam (We can check)

Pretty sure that what you're describing would fall under that second "not acceptable" point (though if you were to come up with your own Dino Run style game from scratch I expect that would be fine). I feel as though I've seen similar rules for previous GDevelop jams so hopefully this gives you something to go on for the next one.

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The music was actually composed for this game by TurtleBox! I remembered to include a credit on gd.games but was in a real rush by the time I got around to writing the Itch description and neglected to add it here as well. The SFX was largely just grabbed from Pixabay but took a bit of work. The engine noise in particular has a few different elements: whenever you accelerate there's an initial rev followed by a looping "engine running" noise, plus a steady "idling" loop running in the background. (Realistically the running/idle sounds shouldn't be heard simultaneously, but actually switching between them in the game sounded weird for some reason.)

It would be great to expand this into a more complete game: in particular I'd love to include local multiplayer. The two-button control scheme would make it really easy to let a bunch of people simply crowd around the same keyboard, or to have two players using a single controller (or four players using two). I can imagine using shoulder buttons to accelerate and face buttons to steer, with one person essentially playing left-handed and the other right-handed. Multiple tracks are a great shout as well: I was originally hoping to do that for the jam version, but it took a surprisingly long time to design just the one!

As good as it would be to have sound, I think you probably took the right approach by focusing on the gameplay first. A little "boop" when hitting the buttons and a "thunk" when putting items in the boxes (plus a music track in the background) would go a long way without taking ages to implement, but if you're seriously pressed for time then it's better to have a silent game that works well than one that has sound but never quite came together.

Ah, thanks for letting me know! The gd.games version is definitely smoother. If you can find a way to offer meaningful choices of upgrades etc. I think that would really make the most of the two-button gameplay: it's always nice to be able to keep the core game simple, but offer a bit more depth between levels. I also feel as though it could lend itself to local multiplayer as well: if you've only got two buttons to handle, one player could use left/right and the other could use A/D (though I remember multiple cameras being a bit of a long shot in GDevelop last time I tried, which might make split-screen a challenge to set up if it's even possible).

This is a neat idea for a game, but In practice I found the bombs almost impossible to avoid because the ship moves so slowly: you might be able to steer away if it was only going to clip you, but if it appears dead ahead then there's no chance. The game looks and sounds good, though - it's neat you managed to find a song that explicitly included "two buttons" in the lyrics.

I like this - a sort of Flappy Bird meets Rocket League. The controls seemed a bit janky: it took me a while to work out how to move left/right, which could have just been noted in the description, and even that seemed to stop working at some point. The music also seems to start playing over itself after every goal, which gets extremely annoying after a couple of them. Still, that kind of thing is to be expected in just 48 hours: with just a little extra polish this could be a great game to pick up with friends.

Haha! I like this take on the jam theme. A lot of people went with two-button controls so it's good to see something a little more original. I felt as though the gameplay could have been refined somewhat: I found that clicking to drag/throw a snowball would often be interpreted as the first click of a double-click, making it hard to predict when snowballs would actually appear on screen (and sometimes wasting time throwing them). Still, the basic game's there and on the whole I think it works well.

I've only tried the local multiplayer on my own, but it's easy to see how dividing the controls between two people would add another layer of fun. I can imagine it being especially tough online if you can't talk to the other player. I feel as though the graphics and audio are nothing to write home about but they certainly do the job: this feels like a nice, complete game for the 48 hours especially considering the two different multiplayer options available.

I can definitely see myself playing this for fun. On that note, any chance of an Android version for picking up during ad breaks on TV? ;-) I found it pretty hard just having a quick go, but the difficulty seems tough but fair: it's easy to imagine getting into the swing of things and developing a knack for when to reverse direction and when to switch circles. I feel as though a little extra effort on the audio would pay off as it feels very rhythm gamey overall, but what's there does the job just fine as-is. A fantastic take on the jam theme that works really well in its own right.

I see the score isn't tracked properly but honestly I don't think that really spoils the experience. The core game is there and there's some good, frantic box-packing. I'd like to see some further complications (maybe some orders should require frozen meat and you've got to take it to a machine to freeze it before you put it in a box or something) but for 48 hours this is pretty good. The only other thing that would really polish it up is a bit of sound: it doesn't take much to make a game feel a bit more complete. I liked that there's a reliable order to the items the buttons cycle through, though: it feels as though the game rewards that level of attention rather than being purely chaotic.

The character animation is a real highlight of this, and the kick (including a handy drop if you're obliged to start the attack in mid-air) works very well in gameplay terms as well. I think a leaderboard - or even just a score displayed - at the end would really be the cherry on top here: I was a little disappointed to finally run out of hearts and just immediately start over. Still, great work for two days and spot on for the jam theme.