itch.io

Hi everyone,

For the 5th year in a row, the Tool Jam will take place in May.

It’s an annual ranked jam with an optional theme where the concept is to create a tool.

At its peak, it received 104 entries (for the 2022 edition). But even in the years when there weren’t so many entries, it was always super-rich and a real pleasure to be surprised by the creativity of the participants.

I hope that some of you will want to give it a try! And even if it doesn’t inspire you, that you’ll be curious enough to test (and why not rate) the tools that will be created!

See you there!

Great game, here is my attempt to make a small guide for new players

Enemies

Enemies can spawn from any of the four corners of the screen. Do not touch them.

Basic enemies

Spawns every 3 seconds with random direction and speed. When it leaves the screen, it reappears on the other side.

Smart enemies

The first one spawns at 20 seconds, it’s fast and targets the player as it spawns; when it leaves the screen, it reappears in the same place it left.

Explosive enemies

The first one spawn at 28 seconds. It tracks the player and quickly explodes with 4 spikes going diagonally in all four directions.

Power-ups

F (freeze)

This power-up lasts 5 seconds and freezes all enemies in a small radius around the player. (nb: explosive enemies will explode even when frozen).

B

this powerup lasts only 3 seconds and destroys all enemies in a small radius around the player (nb: if you destroy an explosive enemy, it instantly reappears where it appeared)

S (speed)

This power-up lasts 10 seconds and allows the player to go very fast. The timer also goes faster !!!

Synergy

You can stack the power ups, here are the possible combinations:

F + B

F + S

S + B

F + S + B

the best combination is S+B, because it’s the best way to reduce the number of enemies that accumulate on the screen.

B+F is useless; the freeze power up is eclipsed by the B power.

(°<_ °

Nice game ! my best score is 7

(some bugs : People can see you and even catch you through walls ! also the tunnel exit at the bottom of the carrot sometimes teleport you to the wrong tunnel entrance..)

So good !! (*<_ *

Lol yes, I did that with your grDraw, weird drawing softwares are my guilty pleasure.

Couldn’t try it because I’m not a godot user, so I’m waiting to see what godot users think. From the outside it looks clean!

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Cute little desktop pet.

The moment I downloaded it, itch.io warned me that it was probably some malware. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but I decided to trust this cute little blue slime. Time will tell if I was right…

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

It’s cool to see a tool that someone has made for their own games being opened up to others. Sometimes you create little tools in your own workshop and use them for your own projects, then little by little you tweak them to make them perfect for you. The moment we decide to release them, to open them up to the world, is often an opportunity to take a step back and reflect on what we’ve done. And sometimes we also take the opportunity to make them easier to use, because we’re often more mindful of others than of ourselves. So even if, in the end, nobody else is using it, I think it’s always a good idea to make our tools public and open!

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I haven’t used Mac for a few years so this tool isn’t for me. But I appreciate the fact that you gave it a name like a virtual assistant.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Typically the kind of tool I don’t understand, but which seems very useful for someone who needs it.

Anyway, the tool jam RPG community seems to like it a lot, and that’s a good sign :)

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I haven’t tried it, so I can’t say if it works. But if it does what it says, it seems to me to be very useful. I guess it’ll save you a lot of time on Biogoth development, and that’s already great ! good job !

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I struggled a bit, but I finally got it to work! It’s fun. As you say in your description, it could use a little polishing on the interface! But frankly, there’s not much missing, just a few improvements to make the tool more intuitive.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

PDF is both a wonderful format and one of the worst formats around. Dealing with it requires tenacity, courage and skills, but also solidarity. Thank you for accompanying us in this everyday struggle.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Very early dev but already usable. I didn’t understand the “group” feature and also couldn’t figure out how to delete an object. But I managed to model my laptop very realistically.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Quite cute and fun to use, especially when moving stickers, the little animation that goes with the action makes it really cool

The list of Future Features looks promising, I just wanted to suggest two other features that I think are pretty essential for your tool:

• Be able to choose the text color
• To choose different background color per page
• even more and more stickers !!!! :D

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Okay, that’s rad, I love it, if you make a collection of planets like this and play live music while traveling in your weird galaxy, I’ll come to see the concert straight away.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I don’t use Godot, so I wont use this tool. (see my comment on Zip Carver for more).

The same tool can have two names, depending on what it’s used for. For example, if I use my lighter to uncap a bottle of beer, it won’t be a lighter anymore, it’ll be a bottle opener. So, I think it’s both funny and fair that you’ve proposed two entries for the jam when you’ve only developed one tool.

Otherwise, I really think it can be useful, disk space and internet speed are precious resources and that can sometimes be forgotten these days. The interface is simple and efficient, good job.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

FR: Une esthétique cohérente et soignée ! Et félicitation pour avoir réussi à sortir un outil bilingue, ce n’est pas évident, surtout dans le temps court d’une jam.

EN: A coherent, polished aesthetic! And congratulations on managing to produce a bilingual tool, it’s not easy, especially in the short time of a jam.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

It’s really super clean and pleasant to use.

What impresses me is the mechhanics of the decks. Usually, it’s hard to manage a deck of cards, but you make it really simple and kind of obvious. The strength of the tool is its minimalism, I hope you’ll keep working on it and adding features, but try to keep that minimalist vibe, the feeling that that only what’s necessary has been kept and that there isn’t a single button too many.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

The animation on option hover is really a nice touch!

The mechanics of being able to lock certain traits is cool.

Small detail that confused me: The element with the trait type and the lock icon really looks like a button and it’s not obvious that you have to click precisely on the lock to lock the trait. The whole element (span.lock_title in the code) should be clickable in my opinion.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

First of all, I love how you brought the lospec jam rules into the tool jam. Great cross-submitting

I haven’t actually taken the time to use it to create a game, I’ve just read through the doc.

What I love most is the controller. It lets you make mobile-compatible games, which is really cool. And also, it gives a constraint by forcing devs to use a precise set of inputs, and that’s cool too.

When I see your list of todos, I think you need to keep in mind that your fantasy console is only one among many others. You need to make it an original and unique development environment rather than trying to cover every use case.

In my opinion, the biggest flaw at the moment is the difficulty of setting it up. You’d have to be able to download the example cartridge from the console, modify it on your computer and insert it back into the console (for example, by drag and dropping the .js file directly into the console), it would really encourage users to learn and start developing a game. Having to install node to use OWLS16 might seems simple but is far too complicated for the average user.

Once that’s fixed, fix the 2-3 button-related bugs (especially on mobile) and you’ll already have a tool that I find really exciting and that could find its place in the world of fantasy consoles.

Can’t wait to see how it evolves !

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

A very original GUI with a lot of attention given to the image editor! I used it to list the different things I could walk on and it clearly helped me select the best option :

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

A very elegant tool with a neat style. It needs a few features and adjustments to be really pleasant to use, but as it is, it already feels comfy and makes you want to be productive and organized!

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I’m not going to use this because I don’t use C#, but reading the description it seems very useful. I’m glad if you managed to create the simple tool that solved your dev problem. And thanks for sharing it with us!

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I really don’t do a lot of 3D but recently I had a .obj file and I really didn’t have the tools to see what it contained. I wish I’d known about an easy-to-use online tool like this one!

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Fun idea. Makes me want to have a version where the transformation is reversible, like a way of hiding an image in a sound or vice-versa!

Still fun to use! I like the animation, it makes the process clear.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment and rate other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I’m not an RPG player, but I appreciate the creativity and interface of this tool. The selection of pronouns in the settings is a nice touch.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Great idea. It’s funny because I have a musician friend who uses old controllers found at flea market to play samples. Just to tell you that if you ever took the time to slightly improve the interface for example to let people import their own samples. There are people out there who could seriously use your stuff.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Great tool for writing normalized image points to a json. It’s a task I’ve never needed to do and I don’t really see why I should, but deep down I feel that one day I’ll need to do it and I’ll remember that this tool exists!

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I think you can be proud of having achieved this result. It seems to be one of your first experiences with python, perhaps your first tools, and it’s totally functional and well done. To be honest, I won’t be using your tool in the future, as I have other programs in my toolbox that allow me to edit tilemaps, with more options and better ergonomics. But the cool thing about this tool is that it’s yours! If you ever wants to keep working on it, take advantage of the fact that it’s yours : do what you want, what’s useful to you or what you think is fun.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Fun idea and well executed. I think it could really useful for some people. Have you tried it on yourself? Personally, I don’t know if I could use it… I find it a bit too hard sometimes to tell the difference between what I consider to be tasks and what I consider to be rewards….

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

As promised, it was really intuitive and easy to use. Even rather pleasant to create a mini adventure !

However, I don’t think the promise of being able to “seamlessly switch between Make and Play” is really fulfilled. It should be easier to switch from one mode to the other (should take one clic). I don’t think that would be very difficult for you to implement, and it would really change the whole user experience!

Nice tool overall

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Very ambitious and promising, and the tool is already really impressive for a jam version. I can’t wait to see more, but I think the most important thing for you right now is to work of the documentation. It took me about 30 minutes to make a sheet that adds two whole numbers, and I’m still not sure I understood how I did it. You need examples, tutorials, etc. (if possible integrated into the tool). I know documenting is hard, but please don’t neglect this work ! The great potential of a tool like this can be wasted if users abandon it because they felt a bit lost during the first 2 minutes spent trying to use it.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Saddly, I’m currently on a computer where pygame isn’t installed and “windows binary” doesn’t work for me, so I haven’t been able to sketch anything… But I’m sure that under normal conditions, this tool can really sketch anything, as its name suggests!

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

I tried using it to draw and it was difficult. And that’s a good thing. I think the more difficult drawing tools are to use, the more they boost creativity. I think that’s why a toy like etch-a-sketch has been so successful!

However, I have a suggestion to make : a selected tool should remain selected after use. This would make it possible, for example, to draw lots of circles in a row without having to click the button again!

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Contains some good jokes, the fake apology gen made me laugh but I think my favorite is the timer that stops by itself. It reminds of a real timer I have in my kitchen that goes crazy when the batteries are low.

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

Fun ! it reminds me of ELIZA, the cult chatbot from the 60s that you’ve probably already heard of. A little remark on accessibility: an option to display the text of replies would have been really welcome for people who can’t hear or who can’t turn on the sound !

♥ Thanks for taking part in the tool jam. Don’t forget to try, comment on and rate the other tools! tools are made to be used! ♥

(’<_ ’