rpg maker is solid for starting out. The database is easy to update, and you can get a lot out of it by just using event logic rather than full on coding. My suggestion for learning is look through the event action options whenever you open an event. It's easy to forget the options since there are so many and i'll usually get an idea for something to add whenever i look through it.
Also, that was very nice of you to help your sibling. I don't think i got to play that game yet.
Lol, i've been waiting for someone to comment on it. It's not bug. It's one of the artistic things i was experimenting with. If you catch the sprite it isn't random.
I'll be doing an update in next few days with one more layer to some choices. I don't know if I should keep working on it for more layers or stop there though.
The cooling was such a lateral thinking move, i don't think most people intuitively figured out what it's purpose was. It's genius though. Attack/defense in real time is very hard to achieve outside an rts, and as much as i love rts games they get too complicated quick. The other way to go is multiple players with sports ball or capture the flag, but you nailed the feeling in a solo game with simple mechanics no less.
So yeah, huge fan of you guys now and I'm pretty eager to see either updates or whatever new projects you have in mind. I'd donate if you had a patreon!
Oh and if you have tabletop simulator i'd total take you on in Tzar. I've beaten all my friends so far ^^.
Honesty I'd love to hear your story on making this game? When the theme was announced did personal experience just leap to mind or have you been wanting to convey this before and this gave a good outlet? Why RPG maker? something you've had and experimented with before or is there another reason? What difficulties, if any, came up while trying to convey your subject matter?
This game really hit close home to me. I only have 1 brother and he's 10 years younger than me. We are so similar but so distant in some respects. I'm never really sure how to react, what he expects, or how to do best for him at any given moment. I'm not a parent or a friend, but I have to be both and neither at all points in time. You did a really good job conveying that awkward loving position.
For a first game, awesome job. The first game I ever tried to make was the worst version of Tetris you will have ever played. Horrendous garabage messes are VERY common in first games, and they are learning experiences. This is NOT that kind of first game.
Did you do the graphics yourself or get them from somewhere? If you did them yourself you need to stop being so down on your work, they look amazing. I grew up on Atari and early NES games. Game designers had to convey A LOT with very little at that time and your little people convey everything they need to. If you're not confident enough for more complex models in future projects keep the retro style and just look up some of the top rated old Atari and Arcade classics. I think you could make some really neat retro things with what you can already do.
The colors for the world are a little, bleh, but the mummy itself makes up for that in spades, because the bleh colors make the mummy pop out more and so your eyes are always drawn to the mummy which is the focus of your game.
Are you using the built in physics from game maker? I honestly hate them for simple things. It's actually pretty easy to make your own for something like this just using a few variables. If not, then I agree with everyone else here and just tweak what you did a little. The acceleration on forward movement takes too long on the start up and you spring up way to high, way to fast, every jump. That said WE don't know what your intentions were for the movement, and you don't have to follow any advice. It needs tweaking, but everyone here has different ideas on how to build a game and what we want an end product to be so following us wouldn't make it YOUR game anymore if that makes sense? Tweak it however you see fit.
As for difficulty, I think it's fine. Whether it should be harder or easier is up to the scope you were looking at for your game. How long did you expect people to play your game, when, and why. Google has this little dinosaur you can play whenever you lose internet connection. The game itself is technically pretty bad, but it meets it's scope perfectly. Internet is stuttering, and it gives me something to do while I wait for it to stabilize. It's basic, memorable, and only needs to go a few minutes because that's all the time I really have for it. I love that little dinosaur game. This game is similar it's something I can do while waiting for a longer game to load or laugh at my family/friends trying to play it while we hangout.
One request, though, is to have some music. Things are a little too quiet playing the game. Otherwise fantastic job, I'm going to be laughing at people flipping the mummy into a pit later.
The art is just rpg maker assests mixed around. I'm not terribly good at asset creation and not really interested so i have no shame in buying assets to use or using freebie assests. I do like to figit with them though to see what they look like in various nonstandard ways.
An example is the spell animations, a lot of what i've seen with rpg maker is people either use the default animations in intended ways or try to make their own assests for anything non combat. I think a lot of them look cool and could be used in many noncombat ways. The tornado animation, for example, can be used outside of combat in combination with jump animations to look like its flinging people or whipping them around.
feedback from anyone i can get is nice, so i have a better idea on things to keep/remove for future ideas.
https://itch.io/jam/extra-credits-game-jam-6/rate/739230
I'm trying my hardest to play everyone's submissions they request people to check out and leave constructive comments as well. Hopefully everyone can get good feedback from at least 1 person.
The music and sound is nice. I love the art style. Don't let any negative comments get you down about the game play. The game has a high learning curve, but it's actually really fun. It's a push/pull game between attack and defense. My favorite abstract board game, Tzar, is set to the same theme. You have to keep moving and decide every second on whether attacking spawns or cooling pylons is better. You can't win without doing both and the challenge is finding the balance between the 2 for each round.
It took me about 3 tries to figure out what I needed to know at any given moment in order to complete the main game. For anyone feeling overwhelmed you either didn't efficiently use down time to cool your crystals and the wave is going too long (the longer the wave goes the worse the spawns get), or you didn't kill spawns at a far enough distance and they swarmed your crystal (once about 2-3 are in position to attack, just give up on that crystal and either prepare for next wave or defend a secondary one if it's a 2 crystal wave).
It's pretty addicting once you hit a rhythm. Of course I'm also a glutton for difficult tower defense games so this hit the right buttons for me. My personal requests would be some type of indicator when I'm close enough to the water to refill (you have to keep moving, and fidgeting with the water refills became difficult in late waves), spawns leaving the minimap faster after they die (I became very paranoid of things I had already killed attacking the crystal or a flier spawning I didn't catch), and some built in way to knock everything off the crystal and buy me time to recover when **** hits the fan (Finding powerups to do something like this takes too much of my attention away from defending. My suggestions are a once per game burst so you have to question if this is the wave you NEED it, have the water knock back enemies but not hurt them, or for risk/reward you can explode your water container, but can't use water for the rest of the round while it recharges/rebuilds.)
For me I started out with some ideas for social infection games, and was messing around with core to try and get mechanics working in a simple state. After over a day of working, I figured out I wasn't familiar enough with Core, Lua, or 3d games in general to be able to get something into a workable state in time. Anxiety started to hit and overwhelm me, but I managed to push through and refocus myself. My goal was to complete something and it was still very achievable. I fell back to what I knew the most about, rpg maker, and part of what was nice about falling back to something more familiar was trying new things with it. Captive is the game I managed to complete:
https://itch.io/jam/extra-credits-game-jam-6/rate/739230
THEME: For the theme I went with a use what you know approach. I have BAD anxiety that completely cripples me some days, and I've had to learn many tricks to get myself functional when it comes up. I've wanted to make something around it to share my experiences with people for awhile, but there is always a difficulty in explaining abstract things to people. So take care of your anxieties was the theme, and I used a prisoner analogy to try and make it relatable.
Extra History: I threw in an easter egg from one of my favorite quotes from the web series in a slightly off path place.
Extra Retro: The extra retro challenge felt more of a stylized art challenge. I've played enough retro games with those pallets, if you don't have a strong vision when using them they become vomit inducing. I wasn't going to be able to go that way.
Extra Distance: It's kinda there, kinda not. The goal is too escape and put as much distance between you and your prison as possible, but I do offer an option to confront your warden.
Extra Translation: There are tiles with a magic language on them used for one of the spells. An NPC that can't use magic will reference them as gibberish at one point.
My own extra challenge, no music: This was partially brought on by time constraints and partially because I had never tried it and it sounded interesting to do. I added in ambient sounds and tweaked them for each scene. I wanted to do a little more with them, but exhaustion hit me too hard by the end and I just had to accept what I had.
i think it took me 15-20mins. Probably less if i had read the manual right away rather then blindly using items on problems until i found what worked.
One thing you can try if you don't have a composser is ambient sounds. I just tried that concept in my jam game. I didn't use any music just rain and wind and i think it worked pretty well. It puts a little more stress on the art team, but if done with minor random weather effects it would go a long way. So like have a default happy forest sound, birds chirping, and randomly on a restart it rains with a slight effect. Then you could have a wind one with just the wind swirl, a leaf blowing left, and the character moving slightly slower right and faster left. It keeps things fresh if you are stuck on a puzzle and kinda pokes a little fun at all the in world time you are wasting on restarts.
***Note: played updated version ^^***
I love the art, the music is great...until it isn't. It just isn't long enough to support the whole thing and I had to turn off the music to be able to think through the last round. It's a good song it just either needs to be longer or have a different song swap in at some point.
The concept is solid. I completely disagree with the person who wasn't sure of the concept. Basic programming games are great. When you get the right set up you feel like a genius watching your guy carve though the game like an action bad-ass. When things go wrong, they can get hilarious with how catastrophic the failure can become. Many a good story comes from well crafted failure. Even in your simple game I thought it was funny when my mouse walked right past the chest he needed and refused to open it. He had 2 keys and everything, but was like "nope, grandpa said only if I have an open hand and my hands are full of keys"
One big criticism is the blind start for every round. First try is ALWAYS failure and often just at first check since I have no idea what even exists in each round. Some vague clue to start would be helpful like "Be careful of floods from the rain last night." That would key me in that I need a stick at some point and I can try to work out a starting build for first attempt. Every round has me clicking through menus as quick as I can to start so I can see what's ahead. clicking menus is boring, planning strategy is fun.
That's pretty much everything I have to say. I saw the words demo at the end, so I'm actually excited for the next version to see what you guys add.
10/10 would send my only Grandchild blindly in the woods again with only vague advice that probably won't kill him...probably...
https://mashama.itch.io/captive
Here is mine, i look forward to trying everyone's games now that I am off work for the week.
thanks. Don't worry too much about "the good ending". If you've ever played heavy rain, i like the concept of inserting yourself in a world and each player telling their story. No matter what happens the game keeps going until the player reaches their ending, making things more personal. Feel free to play again and craft a new story.
Also huge fan of yours. I loved always watching.
I wish i had slept sunday instead of just trying to work through it. I lost so much time doing things to get myself alert again, still nodding off sometimes (i discovered i can fall asleep with an energy drink, it's not a happy experience), and making antiprogress just trying to correct mistakes.
It was a good learning experience though as this is both my first jam and the first time i made something for someone other then myself.
From observations from my actual job which gets very tedious with quotas so I have to track my numbers and make sure I'm meeting company demands, music does slow me down but keeps me sane.
That said, white noise is the best of both worlds. I produce faster than with music and the silence and tediousness doesn't kill me while I work. Whatever works bets for you though. You can probably test it out by timing how many Sudoku puzzles you can complete in a given time frame using one of those free random generating apps. See what's better for you, music, no music, or white noise.
I find I have an easier time taking things in parts. I conceptualize what I want and just write everything down. then I go through what I wrote and think of how it can be done practically and assign each thing I want to do as a task. The real trick comes here, the tasks don't need to be done sequentially. Yeah some stuff requires other stuff, but whenever I look back over my notes I find a can make skeleton parts for different sections and just finish them off when I'm doing the other required thing.
The reason this has been a good trick for me is I don't feel forced into doing anything. I can work on whatever part I feel like at the time. When I get into a work groove I switch to the more grinding stuff that needs to be done. It massively helps remove the boring stressed bits.
The 2nd thing I do is just find something fun in the game that's already done, like 1 battle in an rpg, or a jump sequence in a platformer, and just stop and do that whenever I feel fatigued. It reminds me how awesome what I am doing is, gives me a break, and gives me some play test perspective on what the game should feel like throughout.
