Hey, thanks for taking the time to leave some feedback! All the points you brought up are valid, though I don't have much of an issue with the music since it's just a jam entry. The points about the projectiles and mouse sensitivity are good ones though that I will implement soon.

I also really liked your game; hope it gets highly rated.

Best game I've played so far this jam. Would love to see the expanded to minigolf as someone else mentioned or a full 18 hole course.

Nice and relaxing for a tower shooter. +1

Controls are a bit floaty but visuals and audio are both good. Nice job +1.

Bop that box!

D00T

Thanks for the comment, it's fixed now.

Thanks for the feedback and for playing! If you want to give it another shot I found out what was wrong with the lighting, so hopefully it will be easier.

Sorry about that, it's fixed now.

Awesome, thanks so much! I'll check it out when I have a moment.

Thanks for the feedback! I completely agree that the car visibility is a big problem and I'm working on a fix for it. I'll be sending out updates throughout this week, so come on back in a few days and try again.

I enjoyed that a lot more than I thought I would. It's a creative take on a time old genre, although the note spawn noise did become grating after a while. Solid work, man.

Fun and challenging, although unfortunately the audio didn't work for me :(.

Thanks man, really glad you like it!

Pressing start doesn't start the game for me :(.

That was pretty fun! Only thing I'd change/add is there wasn't a lot of feedback for when you collected a crate or hit a boat; even something like a simple sound effect would go a long way. All in all, good job man.

That's odd, thanks for letting me know. I'll look into it on my end. 

Thanks for the feedback! Other people had also commented on the glitchiness of the car movement, so I've fixed that in this latest build and boy does it make a difference. More updates will be coming over the next few days, so stay tuned.

Really like your take on rhythm games. Simple and hard, but very fun!

Nice to see I wasn't the only one that went for a vaporwave/outrun style! You nailed the aesthetic but I found the game could use some work. As others have noted the hitbox for the ship seems to be way bigger than it is, and I'm still not sure what I do to get points. Also not a fan of the automatic reset, but that's a personal preference.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it! I'm currently working on a fix for the jitteryness with the player movement, so check back later this weekend.

Edit: jitteriness has been fixed. Give me a shout if you find other things still aren't working.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! That was pretty quick. I agree with your points about the edges and the range of motion, and I've added them to the list of improvements for this weekend. Thanks for playing and enjoy the rest of the entries.

Really nice video; glad to see Amphibian Annihilation made it in for a second there.

I think this concept has a lot of potential. I like the loose Octodad-esque physics as they make it fun in a casual setting and they're easy to pick up. The visuals are well done and in line with the XKCD aesthetic, although some differentiation between which objects were solid or not would have been nice.

The biggest thing holding this game back is the seemingly arbitrary abilities and progression. I couldn't figure out what the abilities did or if they were having any impact at all on gameplay. I similarly was puzzled on how my airtime or flips were adding to the progress/XP bar. Actions should have feedback, so there should be feedback for the actions you want the player to take. You have a good start to this with the level up sound effect and the "FLIP!" text, but I think you could still improve in this area. Here are a few things that I would add:

• A text popup that lets the player know if they've beaten their longest airtime, similar to the "FLIP!" text
• A text popup showing how much XP/progress an action has given
• A tooltip or text description of what each powerup does. I like that they're there, but it doesn't help if I don't know what they do.

All things considered, this is a good start with a lot of room for growth. I look forward to seeing where you take this if you have more than 48 hours to work on it.

Hey man, I saw your game as well; thanks for the feedback! I think your cons are all valid points, especially the comments about the UI; I feel like it's been a weakness of previous games I've made, and now I've got proof it's something I've got to work on. Despite that, I'm very glad you had fun with the game; I definitely had a blast making it, especially when the sound effects were added.

Hey, I'm the guy from who made the other game about #772. I really like that you went with a literal interpretation of the comic, and as a whole the concept works. It's fun messing around with the different ways the cars crash and how many ways you can create pileups. However, there are a few things that can be improved.

• I'd like to see multiple types of vehicles. As fun as the pileup are, they'd be far more interesting with the occasional 18 wheeler or two.
• As some people have already mentioned, it feels impossible to achieve the win condition. I didn't play it for long, but I found it impossible to cross the highway without causing a crash let alone cross the highway alive. This isn't enough to sink the game as whole because the pileups are so entertaining, but the win condition should still be achievable nonetheless
• A few extra levels wouldn't hurt. Imagine the carnage you could cause at a 4-way or a T-intersection.

Link to the game for those who are curious

So after two longish weeks I've made it to the end of my first game jam, and I'm pretty happy with my progress. I have a playable - if not complete - game that's only slightly deviated from what I set out to make, and though it could have been more I realize that it's only my first jam, and I'm happy with what I have.

So - without further ado - here's what I did good at, what I didn't do good at, and what I've learned from my first game jam.

What went well

I was basing Format.execute() on an isometric action game concept inspired on the works of Supergiant Games that I had made in college; I sought to improve on that design and take it to another level of polish and complexity. The first thing that sticks out to me is how much I've improved as a programmer since then, which was about two years ago. I was able to make many improvements over that first version, such as finally figuring out how to make the player rotate to face the mouse and incorporating parent classes to make my code neater and more elegant. I also explored new ways of programming UI, designing a health bar that wasn't just an appropriated slider and creating a system of icons for the player's abilities that displayed 1) which ability was selected and 2) how long cooldowns were.

What didn't go well

The first thing that went wrong was I didn't put nearly as much effort into the design stage of the project as I did the rest of it. I know that very often things change after the design stage due to constraints, but I feel that some of the changes I had to make - which I'll get to in a moment - could have been avoided had I been more thorough drawing up the concept. I realized, once I got under way programming, that I was writing code for a game that I had no idea how 1) it looked or 2) it played, and it was so far into development that I had no choice but to continue.

I also spent probably more time on the code than I needed to. I had to scrap my original concept because I realized I simply didn't have enough time to find the art assets that would work the idea I had going in, so I changed the theme to what would become Format.execute(). While I do think the game did come out looking well enough, it should not have come out looking this way. This also ties back into not taking the design stage seriously and winding up with no idea what kind of game I was making.

What I've learned

I've learned that I need to have a concrete design process before I launch into any project. Among others, I need to know

• what type of space the game exists in
• a visualization of the general aesthetic; for this I need to do some primitive sketching or look at images of games I want to get inspiration from
• write down EXACTLY how I want the game to play
• think of the type of emotions/thoughts I want the player to feel/think, and how I can make the game evoke those thoughts

For UI development, this was the one part of the game I did sketch out, and I thought it came out looking pretty nice if not completely polished. Everything was laid out nice and simple, and it seems to be easy to keep track of both the player's condition and the status of the enemies they're fighting. I also got to learn about anchoring in Unity, which is something I'll definitely be taking into future games.

For coding lessons, this was the first time I had seriously incorporated parent classes into one of my games, and now that I've done it I wish I'd done it sooner. I incorporated it into health systems, basing the enemy and player health scripts off a base health script, and it worked out very well in greatly simplifying that aspect of programming the game.

In Conclusion

This game jam has been a fantastic learning experience, and I'll definitely be participating in other jams in the future. I've come away with many successes and failures, but even more importantly I come away having learned something, which means all the more to me. Many thanks to everyone who organized and participated in this jam, and I hope to see you all around soon.

-Medic

https://mediconduty.itch.io/formatexecute

Things I would appreciate feedback on:

• how well it works as an action game
• is the game well balanced in terms of difficulty (too easy or too hard?)
• is it easy to keep track of things during combat?  esp. health, ability cooldowns, and enemies

Things I would like help with

• creating convincing enemy AI besides simply chase the player and attack; advice and resources are both appreciated

So it's been a while, and a lot has changed. I've sadly had to abandon the Jam theme in favor of something that would work with the art assets I've been able to find, but overall the project is progressing well. Since the last update I've implemented many things, and I won't get to all of them today, so here are the most important ones.

Gameplay programming for player and enemy is complete, save for some bug squashing. Players and enemies can move and attack each other, as well as die. I've also programmed a series of managers for aspects of gameplay, such as a system for pausing the game, a system to change audio tracks, and a UI system to display player and enemy health as well as status conditions and cooldown effects.

As we head into the home stretch, I'll be focusing on level design and boss design, and I'll provide updates when I can. I'll also be doing a postmortem in this thread when the jam ends.

-Medic

UPDATE 7-24-17

Yes I know it's technically the 25th right now but be quiet.

First major update is that I've started a Trello board for this game, for those of you who are interested in a more concise version of what I'm up to an how I'm progressing. The board can be found here: https://trello.com/b/qLjNGu4x. On a side note I highly recommend Trello to other jammers who haven't tried it yet; it's flexible, easily editable, and it really helps keep track of things, especially with teams.

On to the game, and I've made a number of important scripting improvements. For starters, I've made a parent health class that will serve as the backbone for all other types of health systems in the, from the player to the bosses. The health system is an HP system, called Integrity Points (IP) in game. The health system also has two conditions: Burning, which does a small amount of damage every second over time, and Stunned, which temporarily immobilizes the character and prevents it from attacking. There will be things to be added in the future, such as resistances to certain types of damage for enemies, but for now this is a solid start.

I've also started to set up code for the player's abilities, which will also be carried over to enemy abilities. So far I've gotten one ability programmed, an area of affect attack that is centered around the caster. But more importantly I found a timer system online that allows abilities to have cooldown, which will be important for obvious reasons. The playable character also now rotates to face the mouse, meaning that the only remaining part of the player movement script to be completed is the dodge mechanic.

My plan for the next few days is to complete the player movement script, finalize the code for the rest of the player abilities, and make the cooldown class something anyone can use. After that, I aim to complete the enemy AI and attacks, and move into programming the game systems. After that, I we narrow down the design and make it pretty. I'll have another update for you guys soon.

-Medic

Hello all, this is my first ever game jam and I can't wait to get started. Enough about that though, let's get to the game.

My project, Dreampatcher, is an isometric dungeon crawler/puzzle game about a person who, while dreaming of a childhood memory, discovers it is not what they remember it as; they notice a gap for the first time, see important details missing. As they attempt to resolve the discrepancy, part of their mind attempts to stop them through their dream by attacking them and locking the true memory away. Only by revisiting the memory through their dreams and struggling against their own mind night after night will they know the truth, but will it set them free?

Dreampatcher is a short single-player action game that I will make in Unity. In total, there will be around 3-5 levels, depending on how much I can get done.

PROJECT GOALS

1. Programming
   1. Player
      1. Movement
      2. Attacks
      3. Abilities
      4. Health and status coniditions
   2. Enemies
      1. Movement
      2. Attacks
   3. Systems
      1. Music
      2. Spawning enemies
      3. Text boxes/story progression
      4. Boss fights
      5. Puzzles
2. Art (will try to produce what I can, will get from the internet what I cannot)
   1. Environment
   2. Character
   3. UI
      1. Health bar and status condition
      2. Abilities
      3. Currently selected ability
      4. Enemy health bar and status condition
3. Sound
   1. Music (will probably find some stuff on royalty free sites)
      1. main menu music
      2. different theme for each level
   2. Sound FX
      1. footsteps
         1. pavement
         2. grass
         3. dirt
         4. gravel
      2. a variety of punch/impact sounds
      3. hurt noises (human and animalistic/machinelike)
      4. click and button press noises for UI

Day 1

Made fairly good progress for the 4 hours or so I put in day 1. I've worked with isometric games before, so some of this stuff is familiar territory. I found an isometric game I made for a school project and took the movement system from that. Movement is surprisingly hard because of the way I accomplish the isometric effect; at  the of the day, it's not as easy as press up and move the player up because according to the gameobject foward is no longer forward. But at the end of the day we have a moving player, and that's where it all starts.

I also started working on the player's basic attack. The basic attack is a simply melee attack; unlocking abilities as the levels go on will give the basic attack a passive enhancement based on which ability you have selected. Right now, I have it working so that when you click on an enemy, it registers the click, determines if the player is in range of the enemy to strike, then strikes. It doesn't actually deal damage now, although that functionality is coming soon.

At the end of the first day, the game looks like this.

Player is green, the enemy test object for the melee attacks is red. It's not much, all placeholders at this point, but it's not going to stay this way. Thanks for joining me for day one, I'll be back tomorrow with another progress update.

-Medic