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After having made it public for a while and encountering non-TF people submitting projects which perhaps misunderstand the assignment, I have unlisted it again and won't be having future ones publically listed.

I'm going to disqualify this one unfortunately.

Reason: Game was not created or updated during the game jam (rule 2), last update was 70+ days ago. Game uses AI-generated image as thumbnail (this alone was not a major reason for disqual, but should be amended).

I can requalify it if you make a big update for the game during the jam (in which case, reply below). From what I can tell in the game files it doesn't use AI generated images in the actual game, but there are a lot of unused JRPG engine stock images and other random art files (:img/pictures) that are massively inflating the file size, which you should seek to amend.

Edit: Requalified due to edited image, but predicated on an update before the jam ends :)

I'll be using Godot & GDScript!

The rules specify "media", but should reasonably be expected to extend to code, though unless you release source code and it's obviously got some comments that sound like AI, we don't really have any way to know - as opposed to images/text/music which if you are familiar enough with tone and things to look out for you can clock it. 

It's mainly an honesty-box system where we would really prefer you didn't, but we can't exactly stop you from generating AI code and passing it off as your own. Beyond that, AI doesn't generally understand your project and so while you can generate code if you want to, you still have to consider a lot of other things like how it all fits together, code optimisation, setting up your project, etc. You also have to be able enough with code to assess if what it generates even works for you. It isn't feasible to give all of your project's code to the AI each time and it tends to be fairly mid with debugging and code generation, especially if you're trying to do something advanced. With images and text, you can just slap that in wholesale if you want, so it's easier to moderate because it tends to be fairly obvious. 

All that said, I'm glad you are choosing to make a game that plays to your strengths rather than relying on AI as a crutch.

It's an unlisted jam, but I suppose I can make it public.

Hi, thanks for taking the time to write this up.

I would like to address your points here, because I think it's important and I'd like to clarify the stance for others who may be curious. Long response incoming :)

Malic and I did discuss this rule and he was a little more ambivalent about it, it was me who was pushing for it, mainly because there has been an uptick in AI fatigue and derision as of late. I'll go through your points one by one.

I'll preface this by saying my points aren't directed at you or your game, just the premise of using AI going forward in general. Don't take any of this as an attack on you or the projects you've submitted.

1) You can use human-created assets for your game, whether they were made by you or not. We want to see what you create (whether that includes stock assets or not), not what a machine generates for you. I understand that there is also some effort you have to go through to get that generated content into your game, but we feel that effort could be better spent making your own assets or finding assets other people have made. You can kitbash, mishmash, programmer art whatever you want and I'll still be happier that you went through the effort of doing that and learning, rather than got a computer to spit something out.

2) Genuinely, I would rather see a text or systems-based game that has effort put into it than something with AI generated visuals. I would rather see programmer art. I don't believe that AI significantly lowers the barrier of entry. There are plenty of game concepts and systems you can create and design to make a simple game that doesn't require the use of AI. As you said, you were the only person to submit a game that used AI in the last jam. There were other people who had never made a game before who didn't use it, when we didn't have the rule in place. I think a developer's time is better spent making or finding assets than collating and fixing AI generated content, or simply rethinking how to approach a game so that it doesn't require its use.

The sensibilities of the organiser(s) are always going to come into play. You are for the most part free to make your game however you want, but every game jam has its limitations. Some have more, some have less. This one is quite open and isn't judged or ranked in any way. My thinking around this is that we want to see a game that YOU have made. We want you to challenge yourself. 

We also encourage you to work with others, you are free to collaborate with someone else who does have the skills you want. You don't have to do your projects alone -- if you are lacking in one area, I again encourage you to work with someone who can do that area. I reccommend anyone who wants to work collaboratively on a project to make a an open thread with what you're looking for!

This point is getting a bit long, so I'll move on.

3) You are correct in that, given the jam is not judged or ranked, your submission doesn't really affect other people's submissions. Even so, I don't particularly feel that AI generates interesting content. I would rather see programmer art that was made by a human than anything generated by AI even if it's visually stunning. I think people are fairly tired of the overload and overuse of AI content, especially within the last year. I've never read interesting AI-generated TF content, it all sounds the same. Formulaic. Sterile. Generic. When a person who is actually INTO transformation as a concept or trope, it becomes interesting because it is being written through the lens of a person who appreciates it, not through a black box of approximation.

4) I think the better way to frame this is that instead of using AI as a crutch, you should think about novel ways to make systems that don't rely on it. To use your previous submission as an example, you could make a modular sprite system and make a few variations of sprites for different scenarios, and create the rules for how they should combine. I would much rather see that, even if it ends up looking janky. Again, I want people to challenge themselves. It's up to you where you spend time on your project, and you should consider the amount of time and scope your project will need in various areas. There is ample time before the jam starts to come up with ideas to work within the constraints of the jam.

5) It is, at the end of the day, up to you if you want to make a project for the jam. I do want more people to make TF games, but I want to see what humans make, not what a machine makes. Again, you have plenty of time to come up with ways to make a game that works within the jam's rules.

6) I generally feel that the opinion around AI has shifted substantially since even a year ago, as has mine. When it was first cropping up, I enjoyed seeing the weird things it could make that I couldn't devote the time to doing myself. However, as time went on the issues with it increased, and the novelty decreased. My opinion, along with others, shifted. There is a lot more AI fatigue around as of late, people are tired of it. It's usually quite formulaic, and the sentiment is prevalent that it is just stolen content approximated into something 'new'. I would agree with many who are against the use of it due to the fact that it is trained on the work of artists that did not consent to have their work taken wholesale and put 1:1 into training data. Genuinely, just make programmer art instead. It can look bad, but at least it's your original content, or if you use stock or someone else's assets, it's another human's content.

7) I don't even know how to see the plays of other games in the jam. It wasn't a consideration, I'd forgotten about your submission since last year and the rule's addition was based on wanting to see things a human has made, and challenging participants to be innovative. If I had thought about it earlier, it would have been a rule in TF22 & TF23. It was not added because of your submission.

Again, I encourage you and others to challenge yourselves and collaborate with each other to fill in areas you are weak on, rather than relying on AI just to get a submission out there.

Cheers ^^

I'm not sure, but we are going through and reworking basically everything for the next update, so chances are the bug will be gone then.

I'm looking for feedback on what you'd like to see out of the game in terms of potential NSFW content. I'm of mind to err to purely anatomical, scientific descriptions, though I know many will want some more detailed...things, but I also understand there are those that prefer to keep it at least plausibly deniable.

Currently I'm aiming for middle-of-the-road, but I could be swayed either way. However, please keep any comments nested here on the side of tasteful and not explicit.

Hey, thank you for the very detailed feedback! A bunch of this will be changing in the next update (it's a big one) that eases most of your issues. Some examples below:

Internal request should be repeatable and procedural, so it shouldn't be the same and will give variable rewards each time.

Statwise, I think we will be looking to redefine the stats and have them be a little more detailed so as to have a few more levers to pull and reasons to make some species over others, for different purposes.

Quality doesn't yet affect anything but it is something we're working on.

You will ideally be able to make your own species by taking a sequenced gene and adding or replacing parts from other sequenced genes, and then using that as the base for a serum.

We'll also be looking to rework sex/gender in the game, though it may increase the maturity rating of the game. It will likely be more explicit in what exactly is changing, because as it stands the nebulous masc/fem labels are confusing more than they enlighten. The original intention was male = all male parts & mutations, masc was female parts but can have male mutations, intersex they can have any of either, fem is male parts but female mutations, and female is all female parts & mutations. A female serum used on a male will pick between feminine/female/intersex, and the patient will eventually end up there, but can gain the related mutations before that full change actually happens.

It'll be clearer in the next update where that will be spelled out in plain anatomical detail, but I'm still to determine if we go further and have mutations for such parts. I understand many gamers enjoy the lewd aspect, but many also prefer a purely scientific approach. I'm in two minds about it, and it probably warrants a checkbox.

There is a LOT that's changing and being added to the next version, I think you'll like it!

Holy hell...this is so good dude...such a cute donkey :)

Decided that I will be continuing with this instead of starting new projects all the time, since it'll be easier to rework this as I need to. It'll take a bit of time to get all the reworks I need to do in place, but the game should function a bit better when I'm done.

Very very high on the list is save/load, but because I was kinda stupid and under time pressure to get it done I made some bad development decisions which make it difficult. It's WIP though.

I'll keep updating the comment thread as I work away at it. Thanks for trying what's here so far, I think with people's suggestions in mind I'll be able to make this into something really cool. ^^

Thinking about this concept more, there's some things I think I could improve at a foundational and conceptual level.

Things I like about my game:

• The dynamic progression of TFs and the descriptions.
• The systems I've designed to allow for partial TFs, parts with multiple stages, and possibility for custom species and chimeras (which aren't fully implemented).
• Mad science theme and UI-based approach. Lack of extensive 2D gfx means I can focus more on the systems and making them work together. 
• Design-wise, managing the staff side as well as the subject side and how they could potentially interplay.

Things I don't like about my game:

•  I don't particularly like that you make all these animal people and then immediately get rid of them to a contract. If they had some staying power or reason to take care of them after you make them, it wouldn't be as much of an issue. Production morphs are one thing, but that's a very narrow band of species.
• Narrow selection of stats to affect. This would need quite a rework, but I'd want to have more than just the three stats of production, social and combat. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but perhaps a more rimworld-like approach of having MANY stats that can be tweaked by parts is a better play.
• The window idea is fun but gets hard to manage in Godot. If I wanted to expand it further I'd need to fundamentally alter the architecture of how I set up my game, and use scenes and signals far more than I did. I *like* the windows but they don't seem to be very customisable and can be a pain to manage refreshing and updates when there's a lot of things on the screen.
• Some of the systems I made were scraped together and duct-taped to others, and I hard-coded too many things. I didn't store everything in one place, which made managing resources a pain (they also weren't Data-driven). Many of the design decisions I made earlier held me back later and weren't as fluid as I'd hoped - ie they caused a lot of bugs and troubleshooting from unintended behaviour.
• Because of the amount of hardcoding I implemented and some decisions I made with how to assign objects to things, saving and loading would become an absolute nightmare. I need to figure out a better way of doing this and I need to begin implementing it from the START.

This is the largest game I've made in Godot and it feels pretty small still. There's a lot more I could do with it but I'm not sure the core concept is what I want to go with for the future.

However, there is some merit to it and I think there's a version of it that ends up being kind of fun, but maybe not as fun as another way to rework the game from the ground up would be.

I'm thinking something like half sports team manager, half mad science TF game. You'd make your creatures out of former (fictional) sports players, and send them out to fight other chimeras in an underground arena. You need to contain them, prevent breakouts and outbreaks, manage your resources to keep them fed and happy (and paid, if you want to do that). I'll need to plan it out in more detail, but it'd solve a lot of the issues I have with this (and I do want to add some modular portraits too).

I want to focus on GUI design and deep, interconnected systems because I see a LOT of gameplay potential for how to build and deploy chimeras and how best to present this to the player.

I will try to fix as many obvious bugs with MUTALAB as I can, but I think beyond that I might need to evaluate a full redesign from the ground up.

Let me know what you think!

Thank you! It does need a lot of expansion on species/biomes etc as I built most of the systems to allow for a lot of options. Still a few reworks to do on some things but that'll come with time.

No worries, thanks for the detailed feedback! There's a lot of things I want to change and fix so this gives me a good list of important stuff to start with.

Oh, well that explains what I've done wrong there exactly thank you ^^

That is actually kinda funny...I'll fix it though.

I probably missed something then ^^ I'll have a look at that as well. Thanks!

You need to unlock the other biome by completing one of the contracts.

Shift select, sorry should make that more clear

I'll see what I can do

I can add a means to do this, do you know what exactly happened to make the changes never finish? Serum type, any modifiers, gender etc

Thanks for letting me know, chickens were the last thing I added and I didn't get a lot of time to test them, so I'll have another look

Oh man this is something I always wanted to make, so I'm glad to see this be a thing submitted to the jam! I've played around with it a little bit (and I'm going to play some more) but I'm enjoying what's there so far. 

I will say it's a little RNG at the start as to whether you encounter a hobgoblin with a longsword when opening the first door, but games are easy enough to restart that it isn't too much of a problem.

System-wise I haven't found that many mutation potions but I did note that one game one of the first ones I got was quadrupedal, which is kind of funny to imagine with no other mutations - perhaps some means of gating mutations behind having some of a different category (or having a certain amount of mutations), or progressive mutations that can be replaced by more advanced stages.

Quick note is having ESC both exit menus and the game itself made me accidentally quit the game when I wasn't intending to, perhaps this could be changed to something like Shift-Q to prevent this.

Overall I really like ASCII roguelikes so this one could get me playing for a long time if you keep at it, really nice opening submission and I'd be keen to see those future updates for sure!

Thanks everyone for your effort and submissions this year, we had double the people enter, and nearly double the amount of submissions from last year! As always, late entries are available - please send a DM to @MutaSheep on Twitter or Telegram in order to get a link to do so.

Now's the time to go through the submissions, play em, and leave some comments!

Heya! Thanks for the submission - however you may need to check the visibility settings as I'm unable to view it.

Your projects must be submitted in 23 and a bit hours from now. If you miss the deadline and want to do a late submission, please DM @MutaSheep on Twitter and I can send you a link to do a late entry. ^^

Good luck and I look forwards to playing them. Good show from the people who have already submitted their projects!

Holy moly there's so many endings to this! Love the descriptions and the progression is very fun.

Welcome everyone to TF23 - hope you've got your ideas sorted and if not, you'd better get to it! Feel free to team up and swap assets, share concepts and ideas if you want - just get your game submitted before November 30th!

Important note - the jam is running on New Zealand timezone (this I cannot change), so for those of you in more populous parts of the world, it starts early and finishes early, please bear that in mind!

I enjoyed this and the spoiler system for avoiding things I didn't want to do - also liked the gradual changes! Would be interested to see some more locations and pathways in the future as well.

Thanks for joining and submitting thus far everyone! We have some good variety in the submitted games and I'm looking forward to trying them all out. Now you get to play all the various games and leave a comment - it could be something constructive or just what you enjoyed about the experience! This is an *unranked* game jam so there aren't any awards for best game, but authors would still appreciate your feedback especially if you're a submitter as well.

So to serve as a nice capstone to TF22, let's deliver some upbuilding feedback/comments!

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it :) I do want to work on it a bit more and add a proper map, maybe some soldiers that shoot at you, and the like.

That's awesome! Thanks for the post, fluffy! ^^