itch.io

I've added a devlog to my entry to discuss my plans, what I've done, what's left to do, and what technology I've chosen (it's not what you'd think!) 

https://ninja-ghost.itch.io/chrono-flora/devlog/719920/it-begins

Hi 👋 

For my entry I'm attempting a classic SNES style zelda type look, and i'd rather work with a pixel artist than try to source the pixel art assets I'd need from asset stores to bring the presentation together 

Or even 

I hope that helps establish the kind of idea im looking at here 

if anyone is interested just throw me a holler :)

All the best everyone, 

~NinjaGhost

:D stay tuned for more details!

Experiences like this give me strong old school Newgrounds.com vibes. I loved every second of playing this little byte sized game. Lots of love went into it, it's easy to see :) Well done and thank you for this

♥ Keep up the awesome work! 

Thank you so much :) 

My goal is simple, I'm releasing alpha builds along the way of my current project, under a "Donationware" model. 

What I jsut need help verifying is that once someone has donated, and I upload a new distributable to the page, do they ahve to donate again, or will it be available to them permanently going forward? 

Thank you 

Hah! Thanks so much for recording your playthrough :D  I'm so glad you liked it :) 

Our project is a success :D Updated the original post https://itch.io/t/698387/nothing-left-to-lose-success with the details 

And we are LIVE! 

https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2020/rate/583001

Some screenshots!

Alleyway 

Enemy Idle Animation Test

AI Test

The Team worked SUPER hard, and we're proud of release Nothing Left To Lose here on Itch for this Jam

https://redacted-games.itch.io/nothing-left-to-lose

----- Begin Original Post

NL2L is a 3D First Person RL that takes place in the back alley streets of poverty.   You've been double crossed, and made resourceless by a former colleague, forcing you into a life of squalor. 

It's a simple revenge plot, and Redacted Games is excited to share our creation with the community of 7DRL. 

This entry represents a LOT of firsts for our team, and we'll likely be pushing ourselves all the way to the deadline from now.  it doesn't look like much now, but we're well on our way! 

thank you for your feedback. I agree, a very last second adjustment to a game that was waaaaayyy too walk in the park boring easy, made it almost unfairly difficult

Here's a hint tho... Go to the outer edges of the arena... The shooters can't shoot you up there 😂 helps quite a bit when getting overwhelmed like I do so frequently haha 

Hi Dibaka! Thank you so much for the kind words :) 

My team and I have been discussing over the past week on which direction to take Ne/10, to spin it into it's own fleshed out polished experience. 

We got some ideas in the works, make sure to watch your notifications for when we make a proper announcement :D 

(also definitely watch our twitter and youtube for updates too! )

Cheers!

why would you enter this into a n UE4 jam if it's powered by Godot? 

Another thing to keep is mind is what kind of metrics you want to keep track of

Downloadable distributions are easy to track: someone needs to click download.  Itch.io takes care of this, which is nice. But it can be a bit.. segmented by it's implementation.  Manually counting windows distribution downloads across several releases can be something you grow tired of super quick lol

Browser games? There's no download, just a page view.  And Itch.io doesn't automatically ignore scrapers and bots (like sharing on Twitter, Twitter will scrape the page for every-time the tweet "refreshes" while you're authoring it, and then once more for good measure before caching it.) So itch might report 200 views on your browser game.. COOL, till you hook up a real analytics platform to the page like Google Analytics and notice that only 1 actual person hit your page.

The raw APPEAL of a browser game is high: no barrier for entry, just load up and go.  Unfortunately, browser games have a negative reputation so people might be expecting a lesser experience and might be a _lot_ less tolerant of bugs, UX issues, and frame-rate dips. 

The downloaded distribution is great because they can launch it whenever, without first going to itch or other platforms.  But, I've noticed a frightening number of people just straight up not want to bother downloading something out of pure laziness.  Even friends of mine who "want to test it" or "support" you.  

Me: "Hey man what did you think so far?"
Them: "Ehh I had other things to do"
Me: "But you practically begged for it"
Them: "meh" 
^^^ Actual conversation with a friend. They cited the "work" involved in downloading and going through the whole process of extracting the archive or installing, and then finally launching the game.. 

In my personal experience, I've had so many visitors to my various pages over the years, but only the smallest fraction bother to download at all.  Where when a game is embedded in a page, it gets a lot more traffic by sheer virtue of just.. being there. 

The key to a good browser game experience is UX. They're already at your game, make it inviting to get them to click into the window to give it a real shot. Keep the load times low as possible, the ability to get into your game as quick as possible, and get the player into your addictive gameplay hook ASAP before their attention is grabbed by anything else going on on their screen.  When it comes to browser games, "hits" isn't your metric of choice to track, it'll be "Time on Page" in minutes you want :)

fair enough and fair enough. I use PayPal internationally and Canada's Interac eTransfer system domestically so I don't really have much experience with anything else 

Looking up https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/paypal-alternatives maybe WePay and BrainTree?

Thank you so much :)

@9:45

definitely not against it if I can pull something together by then :)

I appreciate that, thank you :) I hope it can live up to my own lofty expectations heh :D

I appreciate that greatly! I'm glad to hear you found the concept interesting :) 

Nah dont extend the deadline, it's ok. I could have opted to just power through this and release something, but I wouldn't have been happy with it. This wasn't an easy decision to make but it is the right one.  

I will definitely be updating the Devlogs with progress with the refreshed project

Hi Everyone, 

I joined this jam with the intent on learning some new artistic techniques that I had never embarked on before. I have accomplished those goals. 

But unfortunately achieving those goals was at the detriment of the gameplay experience of Moonlight Drive.  Simply put: it was no fun, and mechanically frustrating to play.  Plus a myriad of technical problems from trying to blast through some areas to get to others meant I'd be spending unfortunately large amounts of time fixing what became of them, and axing features. 

I decided to restart the Moonlight Drive project from scratch last night. 

But it will be a while before I have anything truly worth playing, and with only 9 days left, I decided it best to retract my submission and recess into the dark corners of my own little world to quietly work away at this game that I've found myself inspired once again to make. 

Thank you everyone for joining me on this journey here in this jam, I wish everybody the best of luck with their submissions (I cant wait to check some of these out). If you'd like to follow the development of Moonlight Drive, throw me a quick Follow here on itchio and the Moonlgiht Drive DevLogs will wind up in your itch inbox. 

The thing is, as fans of this genre, I would certainly love objective and subjective feedback as the game progresses form you, the #hardboiledjam community.  Your expertise in the genre would can only stand to help Moonlight Drive's legitimacy, as this is sadly an area where I , myself, need to spend a lot more time in researching. 

Thank you all again for having me!

Cheers!

~ Kyle
Cold Sweat Games 

added a big ol' overdue DevLog discussing the progress: https://coldsweatgames.itch.io/moonlight-drive/devlog/67544/the-road-to-demozone

Thanks! Been giving some thought about expanding on it into some fun bigger project, but that might be a ways out yet :) Thanks for the support!

I've had to make some radical pivots to my games design, and I'm pretty sure all I'm going to be able to get accomplished is a short demo unfortunately :(  Something wasn't feeling quite right and it took me a while to figure out exactly what it was, and i'm currently addressing it. 

OH WELL.

There's a cheap asset in the unity asset store called "PlayMaker" that let's you code visually without writing anything.  You basically wire up behaviour in a literal sense. 

Or just wait a few months for the follow up to Unity 2019.1 as it's said to include a built in Visual Scripting extension for free. 

as someone mentioned earlier, while basic personality traits might still be present, it really is the chain of everything that's happening in your life that shapes who you become and how you behave.   You shape the way you talk after your idols, you make your decisions based on your upbringing, your fundamental personality traits come primarily from your environment. 

If that's ALL gone then you're a blank slate again, likely need to re-learn how to speak as well., thought basic motor functions may remain just fine 

Unity + Visual Novel Toolkit = 100% Free: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/visual-novel-toolkit-free-9416

Then there's also Ren'py https://www.renpy.org/ which is arguably  the most popular visual novel engine, therefore would likely be the easiest.  Easiest in the way that if you run into any issues, a simple google search will bring up a solution to an issue you're having that likely someone else would have also already had before. 

The visuals are absolutely stunning, I like this world, very inviting :)

Looks like an interesting concept that can be a lot of fun to play. Solid mechanic and gimmick, I'd play it 

Brand new development:Cloth physics on the coat

I have to be completely honest, each time I sit down to write my story beyond the first day, it's been difficult getting "into" that flow @_@  I admire your passion to write that much!

Working on my detective's coat!  Hoping to add basic cloth physics to the lower half to react to his legs, the environment, and the wind!

As per the way Itch.io works: yes. 

Just submit your game to the jam as is, and you have all the way up until the end date to upload new versions of your game. 

What I do is upload new packages and hide the old ones so as to keep the download / play stats