itch.io

I was considering getting the Gimp course as a good way to learn pixel art and the Gimp software at once - but apparently they yanked it from the site during the migration or something. Oddly in the side bar when browsing courses one of the filters is Gimp... Oh well. I'm sure there is plenty on YouTube for it.

As such, I'll likely get the "Pixel Art Environments: Design & Animate 2D Environments From Scratch!" as that and the Pixel 2D Character courses are the only ones I don't have which interest me atm (except maybe the Git one, but Git isn't very hard to learn from Youtube tbh).

Now I just need to focus on actually going through the various courses I already have (Yay for HumbleBundles)

From what I understand the game engine got dropped in favor if focusing their energy on what Blender was meant to do - be a 3D art program. However, Godot 4 has native Blender support so you can load the .blend files directly. Thankfully since Blender is open source and the community is completely unhinged most of the time (in all the best ways mind you), there is a fork of Blender that is all about the game engine you can check it out here: https://upbge.org/

As far as the GameDev.tv Blender courses go however, Grant is an amazing instructor so I'm sure anyone who picks up his Blender courses will love it. He also has his own youtube channel with a ton of beginner friendly tutorials, specific guides, and general skill improvement challenges so definitely would be worth looking into if you are new to Blender and want some extra material to learn from :)

Really fun and fresh take on a tower defense! As one who works retail as my day job, also highly relatable lol

Biggest issue I had, was it took a few tries to realize how to place turrets. Initially I thought it was super bugged because since the mouse controlled the camera I thought I had to walk up to the placement areas, not click them. When trying to click, the camera movement made it really hard to control. Once I got used to it, it was pretty straight forward. I'd suggest maybe a "hold right mouse to move camera" type control.

Overall though, I loved the whole 80s vibe and the overall game play once I got it figured out though. Will definitely be playing it some more. If your team chooses to continue development I'll be looking forward to seeing it's progression! :)

Really fun Plants vs Zombies style game :) Really love the low res pixel art style for it too. Could really expand out if you wanted to keep working on it, would be fun to play more of :)

Yeah, tank controls can be a little weird if you aren't used to them. Little bit of practice though and I'm sure you can be running the enemy tanks around the map in no time though - until they ambush you and spam the screen with bullets and missiles anyway ;)

As far as the tank color, that's actually a good point. If I keep with the green tank color after the jam (I do want to update the game a little bit more) I'll look into ways to make it pop a bit more :)

Glad you enjoyed! Tanks for playing :)

Really fun and interesting puzzle game with unique mechanics. Clever how the iron bars block the ghost's passage since historically iron was believed to be harmful (or at least impassable) to ghosts and the such.

Couple bugs I found:

• In one of the levels (4 I think it was? Lots of book cases to the right and multiple gates to pass near the top, spike pit in lower left) I had two skeletons near each other and when I went to possess one, the game had me possess both at once. And, when I came out, I had two ghosts. Somewhere I accidentally killed one of the skeletons in the spike pit but it didn't reset (because I technically still had the other ghost) basically soft-locking the game on that level until I reset.
• The exterior walls are passable to the ghost letting you drop out of the world resetting the level (learned this by accident when I was near the end of one of the levels).

Reverse Tower-Defense is pretty fun and rarely see them so this was a nice change!

The balance is a bit wonky though once you learn the swarmers have the best ratio for cost/income increase. Just mass them until you can afford an armor upgrade and 4+ Taurens per wave and it's basically auto-win.

Still really fun and definitely a strong foundation for a more fleshed out game if it's development is continued post-jam!

Ohh! Really fun tower defense game. As a genre it's very hit and miss with me, but I really liked this one. Really nice retro-style graphics, good music, and pretty intuitive game mechanics. By the end, I really wished I picked up some of those teleportation blessings as I desperately needed to re-deploy some of my units to new locations.

Even though I lost, it left me feeling challenged and not overwhelmed which, tbh, is part of what makes the genre so fun is finding the best strategies and adapting on each play through.

Will very likely be coming back to this game again!

Awesome, gotta love when something hits ya right in the nostalgia (in a good way)! Glad you enjoy it, tanks for playing! :)

My friend said it reminded him of Battle City for NES so maybe that was it? Never played it myself, but I was definitely going for the same retro NES/SNES era vibe. The 80s and 90s by far had some of the best games imo so I often try for something similar with the games I make.

Tanks for playing :)

Thanks, the graphics are both Kenny's assets, Godot's built in particles, and a smoke sprite sheet from open game art. I was surprised how well it all came together in the end :)

Tanks for playing! :)

You're right, there really doesn't seem to be enough of them it seems.  Closest popular game that is 'vehicle combat' in recent years seems to be Mario Kart and the occasional Twisted Metal.

The Dev high-score was literally put in just before uploading about 2 hours before submissions closed (along with the high score system in general). If you  can beat it, it changes some graphics on the main screen to celebrate outdoing me at (literally) my own game ;)

Seems bugged for me. For me level 2 kept looping. Every time I'd beat it, it would just restart it. No enemies to deal with (not sure if they were meant to be in levels 1 and 2 as they seemed more 'learn the controls' levels but thought I'd mention it since level 2 layout seemed like it was meant that you would duck into the alcoves to avoid enemies).

One idea to improve is adding an ambiance of gunfire/war sounds.

Otherwise, seems like a pretty solid game concept and matches it's source inspiration very well :)

Replayed it, and I love it! Played perfectly (as in no bugs, my timing was way off on some of them lol) and got a score of 13,450 on my first go. Love the music even more now that I can go all the way through! :) Also, the whole theme of "don't fall" with fall leaves... very clever! :)

The visuals are the Kenny Top Down Tank and the Kenny Urban kits. I was pretty amazed myself with how smoothly they worked together, especially considering  that since the urban tileset is like 1/8 the size of the tank tileset, I don't think Kenny initially intended them to be used together.

I realized early on how tough the tanks were going to be at times so I really wanted to add a little extra to when you kill them. I forgot to add a special larger explosion for when you kill them, but it worked out pretty well in the end.

Glad you liked it! Tanks for playing!

Ohh!! That's pretty good! Usually I can't get much past 20 myself (initially I could only get to 12-15). At first I was concerned the game was too hard, but then when I realized a big trick is to make a loop between the 3 health upgrades I was able to hit my 42 high score before I got ambushed.

Two of the health power ups you can see the sparkles but not the item itself so it's a little hidden (one is behind a tree, the other behind a building), but still can be spotted when you aren't panic running from 5 enemy tanks at once lol

Glad you enjoyed! Tanks for playing! (yes, I had to lol)

Had a blast with this one! Took 3 times to beat it, every time died on wave 5. First I died, then they got the base... then third time I verified that hexagons might be bestagons, but circles still prevail!

Also threw me off for a second because the background music is the same one I ended up using in my game! lol

Cute rhythm game, was pretty enjoyable for what I could play. Really nice music, art, the little "wheee" of the leaves. Whole thing was pretty adorable :)

For me it was a bit bugged and half the time wouldn't register when I had to hit double-arrows. At first I thought I was hitting them wrong but then paid special attention and it would still only register one.

At first I was thinking "Oh this is easy..." Got the upgrade so bounced meteors don't do anything and felt like I was cheating. Next round got a bit trickier but not bad, got the upgrade for constant attack.

... what was that madness which happened afterwards?! I barely survived to get "faster respawn" and got absolutely cratered in the next round.

10/10 would (fail to) prevent extinction again!

Took a bit to figure out the controls initially but was pretty fun playing around. No one to play local coop with, but it looks like it would be a fun game. Maybe as a mini-game within a larger game?

The bounce pad was pretty fun, when I got on the first time I thought I was going to land on the moon! lol Managed to clip through the map goofing around trying to land on the fountain, but it only happened once and couldn't reproduce.

As a veggie, gotta love the shameless vegan propaganda lol

Tip though (maybe it was a bug?) once I died there wasn't a way to restart without completely reloading the game.  Has potential to be a pretty over the top survivalist game (eg: binding of isaac, but even more absurd) so if you feel so inclined could be worth expanding it out a bit :)

That makes sense :) I just saw in the rules where it says:

"Q: Can I edit my game once I submit?

You can fix game breaking bugs in your submission and upload those. If your game is unpleasant or unplayable due to technical issues, we want you to fix those! You just cant add new features or gameplay. or things like that."

and since the Q specifically stated "submit" I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to get disqualified accidentally. My current iteration of my game is "done" (for gamejam standards anyway) but I do have some more ideas I wanted to try to put in there and didn't want to submit if I was able to get it done, but wasn't allowed to re-submit.

I was considering submitting what I have now, then if I get a chance to update/add more things before the deadline I can just update it then but wasn't sure if we were allowed.

(To clarify: I know bug-fixes are always allowed even after the deadline, I'm talking about adding new features which isn't allowed "after submission", but wasn't sure if that rule applied if the deadline/voting period hadn't happened yet)

Afaik there is no rules against it once the voting ends.

Since you can upload different versions of your game to the same project afaik, it could be fun to rename it to something like "GameJam Edition" and leave that up so future players can always go back and see how it all began. That's what I plan to do with mine.

Afaik they won't be, however there are plenty of sites to get freebies. 

Kenny Assets is a pretty big name one.

Here on Itch there are plenty of CC options as well.

opengameart.org is a fantastic source for all sorts of stuff as well (a lot is CC0)

While the app allows us to filter/search our library (why can't we do this on the website?) it would be useful to be able to bulk add items to collections instead of having to add them one at a time from the item page itself.

Couple ideas of how to implement:

1. From the main library listings, the ability to multi-select via a check box (or other multi select mode) with a "add to collection..." button to select what collection to add it to.

2. From the collection itself, have an "add items to collection" button that you can search/filter the items in your library and click check boxes (or just the item itself) to select and a button to add all selected to the current collection.

I'm also a writer rather than coder but looking at the idea that maybe visual/game based story telling is more my thing. I made my submission (Longinus-3) using Scratch. It's simple but you'll start to feel some of it's limits if you make anything complex. If you decide to check it out, GriffPatch is a youtuber who outright breaks Scratch pushing it way beyond it's intended functions on the regular.

Something of a step up from Scratch is Godot if you don't want to get into Unity or Unreal. Godot is appealing since it's free and has a pretty solid community around it while generally considered the easiest of the three to learn (but I've also heard it has the least tutorials/resources to learn from) while being highly flexible.

If you want mostly 2D games, then Unity or Godot might be the best but since I've heard Unreal is a bit rough in that area. If you are going with 3D games, Unreal is pretty nuts but the other two are both very capable as well (Godot is mostly a 2d engine afaik, but it can do 3D as well).

For making your own graphics, I'd recommend the Complete Blender Creator 3 or GIMP courses (for 3D and 2D art respectively).

Also keep an eye on HumbleBundle. Occasionally they have bundles from GameDev.tv (which is how I got most of my courses from them).

Yup, as far as I know you can pick any course from their site. Not just game dev/coding specific stuff (eg: You could pick The Complete Blender Creator 3  course if you want).

Ah sounds good. I gave it a go....and remembered why I hate Flappy Birds (which means you did it right lol).

Scratch is super simple drag code 'blocks' (literally) into position and connect them together. I was watching a couple tutorials already on Godot 4 and it looks really good. Significantly more complex, but it all looks complex at first.

If I decide to go with a different free course, I'm not sure what I would go with offhand. I have most of the Blender courses already via HumbleBundle, The GIMP course could be interesting since I've always struggled learning it and since I plan to do mostly 2D games, it might be better in some cases than rendering out assets in Blender.

Ah nice. Thanks for the heads up, I'll check it out!

Since itch (I think) allows different versions of the game to be kept in the downloads section, I'll probably leave a base "as submitted" version then another with bug fixes, and maybe a third which has some quality of life (such as a photo sensitive option since it has a lot of flashing neon lights).

Otherwise, I plan to make a full new version of the game as a separate project as the "Scratch" edition while I work on one I can release as a full retail release in Godot.

Very likely  the Godot 4 course they just launched. I actually have several Unreal and Unity courses from bundles, and SEVERAL Blender courses (which I really need to just sit down and do) but Unity and Unreal seemed really intimidating.

 I did the Scratch course just before this jam (part of one of the bundles) and got hooked. Godot 4 seems the next logical step up.

Great throwback to the retro arcade racing games! Really nice visuals, audios, handling feels good. Solid retro racing game I can see myself coming back to!

Biggest problem is anytime I'd go offroad the road got really distorted and disconnected/floaty looking and started almost making me motion sick as a result. Might also just be from running it in browser though.

I've never even made a game before this and finished my Scratch course (from GameDev.tv actually)  literally on the same day the jam started soooo yeah, I'm pretty proud of what I managed especially with how crazy my irl schedule was getting. I hit a lot of issues having to literally rewrite the core of the game 3 times to accommodate new features and dealing with bugs (when you make something fade out....you need to remember to make that effect go away for it to show up again....oops)

I actually plan to continue active development on the Scratch version for a while (and back port a few QOL and bug fixes to the gamejam edition such as photo-sensitivity settings to disable the flashing neon lights). Also thinking of using the free course being offered to get the Godot 4 course and remake the entire game into something that can be a full retail release one day.

A few ideas I've come up with:

* A full story with conspiracies, plot twists, and an underlying theme of what it is to be human. (I have a large part of this already written in my head - hazard of being a hobby writer lol)

* Extensive content OUTSIDE of the Longinus Unit (the tank) including stealth, combat (both small and large), several minor and major moral choices, and a few small metroidvania style segments.

* Lots of weapon and equipment options. Ideally they should all be roughly balanced allowing the player to choose what they want rather than feeling the need to choose a meta build (they will ALL be meta builds by end game)

* A branching narrative which won't be immediately apparent.

* 2.5D graphics using Blender to render the 3D models out as fully detailed sprites.

* A cat, and probably a dog. Yes, you will be able to pet them.

I'm legit super excited now that I see how the core of a game can be put together once you know the pieces. Before this jam, I never thought I'd actually be able to make a legit game.

(Edit: https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2023/rate/2090581 My game jam submission)

Cute simple point and click. The idea that you can interact with the pictures was a neat concept. Feels like there is a lot of potential here if you decide to expand it into a larger game both for meaningful choices (eg: good/neutral/bad endings), and overall story.

Super hard until I got used to it, then it was really fun with an interesting dynamic of switching between the two. Kind of addicted now lol

A simple puzzle game with interesting mechanics. Starts simple but gets very challenging. Definitely enjoyed it.

Awesome! I ended up switching over to TurboWarp also and it worked great! Had to submit a day early because I knew I was going to be too busy to work on it anymore but I got it in and the whole thing plays fine with the html package TW created! :) (well as fine as it will with the bugs i haven't had a chance to fix yet lol nothing game-breaking, at least!)

Like the title says. I've seen some stuff on Google like HTMLifier and HyperWrap (haven't looked at it yet) but figured I'd check here in case there was a preferred/best method. (also thought asking her  would benefit any other Scratches if they have a similar concern).

I'm currently using the Scratch website and Ubuntu Linux if relevant.