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As you can read here, the organizers of this jam are brainstorming how they could expand this jam series. I got an idea I would like you to comment on.

One of the greatest concepts of Open Source is the right to fork. FOSS allows you to just take the project of someone else and turn it into something better, without even having to ask for permission.

How about creating an "Open Source Fork Jam"? A game jam where participants take any project from a past Open Source Jam, fork it and turn it into an entirely different game.

I think that giving a theme would not be that appropriate for such a game jam, because not every game will be suitable for adapting to a specific new theme. So perhaps the surprise challenge revealed at the start of the game jam could be which game to fork.

Now there are of course games made in a lot of different technologies. Most participants won't know how to work in every single one of them. So the organizers could pick a small selections of past games which cover a wide variety of frequently used technologies and allow people to choose from. Like one in C++, one in JavaScript, one in Godot and perhaps one in Unity (While Unity is a proprietary engine, it just is the most popular engine among game jammers).

I got another idea for your brainstorming which I elaborated on here.

Everyday after work in the rocket launcher test lab, Rocket Ranger buys himself an ice cream cone. But every time, one of the evil birds steals it. The birds put the empty waffles on their heads to taunt him. Now he decided that enough is enough and swore bloody vengeance on them.

...nah, actually, I have no idea. I just took that asset from open game art :)

Can you be more specific about how I could improve the collisions?

Now I just hope that everyone actually discovers that and nobody thinks it's literally just standing around and shooting balloons. :)

It's not unusual that many people sign up for a game jam and then end up not submitting anything. But I never participated in a game jam where the submission rate was that low. Any idea what the reason could be?

It took me quite a while to figure out what to do and even longer to figure out how to do it properly.I often found myself stuck in a spot where I had no obvious way to get ahead, and all I could do is move backwards and take another swing.

I think you got a really cool concept here with the potential to become a great game. But what it needs is a tutorial and a more beginner-friendly first stage.

Sorry, but it doesn't seems like I can just fix that for you that easily. Playstation and XInput gamepads use different axis configurations in Unity. You can check out how this works here: https://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Xbox360Controller

• The triggers are axis 3.
• The right stick are axis 4 (horizontal) and 5 (vertical).

So people with an XInput gamepads like me just need to hold the right stick down when they don't want to shoot.

I don't think there is a simple fix to just make it work on either gamepad. I think you have to add some way for the player to tell you what gamepad they have and configure the control accordingly. Or perhaps switching to the new Unity Input System might help?

The culprit might be Player.cs line 169 where you consider any value for the axis of the trigger-buttons other than -1 as shooting. It' possible that some controllers never return a value of exactly -1.0f. I'll see if I can fix it and send you a pull request on GitHub.

That was... weird.

I checked the sourcecode from the description of the video you posted and the sourcecode from your git repository and they seem identical to me. Did you change anything about it?

I had the problem that my ship would not stop firing until running out of energy, which made the game quite unplayable. Really a pity, because it looks really great. Respect for going 3d in a weekend game jam. I know that it's a lot more difficult to create good looking 3d than 2d under time pressure, and you created a really decent looking game nevertheless.

Really cute point&click adventure.

That was beautiful.

Really nice, minimalist aesthetics. And the story bits were a good way to motivate me to play all the way to the end (the end is at 1000m, right?)

But I think the health regeneration upgrade might be bugged. It didn't seem to do anything for me.

"We're not particularly happy with the end result, you can barely call it a game at this point."

Don't be so hard on yourself. It's a novel and interesting game idea and quite playable. I have seen much worse submissions to weekend game jams.

Interesting game idea and it looks pretty good for a weekend game jam.

I would have moved everything closer to the base so the player spends less time traveling and more time doing interesting stuff. I would also have picked a different music. It doesn't fit the theme very well and got repetitive pretty quick.

It looks and sounds great.

But the gameplay was far too difficult for me. There was no way for me to tell when an enemy would attack and far too little time to react. My high score was 9, and that just with luck. Any hints for how to git gud at this game?

Nice touch to give every single jump in the game an unique game.

That's really unintuitive. You might want to hint that by drawing part of the character on both sides of the screen when they walk half-way out of bounds. Or perhaps have some object which uses that mechanic to give the player the hint that this might be possible for them.

Really cute aesthetics and a good camera controller.

The gameplay seems mostly luck-based to me. Is there some way to control anything while the egg is in flight.

It seems like I can't jump far enough to reach the 3rd platform. Am I overlooking something?

Thank you. But I don't deserve credit for making the music. I just chose it.

The credits are on the game page and they would have been in the ending screen, but cut off due to a layouting problem I didn't notice until minutes after the deadline. I uploaded a fix just yesterday which fixed that.

They gave you a pretty hard article and you made a pretty interesting game out of it.

Thank you. Can you tell me more about what was wonky about the controls? Any specific situations you had problems with?

I really like the atmosphere. Also nice to see some polished UI design in a weekend game jam.

But the tilting mechanic is more annoying than interesting and just waiting under roofs until the wetness bar is down again is also pretty boring.

Appears to be just an empty zip file. What a pity, because the screenshot looks quite interesting. Perhaps you could upload your game a second time and post a link?

The crafting menu only seems to work if you switch to fullscreen mode. You are not the first person to stumble into the pitfalls of the Unity UI layout system.

When you fly into the wall, you leave a hole in it. The hole stays there for your next run. So you progress by dying.

Interesting game idea which unfortunately doesn't explain and introduce itself very well.

Improve the onboarding and try to make the alive phase just as interesting as the dead phase and you might have a very cool game concept.

I found the game mechanics really confusing at first, but after some experimentation they started to make sense.

Really cool idea to simulate the text input through the number pad used on phones in that generation.

Also very nice pixel art and animation and authentic sound effects.

Sorry, but I couldn't manage to get across the first screen. It took me several times each time to just get on the first platform. When I finally got my character on it, then my character often kept on jumping and I missed the next platform. When I reached the next platform successfully, then I always fell off while trying to jump towards the next. I tried for a couple minutes and then gave up.

A shame, because it seems you have a couple good things in the game.

One of the few submissions I could really imagine to be on an old Nokia cellphone.

Too bad that the theme really felt shoe-horned in.

It didn't work in Firefox. But I was able to play it in Chrome. I also couldn't really figure out what I was supposed to do in this game. A tutorial would have been nice.

I really liked the story. And all the different music tracks were really catchy, considering they had to be monophonic.

I don't think I deserve a medal for not using an engine in this particular game jam. What does an engine do for you? Mostly provide you with a visual scene editor, collision detection physics and a ready-to-use rendering engine. I didn't really need a scene editor for this game, the physics for my game idea were very simple and getting an engine like Unity to adhere to the stringent graphic restriction of this jam  was likely more work for some people than just rolling their own.

I in fact believe I saved time by not using an engine for this project. It certainly helped me to work with the restrictions instead of against them.

What browser do you use?

I tested it on Firefox and Chrome. I already found out that it doesn't work on Internet Explorer and Edge for some reason.

I really like the subtle effects like the ghosting and the dot matrix lines.

But this game is LOUD. I had to turn the volume all the way down to make it bearable. By the way, you can control the volume of the HTML5 audio pipline you set up in retro.min.js in the function "sound" by using the gain node. Set g.gain.value to something between 0.0 and 1.0 to control the volume.