itch.io

Good game. After trying a few times at this game, I didn't get very far, but then again I am not very good at mazes. I love the unsettling atmosphere. The walking and collision mechanics are smooth. Picking up items seems to work well enough inasmuch as they go into my inventory when I pick them up. I wasn't able to get enough ingredients to brew anything yet, but if I keep playing this, maybe I will get good enough to experience that aspect of the game. Well done.

Hello, I am puzzlefrog, but you can call me Alex if you want. I have some feedback if you want it. If not feel free to ignore or delete this. Anyway here I go. As someone who had trouble with the conversion to HTML5 myself, I know where you are coming from on that front. If you plan to continue developing this game after the jam, I hope you will find this advice helpful.

First, let's talk movement. The movement speed took me a bit of getting used to. Your character moved a lot faster than I expected him to be able to go. He is quite nimble. The movement feels rather abrupt. One thing that can help with that is making his acceleration from 0 to top speed more gradual. 

Next, let's talk audio. There isn't really anything to be spoken of there. Strictly speaking, music and sound effects are not a necessity, but they are a nice thing to have and they make a game more enjoyable in my opinion. If you have the ability to add either of those things later that would help the game's feel or vibe or whatever you want to call it.

Then there is the premise. I love the premise. It is simple and easy to understand. I could see a great game developing out of that if you keep working at it. Some notes though on how the game play is built around it. Collecting the ingredients was relatively easy, but I wasn't able to figure out how to craft spells or deal any damage in combat.. Now I do acknowledge that could just be a skill issue on my part, but I thought was still worth bringing up. 

I think that's everything. Accounting for the time constraints you had to deal with and the troubles that you had converting your game, I can see why the game didn't do as well as you were hoping. For future game jams. Try not to focus on what it is you couldn't do. Don't say in your submission, "I couldn't do this or I couldn't do that". Say,, "I did this or I did that". Focus on what you did right. You got your character to be able to walk, jump, and talk. Sure it could use some polish, but you don't need to bring that part up. Also don't undersell yourself. Be nice to yourself. This was a learning experience. If you learned something from this, even if you don't win, then you were still successful in at least one respect. 

I have no doubt that if you do more game jams and apply what you learned here, you will do so much better. I believe in you. Good submission.

Thank you for checking out the game. If you like it feel free to let people know about it. Also, I will write down what you said at about guidance at the beginning. Thanks for the feedback.

Does it have the same bug that Pyinstaller does where things get flagged as viruses even when they aren't viruses?

That makes sense. Thanks for the help.

Edit: I just tried it. This is not what I am looking for. I tried to modify it to suit my needs more, but had no luck. I wasn't specific in what I was asking for. That's on me. Anyway, do you have an example with a game window, where you click an x and that closes it? This just closes on its own. Also this leaves out a lot. Where do I put my global variables? Where do I call functions that do things like fill the game window, draw things, and play sounds? I would assume that is starting on the line after the code says while True:

I know how to do it without asyncio, but with asyncio, no idea. Should I show a screenshot?

Why is there nothing on the same line as return? What is being returned? It just skips a line. Also, the  if not count part confuses me. count is initially set up at 60, that is not a Boolean. What keeps count from decrementing forever?

That's not helpful at all.

I do not know if I am knowledgeable enough about asynchronous code yet to even understand the documentation for pygbag, its worth a try. Can you link to the documentation? When I try to search for Pygbag documentation, I get a bunch of videos made by people not working on Pygbag talking about Pygbag. I want the actual documentation.

I have been working on a game for a game jam. It has to be a game that runs in the browser on Itch.io. I am using Pygame to make it. Once it is made, what options do I have for uploading it?

 I want to know as many as possible. That way, in the event that one of them doesn't work, I will have a backup plan. So far I know of only two ways to export games made in Pygame. The first way I heard about was PyInstaller, but that doesn't work for me most of the time and when it does Windows Defender just flags it as a virus. Also that creates an executable which the game jam runners do not want. The second is Pygbag which can convert the games I make on my computer into web assembly browser games. One problem with this is that if I have to mess around with the asyncio module which I find to be a pain to deal with as I only recently found out that asynchronous code is a thing. I haven't really needed it much up to this point. As a result, I am not good at working with the asyncio module yet. 

One of my teammates recently introduced me to Github. I have a copy of my code stored there. Maybe there is something I can do with that. If not, there are probably a lot of other ways to get my game uploaded.

Wait so that is why Windows called my game a virus? I thought it was just making fun of my programming abilities and telling me that I am not a good programmer. Maybe it was a bit of both. Anyway, what "embeddable Python package" are you referring to?

If I make a game in Pygame and use PyInstaller to make an executable for that game to put up on itch.io, would players need to have the Python language and interpreter installed on their computer to run my game? If so, is there a way to give players instruction on how to set up the game? 

How would you upload games made with Pygame or Pygame-ce, depending upon which fork you want to use? Is it a similar process?

Do I use a different import statement at the start of my file?

Normally I would structure a file like this:

import pygame

pygame.init()

game_code(game_window, game_loop, event_handler)

and that works well enough.

With the ce fork would I instead structure it like:

import pygame-ce

pygame-ce.init()

game_code(game_window, game_loop, event_handler)

I am not familiar with how forks of a program or library work. I know it has something to do with Github, but I have no idea how Github works. I have never used it. 

What is pygame-ce and how is it different from regular pygame? 

To install pygame - ce do I have to uninstall regular pygame?

Does pygame - ce overwrite regular pygame?

I saw the part in the rules about pygame vs. pygame - ce and was wondering what that was about. I am still new to pygame.

Thank you. That is good to know.

How long should our game be? Do you want a short game where you can get through all the content in a few minutes or would you prefer something on the longer side that would take a few hours to get through?