itch.io

Its pretty well known so you may already be familiar with it but the Handmade Hero community may be up your alley. I think the community stuff (including the discord) is under the name “Handmade Network”?

Lotta game dev adjacent and general lower level programming stuff going on in there

This was awesome! Sara and Jessica were a very sweet pair and the ending#1 cinematic was well done. good stuff!

I’m a hobbyist for sure. Game development is a cool creative exercise and one that makes me feel closer to something I’m deeply passionate about.

I haven’t set aside any budget for marketing on any hobby games so far

ha when the tape hiss started on end music I thought something crazy was happening to my computer. I’m not sure if I actually did what I was supposed to do in the game. I walked for maybe a minute. found some cubes. fell. and then hit end credits. was there anything I might have missed?

Wow! Love the homebrew psx work. Super cool backgrounds. How did you make those? And thanks for the tips on the game’s page about how to work around the bugs. I was pretty confused at first.

EDIT: oops sorry for accidentally posting this same comment 3 times. the itch.io website sorta freaked out on me. the rest of those comments should be cleaned up now though

I tried to play the game but wasn’t really able to. It ran extremely slowly and I got this error message that it was taking up too much vram

what I could see of the game looked really cool! I liked the creepy music, the sonar, and the pixelated first-person look. kinda reminded me of myst

Good work! I thought the music was cool and the opening cinematic was cool. I found the controls a bit awkward though so I didn’t get very far (died 3 times.)

Jar hammer!!! such a cool design. Love how this turned out.

can you clarify what you mean by “clone generator” and “clone generation architecture AI”?

I’m looking for a musician to write/compose some music for my hobby pico-8 game.

The game itself is already available and playable https://scottnm.itch.io/dig-deep

But it’s using placeholder music that we used with permission from someone on the pico-8 BBS.

I’d like to commission some original music for it.

The position would be paid and we can negotiate a rate.

To set early expectations:

1. If you’re interested, please comment with a link to an example of your work. It can be a full portfolio, a single link, or whatever. I just want to get a feel for what your style is.

2. As mentioned above, this is a paid position and we’d negotiate your rate before you start doing any work.

3. You would be responsible for delivering the finished product in a pico-8 cart. You do NOT have to integrate it into my own game, but the music already in pico-8 cart format would be required.

4. If you’d like, I can credit you on our game’s itch.io page with any self-promotion links you’d like me to share (within reason).

Reach out to me if you’re interested! Thanks.

sounds reasonable.

the part that feels like a nuisance is for quick and dirty things like game jams where everyone already has an install of unity so trying to decide which version to use and then making everyone go download it sounds like a pain…

but it’s probably the lesser of two evils (e.g. finding an unexpected incompatibility between editor versions)

c’est la vie I guess.

Let’s say I’ve got a team of multiple game devs working in Unity.

Is there an easy way to setup the project so it requires a minimum version of the Unity editor and not a specific one?

The scenario I’m thinking about is multiple different people who each use the same major/minor version of the LTS Unity editor (i.e. all devs are on Unity LTS 2020.3) but some maybe be using different patches (e.g. one dev has 2020.3.16f1 and another dev has 2020.3.24f1)

It’d be convenient if I could find a way to say the project requires 2020.3.16f1 and the dev who uses 2020.3.24f1 doesn’t have to go download a separate unity install.

It’s frankly probably pretty minor. Likely not too hard to just tell everyone to go install a specific unity editor but I’ve been surprised that the Unity Hub doesn’t make downloading arbitrary versions of the Unity editor easier. It’s trivial to download the latest LTS patches but if someone on our team sets up with an older LTS patch I’ve gotta go manually look through the Unity archives to find it which is a bit of a pain.

Related question: are there best practices for managing unity versions on a team? e.g. for any new project always use the latest LTS patch and ask all devs to download it? or leave a link in your project to some unity LTS version to make it easy for all devs to find the same version of the unity editor?

I might be overthinking this, but thought I’d ask in case anyone had found a way to alleviate this potential tripping point.

that was fun! I made it to level 5 but didn’t beat it :P

I’d get a new sound for gun. It was a bit hard to listen to.

This was really fun! I haven’t beat it yet because my gameboy started to die (playing with an EverDrive GBA flash cart)

Just got past the level with all the ghosts to the level with the creatures who eat you if you walk through their line of sight

ay I watched you build this from your youtube channel. cool stuff. I did the totally-not-mario puzzle. looking forward to what you make next.

I don’t think it would hurt to make a proof-of-concept or something. I’m not really sure what your tool would look like so it’s hard to say one way or the other

I don’t like high score competitions but I do like when games give you stats about how other players play the game. The puzzle game Catherine would tell you what dialogue options other player’s picked during certain story parts of the game which was cool.

Whiteboxing sounds like a good idea. I tend to get choice paralysis looking at the asset store even when I know it’s placeholder art.

What has been your experience making 3D games in Game Jams?

I'm mostly comfortable making 2D games in Game Jams so I thought I'd get out of my comfort zone and try something 3D for the next one I enter.

I'm a software engineer by trade so I'm very comfortable with programming and I've got a little bit of experience with 3D development in the past (though it's pretty rusty).

I'd love to hear advice/tips/warnings from people who have made 3D games for game jams in the past.

What sort of strategies have you learned over time that have made your 3D jam experiences more fun and more likely to succeed? I imagine some general advice about scoping and proper planning apply to 2D and 3D equally, but figure there might also be tips that are more 3D oriented.

Are there any game engines that are specifically super well tailored for fast game-jam style iteration/prototyping/building?

Any advice for how to prototype without spending tons of time building (and searching for) 3D assets?

Got any other miscellaneous 3D jam advice? I'd love to hear it.

I'm not sure if you really need books.

I think GameMaker has tutorials on their website. You'd probably pick GML up faster by following those than by trying to just read about GML.https://gamemaker.io/en/tutorials

If you do want to read about GML again I'd recommend looking at the GML reference documentation online instead of looking for a book https://manual.yoyogames.com/#t=GameMaker_Language%2FGML_Overview%2FGML_Overview...

if you have no programming experience you might also benefit from starting out with GML's Visual tools for building games instead of jumping straight into code.

https://manual.yoyogames.com/#t=Drag_And_Drop%2FDrag_And_Drop_Index.htm

In the last game jam I worked on, the ideation phase for me looked a lot like this

1. think about some games that I like and try to "borrow" concepts from them that I think work well in a game jam.

2. setup some somewhat arbitrary constraints for the game (maybe the game has to be first-person or no real-time physics or whatever)

3. do some chaotic unstructured text-dump brainstorming in a text file. I prefer simple plain text editors like Sublime Text or Vim because I'm easy to distract with more featureful word processors

4. when ideas from #3 sound right, really roughly sketch out what I think that might look like on paper. This is less for art planning and more just so I can visually diagram things and make an idea more concrete.

5. start prototyping the simplest version of what I was sketching up

I do #1 and #2 because I think I work better when I don't have the entire design space of all possible games to think about

I do #3 and #4 more as just something to get me started that doesn't require any complicated tools or coding or anything. I've heard some people like to make actual paper prototypes but that feels like too much work for me. At this point, all I'm really trying to do is get myself excited enough about an idea to start prototyping

#5 is where the real magic happens so you should be trying to get here as fast as possible. Don't spend too much time on the previous steps. Just use them to build momentum to get to the prototyping phase. 100% agree with what "No Time To Play" said above

a demo project from like 4 years ago. Mostly an excuse to try making something with 3D assets since my comfort zone is 2D and top down. Frankly it’s been so long I can’t remember what is or isn’t in this but I hope it was interesting lol