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Good call. I’m early stages of fleshing this out into a fuller game where you can complete some story missions or have responses that build on each other, feels like it could fit in nicely.

As someone who is uhhhhh not great at 3D yet, I found this really really helpful to get me up and running quick and figure out some basics to start experimenting. Thanks for sharing!

I appreciate you pushin' through, and thanks for all the kind words! Good idea to add an extra prompt before the first level, I've heard that from a few folks...will probably roll that into the next update while I'm smoothin' out the last few lil bugs. Facial expressions were on deck but were sacrificed at the last minute for time, but hoping to expand all that stuff and add some more personality and movement if/when I flesh it out!

Just patched that bug, thanks for the heads up!

Fixed that A/D bug in the latest update, thanks for catching that! Also fixed some of the jankiness with the platforming to catch that place you got stuck, hopefully! Appreciate the kind words and thanks for playing.

Frankly, I set up my player character in a weird way, which is what was causing the weird collisions. Still not perfect, but I just uploaded an update that smooths out most of the collision issues (I think?). The level design, well...that's a whole 'nother ball game! Appreciate you taking the time to play!

Oh damn, good catch! Honestly, this version of it looks way more fun than the current game, maybe I need to just lean in to this.

I'm a sucker for goofy physics, so I liked the chaotic thrusting of the jar around the screen...felt like SnipperClips in terms of like trying to fight for control, but in a fun way. I only made it to the second round or so because I kept hitting the red bug as I flung around. If you iterate on it, it might be worth giving people some hearts or lives or something to allow for a failure or two before reset, and maybe a more generous hit radius on catching the bugs themselves. There were a few times where I felt like I had 'em, but it didn't register the catch. All in all, well done!

I dig the direction this is going! I played a few rounds and wasn't entirely sure what my goal was...it might be easier to dole out instructions step by step in the game itself to hand hold a little at first. I also wasn't sure if I could point a pipe at any side of a hospital bed to get power to it...my first instinct was to try and loop around to the front of the bed, but the randomly assigned tiles made that impossible sometimes, so I wasn't sure. Actually, the first round I played, the randomness also sort of trapped me in the first two tiles, because I could only get the energy to go off screen. All that stuff feels like stuff you could iterate on, though...a few more animations, tutorials, etc to support the concept, but I think the core idea here feels really strong. Well done!

I dig the retro feel and the idea of swapping lenses/revealing boxes to get around the areas is a fun mechanic. I wasn't immediately draw the connection in the Generator room that the lenses referenced in the text were a thing I'd need to get through the boxes, so I thought I'd hit a bug until I went back and explored the hall some more. It might have been called out in previous on-screen text and I missed it, but it might be worth streamlining the text a bit to emphasize important instructions in case others are like me and sort of blaze on past. Congrats on the game, it feels like something you could really expand upon if you wanted to!

Nice game...I made it to Wave 4 and then had trouble hitting the big guys, so might be worth a tweak to either expand the area they can be hit OR add something to the sprite to denote where we should be targeting. I liked the tension builder when you dipped below a certain amount of hearts too, did a good job of keeping the energy up.

I dig the application of the color limitation! The art and presentation are very fun. I had trouble hitting the ghosts even when I felt like I was firing directly at them, so I had trouble getting very far, but that feels like an easy tweak to hit boxes if you expand the concept further. Well done!

Yeahhh...first time making platform bits, so I’ve got some things to improve upon if I flesh this out further. Appreciate you playing!

Duck is ALL of us.

Thanks for the heads up on the caps lock issue. The enter thing is something I’ve been trying to fix up too, just gotta untangle some logic. Appreciate you playing nonetheless!

Others have said it, but the design is beautiful. Great use of the theme both aesthetically and gameplay-wise!

Love the art and the limited color palette!

Ah, I see what you're talking about, pressing enter a bunch at the start sends you into a weird black hole. Looking into a fix for it now, thanks for the heads up!

This turned out real nice. Gives me the same chill satisfaction of rolling around a Katamari!

Hmm...I just tried to recreate the issue in Chrome but I'm not seeing it. Out of curiosity, what browser were you using? I can do some digging.

Okay, hi! My v1 is submitted! Good to have another jam under my belt!

Here's the page, if you wanna give it a shot and submit a rating: https://itch.io/jam/blackthornprod-game-jam-3/rate/898015

In the end, I stripped a few more things out while chanting "less is more" in my head. 

The little thing, that I actually think improves the aesthetic as dumb as it sounds, was removing eyeballs from the duck. Making it just sort of an abstract duck shape ended up being more in sync with this pared down approach. 

I removed the missions/prompts to keep things more free form, and just kept the simple score mechanic for people who are trying to explore every nook and cranny. I'd originally had it displayed as like "0 / 300" but I don't imagine people sitting and trying to find all 300 things...so instead, I expose the total count only in the setup instructions and keep the score as a subtle general tally. I didn't want people to feel like it was an impossible task with that looming "out of" number visible at all times.

I'm calling this a v1 because there are things I still want to do that I didn't quite eke out in time...a few quality of life additions to make it playable on mobile, the ability to save score for people who want to return, and the ability to share specific screengrabs on social media if you find a good one. And, of course, continuing to add more verbs...300-ish is a good start, but there's a lot of ground still to cover and I want people to be able to try and push the boundaries and stump the thing and still be rewarded. Would love to hear what common words you may have tried that didn't get a response.

Best of luck to everyone else with submissions today, can't wait to play stuff!

I've got most of the display logic up and running at this point...I figured out a simple "mission" structure where I can give simple prompts like "get the duck to the moon" or "say hello" and you have to fill in a word that'll achieve the goal. Still not sure if it'll make the final cut of the thing, because it'll require some extra logic work.

First, and more importantly, I need to finish out scripting for the first few hundred responses, and then draw a couple more simple modifications to the duck image that can be used in response. I started with a full body image of a duck, but in the spirit of "less is more," I'm trying to keep animation needs to a minimum and let most of the reactions happen in the head. Also stripped some of the UI elements down a bit more...gonna focus on just adding more juice to the limited ones that remain instead of having cards flying in and out, etc.

So...all told, making progress? Praying for the next few days?

Here's a look at where it's at:

Oh hey! I'm Shawn. Pleased to meet all of you. This is my second jam and my second game (I just finished the My First Game Jam 2021...check out my game, The Right Todd, if you're interested). 

It took me a bit to settle on a concept based on the theme, but I'm now moving forward full steam ahead. My game is (tentatively) titled Blank The Duck...you're given a blank text input ("_____ the duck") and you can try anything you want. That's the first use of the theme...stripping away most controls. Then I'm writing piles and piles of "reactions" to the input. It's a bit like that Sam Barlow game Aisle, except it's not really telling a story per se...it's just modifying your relationship with this duck in this moment. There's persistent art of the duck that gets modified as you go, but the responses mostly play out in text...so playing with the "less is more" in terms of what I'm showing too.

Not sure yet what I'm doing in terms of "gamification"...I have some ideas about keeping track of things like how many times you managed to kill the duck, or figure out some meta goals you can try to achieve by exploring dozens of inputs (a la Reign). So there's a chance this ends up being more of an interactive toy than anything, BUT I'm using it as an excuse to do more with Construct 3 and specifically working with JSON files and branching scripting. 

To start, I got some rough wires set up in Construct to make sure I could...y'know...make an input populate a response. Got that figured out today, so I'm moving into the part that (I personally) find more fun...the writing and design.

I have a spreadsheet going of the 700ish most common verbs in the English language, and then I'm culling the ones that don't make sense within the "____ the duck" sentence structure, so will probably end up with 350 or something from that. Then adding more words that aren't as common but could produce fun results. The goal here is to present something relatively simple but with tons and tons and tons of possible results, which is really only possible by keeping the UI as simple as I am.

Concurrently working on figuring out fonts, palette and general layout...I'm trying a sorta card-inspired thing, like this:

Art will probably come last...and I'm waffling between doing like a heavily-Photoshopped-actual-photo motif or fully illustrated. In theory, it's a serene duck floating on water with some subtle "quirk" animations to give it life, and then it has small mods depending on certain inputs. Like if you said "contain the duck," maybe a box appears around it...or "burp the duck" and it lets out a hic bubble or something. Not doing that for all of these (cause who has the time) but maybe can proof of concept a few and then expand upon it later if the game proves fun.

Anyhow! I used these little forum devlogs just to keep me honest on the last one, so might check in every once in awhile here too. Good luck to everyone on their projects?

Thanks! I may expand it out now that I have a structure in place...add a few more rounds of Todd-picking with more clues or Todds to ramp up difficulty.

Thank you for the kind words and thanks for playing!

It's up! Is it good? Hard to say! Is it done? Yes! And honestly, for a first game, I'm happy with that!

Give it a try here: https://shawnbowers.itch.io/the-right-todd

I'm jumping into another jam tomorrow to try and keep the momentum going....going to try something a little more action-packed this time, but keep building out the art style. At some point, I want to go back and add a few more "levels" of Todd picking to this one, or find some further complications to add to make it a lil longer.

Anyway, if you give it a shot, let me know how it goes!

What's the game about? Or are you looking for a title first to base the game on?

Okay, final stretch!

Here's the progress I've slowly made last few days:

• My game screen is looking a lot different than that first wireframe (thankfully). I'm going softer, overall...and juxtaposing the real life photos with the simplistic blobby characters seems funny. So right now, the mechanic is dead simple...you drag and drop a clue in front of one of the Todds and he'll tell you how he feels about it via dialogue text above him.

• To spice up that dialogue, I figured out how to write into a JSON file and load that into an array in Construct 3, so I have 5ish responses per clue, per Todd. I'm gonna try to make the responses a little vaguer so that it's not immediately obvious which Todd fits the bill (though I still think it'll be a pretty simple puzzle to solve).
• I found some lovely piano jazz to be my soundtrack and have implemented that.
• I've written most of the opening "cinematic." This took longer than expected to get a couple of one-sided dialogue lines to fire in sequence...totally a result of me being new to the software. But felt triumphant once I cracked that!
• Started sketching out the design for the overall itch.io game page. I love seeing games on itch that use the preview page in interesting ways, so I'm going to try and have that page sort of act as a start screen of sorts. I DID program a simple start screen into the game, which was helpful just to learn how to animate button presses, but may cut it if I can figure this part out.

What's Left:

• Program the win/lose state...which also includes implementing the "select the right Todd" thing. It'll either be a similar drag and drop element with a submit, like a badge that says "THIS IS TODD." Or maybe jump to a different layout and click which Todd from the lineup is the right one. Haven't fully decided yet.
• I need to animate a few more reactions for each Todd...a positive and negative for each, to go with the appropriate text.
• Also need to animate a simple two frame mouth movement when dialogue is firing.
• Details work...maybe adding a few more elements to pretty up the game screen, adding some hover states to the photos, and SFX for everything.

So yeah! Little bits of triumph, lots of bits of detail work. I think the thing I'm learning is that improvising is fun, and a way that my brain knows how to work, but I'm excited to have a more detailed plan going into the next game...which I think I came up with an interesting idea for last night while I was doodling. So...here's hoping I survive this first one to get to the next!

Just some bits and blurbs in the last day or so. Got enough of a start screen ready to roll, started scripting dialogue for the short opening cinematic and the clue section, and dropped in a hint sheet.

Got two more rough Todd designs going, but I’m waiting till I have all the basic shapes before I go back and do a lil bit of color palette syncing. Here’s Todd 2 and Todd 3:

I also figured out how to actually do idle states in Construct, and some other details stuff like that...blinking, etc.

I have Monday off, so hoping to get a fair bit more done then...weekends tend to be lost time while chasing a 3 year old!

Minimal progress today, mostly figuring out a script outline for the clues and continuing to futz with color palette and layout of the 4 Todds on screen.

I did do some initial doodles of my Todds, more "Todd busts" than anything:

But then as I started playing in Photoshop, I've decided to just make them sorta free-standing little blob Todds. Here's a quick idle animation for one of 'em.

The other thing: to try and simplify the "plot" a bit, I'm changing it to having the player character come across a door to a secret club, and instructions are left for them about how to find the right Todd in order to earn entry. It'll allow me to keep some of the visuals more abstract and not need to spend a ton of time on expository stuff to get to this relatively simple mechanic. Secret clubs, doors in the middle of blank space, blob creatures...sure, why not?

Hey hey, this is my first game jam and my first stab at making...y'know...a "game."

I'm trying to keep things fairly simple, which is really hard for me because I tend to go pie in the sky immediately and then use that as an excuse to not finish. So I'm using the theme of "LOCKED" and doing a quick little whodunnit game called The Right Todd.

You play as a person trying to get into their friend's apartment building to water their plant while they're on vacation. Except...you were given the wrong key, so you're locked out. Your friend said to ask their neighbor Todd for a key, but all the neighbors are named Todd. So you have to work out which Todd is the right Todd from a handful of clues you were given.

All of the "clues" come in the form of icons or objects that you drag and drop onto the different Todds to get their response and narrow down which Todd is the Todd you're looking for. So like...if the clue is that Todd is a real grade A tickle freak, you'd drag a feather onto them to see if they giggle. 

I'm using Construct 3 to build it out, in the spirit of using a format of conditional logic that I'm comfortable with from my day job as a UX writer. Right now I'm just temping in some elements to make sure I know how to make things happen, so things are VERY wireframe-y right now, as you can see:

(The Todds will all look different in the actual game)

Going to try and do 1 clue and 4 Todds to start, see what I can glean from doing animation states for each of the potential Todds, and see how fancy I can get with some VO and a short intro/outro cutscene using limited art...then if I have time, expand out to a few more clues. This'll probably be a very short game, and possibly not a FUN game, but mostly just wanna pick up some skills to roll into the next thing.

To keep myself accountable, I'm gonna try and post little updates here and there as I keep fleshing stuff out.

Anyhow, nice to meet everyone! Good luck with all our projects!