Make another game!

Happy full moon

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As the solo dev behind Songs of Myara, I am pleased to announce its graphics are being overhauled for a third and final time this year, finally bringing the detail and scale up to the 1990s click-and-point adventure aesthetic previously envisioned, based on such classic titles as Legend of Kyrandia and King's Quest.

Really enjoying this series, thanks again for sharing!

Connectome→Blender update: version 0.0.3 released -- bugfix update

This update fixes all known bugs in Connectome→Blender:

• connectome tract curves are now imported correctly without any distortions
• plugin no longer stops user from importing multiple connectome datasets into a single file or Blender instance

Stay tuned for more features to come!

The Neurorama team is proud to announce the first release of its Blender addon Connectome→Blender, which allows users to import human connectome tract data exported from DSI Studio into Blender as curves. This process requires no paid software or neuroscience expertise whatsoever, making neuroscience visualizations made in Blander more accessible than ever!

This inaugural release is quite buggy. Known bugs, in order of most to least severe, are:

• occasional mirrored tract plotting due to a data processing bug
• only one connectome dataset can be loaded per file before an import error occurs, reported as AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'object'"
• long hang times while curves are plotted (verbose progress is logged to Python console during import)

These will be ironed out in future releases, along with additional plotting features.

Enjoy your research!

Cool idea! Love the modifier key buttons, gives me lots of ideas. Could make a whole separate font around modifier key designs...

Cute stuff! Very nice, thanks for sharing.

Looks more like sci-fi minimalism than the fantasy genre, but nice and clean in any case.

Thanks for pointing those out, will work on refining them!

Hey, these are pretty good! I'm not too familiar with visual novel art, but my only nitpick is that some of the expressions are TOO subtle. Maybe widening the middle top expression would give a greater sense of amusement, shifting the eyes a few pixels downwards would enhance the sad expression, or stretching the mouth open more for surprise would give them a more dynamic look.

Title screen background is great, but the vector style buttons don't match it too well. Would look more consistent with bitmap buttons with a more rustic look.

The ant character is decent flash-style art.

Those crystals can't decide whether they want to be round or sharp-edged,  and they don't have a sense of refraction or transparency.

The interface looks like a default template, you should customize it more to your game. Maybe add  a background, stylish fonts, and more bitmap buttons instead of vector gradients.

Update, with more even lighting, and some other refinements:

Nice little collection, might pick it up down the line. Thanks for sharing.

Might be more useful if all the assets were the same scale, so they could match standard sizes used in games? Such as 8x8, 16x16, 24x24, 32x32, or some oblong combination thereof.

Here is an avatar I'm working on for a DOS-style adventure game (unclothed, so clothes can be added later via inventory).

Currently I'm working on evening out the lighting so it looks more consistent when the sprite is flipped horizontally -- but I'd love any feedback on how to improve it!

I jumped in late to the jam but still wanted to code a fresh submission. I was intimidated by the number of rules on the jam page. I think many people (although not me in this case) just want to join game jams simply to submit things they've been working on, for exposure and feedback, which they don't otherwise have a venue for. This was my experience running another literal no-effort jam over the holidays. You might get more submissions and random enthusiasm if you made the rules more minimalist. However, then submissions might feel less relevant and thus undesirable -- not sure how you'd feel about that possibility.

This being said, I think the rules all make sense, and synergize well with the provided code/assets/theming. I plan to continue to use the democart as a reference point. My suggestion would be that, while listing the rules against a bright red [delightfully festive!] backdrop, add lots more pictures. Pixel art is one of the best languages around, I find. Add a blown up image of the spritesheet on the jam page, "ONLY use THESE SPRITES," could do the same for the soundwaves ("ONLY use THESE COOL TRACKS by THIS COOL PERSON!") -- then potential jammers see they have an opportunity to use really awesome assets from a supporting community, instead of feeling like are prohibited into following rules. 

Positive psychology! Holiday cheer! Fine print can always go lower down on the page :)

Another thought -- I don't do many jams, but maybe themes weren't necessary? I think a more elegant solution would be to let the sprites and assets guide the theming. It felt like they really wanted to! Sometime prompts are inspiring, but this jam had so much goodness that I just found myself trying to make my code fit one of the themes at the last minute.

But now I'm not entirely sure of these suggestions. The jam seemed to want to appeal to both new programmers (being in P8 and having lots of easy-to-start assets) as well as more experienced ones (given the complexity of some of the code and associated community). In this sense, I think it succeeds very well. The assets, mystery content, and retro appeal definitely bridge those two groups. Maybe put even more links to PICO-8 communities (Discord, BBS) on the jam page? With big PICO-8 style pixel art buttons that beg to be clicked?

All that said, this jam was really fun to follow and incredibly well thought-out in its metagame and theming. Would be great to see it get bigger and/or better next year

🎁

Really solid controller feel and aesthetic.

Never seen a dungeon crawl like this before. Super fun concept and execution!

Hey, this has a really great vibe. Reminds me of Software Creations' "God of Thunder" combined with early Ultima a bit.

This is a postmortem written from Devtober 2019. This post can also be read at the Songs of Myara page on itch.io.

Songs of Myara is a personal project to create a modern MMO that embodies the experience I had as a child playing DOS adventure games, CRPGS, and graphical MUDS. During #devtober I was able to complete an early offline prototype, which I will build on over the winter into a pre-alpha small-scale MMO.

The biggest lesson for me from this #devtober was how to manage multi-tasking. Although at first it was necessary to program, make sprites, and bugtest all in the same day, as the project becomes more elaborate this process must be spread out over several days of weeks. At once point I had to take a whole week off to draw environmental sprites. In order to save time for programming, I opted not to re-draw the player avatar and NPC sprites. I also purchased some portraits assets online (from @misbug and CobraLab), and redrew them in my own style. This was to simulate having a small team, as sprite redrawing was a common practice among early CRPG art teams (according to some postmortems of Westwood Studios).

The original sprites as purchased (bottom), and my cleanups of them (top)

I got a lot of pixel art practice in. I worked my way up from 16x16 item sprites to 128x128 sprites for the large oak and aspens. I am learning a lot about drawing leaves in this process.

Some of the larger trees I had to draw by hand, up to 128x128

I was excited to use October to start using complex shaders on pixel art. This has allowed me to add subtle changes to seasons that dynamically change over the course of a year, sprites that can gain or lose foliage, random autumnal color changing patterns, incremental snow, and more. Unreal Engine is perfectly suited to these effects, although I must continue to focus on optimizing their implementations.

Random leafage amount scalar on pixel art

Another lesson I am learning is how to organize large bodies of research. Most of my research and development logs are publicly organized in the Myaran Development Discord server, which I find useful because it is so accessible and integrated with my daily communications. It is also easy to use as a pinboard, and more suited for sharing than Dropbox. I am still wanting a more comprehensive to-do system, though, and may be shifting to Trello or Hack'n'Plan in the future as needed.

A peek at the Discord pinboards

At this rate of progress, I am aiming to make a small-scale multiplayer release by Christmas.

NPC scripts need to be rewritten, but their implementation is fully prototyped

For me, any game granting me the ability to eat rocks is an instant hit.

I have been working on Neurorama for some time (see the github for UE4 blueprints source), but today it is released as a binary for Windows here on itch.io. Feel free to check it out an brush up on your neuroanatomy:

https://jellocube.itch.io/neurorama

More updates coming soon -- including VR support, which is still being polished ;)