itch.io

The sprites are shaded, actually, but intersting that you thought it contrasted. You can sometimes see a shadow cut across one, which I think is a cool effect. I haven't seen it make them look flat. At one point the sprites also cast shadows, but that looked really bad when they were edge-on to the light source, plus the shadow often didn't connect with their feet,  Otherwise, I thought enemies casting shadows looked nice, so I'd like to try adding it back, using a custom "shadow mesh" (turn the sprites towards the light rather than towards the camera to fix the edge-on problem).

Yes, I don't know that there's anything wrong with Godot's GUI features, but I just find it unintuitive because Control nodes are quite different to what I'm used to (the OHRRPGCE) and I need to unlearn!

Thanks! I'm glad to hear you liked the devlogs. There's a lot of games and not much attention to go around when everyone's so busy. I really want to take the time to play through other's games, though I'm still busy working on an update to the game (the scope of which I fear is already getting too large). Well, your game looks quite stunning, so I'll give that one a go!

Seilburg actually seemed to get the GUI done quite quickly with not much code this time. At least, it was one of the first things he did so it wasn't a worry. Unlike our last few games where the GUI turned into huge time sink (especially for me whenever I tried to help, not understanding what I was doing). As for the title music, I was expecting him to add it to the intro, actually. I think it would have fit.

I'm surprised how well billboarded sprites can work (though I think the treasure chests in isometric perspective are problematic), and think I'll do it again.

The forums are at https://www.blitzcoder.org/forum/

I was browsing the itch.io devlogs RSS feed. Yours was the very last one.

Thanks. It's the unusual type of emergent gameplay that I hope will result that interests me; the theme is just a way to make a game about manipulating NPCs.

Days later, working on better mapgen, we're still struggling to get Godot 4's new constraint-propagation autotiler to produce desired results. It seems a bit unreliable when it has limited tile variants to work with and there are mysterious tricks to its use.

There should be a space after the +x.

If you still can't get it to work, you can instead download a Mac version of the OHRRPGCE (the engine the game was made with) and use it to run the .rpg file from any of the downloads (it's inside franken.app).

Works on all OSes

A couple other people said something similar. Did you try enter/space/ctrl to advance? If that doesn't work, try pressing F12 (maybe Fn-F12 on a laptop), which should show a message about saving a screenshot, meaning the game is reading keyboard input fine. Does that work?

Thanks for the comments! Yes, we're excited to keep exploring that potential.

Certainly the user interface suffered as we ran out of time.

I'm not sure what you mean by "balancing of real-time move and turn based jump". But I can tell you that one problem is that jumping takes longer than walking, and the game waits for nearby enemies to complete their jumps, which causes stuttering walking. Maybe I need to make them take the same time, but hopefully if  it only pauses for visible enemies players will accept the pause

Because there are three types of ammo, how much you will find for your first weapon is quite random, but it only takes a  couple minutes to find other weapons and ammo.

What! I'm missing out on lsp-mode!

Hurrah, congrats on release!

Oh crud! I missed this thread. The community blog in previous years was really cool, but I see this is just not well advertised and hardly anyone is using it yet. Wish it picks up more, and becomes a big thing next year.

But so far noone has posted more than one entry, they've just linked to their devlogs elsewhere. But you intended people post as often as they want, right?

Seilburg and I have been posting daily devlog entries for Portlligat on our itch.io game page, but the chance of anyone actually seeing them during the week is low. Feels lonely. I think a community blog feed is ideal, although twitter hashtags are pretty similar. I crosspost to another forum but it's a nuisance. I wish that were automated... i.e. if we could create a feed of devlog entries from everyone's itch.io pages and from every thread in this forum! itch.io does allow creating private feeds... can be they be public too?

Hmm, wow. This is ambitious in the sense of trying to get a fun game out of a difficult concept. If you manage, that could be pretty interesting.

I see three different possible ways to set up the core gameplay loop of the game:

-Puzzle game: the player has to think carefully about the consequences of every move they make, by working through the GoL rules.

-Like a causal RL, faster paced: how exactly the game will respond to the player's action does not really matter. The GoL rules are essentially a random number generator with visible state. The player takes actions quickly, bashes through the living blocks, mostly probably removing more than adding them, and dodges the formations that move towards them.  They will hopefully gain some intuition as to how to react to a particular formation but they can survive without it. It's like Space Invaders except the invaders move in highly complex patterns, multiplying and disappearing. 

-Like a traditional RL: combination of the above two. The game is not a series of carefully set up puzzles, it's a collection of  primitives like blocks and gliders which the player learns straightforward rules to deal with. After a short learning period the player makes decisions quickly much of the time, but in tricky situations they stop and think, working through the GoL rules to figure out what to do.

From your description I'm not sure whether you were going for #1 or #3, but probably #1? I personally would go for #3 as otherwise it's a puzzle game (isn't it meant to be a RL?), and in my experience playing with GoL in that way gets tedious.

Good luck!

(crossposted from the devlog)

Day 0

An hour in and so far we've written a blurb, and accidentally rm -rf'd an empty git repository!

We are far better prepared this time, both with tools and design, and this will be a unique RL which I'm excited. Details will leak out over the week. And yet the very lengthy design doc seems to leave us needing to make most decisions as we go.

For this game we will once again be using Godot, as we did for Slumber. Some code will be reused from the previous game, plus other preexisting utility code, in particular Schemat, an ontology language and inference framework I've been working on to help describe properties and interactions between objects -- still completely nonfunctional, and written in the wrong programming language! More on that later.

Good luck to all!

Hi, yes, I do. I posted about it in your thread.

Congrats! I've got 17 hours to go... and still haven't made the hard decisions about what to brutally cut. Unbelievable amount left to do, the pain is still ahead ;_;

I'm surprised there aren't many people keeping devlogs here. Where are the other 1000 people?! Keeping a devlog is one of the most fun parts of a game jam/contest!

Meanwhile Seilburg and I have been posting daily devlogs. That's 9 so far. Maybe we should have cross-posted here. Our game is on a disastrous course so I'll openly admit that the tragedy unfolding in the devlog will probably be more engrossing than the game itself.

Change of plan! Totally forgot you can host a devlog on a game page.

So our day one devlog entries are at https://seilburg.itch.io/slumber

One day down is nothing to worry about, right?

@Seilburg and I are beginning our 7DRL entry, a (slightly) esoteric base-building survival roguelike with working title "Slumber" and this is its announcement and devlog.

We are creating it using Godot and will be making the game almost from scratch, reusing very few existing resources or scripts. We did spend a few weeks on the design doc though.  I'm using this as an excuse to learn Godot - I don't know what I'm doing yet!

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