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ZeroTheDogGames

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A member registered Sep 27, 2023 · View creator page →

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I have seen the bug! Like you, I've only seen it once and found it to be amazingly difficult to replicate. I haven't been able to pin down what causes it. The drawing uses a raycast that goes out from the camera in the direction of the calculated in-world mouse position to determine what surface to draw on, so my suspicions are that it has something to do with when the camera locks to the game window? There is a lingering FIXME in my code for this :P

Regardless, I really appreciate you giving it another go! I'm happy to hear the you got the hang of the controls. That was something I was worried about. The controls feel better in the latest version thanks to Victfy's suggestion!

Drawing on the floor definitely needs some work. The rotations I perform so that I can order the detected corner points (for generating the mesh) don't work as expected for flat surfaces because they don't take into account the direction the player was facing when drawing. I also don't do any vertical rotation on the player yet which should probably be some kind of slerp function. It might be a good idea to add some vertical velocity when coming out of a ground portal too.

I'm happy to hear about the trees! Those were made by my brother, so I'll pass along the compliment! Haven't nailed down a visual style just yet, but it's always good to get that kind of feedback early!

Thank you again for playing!

Thank you! It really makes my day to get feedback of all kinds (but especially positive feedback :P). Hearing that you found the mechanics interesting gives me some extra motivation to see how far I can take this thing. Thank you again!

Thank you for playing and, even more so, for the feedback!

  • Completely fair! I render the line using a procedural mesh built at runtime (makes classification easier to have it be its own mesh on its own layer). It's just the tweak of a parameter to change the thickness. If the classifier isn't sensitive to those kinds of changes, I might be able to give the player thickness control? 
  • Haha yea, I tried to account for orbs falling through the floor, but didn't account for other objects :P
  • I definitely plan to keep going with this. I hope to have a regular a caedence of updates once the jam is done!

RPG maker was my first ever experience with making games! I love seeing a game made with it. It all came together really well. There was some funny writing in there too! Nice job.

I'm not sure if ther was a shop keep in that first area, but I just ran by that first enemy :P

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Implemented your controls suggestion last night. Much more intuitive. Such a quick fix, I should have done it immediately. The things you don't think of mid jam :P I won't post the new version till after the jam, but thanks again for the feedback!

PROJECTION UPDATE!

Last night I realized that if I project the line points onto the avarage normal plane of the drawing I could solve the bumpy surface issue for corner identification. Quick tests seem to work! I won't upload the new version yet in fairness to the jam, but if anyone is interested in keeping up with the game post-jam. I'll start a devlog for it!

Thank you for playing and commenting! Getting fedback is really nice since I plan to keep working on this.

You are 100% correct on the animation not matching the control scheme. In the very beginning the rune was going to be drawable in one stroke so right click wasn't needed at all, but then I though having multiple strokes would be cooler. I should have switched the hand raise to the right click. Should probably add a right click release animation too that tells the player they are activating the classifier.

Again 100% correct. This one I just didnt have time for. My original plan was to procedurally mesh an actual frame and door around the portal that would open and close and then make is so only one door could be open at a time.

Thank you again!

Thank you for sticking with it. I put a lot of work into this and really appreciate the feedback! Sorry for the control scheme. Still working out what feels good! This stuff is a little messy right now :P. 

If you have trouble finding the eyes in the second room, try peeking through the portals in the hub world back into the real world! ; )

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DRAWING CLARIFICATION:

Drawing classification is tied to right-click. When you press and hold right-click, everything that you draw before you release right-click will be classified.  Other overlapping drawings may interfere with classification, but won't interfere with corner detection. 

Corner detection relies on the door being drawn in exactly 2 strokes (1 stroke = hold left-click, draw, release left-click) with the first line being the door frame and the second being the door knob. I already have a fix in mind for this, but for the sake of time, I implemented it with these more restrictive mechanics. If you draw a door and the drawing disappears entirely, it should be because you didn't use exactly 2 strokes to draw it. Otherwise, if it doesn't activate, it's because the classifier didn't recognize it.


For anyone curious on how it works:

Drawing classification is done using a Convolutional Neural Network that I trained using drawings of the door rune that I manually drew and saved out in-game. I drew the rune 100 times and then programmatically altered the images slightly (e.g., random rotation, coloration, etc.) to generate 1000s of images of the door rune. I aslo drew hundreds of examples of things that aren't the door rune (e.g., scribbles, squares without knobs, circles). I then trained the classifier to recognize these two classes.  It's definitely not perfect. Ideally I'd have hundreds of thousands of examples from lots of different people to train on.

The corner detection basically just looks at the dot product between three points (i.e., Dot((P1-P0, P2-P1)). This dot product is proportional to the angle between the vectors. If both vectors are normalized, then the result will be between -1 and  +1.  A positive dot product means the two vectors are generally pointing in the same direction and a negative means opposite directions. 0 means that they are perpendicular. Using this I assume that the smallest 4 dot products should correspond with the 4 corners, but this is only true for relatively smooth surfaces.

Sorry for any furstration this may cause. This stuff is very experimental!

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Thanks for trying my game! Interesting.  Are you drawing the doors in two strokes? frame first and knob second. Are you only releasing right click once you drawn the entire door? The release of right click is what triggers the classifier.

The eyes only have triggers. Once you get a door to spawn you'll find orbs that can contact and destroy the eyes.

It's impossible not to just echo what Bworg has already said. This is great. Really great. I would pay for a full game of this. Great visual, audio, and mechanics design. Great writing. I wish I had made it :P

In the interest of giving some kind of constructive criticism,  the only thing I can think of, which I am sure you already know is, it would be nice to have a few more UI bells and whistles (e.g., a border showing which character card I have selected).

The visual effect here is effective without being frustrating, which can be difficult to balance for full screen fog effects. Great job. Excited to see what you mentioned in the future menu. 

The hand and mouth are really effective at building tension without being frustrating to avoid. Great work. 

Unfortunately, my game also crashed at what I assume was the end cutscene.

Not sure if I'm being dense or if I'm loading into the last scene or something when I start the game? I'm starting in the boiling blood floor room. As soon as I talk to the yellow hooded figure, the game ends. I see you have a lot more areas in your screenshots so I'll hold off on rating for now. : )

No worries at all. I'm running a 1080Ti.

This is probably the most polished thing I've played so far. Interesting setting. nice visuals. Didn't find any noticable bugs.  Great work.  Only comment is I didn't realize leaving the apartment was going to end the game. I had to restart :P

Also... do they eat batteries?

Spooky! The ghosts have some really good effects on them.

I had some framerate issues with the graphics settings all turned down that I think were tied to the lighting because I they got worse when my flashlight was on. Wouldn't hold that agains you for a jam, but figured I'd mention it.  I also hit a small bug where I was stuck in a forever loop  of the camera animation that happens whe you take damage :P. 

It's a clicker! Nice feeling of upgrade progression. Wasn't sure what upgrading the Other did. It seemed to just reset everything?

You know these commercially sourced bodies just don't have the yield that they used to. Only one limb per cadaver :P 

There is some cool stuff here! The body melter in-game UI was satisfying to use.

It felt like something in the Mortuary Assistant vein. The only thing I would note is that Mortuary Assistant builds on mostly normal, if not a little gross, gameplay that slowly gets more paranormal. Understandably hard to do for a game jam, but might be something to consider going forward! I also had the bug where the day sometimes wouldn't end.

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Neat premise with some fun writing. I also had the same graphical bug.  Looking at the screenshot I also think the rendering went bit wonky.

Love the visuals. I agree with Bworg that is was a bit too difficult. I also could not for the life of me manage to pick up the top two bunnies.

Very interesting game with some touching moments. I'll have to come back some time to get the rest of the endings (and maybe get some more correct riddle answers)!

Cool tech demo. I'd love to see what this could become!

Clever is the perfect word for this. Great sound design.  Played through a second time to see if I could get out. Awesome job!

Love the steel drum like sound design on the snail chest things. Nice and relaxing

Good use of a limited control scheme to introduce tension. The creepy messages on the power box console were also a great touch. Really cool.

Cool! Nailed the atmosphere for sure. Good use of sound cues. I liked design of the crossbeams room. The reaper is visible across from you but the beams are so skinny that you are forced to look down as you jump across them and take your eye off it.

Always fun to play with a text adventure! Very charming. I think a list of common commands could be helpful. I had a really hard time getting anyone to speak with me :P. I also found Samatha's Key under Jerome's door mat (The Scandal!)

I like the aesthetic. A very neat old Zelda style. I couldn't figure out how to solve the last power ring puzzle though. I got the rings for the target and hitting the numbered pillars. I think the clue was X + X + sword hit, but that combination of keys didn't appear to have any special effect on the boulders or any of the other objects I found. Probably just me being dense :P

Awesome. Gives me Undertale vibes in the best way. Great presentation. Great writing. If I had to nitpick to give some kind of constructive criticism it would be that the event challenges could have more than one try or a practice round so you get a better idea of how the inputs feel. This is really just nitpicking though. Really good job.