devlog

vincenttoups · October 26, 2024, 2:45pm

Its better to make ugly interesting stuff than boring beautiful stuff.

anothergod · October 26, 2024, 2:52pm

Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s just better to make stuff than not.

vodselbt · November 4, 2024, 6:41pm

Having never participated in a jam before, I am curious how I will tackle things, and unsure of how to approach the work. Some people in the Quake mapping discord that is hosting this are prepping, making layouts and prototyping. But there’s going to be some twists to this jam that we don’t know about until it actually starts.

I want to be able to finish something, but I have a compulsion to not prepare too much and a desire to just proceed intuitively when the jam starts. I’ve tried to do a layout and jot down ideas. But I imagine things will really differ when I find out what kinds of weapons and enemies are included in this one. And I really can’t resist the pull of just doodling in Trenchbroom once I get in there. I honestly think my most creative stuff comes from that sort of improvisational work. Perhaps the limits of the jam are enough to constrain that improvisation, and I don’t need to worry about doing a layout now to add even more limits.

Gate88 · November 4, 2024, 9:32pm

pixel art is pretty fun (especially at bitsy resolution) because it’s fairly interpretive and you can kind of brute force when you’re stuck and just to put pixels places and see what works. there’s only so many positions! don’t be afraid to mess it up.

anothergod · November 4, 2024, 10:50pm

The key to any short form creation, jams included, is to get your idea down fast and give yourself time to really explore it.

In the course of a weekend jam I’d try to get the basic game down by Friday night or Saturday morning. Then I’d contemplate what’s going on, find out the fun part or loop, and hammer that down. Spend the next day just figuring out permutations of that fun thing. Every hour or two get a new piece of gameplay to challenge that thing. Make sure the progression of the game is from one fun thing to the next.

I would absolutely not hide anything of any importance. Don’t do branching levels. Dont’ hide a power up. Show off everything.

vodselbt · November 4, 2024, 11:54pm

Thanks for the advice! I have never sought any of it out before but figured there must be some useful sort of way for tackling these things that is more or less common knowledge. Luckily this jam is going to be about a month long, from what I hear. There is always danger for starting something I won’t finish, but I feel somewhat strongly that the spirit of doing a jam is to start your work when the jam itself starts. The fun is to see what comes out of you when you’re under pressure, I figure!

I think my spirit is ready. I’m eager to find out And I don’t want to saddle myself with expectation or prefigured ideas before it starts.

RT-55J · November 5, 2024, 10:21pm

While I think anothergod’s tips are good for shorter (weekend-length) game-design jams, I am going to throw some water on it and say that that advice does not really apply to longer (month-scale) level-design jams, (speaking as someone who won one earlier this year). One month is enough time to create a map with structural novelty and hidden paths/depths, and given how that stuff (level design) is a large part of what you’ll be graded on (level design), you had best be thinking about it early and often.

imho, as long as you consistently work on your project during the jam, and take care to periodically reassess your scope (broad strokes) and ambitions (core conceits) relative to your available labortime, you shouldn’t have trouble making something acceptable.

vodselbt · November 5, 2024, 10:46pm

Makes a lot of sense to me and was kind of how I’ve been hoping I can work on this. Feeling some much needed encouragement, so thank you!

anothergod · November 6, 2024, 12:02am

You can make cooler stuff over a month but really consider your audience and how they’ll receive it.

Tbh over a month you’ll have so many different opportunities. Just make something you’re proud of and you want people to play.

JokersWild · November 6, 2024, 9:38pm

I’m learning Godot! I’d love to hear from other people familiar with this engine if anyone wants to digress about issues they have with it or what they enjoy. It seems like Godot’s 3D is the finickiest part but I haven’t tried that yet.

Bookmarked learning materials

Check out my STG demo (that doesn’t have bosses or an ending or proper fleshed out stages). I did the pixel art and prerendered 3D and music and sound effects and code. The girl’s name is Polaris. Try to beat my high score: 30,372.

I don’t have control remapping yet so the controls are stuck like this:

Move with arrow keys, D-pad, or analog stick
Z to fire
X to bomb
A to slow down
S to redeem powerups (Gradius style)
F4 for fullscreen
F12 to take screenshot

Expert tips:

Destroy enemies quickly for increased multipliers
Power orbs drop every ~11 enemies
“Speed up” is almost useless, so always redeem two orbs at once for “firepower”
There’s a secret bomb hidden under the rock arch on the first screen

Screenshot-2024-11-01T19-03-49

Screenshot-2024-11-02T00-41-53

RT-55J · November 7, 2024, 7:44am

Getting close to the end of my annual Oktrollberfest trainwreck:

Both the jamrunner and I were sick for the last week of October, so the deadline was extended by over a week.

I love making stupid things for an audience of like 5 people. I’m not sure if this will match last year’s level of self-indulgence, but it will certainly be stupider.

vodselbt · January 7, 2025, 4:27pm

Over my winter break I planned to get into development of my next Quake map, after the jam I was going to participate in back in November never materialized. But I actually came to accept that, at this point, two years into working on Quake maps, and with two releases under my belt, I just don’t have much interest in developing more for that game. I remember even when I was developing my second map, just in the middle of it, I was already so bored by Quake’s simplicity and felt depressed by the options for other engines and games to work with. But I’ve figured things out now, got unstuck. After I accepted I wouldn’t be interested in creating another Quake map, I started learning how to work with the toolset released by Frictional Games for use in their Amnesia series. Specifically, I am really drawn to the survival horror mechanics in the latest game Amnesia: The Bunker. I’ve only got my dev environment set up and managed to get a small test room built and running in game, but I feel so much more excited to learn and build with this tool than I have in TrenchBroom and Quake for some time.

I’ve always wanted to make a Resident Evil game, so having a module-based level editor to build survival horror designs is sort of the fulfillment of one of my oldest dreams. It will be nice to design for a game that embraces adventure game conventions more readily. Even though you can do that in Quake, the aesthetic choices you make when designing adventure levels not only seem to weird out members in the community, but it’s hard to get away from the feeling you’re just playing Quake. The idea of secrets in Quake levels being hidden ways to collect ammo and armor has always seemed like a misnomer to me lol

hellojed · January 18, 2025, 9:12pm

I have some of the more basic elements of this Ekranoplan game in place: A large enough terrain to fly through and navigate, a flight control model that is kind of what I’d want the end result to feel like. You have to slow down for turns, which causes your altitude to drop, so you’re balancing speed vs being airborne. I have been iterating on how big to make the canyon to see what’s compelling vs what’s boring.

I spent a lot of time yesterday just flying around an open mountain map I had made because hopping over low enough terrain is pretty fun.

I have been wanting to make a game specifically where you fly a ground effects craft like this for an embarrassing amount of time, probably 15 years at this point? I have also tried twice to start and both times given up right before this point. Here’s one from 2017. Wow this looked nice, maybe I should have stuck with it .

It feels like this idea has been in the oven for too long, and thus so much of it has calcified in my head that I don’t know if I have room to adjust what the core of the game is in the event it isn’t “fun” to fly around a massive soviet-era ground effects craft.

Central to the question is: what do you do in this game? Do you deliver cargo like in Death Stranding? How big do i have to make the game world to make something like that compelling? Is this more of an open world game or should there be discrete stages and levels - which would be a lot easier to produce given my resources.

I think I’m worrying too much about this. I think I purposely picked godot for this project (and others) due to how Godot is pretty much hobbyist only right now, which lowers the stakes of the project and limits how much I can shoot myself in the foot. That said I would like to realize this idea in some form somehow so I can stop obsessing over it, maybe?

vodselbt · January 18, 2025, 9:43pm

This sounds really neat. Have you played the SB-favorite PS2 game Sky Odyssey?

hellojed · January 18, 2025, 10:17pm

I may have to now

anothergod · January 19, 2025, 5:09pm

Overhead lost planet y thing with twin stick and movement options (running jumping dodge flipping).

Thread with videos screenshot club: share your game dev! - #346 by anothergod

RT-55J · February 9, 2025, 4:19am

messed around with this SMS hello world tutorial to see if i could also get it to display my avatar:

praise bachelorsoft’s pixels

RT-55J · February 15, 2025, 9:18pm

0009-scrolling test
0010-gadfly 0011-big oops 0012-slightly less oops 0014-now during vblank

I’m up to the point where I’ve got code that enqueues VRAM writes in the main thread (while the display is active) so they can be safely uploaded in the VBlank thread.

The goal is to able to switch between the two avatars at the press of a button, while a scrolling line of text dispenses a boatload of greetz (and maybe some arpeggiated cacophony for the true cracktro experience).

Khan · February 17, 2025, 3:23am

videogames can be anything. haley and jacob dont spoil yourselves

RT-55J · February 19, 2025, 7:25am

printing letters one at a time (not too hard):

0017-print string test

interrupts working (kinda*):

21-line interrupts ahoy

getting much closer to a textscroller

*The SMS has a “line counter” register that tells the display processor how many lines to wait until the next raster interrupt. Writes to this register during VBlank go through immediately. Writes to this register during the active display are latched (i.e. delayed) until the next interrupt fires. This presents some complications that I’ll need to find a workaround for if I want to have multiple** raster interrupts active.

**It may look like I have two splits here, but don’t be fooled. The SMS has a register that can just lock the upper two rows in place, with no extra effort to the programmer.