Hey, I am fine thanks. I am answering all your questions in here.

“What do you think about game jams in general, and this game jam in particular? What do you think could have been better, and do you have any suggestions?”

I am loving it. It is great because the deadline drives me nuts since I always start late or procrastinate but the rush of finishing something is just too good. I ended up finishing another jam a few days after this. This can be very addicting in a good way. What I would and I have to improve is my schedule. I underestimate the time things take. Specially doing new things. Trial and error can be very time consuming.

“What were your favorite video games?”

Grew up play SNES: Zelda and Super Mario were my first ones. A lot of games after those two on multiple platforms. A lot of jrpgs on the ps1. But I never forgot Vagrant Story and Chrono Cross. But long list short, nowadays I love arpgs. Path of Exile is my favorite.

You are clever with all these personal good questions. Makes me want to rate your game immediately. Very good.

“Where do you think the strength of video games resides?”

“Input” quality and density. I don’t believe it’s the subsets of graphics, story or something when separated. It is the higher density of inputs to create interactions. When gaming the more input is required from the player the better, and I am calling inputs the higher density of interactions a player can have with that game not just button presses. This includes immersion, thinking, solving problems, imagination, plenty of room for curiosity and discovery. When a game tries too hard to hold hand or rub lore and rewards in the players face a great chuck of these “inputs” is gone. It is such a waste and a way to kill the joy of immersing oneself and discovering what you can do.

“What do you believe a video game should have to be a successful video game?”

For success I believe in timing. There seems that frequently there is a hole to be filled in some niche and the first or few first games to do it are extremely rewarded. At some point years ago one could “feel” that the market was missing some chill harvest moon like game and then Stardew happened. Same with things like Jump King or Vampire Survivors more recently. Path of Exile had plenty of interesting coincidences like being released with good practices soon after Diablo 3 had its run. Just examples and my opinion.

“If you would like, you can tell me a little bit more about yourself and your background, if you have any information you would like to share.”

Not really much. I am just very interested in games and programming. So far I am having the joy of my life participating in these.

From your previous comment:

“Did you include any optimization techniques, or did you choose to include only the in-engine ones?”

It was such a small attempt that I didn’t have to. But since I continued working on CB196 I had to:

Specific to Godot (that I can remember right now and learned so far)

Avoiding using queue-free() Avoid using full scenes as projectiles Use more area_entered/exited. Calculate stuff with areas instead of collisions. Avoid using any checks on larger groups (eg: projectiles) No physical obstacles whenever possible = way more projectiles at stable fps (always monitor fps) Use shaders for a lot of things. On this jam only the parallax is a shader.

There is a lot more to learn but so far it has been pretty good. Found a few bugs on the enigne (4.2) but nothing broken.

“What engine and tools did you use to create your game, your graphics?”

Engine Godot, Krita, audacity, blender (because I use sprytile on blender), emacs (too accostumed with it).

“Was it hard to develop your game using Godot ? Did you experience any challenges?”

Godot is sweet. I am enjoying how lightweight it is. The difficulty came from being the first time using it. I set it up with gdnative(c++) but ended up not needing it for now. Lots of trial and error. Never forgot getting stuck for literally more than an hour because a mistyped “queue.free” does not throw any errors but also doesn’t do what “queue.free()” is supposed to. It throws a warning though but I frequently don’t pay enough attention to them.

“What inspired you for your game idea and the gameplay? The game’s name and story?”

Don’t fully remember. At first the companion was going to just pickup stuff. It was going to be something and ended up changing a lot. I had the full story way before this. I am exploring it now. And for the gameplay I was just feeling an itch for a more aggressive type of bullet hell. One more focused in countering/pushing than dodging. What I was able to finish for the jam isn’t it though but what I kept working on thanks to this jam is getting closer.

The name is because at first this was going to be called “Clarbell” from an old set of ideas. But then I imagined a few different tweaks to the story and ended up with CB196 due to many things in the full story.

“It would mean a great deal to me if you could rate my game. If you haven’t already, feedback from friends and fellow gamers is valuable to me.”

Sure. Thanks for the detailed comment and questions.

Yeah there were a lot of problems, aspect ratio and the tiling. Appreciate the feedback. I decided to work more on it. You are right there is so much room for testing stuff in this I couldn’t resist. Thanks again for the feedback!