Our game isn't multiplayer.

https://big-breakfast-collective.itch.io/waldoio

At one moment in the game there is a "reverse action" card, and it's in fact the opposite of the one before with a different sprite because I didn't have the time to actually code the method :'( 

The game: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462407

RPG Maker VX Ace doesn't allow for out-of-the-box manipulation of random encounter probabilities, so I had to write a custom Ruby script for my game that manipulates the current map's encounter table in the memory after each battle. I then discovered during playtesting, that this table is reset every time you re-enter the dungeon, so I had to move the code to a common event with two separate triggers, which would be carried across locations, which was a lot of ugly code, but it worked. I have since made the code much more elegant, and it will be included in the post-rating period re-upload...

I have a one-bullet top-down shooter. I had the idea of recalling the projectile while it is travelling, but since it's powered by physics, applying a force towards the player while it is travelling in an unknown direction proved to be quite unreliable. So, I decided to make the recall work only at low projectile velocities to lower the randomness of the trajectory.

Judging by the comments on my rating page, I should have actually fixed this, instead of sweeping it under the rug. :D

Game is here: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/461473

When I started working on my second level, I couldn't get the directional light working properly on 2 walls without one wall being covered in shadow. I tried using a point light instead which did light up both walls but gave the level a creepy dimly lit atmosphere. Was too lazy to figure out the lighting problem so I decided to roll with that and my game ended up becoming a horror game. Definitely don't regret it!

https://jotlane.itch.io/one-leg

We actually used many hacks to make a game feels right. Name just a few of them:

- Distance of dash towards enemy and without it is vary - you can dash to enemy from a slightly longer distance
- At the end point of the dash we're checking if any enemies in a range and if any - we'll stick to them. This and hacks makes dash way easy to control without noticing it
- We used specific shader material on characters in order to not create any UV and textures for them
- Props are not have UVs either - it's just a three separate materials for 3 different colors
- Colors of environment was chosen from Japanese flag - just clear white with a little of red. Nice and simple!

Game is here: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462992

I had a problem with character's jumping animation - it was set to trigger the moment he hits the platform. But it turned out to be too late, as the same collision also triggered his next jump. I didn't want to just add delay to the bounce (because I wasn't even sure how I'd go about doing it - I didn't learn about platform collider in Unity until it was far too late to change it, so the platform had a collider function as a trigger - if I just added some delay to the bounce, player's character would fall straight through).

Solution? Change the animation from character getting squished by the impact to character getting taller and thinner, basically stretching him out vertically. It triggers at the same time and looks perfectly normal.

You can check it out here: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462343

In my game, there's actually a one pixel gap in between the player and the ground.  To fix that, I just made the graphical display of the platforms one pixel wider than they should be.

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/460811#post-872659 this is ours - we kept glitching out the game when you hit a corner. We fudged it with a 1x1pixel boundry in the corner but you can still break it pretty easly :(

An object wasn't attaching to the characters hand in unity with an object constraint. so in blender i used a boolean unity to make a super budget version. we were stuck on this for about 3 hours and yet it still hurt to "fix" it by fusing the bow to the character mesh.

https://fastandblast.itch.io/one-with-the-woods

Not really a hack, but I wrote the ugliest code I never written =)

I used unity for the jam and I used DoTween everywhere for animating stuff and I used lamda as callback to launch other animations.. in one place I have something like  8 nested lambdas in one callback.. this thing is several hundred lines long... 

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462605

My game is set in a little forest and all the trees are generated on a grid, so that I can use the data structure for the enemy's pathfinding (it moves from tree to tree so it checks which tree around the current one is the best one to move to next), but the forest is circular and I also wanted to not have trees in some tiles to make it more organic… But for some reason my brain wasn't working properly and I didn't realise until after the jam that I could've just not generated those tree objects and nulled those indices in the grid data structure, but instead I just deactivated the objects, so they're still there, using up memory. x_x

Main mechanic of my game is switching between two robots by throwing a battery from one to another. In the first level you play volleyball to get familiar with controls, but the ball you toss is actually a battery but with a different sprite and physics properties! Even in hierarchy it's called "Battery", because my cheeky GameManager needs to find it by name with a string :v

If you want to play it, there is some important info in the install instructions :)
https://huscat.itch.io/powerbros

In my game, the world view is 1D, all by a filter I made. But I've got no clue how to do shaders, so I made it by hand. The game renders an offscreen scene, and puts it into a render texture. I added a line, and then set up a gradient to set the colour of the line. Basically, the line would read what colour was drawn on the offscreen scene, and put that colour onto a small segment of the line. This would've worked... If Unity's gradient system supported more than 8 colours. So instead, I had to rework that system and generate a texture, that had to be mapped onto the line, instead of the super simple gradients. This took a long freakin long time to set up, and there was this whole issue with the created textures causing a memory leak that crashed Unity at least five times. I was wondering why this was, soI looked into the profiler, and apparently there was 100 textures being added each second, which unsurprisingly isn't healthy. None of these were being destroyed, so Unity was gladly storing thousands of textures, equating to gigabytes of memory, simply because I might be using them again (but clearly wasn't).

Oh, but that's not all; 1D had SO MANY shenanigans that I've got to talk about. Like for example, there are these boxes you can push around. Issue was that I couldn't use Unity's 2D colliders, because of how the world functions. The world is actually 2D, and you've got a 1D perception of it. Issue was that 2D colliders would collide with things that you couldn't see, any walls or whatever else you passed, which did not feel smooth. So I had to make my own 1D collision system that only handles collisions with the parts you can see, and by golly that was janky.

Now then, last one; mirrors. These posed the biggest pain for me, with EIGHT HOURS of headbanging, trying to figure out what was happening. I got into that terrible habit of not changing the code and hoping it would somehow perform differently. So mirrors could bend your 1D view, and are an important part of some of the puzzles in the game, but my gosh did they eat me up. I was able to get the view bouncing no issue, but instead it was another feature that made mirrors painful; the fact that you can only travel along your line of sight. If you look into a mirror and move into it, you get reflected so that you keep moving along your line of sight, but by golly the game hat make some big mental leaps. To be completely honest, I still don't know why this was such a pain, but I ended up recoding the entire game. That's right, 12 hours in, I was trashing my game, and restarting. It was just one of those issues that seemed nonsensical, I printed out every relevant value and nothing explained the behaviour. Restarting miraculously worked out, but remember those pushable boxes that I talked about earlier? Well what do you think happens when you push a box into the mirror? Hint, the game hated it, so I told the game 'if a box touches a mirror, then figure out a reasonable spot to take it and just teleport it there'. In the end, I couldn't even think of a level idea that contained both a box and mirror.

I got the game working but still, after all that, Unity still hates me. I must have somewhere used a function not supported by WebGL, since this build simply doesn't work. So now everyone's gotta waste time downloading, which we all know cuts a games view count in half. Anyways, the game somehow was completed, and surpassed all of my expectations, so please check it out, it'd be nice to know that the pain was worth it. I even had some time to do voice acting, and I could ramble on about the strange things I did to record the wacky voices, but I've talked long enough. https://justcamh.itch.io/tunnel-view

I only have one 1x1 pixel texture in my game. Everything you see in my game consists out of multiple stretched squares with the same black 'texture' and 3 different transparency levels. I am not good at drawing sprites :D

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/461649

Sound designer here!

The hackiest moment was butchering the EQ trying to get my voice to sound the way it sounds in my head and not like it actually sounds, failing miserably, and then just adding a s**tload of reverb thinking "that might just cover it up". Also, splicing every single drum hit to align it to the rhythm as electronic parcussion ia not my usual instrument :P

To hear both, hit the gong:

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463231

About half way through building the wall I realized i needed something to spice up the game-play a little, so i whipped out a tile-map that pushes you away from it to take away some of the freedom of movement they have, give them some things to avoid, etc...

problem was that it was janky as all get out! if you entered it from above or below it would flip you out. so I just ended up making sure the player could never enter them from above or below instead of fixing it. XD

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462355

My platormer The Sad duo has solid blocks, but I didn't want to implement complicated collision-handling code for corners that would be required for solid blocks, so I just have the player character instantly jump to the top if they are near the upper corners, and designed the levels so the player would never be able to touch the bottom side of any of the blocks.

My game is a space invaders/breakout style of game where you're a squirrel throwing an acorn to kill spiders.

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463448

This is maybe not a hack, but I decided to implement a combo system where you can earn extra points by killing multiple spiders before the acorn lands on the ground again, which will make the game a bit more dynamic. The implementation is simple: when the acorn collide with the ground, the combo counter resets to 0.

The thing is that it's possible for the player to pick up the acorn before the acorn hits the ground. But instead of adding extra logic to reset the combo counter when the acorn is in the player's hands, I thought it's better to leave it as it is. Then skillful players are able to stack even longer combos by catching the acorn before it hits the ground + I write less code. I saw it as a win-win.

Another "hack" I'm proud of is the clouds in the backgrounds. The clouds are actually based on the inside of a cylinder that rotates around the scene. Incredibly easy to implement, and I think it adds to the game.

Here's how it looks like in Blender:

So I was putting together a tutorial for the game with 10 minutes left and wanted there to be an image of a player on the screen. So I just tried putting a player object into the scene (instead of making a new object that was just a sprite) and somehow it worked. It actually turned out really well because the player can actually move around and figure out the controls before going into the game.

Play the game:

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463308