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A jam submission

you have to make the gameView game page

Make the Next Big Thing (tm)
Submitted by XCVG (@xcvgvcx) — 23 hours, 34 minutes before the deadline
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you have to make the game's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Modifier#43.8333.833
Sound#83.5833.583
Overall Bad#153.8333.833
Graphics#173.5833.583
Overall#183.2923.292
Overall Good#282.5002.500
Gameplay#322.4172.417

Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

If you have implemented the modifier, how have you done so?
A core mechanic is choosing to accept or reject suggestions

Any additional information for voters?
Contains AI art, but you can disable it. Does not contain copyrighted music, that's your own collection

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Comments

Submitted

I like clicker games, so i liked this. I couldn't immediately understand which suggestions to approve, so I just approved everything at first. But it made sense after I finally questioned what was going on with the window in the background. Also, great use of the modifier!

Developer

Thanks for playing!

It's a bit obtuse on purpose, but there aren't that many exemplar images in the set so you can sort of learn what matches up with what.

Submitted

Interesting entry. It’s definitely very ambitious, but it might be a bit too ambitious for the scope of the jam?

Core gameplay was a perfectly fine idle clicker game, though it was a little hard to understand in the beginning. There was this console window filling up the screen that I’m still not sure if it contained any valuable information because it was too small to comfortably read through and it took us a while to figure out how to close it. Then we mashed keyboard buttons in the main game and somehow opened up another console-type area that we again didn’t quite understand what to do with. I think a more streamlined UI would help for new players to get into the game.

I have to admit I didn’t really bother digging into the meta development part of the game. I did open up the config file and the documentation and it does seem like a neat idea (kinda reminded of TIS-100), but when trying to play over thirty games in a week, I just didn’t feel like I had the time to try to make sense of a deliberately bad documentation, especially since I have to do enough of that stuff at work 😅

Graphics were generally nicely SBIG, we especially enjoyed the manager sprite!

Overall, a fascinating and ambitious entry, but maybe the entry barrier is a little too high for the scope of this jam.

Developer

Thanks for playing!

This is definitely a game by a dev who likes to tweak for devs who like to tweak, and you're right that it's probably a swing and a miss for a lot of the audience. I like having a meta element to my SBIG entries but I underestimated how intimidating being thrown a bunch of config files and a couple pages of horrible documentation would be (for better or for worse that's something I'm very used to).

I'm curious about the console window you saw. Could you provide a picture or describe it in more detail? There are a few things that could be described as a console window, but none of them should be showing up in normal gameplay, so it's probably a bug.

Submitted

This was an interesting one, I played a lot of game dev tycoon so right off the bat I like the games premise, the graphics are all perfectly amateur or cursed courtesy of the AI, and of course the soundtrack!

The meta aspect of it is really cool from a technical perspective! Though admittedly the documentation started to give me a headache, not because it involved reading, but because it gave me flashbacks to some really annoying experiences from work and university.

It feels like a perfect in-joke for people involved in more technical aspects of development, but I think I see now why some people got spooked off by it.

Which is a shame, because the game itself is really neat! Being able to modify all the values and name your company and game was fun. I made sure those 40 developers getting paid $1/hour were putting their heart and soul into Shattered!

I think the only thing I would've preferred changed is if instead of just clicking on the keyboard you could just literally mash on the keyboard to increase productivity.

Overall though I liked it!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing!

I think I've done another entry that is either going to land on two feet or totally miss the mark depending on who's playing it. It's definitely game by a dev for devs, with layers of technical complexity and a dose of office satire. We'll see if that pays off or not!

I was going for a specific kind of diegetic UI where everything that can be done in the game is accomplished by interacting with an object in the game world, but I agree that being able to mash the keyboard would be funny enough to be worth breaking specific adherence to that paradigm.

Submitted (1 edit)

Felt like more of a developer playing this than when I actually develop games lmao. I had trouble reading the documentation, but since I have no idea if that's a real issue or just me being incompetent i'm just gonna assume it's the latter. 

Developer

Thanks for playing!

The documentation is deliberately bad, partly because I didn't have time to make it good but mostly as a parody of actual bad documentation that one sometimes runs into.

Host

Okay wow! This was quite an experience!

First off from my perspective, I love the development type game concept and all it has to offer. I'm pretty sure Game Dev Tycoon  is one of my most played games on steam (344.2 hours, and that doesn't even include the time I spent on the windows store version 😂) And you know I modded the hell out of that game to add as many game topics, consoles, and extra features as possible!

First I tried  playing the game "Vanilla" so to speak, and it was a very enjoyable experience.  I kinda found at first that just spamming the keyboard and accepting every single idea seems to be an effective money-making strategy for better or for worse 😅 even though you know I *should* have been looking at the upstream. I make the game it's my rules 😛

The music player was hilarious. Unfortunately for me the main thing in my  Music folder (Besides some trumpet backing tracks) is my "Crap Bin" folder full of audio recordings that were never meant to see the light of day. I was instantly greeted by old acapella audition tapes of me, some weird songs that I had made up but then scrapped as they were terrible, and (unfortunately) a lot of blank audio files that I have on my computer for *reasons*.   suffice to say drowning the  sound out with lots of employees clacking away was very welcome 😂

Anyway  I tried hooking my own music up. Was a bit of a problem as my actual music folders are a weird mashup of symbolic links and old windows installs. I eventually managed to get the only album I had (A collection of Beatles singles) onto the game by moving it to G:\\mp3.  That was beautiful and I loved to hear it. 

I tried messing around with some parameters. I think this concept would work really well for a game that has much more wackier parameters (for example  if it was a game that spawn janky physics objects  it would be so funny if you could just turn it up mega high and make your PC slow to  a crawl  😅 Though I wonder whether  it was the right fit for this sorta game, where the parameters are a lot more *boring*. I think even just having some *weird* parameters might have helped ("Add geese", or something idk 😅) as that would give the player some more of an instant gratification for taking the time to mess around with the json files, rather than the more nuanced aspect of adjusting the simulation parameters.

Eventually I landed on making the suggestion rate 0 (which caused some division errors but hey), and making sure my company would never gain or lose money, and hiring no employees. That way there was no additional noise or interruption, and I had the perfect music player to listen to my Beatles Album in peace.

In the end I got a score  of  1E+17 . Haters say  I just edited the persist.json file but that's just a skill issue on their part. Thanks so much for submitting and well done!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing!

Choosing to accept all modifiers is the safe option and it's not a bad strategy. I didn't really tweak the parameters from the first ones that sort of worked, but more on that below.

Your music folder setup sounds extremely cursed. One thing I knew that would be a problem was that some people just don't keep music locally anymore, preferring to rely on streaming. It only occurred to me much later that weird music folder layouts would also be a problem.

I agree that it would have been cool to have some "silly" parameters. My initial thought behind exposing everything was that I knew I wouldn't have time to tweak them so I figured I'd just dump that on the player. I started to think about silly parameters like you mentioned very late in the jam, but by the time I did I was pretty tired and more or less feature frozen so the chance of developers burning down the office is the only one that made it in.

Early on I thought about putting in mechanics to prevent players from just sitting there with no devs, but I couldn't think of anything that would work well and be doable in the time I had.

Submitted

I am a little confused. How do I know what suggestions I should accept and how do I increase my money

Developer (1 edit)

There's an ingame help, but basically:

  • Click on the keyboard to generate Productivity
  • Click on the Hiring Manager and Firing Manager doors to hire/fire devs who slowly produce Productivity
  • Every coarsetick, Productivityis converted to Money
  • Accept suggestions that match up with the "pulse stream" in the background (the images flying by the window)
Submitted

sorry it was just really hard to read the help