Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

[Devlog] My probably too-ambitious birdwatching thing

A topic by TeaHands created 43 days ago Views: 290 Replies: 22
Viewing posts 1 to 9
(1 edit)

Since we don’t have a jam-specific space on the Discord (edit: we do now, hooray!), I thought it’d be fun to keep a record of my futile efforts here instead. There’s a real chance this game won’t be finished on time, but succeed or fail I’ll admit it here :D

So, when the theme was announced I was thoroughly confused because I’m not from the US. But if I’ve never heard of the kids’ game, I have heard of both ducks and geese and birds in general. And I recently played someone else’s very fun jam entry that involved watching through a security camera so….yoink! Watching birds (cubes) through binoculars it is.

For some reason I’ve gone 3d with this game, which…I can kind of do 3d but am completely lost when it comes to rigging and animations and this is the biggest risk to not finishing. But it’s something I need to get better at for my actual main game project, so what better place to practise than a jam.

There have admittedly been some issues.

And don’t even get me started on trying to rig a duck.

But maybe, just maybe, we’ll get there in the end. Watch this space!

(+1)

This is so fucking cool! good job! I'm going to keep an eye on this. Good luck rigging the ducks though!

Submitted(+1)

Great start, looking forward to playing this! The birds on the ground is such a mood, tbh, my first day jamming was basically only that haha 

And wow, color me impressed at you rigging a whole bird for a jam :o

Last night I managed to get the duck waddling, although it seems it has a slight limp so I’ll have to revisit this animation later. It took hours, and I feel like every time I try and learn animation in Blender I end up doing it a different way and still have no idea what’s “right”. Still, it works.

After that I also added an idle animation, which took all of about 30 seconds so no idea why I didn’t start with that one. Combine the animations with the fact that ducks no longer fall through the floor? Success!

So onto the geese! For now, my goose model is just the duck model reskinned. But fear not, bird people, I do know there are plenty of differences and am just being lazy for prototying purposes.

The point of the game is to identify the geese hiding out among the ducks. Which is a cliche interpretation of the theme and probably one in a large lineup of similar entries but anyway. When you successfully identify a shifty goose, I thought it might be fun for it to freeze, look at you for a moment, then disappear in a puff of smoke. So here’s a first draft of that (ignore the stupid cursor in the way).

Really not sure how much I’ll get done today, we’re staying home all day so that should mean a lot of dev time but I could also really do with a rest and probably a nap. So we’ll see how that goes, I guess.

(PSA: If you are taking part in the jam but gave up on the Discord because of no dedicated channel, we do have one now, come share your progress too!)

Submitted(+1)

Ninja geese! Thepurple joke makes it so much funnier :D

It made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it working and honestly, what more can you ask from your own jam project :D

(3 edits)

Just a quick update from the rest of the long weekend as we mostly used it to lounge around, attempt surgery on a dying houseplant, watch all the Resident Evil films back to back for some reason, and then stay up for Monsterdon on Sunday which didn’t even start until 2am UK time.

I did a lot of behind the scenes stuff to turn what I already have into an actually working (if extremely basic) game loop, which included various backend things you can’t see but also a placeholder UI with goose count and birdwatching reputation bar.

And a notebook, although this is a 3d scene and as I went to take this screenshot a bird wandered through it so I’ll have to make sure they stop moving when the notebook is open, whoops! First time that’s happened, maybe I’d never have noticed the issue if not for taking screenies for these devlogs. Thanks, one person who reads these devlogs!

Most of the rest of my time was bugfixing but also still trying to figure out animations in Blender. Why do they sometimes get duplicated, or even eaten? What is a timeline vs an action editor vs an NLA editor? And if I accidentally hit tab, how do I get my keyframes back so I don’t have to keep making backup files to revert to?!* Yesterday was a frustrating day, can you tell? 😅

Anyway. Onwards and birdwards!

* I did figure this part out, at least

Submitted

The duck walking through the notebook is hilarious, it could as well be a feature :D Reminded me of the ancient game Uncle Albert's Magical Album ... great progress! It really looks like a game now ;)

Thank you! But sad to report I did fix the bird issue ;)

It is ONE DAY until teaser videos are due and I still don’t really have a game as such. Through the power of video editing though, maybe I can make it look like I do.

To that end, I made a quick list of what I’d like to record for the video and therefore what things really needed to be polished up before then versus what can wait until after that deadline. This is an interesting approach because usually my problem is I get bogged down in building systems and only remember it has to look like a game on the last day of a jam.

So I made some basic UI icons to replace the placeholders! They’re still kind of placeholder but better than nowt.

image.png

And then, instead of continuing a triumphant list of easy wins, I got stuck trying to get an outline shader to work and got myself in a right mess.

Thankfully Fedi came to the rescue, as they always do, and put me on the right track. So after a tiny amount of skiving off work this morning I also have outlines!

image.png

Also made a quick animation for the ducks if you try and falsely accuse them of actually being geese.

Small steps, but if you take enough of those you end up getting where you need to go.

Tonight is our fantasy football draft, so not much if any free time, but I’ll hopefully be able to squeeze in a bit of devving tomorrow afternoon / early evening and grab everything I need for the video submission at 11pm (UK time).

Then, you know, actually turn it into a game over the weekend maybe? 😅

Submitted(+1)

this is a damn cute animation. Great idea w the devlog, too! I'm going to do this for all future jams :)

Thanks! Never too late to join us, it’s very nice to look back and have a record of your progress :)

(1 edit) (+1)

Whew, yesterday was stressful for all of us jammers I think! But at the last second, the organisers came in clutch and decided to extend the deadline for the teaser videos, which was very handy as I’d thought it worked out as 11pm UK time but it was actually 9pm so I was in a slight rush for a minute there 😅

Still, happy with what I managed to cobble together within the time limit especially since I was feeling pretty under the weather yesterday too. (I did not have time to balance the audio so be ready on your volume settings if it’s too loud, sorry)

I’m not saying I’ll make teasers for all my jam entries in future, that would be madness. But the planning part definitely helped me polish some bits up much earlier than I usually would, and I think that’s been really helpful, so maybe I’ll adopt that part in future projects and just make the actual video in my head!

Anyway.

Plans for the weekend basically involve making all the missing kinds of birds, adding sfx to the game instead of just to the trailer (movie magic, baby!), and figuring out why sometimes some kinds of ducks stand on the water instead of swimming in it despite sharing their code with all the other ducks that work fine 🤷‍♀️

Siiiigh.

Submitted

That's such a cute teaser! The editing makes it really fun to watch too :) Good luck with the water walking ducks, I'm having a similar issues of one piece working and the exact same piece not working haha

Submitted

The teaser was great! That animation is even better in the game environment. :D

Well, the jam deadline has been and gone and I did not submit this game. Turns out, the game idea itself wasn’t the overly ambitious part, the “spending two weeks making a game without something major interrupting” was the overly ambitious part. So we had a real life thing come up at the weekend and I had to abandon my dreams of glory. Such is life!

My goals for this jam were to:

a) Learn more about rigging and animating in Blender without it feeling so precarious like it’s all about to stop working if I press a single key wrong.

b) Learn about navigation agents in Godot in a small self-contained project without two years of legacy spaghetti making it more complicated.

Both of these were a massive success, and I’ll be using all this new knowledge in my main city builder project. Hooray!

As a bonus I also learned an important optimisation technique for particle systems in web exports, and generally got to practise my low poly modelling. And of course, I learned a lot about the differences between ducks and geese.

I’d love to say I’ll finish the game anyway and update this post with a link, but we all know that probably won’t happen. Still, after a week or so break I’ll hopefully be ready to take part in the anniversary edition of the Godot Wild Jam, so if anyone wants to join me for that one feel free :D

Congrats to everyone who actually did submit, special shoutouts to obscure gods and Brandon Saiz for joining my devlog initiative, and I’m off to play your games now!

Submitted

Aww, too bad we won't be seeing your Ninja geese, but life is life and it liked to get in the way of gamedev :D And congrats on reaching your learning goals! That and the fun are really the most important parts of game jams anyway.

I hadn't seen the other jam yet, but I'm intrigued. Maybe we'll see us there!

Yes I thoroughly enjoy taking part in jams, the learning and the creating and especially the encouraging newbies. But thoroughly hate the part where games get judged and compared and ranked, so this has actually worked out pretty well for me!

I joined the GWJ for the first time just last month and it’s a really nice supportive community, definitely won’t be doing it every month but I should have time for this anniversary one. Jams vary a lot in quality but I can definitely vouch for that one.

Submitted

I was watching the submissions like an obsessive birder waiting for yours to drop. That one animation with the head shake was one of my highlights for the trailer showcase. :) as for me, im going to take a break - maybe until the end of my next irl performance mid-october. But im definitely going to be doing jams for a long time to come in my life. This was so cool :)

Haha, oh no I’m sorry to let you down! Maybe I will have to polish it up and release at some point, just for the sake of closure :D

After my first ever jam I got overexcited and signed up to two more that started straight after and yeah…long story short you make the right choice taking a bit of a break. It’s been great meeting you though and I’ll be following along with what you make next, for sure!

Submitted

I was really looking forward to playing this one. Glad you're still planning to finish the project though!

Jam Host

I second this motion, let the people watch birds! Haha

Jam Host (1 edit) (+2)

TeaHands, it has been incredible having you as a part of this jam. You really brought a lot to the table and inspired others in the community to share their own work here with us on the community page. Even though you weren't able to submit, I think I can speak for everyone here by saying this jam would not have been nearly as much of a success as it was without your participation and engagement. The main reason we started this was to help build a strong community about our collective passion for indie games, and your contributions have helped bring that dream closer to reality.

It has been amazing getting to know you a bit through these devlogs, and we hope you continue to engage with us and the little community we have started here at The Indie Den <3