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This game blew me away! Is this your first game ever!?

The typewriter effect is so good, especially at the beginning when all the letters jiggle around! It looks really good and professional. Very Undertale-y. And everything was interactive, everything had a little dialogue box which is just awesome. I loved all the little animations, how you moved between areas and the camera zoomed in and out, it's all really excellent! Great work!

Obviously it's short, but I really don't have any major critiques for this game, other than the game not closing with Escape and the window options we talked about on Discord (change default window title to game title, change default GameMaker icon to custom icon that's just like the player's head, etc., change the game options so I can click fullscreen on the window, resize the window, and start in fullscreen and let me toggle it on/off with F11).

It's very well done. Great work!

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Hey Gunnar your feedback is deeply appreciated and I have taken all of it into account. I just purchased the HTML5 module so I'm super excited for future jams and exporting them that way. This was my first game jam and I had 2 weeks to complete it and finishing it was a priority. It was inspired by Undertale and Pokemon for sure as I was playing Undertale at the time and I knew Pumpkins room would feel familiar.

I don't want to take credit for the dialogue boxes as this was a free asset but I did implement it in specific ways to have an impact on the reader! I also had to figure out how to use the asset to provide descriptions so I learned a LOT about arrays in the process.

The biggest struggle by far was the resolution and changing camera... but cameras are somewhat controversial on GM2 to my understanding and rightfully so. I might be wrong but did you mention you made a living with GM2? If you wouldn't mind I'd enjoy hearing more about that.

That's awesome! Definitely "port" each of your games so far to HTML5 (it should be all of a single button press to work) and re-upload them! I've had Windows download-only games before on itch, and when I add an HTML5 build there's usually a bit of a boost in players if tagged correctly, though of course it's best to have HTML5 up from the start. To build for HTML5, Clean the project (brush icon by the play button) to ensure nothing wigs out with the texture page (HTML5 is the finickiest of all target platforms for any game engine), then change Target in the top-right corner to HTML5. I keep a blank folder on my computer desktop called HTML_Temp. When you build executable for HTML5, you need to select a folder and because of JavaScript or whatever (at least on my Windows machine), so I select that desktop folder. Then inside that folder, you'll find an index.html file and some adjacent data. Select all of that, right-click, and select Send to -> Zip file. Change the zip file to something distinct. For my Windows builds, I call the executable zip files GameName_vXXX.zip, and I just call the HTML zip files GameName_HTML_vXXX.zip. But do whatever works for you. In Itch change your project to be playable in-browser, upload the HTML5 zip, and select that file to be played in browser. That should do it! It's not too complicated but it was annoying for me to figure out for the first time by myself, so hopefully that helps haha...

Some additional tips with HTML5:

  • As I mentioned in Discord with my code snippet, never run the game_end() function for HTML5. It kills the web app and is dumb... Just make the game revert back to a quiet landing page or main menu if you have to.
  • You can check if the game is currently running in a browser with: if os_browser == browser_not_a_browser
  • Audio is super finicky in JavaScript/HTML5, so look up the audio_system_is_available function in the GameMaker docs. They have a code snippet you can pretty much just copy-paste and will fix your audio. I use an alarm to run that code every 15 or 30 steps in a 60 FPS game. My Sunny New Year game is open source as well... While the code for that game is not good because it was a rushed Trijam game, you can download it and look at my code if you like.
  • HTML5 is prone to be the slowest of all target platforms, which is kind of a good thing honestly... It forces you to optimize your game and not waste a bunch of memory/space. Don't use massive rooms with hundreds of objects, create objects procedurally, disable them when they're outside the game view, etc. But that's optimization stuff you probably won't have to worry about until later when you're making bigger games :) 

I don't know about that with cameras... I always use cameras and don't have an issue :/

Though there was a bug with a camera function with an HTML5 export once, but I reported that to YoYo Games and they fixed it. Make sure to use the YoYo Games forum and report bugs when you find them and you're sure it's a bug with the engine/docs. They're super nice about it in my experience and fix it quickly.

Yeah, it's not a huge deal. I currently work at the UNLV International Gaming Institute, actually, which does casino gaming stuff in Las Vegas, Nevada. Our program generates new casino gaming ideas and patents them, as that's how the casino industry operates funnily enough, and I build prototypes and apps of the game ideas so we can demo them. I used to do more traditional video gamey work, and I still do on the side sometimes, and probably will do more in the future. Because all the games are 2D, I prefer to use GameMaker Studio 2 for my work. I build them all cross-platform for Windows, Android, and Amazon Fire primarily. It's also good because GameMaker doesn't hold any control over the games made in it, they don't charge a fee over time or take a cut like Unity and Unreal, so it's better financially.

And yeah it definitely came off very much like Undertale and Pokémon haha! 

If you have any more questions about GameMaker or anything, please let me know!

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I'm very grateful for all of the information you have provided Gunnar, I have found myself continually retracing my steps to these articulate and focused bodies of text that you write so that I can present my creations just that much better! I made these games to challenge myself and I enjoyed making them for me so when you decided to play all three of them back to back it dawned on me that, holy crap, people are going to play my games and they will have opinions hahah, shoot.

The video was amazing, I had never expected you would make that. It was gut wrenching in a way because I had never seen someone play my game other than the people who are close to me. Pumpkin's Task was my first finished game and Surf's Up was a game I slapped together in 2 days and posted because I thought it was hilarious. When you played it, like a spoonful of cold medicine I had realized I should probably present my games a lil' bit tighter... but it was still really funny to see your reaction to Pumpkin and the crew getting cooked and the spinning surfer. What a blast.

By the way I'm impressed by the quality and length of feedback you're willing to put out for the newbie game dev and I can see why that would be so important in the culture. With this analysis I feel a lot more clarity with the "How the hell do I make video games?" question. Not that I really know how but I know that the road has been paved by more experienced devs that are willing to be helpful. Thanks a million

I'm so glad ^-^

That's definitely my goal with commenting and recording; I want to encourage new game developers and offer guidance wherever I can, and show that people can and will play their games. Really just try to provide what I wish someone did for me when I was starting out. I really want to record more itch.io games... I was trying it without commentary originally, but while it's more work I think it's far more worth it to provide with commentary.

And thanks for clarifying that Pumpkin's Task was your first finished game... that's so awesome! Definitely a very high-quality first game. You're starting out at a pretty high y-intercept on your plot of game quality! Keep it up!

Some parting suggestions for the years to come:

Congratulations on your first few games! I hope I can see a lot more from you in time to come! :)