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

The trails of the projectiles in our game are never really destroyed in the first build of our game. They just stop moving so they stop emitting particles, but at the end of tha game the map is filled with particle systems. We fixed this in following out-of-jam versions.

The game with infinite particles: https://filogc.itch.io/one-man-army

In a previous jam, we had a game breaking bug riiiiight at the end of the game that caused it to crash. After a futile attempt to fix it, we ended up just wrapping the whole game in a try-catch block. When the game crashed, it just took you back to the title screen. Thankfully, the game was hard enough that only a couple people made it to the end, but they had some funny reactions.

We hit an issue right before submission with this game that almost got us to do the same thing, but we thankfully didn't have to resort to that. Though, I won't promise our game is perfect by any means XD    https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/460345

My game was meant to have five characters, each of which has a unique ability. Not only did I decide to completely skip one ability so I'd have time to build actual levels, but I also couldn't think of anything to do with the replacement ability (which another character shared). Consequently, the game features two entire characters who only appear in the first, final, and semifinal levels, none of which make use of  character abilities at all~

On the note of the semifinal and final levels: the entire first day was spent trying to build a completely different game out of magnificently incoherent mechanics. Most of the levels were built on the second day, after completely replacing the core mechanics, but I decided to tack on levels 1 and 2 from the original game at the end, just to avoid having to make a proper ending screen.

https://sirius-bizdness.itch.io/one-by-one

In our game, "A Light in the Dark", the hands were too small and were placed very close to the camera because of that, and when we added the lamp, it was either way too small in the world or way too big in your hand, so I just made it change its size as you picked it up and dropped it.

Also, for enemies noticing the light, I wrote some math that calculates the light level, but it was not at all accurate in actually calculating the light level. I called it good enough when I got the output number to grow as the light got brighter.

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463759

I wanted to build my game from scratch, without engines or libraries. I ended up not using any assets either, mostly to save time looking for them and managing them. Instead of assets I just used emoji, which are really easy to work with (at least in the canvas API), since I can use the emoji directly in the code. The big downside is that the look of the game does change between different platforms.

There's a bunch more smaller hacks that I use to save time. If there's other plain html5 devs out there that are interested, I'm happy to share some of these.

The game is here:

https://kaesve.itch.io/pocket-rocket

Our game (right here https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463306) is physics based (can you see where this is going ?), made with Unreal Engine 4 (CAN YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING ??) and the player controls a bullet which, of course, moves at high speed (you probably see where this is going) and so if the player tries to go through the floor with enough momentum, they glitch out of the universe and have to restart the game.

How did we fix that ?

We hoped the player wouldn't try to go through the floor.

I can say that I'm a bit normal tier when it comes to coding a game, But when it comes to art & animation... I'm damn horrible. So this jam (as always) I've gone nuts and did some programmer art & programmer juice.
One example of my hacky programmer juice is that I've abused (a lot of) programmatically (procedurally?) generated animations (aka spamming cos()/sin() and random() functions) to add some amount of juicy feeling.

Here, The GIF below is one of the motion that can be seen in game, And below that is the code that I used to make it come alive.

Motion:

Code :

Quite a programmatic apocalypse, And beautiful... Isn't it?
(Also looks like my code readability is just as horrid as the hack... lol)

(PS2 : oh yeah.. the link for those curious adventurer, You can see this tech in action : https://zikbakguru.itch.io/game-game-game-game)

Well, I did something "hacky", but I later found out it didn't work as intended...
So what I did was, when you die in my game, you just respawn without the scene loading, as I thought it'll cut the loading screens time.
But, after adding new ideas, it didn't help at all, as enemy health didn't reset at all, and there were a lot of mines on the field! There were many bugs in the game, I found out recently!

If you want to try it out, here it is:  https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462383

Bit Late on this but I kinda cheated on graphics for myself, I dont have much talent on digital art so it was faster for me to hand draw all my art. I did a card game (https://ilprinny.itch.io/one-card-income for context) so I saved time by hand drawing then just taking a picture with my phone. the rest of the graphics are unity defaults!

This is less of a hack and more of "I'm too lazy to do it the right way"

I'm using Godot for my entry https://mrcdk.itch.io/only-one-finger-driver-mark

Godot UI system is really powerful (the Godot's editor is made with the same UI parts you have access in the engine) so  I used them to create all the "GUI" elements in the game. My game gimmick is that you only have one finger so I wanted the cursor to be that, only one finger. Each UI element in Godot has a property to select the mouse cursor it will use (the arrow, the pointing hand,...) when you are interacting with it. Because my game uses a lot of those elements, changing the cursor mode to each one would take a while... unless you are me and do this in a autoload/singleton (in Godot, a node that loads at the beginning before the scene is loaded and is always loaded) :

func _enter_tree(): # a function called by the engine when the node first enters the scene tree
    # set the default cursor to pointing hand
    Input.set_default_cursor_shape(Input.CURSOR_POINTING_HAND)     
    # load a custom graphic for the cursor     
    Input.set_custom_mouse_cursor(preload('res://assets/hand.png'), Input.CURSOR_POINTING_HAND, Vector2(17, 5))
    # connect the scene tree "node_added" signal to the function "_on_node_added"
    get_tree().connect("node_added", self, "_on_node_added")
    
func _on_node_added(node): # the function connected to the scene tree "node_added" signal
    if node is Control: # if the node added is a Control (base class for all UI elements in Godot)
        node.mouse_default_cursor_shape = Control.CURSOR_POINTING_HAND # Set its default cursor to be a pointing hand

Part of https://github.com/mrcdk/gmtk_gamejam_2019/blob/master/Globals.gd
This way, I made sure that the cursor will always be the pointing hand one and didn't have to worry about adding new UI elements.

Another "I'm too lazy" moment was inputing the text in the fields. I really didn't want to code an input field from scratch... so... I created fake input key events when clicking on the on-screen "keyboard" buttons here https://github.com/mrcdk/gmtk_gamejam_2019/blob/master/Keyboard.gd and blocked all the input events that came from the physical keyboard:

func _input(event):
    if event is InputEventKey and not event.has_meta('fake'):
        get_tree().set_input_as_handled()

Part of https://github.com/mrcdk/gmtk_gamejam_2019/blob/master/Main.gd
Notice how I set metadata in the fake key event I generate in keyboard.gd and only consume the input key events that aren't marked by that metadata (all the ones triggered by the physical keyboard) 

So, some explanation on how this work. In Godot the input event system has the following flow explained in the documentation. As you can see, first the _input() function will process the event and, if the event isn't handled, then the GUI input will process it. Because I'm dealing with GUI elements, if I handle the input event in an _input() function I'll be sure that the event won't reach any GUI element. Put 2 and 2 together and that's how I did it.

Our character is two halves connected by a tail. The tail joints kept breaking so we had to increase the position calculations in Unity and devise a system to reduce the characters movement force the faster they go ':D

See how it turned out: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/463922#post-881731

Hey! My team and I attempted something quite tricky for the jam, but I'm super proud of it and it would mean a lot if you were able to take the time to give it a play and rate the game!

MICROVANIA - A One Screen Mini-Metroidvania with a Twist!  

https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462198

And a few notes to help you play it! (The Game Jam build has a few bugs and quality of life issues) 

• - It works with Keyboard OR Gamepad 
• - You can view the controls in the menu (Esc or Start) 
• - The Player has 3x Health but will be instantly killed by Dragon Fire
•  - If you die twice, you should close and reopen the game (it breaks more and more with each death) 
• - There are two Winning Endings (You Kill the Dragon, or You Give the Dragon What it's Looking for!) 
• - There are 5 secret Gems hidden throughout the game if you can't find the last one, keep looking!

My main menu and game over screens are just pictures slapped on top of the game level. If you press jump on the main menu it even plays the sound effect.  I had my 11 year old daughter voice Zeus

https://padr81.itch.io/by-zeus-beard

I really wasn't liking my game's looks for most of the jam, so halfway through I decided to draw a cupcake to calm down... Turns out it looked cute in the game with a different color palette so i just went with it xD

Cupcakes ftw. :) 

Here's the free cupcakes --> https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462549

in my game, there are doors that make a sound as they open. The doors are opened by specific light switches. I wrote a system for making the audio quieter as the distance to player increased. 

In one of the levels, the player activates a switch to open a door that’s pretty far away. I had an issue, though, the door was so far away that the the audio’s gain was 0. So, rather than fixing the audio system, I just placed another door in the level slightly offscreen so the sound would play from that door instead as it opens offscreen. Problem solved!