itch.io

I’m not sure when I’ll get the chance to check it out but I really like what I’m seeing. You weren’t kidding when you said you were pushing the engine! Cool to see you’re still working away at it.

We’re just getting started but we’ve covered the basics of making an FPS in Flax Engine:

• Base movement systems
• Design doc
• Mapping tools (Trenchbroom -> Blender -> Flax)
• GUI scripting/design and UI event handling
• Some incredibly tasty music

We’re running a little late to the starting line but I’m having a blast.

Flax is wonderful so far but it’s undercooked in some important areas. I think if you give it few months, now that all these resources and extra hands are flooding in from Unity, it’ll be something spectacular and generally cleaner around the edges as time goes on.

Well, I’d say in general– keep your scope down and try to keep your eyes on shipping at all times. Your main goal is to take your idea and ship it to users–

I’ve done a lot of jams, with lots of both success and failure. Here’s what I would say really made the difference:

• Untested approaches: Have fun with experimentation, but learn to rely on things you know work at their core unless you have the time to really debug things. i.e. Stick to stable software and don’t go rushing after trendy cutting-edge features.

• 4/44: This is advice for Ludum Dare basically saying you should make the fun loop of your game in 4 hours, and spend 44 hours polishing it (for context LD Compo rules give you only 48 hours starting from nothing). Basically, make a really good prototype and realize the fun first, then all of your work refining the game with extra content, bugfixes, polish, and presentation tweaks should be in service of that fun loop.

• Scope creep: This one’s a killer! Think about the cost of features– if I give my player the ability to shoot a gun, my platformer has all sorts of new problems like introducing death states to enemies, respawn states to enemies, and making sure that any level events relying on the enemies being present still work when the enemy isn’t there. Then there might be new bugs too– dead enemies start moving around again if the player alerts them, enemies that respawn keep returning to the death animation after every action, etc. Not every feature is free and you need to make sure that you aren’t adding things that will take too much time away from the core idea.

• Documentation: Make a design document. Keep referring to it as you work. It doesn’t have to be anything complicated, often times in jams that doc can be a bit of an unformatted mess. But it’s important to keep your design on paper as you go to keep you focused on the end goal.

• Pace yourself: I need to make this point clear because I didn’t take this advice on my first long term jam. Working for a month long at 48h jam time crunch (which is to say, living, breathing, and eating Unity until I dropped dead) will destroy you. It’ll leave you tired, demotivated, and eventually you’ll just shut down and be unable to work any further until you recover. It’s also generally just not healthy. Give yourself time, and keep this a fun thing by balancing out your gamedev time and your well being. That way you can keep fresh as you slowly make your way through tasks.

• Go Gold: This really applies more to long form jams like this one as well. Generally speaking, as you near the deadline you should be approaching a final game. Sometimes you may not get to a lot of the content until the last minute, but your core mechanics should be the focus of the first phase of development and flourishes after. Then you try to build variations of that for content. As you approach the last few days of development, you’ll really want to make sure you’re finalizing things– if a feature isn’t working out or too unreliable cut it, if a stage is failing to work properly debug it– get things working! This includes building your game and testing the final binary. If you’re unable to build, you’ll want to know that ASAP.

I’ll add anything else I can think of but in general, just have fun and read those scripting API docs. :)

I’ll be using the Flax Engine for this jam. But I also had a mad scientist idea– what if I made the game in two separate game engines, and used a plain-text saving system so that you could play it and have the progress tracked in both games?

It’s a horrible idea but I can’t shake it, and I’ll probably attempt it.

I’ve been shopping around a fair bit for the right engine. As a former Unity developer the engines that appeal the most to me are Stride, Cocos Creator, and Flax Engine. For the purposes of this jam I will be using Flax for ease of use as its syntax is incredibly similar to Unity’s– I even wrote a little Unity->Flax cheat sheet of functions and approximates which I’ll be updating over the next month.

If I were to work on a mobile game I think Cocos is the best option as a highly optimized mobile/web engine, but learning TypeScript for gamedev is a headache I’m saving for another day.

Hey all,

I’ll be working with Flax Engine for my own entry. No idea what I’m making yet. I’m a composer, low poly 3D artist, and C# programmer ready to dive headfirst into danger.

The project will be hosted through GitHub and communications will be (most likely) through Discord. If I fail to find a team I will still be entering solo.

Good luck all!

Sorry I missed this comment! I appreciate your support.

While the current version is functional, there are improvements to be made. I had to drop it for a while but I do have a plan to update the UI very, very soon as well as include whatever is necessary to make the process easier for first-time users. Whether this is a batch for ffmpeg, a chaiNNer script, or just something directly in Unity remains to be seen. Stay tuned!

I did, but I chose to ignore it the first few times. Bad call.

It’s a shame about the lack of audio, but completely understandable given the time constraints. The wow factor behind the concept cannot be understated– this is a VERY cool game mechanic. It could use a little more feedback and explanation, but this is one of the coolest sword mechanics I’ve seen in a recent game and I’d love to see it as part of a larger combat system. I think there’s room to grow a game from this, it’s just a matter of polishing things up and improving the user experience. The horde mode gameplay is more than serviceable, but I hope you get a chance to add some audio and impact effects postjam as without those effects it feels like it lacks something.

Congrats on the entry!

I’ll admit that I glossed over the controls the first time I played this, and I wish I hadn’t– once you start using the healing orbs, the gameplay loop is fast and frantic in a way that I feel has a lot of potential. Almost everything in this game feels polished to a T, and there’s not a thing I’d change.

I think if you keep working on this game and give it a little more flair, you’ll be well on your way to a commercial arcade title a la Devil Daggers or Downwell. Keep at it!

The name didn’t lie.

There’s interesting ideas here, especially considering the engine in use. I’m always curious with EFPSE games that go lighter on the combat and FPS mechanics, and you got a lot of mileage out of the level design. I’ll admit it took me way too long to realize the red mushrooms were bad. I wasn’t entirely sure how hunger worked, but the threat was real enough to keep me moving through the fence labyrinth. There’s a lot in here, especially for three days, and the artwork has a great consistency to it.

Congrats on another great submission!

This one was tough, and such an elaborate gameplay loop too considering the time! I’m impressed by the number of animated assets and interactible objects in the game as well as the number of levels– you even got a boss battle and cutscene stills in there somehow!

I’ll admit the level end wasn’t immediately clear to me, and in my first playthrough I just killed most or all of the enemies and moved through the level select. I found myself having to leave enemies alive in order to give myself enough fuel to safely navigate the level. On paper I would have told you this idea would have felt too cumbersome, but in practice the battery gameplay loop works perfectly.

There’s one main issue I noticed in the gameplay– I think your locomotion system is normalizing the Input direction in a way that makes the player keep moving at 1 speed even after they let go of WASD or the joystick. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it pushes the player forward long after Input has been released and doesn’t feel the best. I think you’ll need to add one more check to make sure your Input Axes are still being held before the movement takes place to fix that.

Awesome work on this one!

Mechanically I feel like you managed to find a very good balance between the frustration of the health mechanic and the rapid pace of gameplay. I found myself having to basically zero in on locations and objectives without a moment to spare because of the time pressure, and the simple and easily readable layouts helped greatly in making this possible.

I could see this being turned into a larger gameplay loop if you found more ways to mess with the player’s health– for example, zones or stages where you don’t have health drain up until you cross a threshold. Overall, very clean and well put together. Great work on the submission!

I’d love that, I’m trying to improve in Unreal as much as possible and would greatly appreciate anything I can get my hands on.

It seems like this is a skill issue. I was trying to get up to the highest island by climbing the tree, then launching myself from the tree– it didn’t go too well.

The first level gave me some issues with lighting but I had a pretty good time here. The rocket jumping mostly feels good, though strafejumping emulation could improve it. I would maybe try to block off the outer edges of the map as it is possible to get inside the hillside; I also wondered whether the island at the very top of the map was actually accessible, and some kind of signposting could potentially improve this.

Congrats on getting a submission done! I wish I knew how to do this kind of thing in Unreal.

This game’s on an entirely different level. I loved its atmosphere, the consistent and impressive visual quality, the great gameplay and locomotion, and especially the three-layer levels. I think there’s issues here and there with balance, projectiles and occasional signposting or clarity but what you have here is an awesome foundation for a special kind of retro FPS we haven’t really seen before. As a month long jam I would be impressed, as a three day jam I’m bewildered. I hope you keep at it.

These kinds of puzzle games are hardly my forté, but that didn’t stop me from making a good amount of progress before calling it quits. This was an impressive little entry.

Everything about it– the consistent graphics, the reliable and highly generous checkpoint system, and the level design all made for a very engaging loop out of something very simple.

My main complaint is the music– not that it’s bad as it perfectly fits the game’s story and aesthetic, but I think it is far too short and repetitive for the length of the game and some additional variations would be a welcome addition. This is hardly a realistic gamejam complaint, but more of a general note should you take the game further.

I think you’ve done a splendid job with this. If you add a little more variation to some of the environments and work some minor minimalist aesthetic details into your cave structure, I think you have a reasonable paid premium version on your hands. I would also recommend adding swiping controls and bringing it to the Google Play store.

Excellent work!

As advertised, there were many, many explosions.

One small thing I noticed on the main stream of the game was that at night time (and props for getting a day/night cycle in there!) light is still being cast on all of the buildings from below the scene. This can be fixed by having a plane rotated 180 degrees on the X axis that matches the dimensions of your map. It will block the light from below and if you have other lights in the scene, they will be the only lights visible on buildings at this time of day.

I think you could probably build off of this with more mechanics as between inventory switching and the character controller, there is a game to be had here. Polishing the grenade jumping into a full mechanic would be a welcome addition, and potentially you might even want to go the route of a 3D platformer where you give the player a set number of grenades to reach a target location or blow up a distant object.

This game was great! I did not finish it as the first level after the fork had me scratching my head with one of the craziest difficulty spikes I’ve ever witnessed.

The controls took a little getting used to, and felt a little stiff and floaty at first, but the usage of momentum for levels was on point and made for some exciting levels. The inclusion of par times was a nice touch, though I can’t even fathom how much effort the gold medals would take on certain stages as silver was the best I could do in nearly every scenario.

All in all, this was a very polished and fun entry.

I hope you consider a postjam paid release if you weren’t already, so you can get paid for the amazing game you made. Add some extra stages, some tournament or silly story mode, a slight facelift, and a few new bells and whistles and it’s basically shippable as a premium product.

It runs tolerably on my laptop, but I would definitely say that lowering the minimum requirements a bit would be a great idea should you take the game further as this game has strong potential within a more casual market. I know as an Unreal Engine 5 game there’s only so much you can do, but it’s well worth looking into at least as what you have here is more than viable as a proof of concept for something greater.

WELL DONE.

I really loved this entry. The concept is innovative, the art is adorable, and I found the feedback on most of the gameplay to be surprisingly competent for such a short development time.

Thanks for holding the jam!

Thanks! I plan on retiring this version for a remake in GODOT to settle any licensing issues down the line and make the project open source, but that’s at least three weeks or more away. In the meantime, I’m still taking feedback for any issues that need to be addressed for the tool.

Once that version is on par with the Unity version, the #1 feature on my to-do list is a video splitter that generates the image sequence for you– I think FFMPEG or Blender will be your best bet in the meantime.

I planned on keeping the tool up to date and got it done in a hurry for the Reload Magazine jam, but the upkeep side of things fell through thanks to a busy schedule and some other complications along the way. Hopefully I can make good on that in the weeks to come.

The VA work was a long night of editing. :’) Totally worth it though, I love how it came out. I highly recommend checking out the VAs here, Anubitek was responsible for the Patrol chatter you hear. Many of my favorite lines are quite rare as they’re bound to inactive/idle time per guard, and I’m not sure if they’re even possible to hear in the current version of the game.

I can’t account for trackpad vs. mouse, but you’re far from the first to have issues and an alternative WASD control scheme has been highly requested. As for VIPs spawning in buildings, it’s a regression from the 5.05 update which fixed the Patrol system so that patrol squads actually roam a desginated patrol path instead of sticking only to the F.O.B. patrol route. The change was too important to wait and test, and unfortunately this ended up being one of the side effects. Before this update, VIPs and patrols all spawned in the area where you drop off clearance codes and it made the first few VIPs agonizingly difficult while the rest of the game was a breeze.

Thankfully, the AIs don’t ever get trapped in buildings as buildings all carve obstacle zones into the navmesh. If you get their attention and run away, they should chase you out of the alley they got stuck in. That’s our stopgap for before the fix goes in.

Thank you for checking out our game!

There is a system in place that makes foreground buildings fade in opacity. Unfortunately, the Kenney assets we used as placeholders were never intended for this or for textured surfaces, and we didn’t have enough time to clean them up.

As far as I know the WebGL version is mostly accurate now, with the only difference being slight distortion on video quality and a noticeably worse framerate. There are issues with lighting as a result of rushing through the environment art, and I will be revisiting that at some point postjam.

Thanks for taking the time to check out our game!

It wouldn’t be a gamejam entry if the biggest time commitment was for an asset that nobody sees. In our game I spent a good hour or two modeling a massive tower with stone gargoyles that rises out of the ground, and the trigger pops up before the corner of its base is on screen.

I had no idea you snuck in that detail, that’s awesome.

Okay, it sounds like this is another case of not having the brain for puzzle games. I’ll give the game another try with this in mind.

This was a great entry! I have some issues with audio levels as some sound effects could end up being much louder than others. I also feel that the player movement could use a little smoothing on its motion.

Most of the visuals are very well done; I personally wish the stages had a less aggressive pattern of movement. That’s about it for the negatives, the presentation here has very little in terms of issues and it is a very readable game.

The concept is of course the real star of the show, both in story and how it actually affects gameplay. I wish there was a category to represent how much I appreciated the use of dog.jpg, but I’ll just tack it onto Story for now.

I cleared the game once only doing the upper floors, then once more deliberately going closer to the Cursed zones to find the person I missed; I wish there was a better indicator of how closer you are to the two realms as I had to blindly guess how low I was going. I would also recommend setting the HUD scaling so that the game is playable in WebGL’s iframe view as opposed to needing fullscreen enabled.

Most of my feedback is just nitpicking for future releases should you continue the project; you did a good job with this.

In my playthrough, I was unable to get past the button as my grave got stuck above the platform even though the platform was retracted at the time. I also had an instance where I had two graves next to each other on the spikes, and instead of landing on them I fell through both of them.

There’s been a lot of weird crossover with this theme and Halloween that I’ve noticed, and this is perhaps the furthest I’ve seen it taken.

I’ll start out with my one and only real complaint: the camera is slightly tilted, and doesn’t directly translate to WASD movement. This is a little confusing at first. I would either make the player move camera-relative or tilt the camera to match the absolute direction again.

After you get used to this, the game is essentially a perfect small arcade title. The presentation is flawless and the art assets are incredibly well done.

I love the gameplay mechanic of skeletons colliding with each other as it fits perfectly with the cartoony aesthetic. The fact that your high score is persistent and kept between sessions is also a nice touch. I also found the difficulty to be chaotic, but very manageable until your mistakes start piling up. The way they speed up when you get close is an interesting way to make them just a bit more dangerous, but thanks to their poor turning speed deaths never feel unfair.

This was an incredibly well put together entry. I would get this on the App Store and Google Play ASAP. Make some extra stage layouts and maybe an extra rare enemy type, just MAYBE some kind of temporary powerup, and you’ve got yourself a commercial game ready to go.

For the most part, this entry is simple but effective.

Presentation-wise, I have nothing but good things to say about it. The 2D shadows are well done and I especially appreciate the way the lights disappear when the source is blocked by an object. The music is great as well.

I think the game could use a little more polish. Puzzles involving buttons and switches start to run into issues and the collision detection on multiple graves near each other can get buggy, which is a significant issue when these graves are the only thing between you and a spike floor.

I don’t think it would be a stretch to say this is a viable commercial concept, and putting aside the bugs I think you’ve done a great job creating a minimum viable product.

Unfortunately the environment is a lot busier than it ought to be. I’m not satisfied with the buildings; there are some custom buildings that are okay, not the best, but the Kenney assets had some rough UV wrapping as they were never meant to be textured. Since I didn’t have time to fix the FBXs, I scrambled to throw whatever materials had already been made up on the buildings, and as a result the buildings’ neon windows are just as bright as the HUDs, characters, and other elements of essential gameplay. Even worse, these buildings have a tougher time fading for the camera because of the dark color hiding their rough edges.

In postjam I’ll be making a new set of less aggressive neon materials and I’ll take a little more time into the buildings’ quality. In the meantime, just try to let the objective marker take you in the right direction. I think the game definitely needs a panel or two of clear and concise gameplay explanations, but once you figure out the objectives loop it’s a very simple back-and-forth affair.

PRO TIP: With some exceptions, enemies can’t see in the dark and SHIFT will break line of sight– even when they’re already engaged in combat with you. You can use this to safely reload, get out of a tough firefight, or close the distance to your VIP target while avoiding the fire of their guards.

In most cases Unity is very compatible across platforms; you’ll only feel the difference when you get into video codecs and external resources. Unfortunately, our game used both. :’)

Let me know if you get a build for linux up and I’ll gladly test it for you!

You didn’t miss that, it’s the most commonly requested feature. I want to get alternate controls in there soon but I don’t have a timeline for when postjam support will start. I don’t think implementation will take too long.

Thanks for checking it out!

Ah, it was a couple of days ago that I played this so I misremembered. I played this game in Wine on Linux, which is where my issues came from; a native build would most likely run without problems. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this in Unity games and I’m fully aware that it’s on my end.

Sorry about that!

How was this a solo effort?

This feels like a big project in the making– a great game concept, a great use of the mechanics, and a sense of progression capped off by good level design and even a boss encounter. This was excellent.

If I had one criticism, the RNG involved in loot spawns can be a little tricky to balance if they involve permanent upgrades as opposed to consumables. I found my second attempt far easier than the first after getting walk speed upgrades instead of health upgrades. It’s basically a nonissue and something I bring up only in case you try to make something beyond the jam.

I almost want to dock a point on aesthetics for the fonts being Liberation Sans, as a good pixelated font could have kept the style of the rest of the game… but in doing this I thought to myself, “really? Am I that desperate to criticize it?”

This ended up being a perfect 5/5 across the board. This is a master-class entry and I only wish I could actually give some better and more detailed feedback.

It seems like I missed your comment earlier. Thanks for giving the game a go, and I’m glad you liked the final result! Development was a wild ride and I feel lucky for getting brought on to be a part of it, as I was originally going to skip GDTVJam for other ongoing projects.

Believe me, I’ve tried with the patrol audio. Really, those guys need better military radios. Ragtag resistance or not, walkie talkies? Seriously? It’s the late 21st century, act like it!

Jokes aside, I rushed through the audio filtering for anubitek’s dialogue in a single night and the system involves simple calls. I think the changes will be too sweeping to promise a deadline on, but I’m thinking I can fix them by doing the following:

• Reprocess the original VA audio with a less aggressive set of filters (this will take time as the game has around 130 separate audio files for the patrols)
• Break patrols into their own mixer with an adjustable slider on the menus
• Have every PatrolVoices component report in to a Patrol Dialogue Master when speaking, and tell the DialogueMaster when it stops (most likely an int, currentPatrolVoices, that increments and decreases)
• Don’t allow dialogue if too many are playing (only play if maxPatrolVoices > currentPatrolVoices)
• Don’t play dialogue if the player is too far away to hear
• Expose the maxPatrolVoices variable of PatrolVoices and allow the player to customize it in menus

Other audio in the game… I’ll wait for postjam since the lines that were in but bugged have already been dealt with. The rest were never implemented and remain on the cutting room floor. I believe we ended up only using 30-40% of the VA dialogue for the PA system, and many of the sounds for abilities or gameplay are unfinished or absent entirely. I’m not happy about that, but that’s just gamejam jank for you.

The point is, I think we have our work cut out for us if we go postjam. Again, thanks for giving it a go, and hopefully soon we can squash some of the more complicated problems!

Pretty much agreed on all points. Hotkeys sound like a wonderful idea; my first instinct would be 1,2,3 as hotkeys for abilities, but if we continue the game I think I’d prefer to have multiple playable characters at once which would definitely take priorities for numbers. I think the focus on the entirely world-space HUD was a gamble that people will love or hate in its current iteration.

While the emission helps with the character a little bit, I agree about the environment. We played around with a few different lighting levels and environment textures during development, and only the rain system and main characters shipped looking as they originally did in the early days. We probably would have actually accounted for the dark player model causing problems, but I fell way behind on the world generation until maybe the last Friday or Saturday; at that point it was all hands on deck for getting the game working properly.

Thanks for playing, and I appreciate the very thorough feedback!

That was a lot of tanks.

I think the range and turn rate on the tanks can be a little tough to work with, but it really pushed me to exploit the mechanics as much as I could to get damage without taking it. There’s no shortage of obstacles to take advantage of and the only thing stopping me from perfectly taking down tank after tank is the fact that they quickly get so overwhelming in number.

Overall, this is a neat concept executed well, with a consistent level of quality across the board. Even ignoring that it’s a solo effort, this is commendable. Great work!

I would have greatly appreciated a run button as the walk speed left me just begging to clear an otherwise spectacular scene. Having any amount of backtracking at all will ruin the pacing if the move speed is that of a slow walk. I wish I didn’t feel this way, as when I first saw the in-game visuals I was generally impressed.

While the gameplay is very light, the presentation here is wonderful. The use of lighting is generally great and I can see that you had some lofty ambitions with this entry. Congrats on getting to the finish line!