itch.io

Check out this video by Thomas Brush and Felipe his 3D artist where they use our art rule to re-create Elden Ring:

I would say stick with the engine's defaults. I feel like it's going to end up a rule that gets somewhat bent, so I would just say, avoid it if you can and use it as a creative limitation.

Visual assets. Any audio assets from anywhere that you have access to is fair game.

Themes are generally not gonna be for everyone. Good luck with the other jam and, wow that's a big team o.O

Pretty much :)

Yes you can use multiple objects :)

Alright everyone, the theme of this game jam is: 

~Something not all that creative and you've probably seen it before~

***Oh you thought that was the theme? No, no, the theme is....***

>NOT THIS ALL CAPS TEXT!!!<

It's "Small input, big output" - in other words, some sort of limited action taken by the player must result in a large effect, or lots of effects, in some way.

And we have a new rule: All art assets must come from your engine, and if your engine doesn't let you create any 3D object or sprite for some reason, you can import cubes/spheres/cylinders, or squares/circles/triangles into the engine, but nothing more complicated than basic shapes. This doesn't apply to any kind of audio.

Resource for art (use this to make your game look good despite being visually simple):

Hey!

Come join the Judica Me Discord Server: https://discord.com/invite/Wys9YHFDY7

Under the "Judica Me Game Jam 2023," you'll find channels related to the game jam. You can ask for help, show off your progress, support each other, and find a team.

Let's make some games!!!

Awesome, excited to have you join! Yes the game can include platforming elements, but platformer and top-down shooter can't be its primary genre. For example, it can be a platforming RPG, which would have something a bit more interesting to it than just a basic platformer.

Glad you learned a lot with this! Awesome :D

Thanks! I don't get why everyone is posting cats, but yeah I appreciate the feedback :D definitely hoping to expand the visuals and ambience as this game progresses.

Ah ok, I'm not familiar with the genre then. But yeah great stuff all around :D And yeah I hope this helped you get a better understanding and motivation for your big project :)

Yup I know, everybody had a short amount of time. Best of luck and hopefully this goes well! Good stuff :D

Absolutely, yeah this is terrific stuff! I'm glad you enjoyed the experience and thanks for posting the game!

It's a great first entry! 

Spectacular stuff. I generally gave you my opinion already but yeah, for the record, visually beautiful, great movement controls and sound (one thing there is you can randomize the pitch of the sounds a little each instantiation). Mechanically not a whole lot to do between watch towers but of course it's kind of intended for that for the atmosphere. It seemed that nothing awaited me at the next watchtower though unfortunately.

There is something so satisfying about placing brightly colored blocks with physics and hearing those popping sounds haha! Some improvements you could make would be to pretty up the background, like maybe add a fog or blend the ground with the sky or something, and vary the pitch by a random amount ever time to place a block. 

A fantastic and incredibly fun core mechanic! The game feels great as-is, maybe a bit more visual flair like particle effects and some subtle squash-and-stretch would've taken it to the next level. Also if you narrow down a great color scheme, you'd have a pretty much perfect game for the scope. 

You nailed the core mechanic and the theme! Visuals work but could definitely get some polish with more time, and the game feel could be drastically improved if you keep in mind the principle of "player presses some option, and a strong result happens immediately". UI doesn't highlight or anything if I mouse over, it wasn't clear how to pick up ore, etc. But that stuff is just a matter of polishing - this is great. 

Looks great visually! Unfortunately, players are going to get very frustrated trying to find objectives with that little direction! So if the swole guy gave us a bit more guidance or if the environment was so designed as to naturally draw us to where these mushrooms would be, that would be a very important improvement, given the focus of this game is essentially investigation. Also consider that people would instinctively assume ALL of the mushrooms would be scattered throughout the entire forest, so not finding them after a decent amount of quick exploration is just intuitively confusing. All in all well done! You certainly nailed the theme in my opinion :) 

Spectacular! Level design makes perfect use of the game mechanic and the progression of difficulty is great. You nailed the gameplay. Maybe it could have resembled a city builder a bit more to better suit the theme but, honestly as-is it's probably better than if you tried to do that. The visuals are probably fine but maybe could use a tiny bit of polish.

I've played 9 games from the jam so far and this one is the best, hands down. I appreciated the way you presented the tutorial, and you totally nailed the idle/clicker mechanic for the scope. By the end my island was just gas stations haha! With more expansion and maybe a few other downsides to certain buildings, like having too many of one type too close together or something, could make this into a fine little Steam release.

Oh by the way, the popping sound when placing objects seems to be a bit delayed - it has to be IMMEDIATE. The game feel is so close to perfect.

My one actual substantial suggestion would be to make sure we can move the camera to some extent, because opening the menu blocks a huge chunk of vision of the city. It would be nice to build while having the menu open, although granted you could just close it every time you choose a new building.

This game is for sure in top 3 most beautiful games on the jam visually. I noticed a few issues:

-The help menu shows WAY too many controls all at once - the UI is quite self-explanatory and I'm looking at the help screen thinking woah, this is complicated - but in truth it is quite simple and easy to understand
-Are the buildings supposed to stay as ghostly outlines after I place them? Is there a delay?
-Clicking to destroy isn't fully accurate for some reason and you can destroy the wrong object it seems
-While moving the object to place it, it doesn't quite follow my mouse, it is always a bit behind. I don't think this should have acceleration or anything like that, and if it does, it should be faster or something because it feels sluggish, like I want to click/place it here, I don't want to wait for the building to catch up

But yeah despite all those fairly harsh points, this is the most impressive game I've played from the game jam yet.

Hi everyone!

So unfortunately, to rate if you haven't submitted a game, I have to explicitly mark you as a judge. I have to do this manually one by one (why is there not just a setting for anyone can rate -_-) and since no one asked yet, I suspect people who haven't submitted a game aren't broadly interested in rating so there's no sense in me doing that for everybody,

SO here's the plan: if you haven't submitted a game but still want to rate, just post a comment and I'll mark you as a judge :) 

This is actually one of the best looking games of the jam. Unfortunately, while it is simple, there really isn't much of a core gameplay mechanic - there is no challenge of any kind, you just exist and wander. Unless I missed the objective. Game feel could be improved considerably: tweak the speeds compared to the animations, add some dust particles when I run, add some audio and ambient music or wind or something, tighten that jumping because it feels like I float like a feather on the way up, and crash like a rock on the way down. Great work on the terrain and on getting the dog working and climbing!

I'm glad someone did the turn-based combat idea :D Visually I gave this a 5/5, it's clean, cohesive, and simple. Core mechanic is nice and simple, you have an aspect of decision-making as to whether to heal or attack, but once I seem to win, nothing really seems to change so there isn't really a reward. The Rock is still there staring at me! Haha xD Obviously when it comes to game feel, audio and visual feedback is crucial to know you hit or got hit. So I gave you 3/5 on the mechanic, 1/5 game feel, 5/5 visuals, 1/5 audio, and 5/5 theme :) Great stuff!

Visually really nice. I think you stretched yourself a bit too thin though - you had basically every aspect of an RPG, character stats, inventory, dialogue, a big world, interactable stuff, etc. Given that the strength here is in the visuals of the world, it might've helped to tighten it down drastically to just exploration, or perhaps really downsized the world and just did dungeon crawling - probably didn't need to do character building, inventory, etc. To MikeTen's point, I was quite confused as to where to go as well, and I did listen to the wizard lol. I didn't find anything around the farmhouse, and I went to some sort of tower but wasn't able to enter.

Also why do I have to hold down RMB to look around and why is my vision so jittery and limited? It was quite odd that I had to use the keyboard to rotate, and I think stripping down the other elements would've let you polish this crucial aspect.

So, lots of great takeaways for you here! Good stuff and I'm really glad you got this done and out for us to try out!

Visually really nice. I think you stretched yourself a bit too thin though - you had basically every aspect of an RPG, character stats, inventory, dialogue, a big world, interactable stuff, etc. Given that the strength here is in the visuals of the world, it might've helped to tighten it down drastically to just exploration, or perhaps really downsized the world and just did dungeon crawling - probably didn't need to do character building, inventory, etc. To MikeTen's point, I was quite confused as to where to go as well, and I did listen to the wizard lol. I didn't find anything around the farmhouse, and I went to some sort of tower but wasn't able to enter.

Also why do I have to hold down RMB to look around and why is my vision so jittery and limited? It was quite odd that I had to use the keyboard to rotate, and I think stripping down the other elements would've let you polish this crucial aspect.

So, lots of great takeaways for you here! Good stuff and I'm really glad you got this done and out for us to try out!

A solid entry! I wish the game feel was a bit better with the UI being a bit tighter and there being some feedback when I place buildings. As a player, I should really feel the impact of placing a building, and most importantly, I should immediately understand what it does. Something like an animation that highlights the fact that my food stores are now going up, or even a UI that shows up when I click on the farm. 

I ran out of money pretty quickly, I didn't really know if I was too greedy with making farms, I just knew my people were starving so I built a bunch of warehouses and farms and had no money to build a mage tower. 

So obviously with more time you can flesh this sort of thing out, that's why I wanted to make sure people focused on 1 core mechanic, so they could really focus and invest that sort of UX quality there.

But yeah, solid entry, looks great, tightening stuff, balancing, and a good dose of polish can take this to the next level.

The strengths of this game are definitely the great consistency of the art style and really solid audio for the axe. The game feel is kind of lacking because when I chop a tree, it just disappears. And from a core mechanic perspective - there isn't really a challenge or a downside to what I'm doing, and there may very well be interest in that sort of thing as a relaxing experience, but it even that would be improved with like... the axe denting the tree, particles flying, and then the tree falls and you feel the impact as it hits the ground and the branches shake, etc. specifically because we are so focused on this one thing. But these are details, I'm willing to state them here because this is quite high quality for the game jam. Really well done! 

The strengths of this game are definitely the great consistency of the art style and really solid audio for the axe. The game feel is kind of lacking because when I chop a tree, it just disappears. And from a core mechanic perspective - there isn't really a challenge or a downside to what I'm doing, and there may very well be interest in that sort of thing as a relaxing experience, but it even that would be improved with like... the axe denting the tree, particles flying, and then the tree falls and you feel the impact as it hits the ground and the branches shake, etc. specifically because we are so focused on this one thing. But these are details, I'm willing to state them here because this is quite high quality for the game jam. Really well done! 

I tried again and it seemed to work much better. Will leave a review now :)

...the cat pictures?

Awesome! Absolutely!

It literally froze my entire PC o.O I couldn't even open task manager haha. I'm pretty sure my graphics card is nvidia.

What can I learn from this lol

So, not sure what happened but the game crashed my entire PC seconds after loading the main menu o.O 
I'll give it another go tomorrow but might be something that needs looking at? 

Congrats on completing the game jam! I'm gonna be a bit critical - I think the most important thing that would've improved this game would've been clarity. There is a lot that's going on, I can buy a scout, I can explore a planet, but I'm not entirely sure how else to interact with anything or what my goal should be. I know I need crystals, but I don't know how to find them. The theme was super tough to nail but, I think focusing in one just 1 mechanic would've helped you in all the other categories as you would've had more time - now, despite my critique, this was no easy task by any means and you succeeded to complete the game jam, and there is a ton you can now take away for your next project!

Thanks for joining the jam my friend. So, spot on in terms of matching the theme. The core mechanic is clear and simple and has the challenge of trying to determine the best course of action and dealing with the consequences, although it seems like you often have an opportunity to just go back a page or two and no longer be dead. Game feel gets a bonus for the atmosphere and the animations that I think are build into the engine? Not sure but it adds a nice touch, but some audio and general feedback of the visuals would've added to that. Sound of course didn't quite make the cut. 

So yeah solid stuff for a first completed game and narratively, it is definitely intriguing and makes you want to try more paths.

You should be able to keep updating your game :) No problem there.