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Damon L. Wakes

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A member registered Jul 24, 2017 · View creator page →

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I'm sorry, but this game is impossible to take seriously. Giraffes don't have horns, they have ossicones - skin-covered bone structures only superficially similar to horns. This is a wildly inaccurate detail in what I'm sure is otherwise a 100% entirely down-to-earth interactive work.

Ah - if I understand correctly (relying on Google Translate here) then this might not actually have been a valid jam entry in the first place. I think the games are supposed to be new, made specifically for the jam theme. (But yeah, now that you mention it, the March 2022 release date is a pretty firm indication it didn't involve the AI game generator I'm pretty sure was only added to GDevelop a few weeks ago!)

Apologies for replying in English, by the way. The only way I could write in Spanish would be using automatic translation, and since you've managed to read previous English comments I trust you more than Google!

Finally, the playable "Watch the DVD player logo hit the corner of the screen" game we've all been waiting for.

ART!

It's a bit of a trivial quibble, but I'm not sure the switching mechanic really makes me think "on/off." I also found that the game seemed to steer me away from switching to the ghost during the clown battle since it takes a while to get Maisy within range of the head, and it seems easier to dodge shots once you're there than it is to switch forms (which seems to dump you back down to ground level?) and make your way back up if necessary. It may be that I wasn't playing in the most efficient way, though. The game otherwise feels pretty polished: I like the graphics and the sound (especially the slowed-down music) is well selected all round.

This is a neat game: "Prioritise" made me think quite a bit, and I get the impression that the solution to that one is probably the key to beating later levels but I'm finding the lack of checkpoints or a reset button (and the fairly long delay between dropping out of the level and actually restarting) make it a little frustrating to keep experimenting with those. The most user-friendly option might be some way of rewinding time or undoing jumps, but that seems like a big ask. It's the kind of thing I'm quite willing to overlook in a jam game, even if I don't necessarily want to wrestle with it myself: the game as a whole is solid and I'm impressed by basically any platformer puzzle that gives me that sort of "Eureka!" moment after initially giving up. The only other thing I feel would improve this beyond tweaks to the overall try/fail/restart process would be sound: the graphics look great and it's immediately obvious what everything is (and reasonably easy to guess what it does).

I sometimes wonder if the AI generator was involved in some of the simpler GDevelop jam games, but in this case I don't get the impression that it was. My brief experiments with that thing have led to games that feel technically competent to a certain extent (with coin pickups featuring variably pitched sound, etc.), but that have nonsensical level layouts and poor balance, etc. This seems much more like something built from the ground up (hand-drawn art, but no camera movement and no sound, and the UI occasionally hidden by bits of the level). Basically, I'd be more suspicious of games that are only superficially polished/complete than ones that feel unfinished in a more rounded way.

It's good to see such a complete game, even if it's very simple and a little unpolished. I couldn't quite follow the story, but I like that there were little scenes in between levels: it feels like that's missing from a lot of games (especially jam games).

This is a really good effort. I would have liked some sound effects, and I felt as though the star was kind of fiddly to control to begin with - it's very floaty and it seems as though you can only really add momentum in one direction (of four) at a time - but the idea is a a good fit for the theme and I'm impressed by the variety of bullet hell attacks. The sun's "follow you with a beam for a bit before locking it in place and shooting" one is especially good.

If you were to do more with this I'd LOVE to see the two bosses used to defeat one another. You could goad the sun into firing that beam at the moon, and get the moon's homing shot to hit the sun. I found myself trying to do it anyway just for fun.

Really nice jam game - the menu with the (tweened?) items flying in and hovering is so good! The game itself is also really solid. I found I couldn't seem to scare the monster off with the flashlight, but health was plentiful enough on easy mode that it didn't feel as though it broke the game. I think part of the problem might have been that the combination of shift and right click brings up a menu on my machine, so I couldn't shine the light while sprinting away.

By the way, I see you seem to be having trouble with audio at your end but it didn't seem there was anything missing on mine (Firefox on Linux). I got music at the start, a heartbeat as the monster approached, and bleeps when picking up items (plus possibly other stuff I forgot).

Obviously there's only so much you can fit into a game jam (and I gather from the replies here you were probably shorter on time than most), but a little more audio would have done wonders here. Just a little victory jingle, even. Still, it's an impressively solid game as far as it goes: the timer, and the possibility of, say, moving Yellow to the heart before spotting the switch necessary to free Blue on the third level is an effective combination. I imagine you could come up with a bunch more interesting levels if you wanted to expand it.

This is a fun game - it may be simple but it feels very complete, which is a real achievement for a jam game. Some music or ambient sound would help polish it up, as would a little "Mwa-ha-ha!" or something when you click each demon (perhaps unique to that demon)? I second the idea that a leaderboard would be nice too: I can always try and beat a personal best (though I note the highscore on the title screen doesn't actually record it for me), but it would be great to compete with other people and get an idea what's considered a "good" score overall.

I also had a bunch of browser prompts pop up at the start, but simply hitting "cancel" on all of them let me play without (as far as I could tell) any technical problems.

A little bit of instruction in the comments would have been very useful: having the light "off" to begin with left me completely lost as to what was going on (and the character seemed to simply float around randomly and reset occasionally until I first turned on the light: I'm not sure if that was because hitting the button did something to initialise/reset the game or I simply couldn't see what was going on, but it made for a very confusing start).

Greater care with the graphics might also have helped communicate what was going on. I don't mean making them "better" in a more general sense - which is probably not the most effective use of time in a jam - but thinking about what you want each sprite to communicate to the player. The platforms seem to be photos rather than a representation of something I'd expect to be able to stand on, for example. And the hammers seem to fly directly towards the player, so why not make them some object that would ordinarily be expected to do that - maybe arrows or cannonballs? (I also noticed that you can keep playing the game even after a game over - not exactly a serious oversight but something that could potentially be addressed if you wanted to refine this later.)

Theme-wise this seems a great match for the jam, by the way. I feel like a lot of people went with lights for the on/off element but this makes it nice and central to the gameplay.

This is a really neat take on the jam theme, and if you make/made a game of this sort I'd love to play it.

Pony Princess is probably the most charming platformer character I've ever seen in a jam game. I'm not sure what's going on with her arm (leg?) when she runs, but the animation has a ton of character all the same. Gameplay-wise I feel as though it's not quite there - I wasn't sure how I was supposed to anticipate opponents' moves, if that's even a reasonable expectation - though the basic concept of getting into "honour-offs" when you hit a creature is delightful. It's also a novel take on the theme for this particular jam. (The voice acting was also a highlight.)

Haha! Yes, that's me in the freebie Borderlands mask: it was quite hard to see what the camera was picking up while wearing it, so I pretty much got whatever footage I got. I've done a couple of FMV things for jams now and they've always been extremely rushed, so it's great to know that the jokes land regardless!

I'm so glad it's made such an impression! This has absolutely made my day. :-)

The game was made with Twine, which I'm a huge fan of: it's really simple to pick up and use, but offers a lot of power and flexibility despite that. I've actually written a series of tutorials on it, and if you're curious how this particular game fits together you can actually import the HTML file back into Twine and explore its flowchart by following this one. (It might be a little hard to follow exactly how it works if you're unfamiliar with Twine, but the basic structure should be easy enough to grasp.)

Thanks! The audio was (as always) a little last-minute, but I ended up recording so many lines that the non-voiced passages felt a bit bare: I ended up adding the random page-flip sounds just to fill the gaps.

Though this was mostly an exercise in squeezing as many passages as possible out of a tiny word count, I did actually find that the self-imposed one-word limit prompted a bit of creativity in terms of exactly how things were phrased. I wasn't even positive that "autodefenestrate" was a real word when I settled on it, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was!

I'm glad you liked it! (And I'm firmly of the opinion that "SCHWING" is the sound all swords should make.)

I'm so glad you like it! I wanted to record even more lines originally but it turned out the mic wasn't working on the laptop I used to film so I had to dub it in later, which ate up quite a bit of the jam time.

This is really neat! I like the balance between slapping down high-scoring tiles as efficiently as possible, and trying to set up combos even if it means maybe not laying things down as densely as you might otherwise.

This is nice! A really good use of a tiny word count.

I know I managed to affect text in an SVG image by trying to make it a hyperlink in Harlowe - the text in the SVG essentially ended up being styled as a hyperlink, which looked terrible but seemed to open up a few intriguing options - so I'm hopeful that there's some way of doing it. But I probably would pick up a bit of SugarCube just to work with stuff like this. SVGs appealed to me initially just as a method of including images in the HTML without the unwieldy passages produced by Base64 URLs, but what you've done here shows just how much more they can do. (I've experimented with layered PNGs with transparent backgrounds as well - which might be easier under certain circumstances - but you'd need a truly absurd number of them to do anything like the kind of colour customisation you've got here.)

This is neat, and reminds me of some old Flash games that I really liked back in the day. My only real complaints are that it's a little slow to get through each day - I find myself waiting for enemies to appear quite a bit - and that dying seems to send you right back to the start. It's nice in a way that you get to keep your upgrades, but it also compounds the issue of the slow-ish gameplay: you end up back on Day One but wildly overpowered, earning only a trickle of income, essentially waiting until enough enemies appear that you can continue upgrading the sandcastle. I'd rather just restart from the beginning of the day I died on. That said, that's a small detail for a jam game and this really is great fun overall. I hope it does well! I'd rate it highly myself if I were taking part in the jam.

This is a really neat idea! I ran into an error with Firefox, though:

---

A fatal error has occurred. Aborting.

Error: no valid storage adapters found.

---

For the benefit of anyone else who might run into the same thing, I found it worked fine in Chromium.

I also got curious and tried saving the HTML file from the frame here to import into Twine 2 myself, but I'm not familiar enough with SugacCube to be sure how everything works. Trying "Play" from within Twine produces errors which is strange because the actual character builder clearly DOES function in Chromium (and because of the SVG info in the relevant passages I gather it shouldn't depend on external files not included with the HTML):

---

Error: <<print>>: bad evaluation: '' string literal contains an unescaped line break

<<print  '<<set $RGB0 to "(" + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[0] + ", " +  $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[1] + ", " + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[2] +  ")">><<set $RGB1 to "(" + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[3] + ", " +  $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[4] + ", " + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[5] +  ")">><<set $RGB2 to "(" + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[6] + ", " +  $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[7] + ", " + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[8] +  ")">><<set $RGB3 to "(" + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[10] + ", " +  $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[11] + ", " + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[12] +  ")">><<set $RGB4 to "(" + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[14] + ", " +  $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[15] + ", " + $opossum'+ $ID +'GENE[16] +  ")">>'>>

Error: cannot execute macro <<include>>: unable to parse macro argument ""COMMON ": unterminated double quoted string

Error: <<print>>: bad evaluation: '' string literal contains an unescaped line break

Error: <<print>>: bad evaluation: '' string literal contains an unescaped line break

Error: cannot execute macro <<include>>: unable to parse macro argument ""COMMON ": unterminated double quoted string

Error: cannot execute macro <<include>>: unable to parse macro argument ""COMMON ": unterminated double quoted string

Error: cannot execute macro <<include>>: unable to parse macro argument ""COMMON ": unterminated double quoted string

<<include "COMMON  LINEART">>

---

Given that, again, the thing clearly works as expected in at least one browser this may not be an issue to be fixed, but I include the details in case it's any help in making an admittedly ambitious project more robust. I've been rather intrigued by the possibilities offered by SVGs in Twine games myself and it's fantastic to see this: I might have a little go myself and see if it's possible to achieve something similar with Harlowe.

All in all, a technically impressive project that's also really cute. Thank you so much for sharing it!

Sorry, but if a game doesn't work in a second browser I don't try a third.

This might be my favourite game of the jam so far! It's simple, but what's there feels very solid. I like that it just gets faster and faster (particularly as it starts at such a leisurely pace). I'm assuming that's achieved simply by having the game speed itself steadily increase, but even if so it works very well. I especially like that the music keeps speeding up and up too.

The one suggestion I have to improve it is super small: I'd like the scores to remain visible on screen after getting a game over! Once you're essentially in a rocket-powered river raft with a minigun strapped to the front, piloting it through a crowd of crocodiles, it becomes very difficult to keep an eye on exactly what your score is so it's hard to know if you've beaten your best. (Actually, high scores would be a great little addition too - I've found them pretty easy to implement in GDevelop.)

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I'm afraid that hitting Enter to start did nothing in Chromium, and I couldn't even get that far in Firefox. It sounds as though other people have had more luck than I did, though, so hopefully you get plenty of ratings - what I did see looked pretty polished for a jam game!

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I'm afraid I'm also getting stuck after selecting an advantage/disadvantage, same as some of the other people here. It was the same in Firefox and Chromium. I'd be keen to play and rate it if I could, though!

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I'm afraid I didn't get to the first-person 3D bit I see in the screenshots because I was having trouble both getting through the early levels and simply getting the box to move at all, but there's a solid idea here! It might just take more than a week to get it running smoothly (especially on all devices, as I suspect other people might not have run into the same issue I did).

It might be small, but getting something done for a jam is always an achievement - especially this one, given how new GDevelop's 3D stuff is. I think reworking the player, enemy, and camera movement speeds might have been worthwhile here, since avoiding the enemies that could pass through walls seemed to hinge primarily on belting through the maze as fast as possible while the camera struggled to keep up, but again it's clearly a complete game and that's something to be admired given the nature of the tools and the tight time limit. Well done!

Hi! I think I might be able to help a little bit (though I think you'd need to contact the jam organisers to have any chance of fixing the game over on itch - hopefully the gd.games version is enough to count for the jam).

Based on the huge number of files you have available for download here, I think I see what's gone wrong. To get an HTML5 build to work, you need to combine all the files that GDevelop produces into a single zip file. Basically, use the option to produce a web game and there should be an option to "view files in folder" (or something very similar). You'll need to select all of those (Ctrl+A will typically do the job), then right-click one of them. There should be an option for something like "Compress" (or possibly "Send to..." which should give you one option called "compressed zipped folder). All in all, it seems as though you have all the files you'd need for this to work as a web game, they're just not arranged in a way that itch can deal with.

In case it helps, this video shows roughly what you should be looking for, though it skips over it very quickly at about 2:35:

The fact that GDevelop lets me do stuff like this is one of my favourite things about it - definitely hoping to do more in future! (Also, I did something similar for the last GDevelop jam, in case you're interested: https://damonwakes.itch.io/nine-hole-ninja)

Thanks!

Thanks! I had a real job recording that: my laptop mic didn't initially pick up my voice through the mask!

Glad you liked it!

This is neat! I found it a little difficult to get started, though: it took me a while to realise that "type the words on screen" were actually the words I needed to type right then. (My first guess was "SPEED" since it was sitting up at the top of the screen, and not immediately obvious it was connected to the slider next to it.)

Also, my score at the end showed as 0wpm, which seems as though it was probably wrong even if the average was brought way down by a long time spent blundering about at the start. I'm not that fussed, though: it's a fun game in its own right co competing for a high score would just be a cherry on top.

Haha! I wasn't sure the maths would be a draw here - I'm so glad you liked it!

Thanks! That might help clear things up. Your 4k monitor could be making the dice look fuzzy, but I don't have a higher resolution screen to test the game on myself so that's just a guess. (It certainly sounds like what I experienced at 1080p with dice sprites of a smaller size.) The physics issue almost certainly isn't just at your end: I suspect it's probably a quirk of how the new dice spawn then move. It shouldn't ever happen with the only die on screen, but once there's another one bashing about it's possible for some of the forces to cancel each other out: I've seen it happen on several occasions myself.