itch.io

Unfortunately my tutorials are mostly for the company where I work, or on very advanced topics (Co-Location, Room Reconstruction).  Here are the Oculus Unity samples: https://github.com/oculus-samples.  I recommend starting with https://github.com/oculus-samples/Unity-StarterSamples.  I'm a Unity dev primarily, so I don't have much advice on the Unreal side.

My best advice is to find some mechanics in other games that you like.  Here is the list of ones I recommend for the cozy-dark feel.

a fisherman's tale (short)
Moss (medium)
the last clockwinder (short)
Budget Cuts (medium)
Walkabout Mini-Golf (party)
Demeo (surprisingly long, you can only save between levels)
Virtual Virtual Reality (medium)

The things that will drive the VR design are locomotion.  I was thinking of building the boids app in VR with the hands being fish like the planes in Xortex from The Lab.

I'm an expert on VR development, feel free to ask questions.  The Oculus sample projects are a good starting point.  What platform are you building for?

VR would be great, although I'm not sure how I would do the locomotion.

Is an APK sideloaded app for Quest an acceptable submission format?

This is a nice base for a game, and I'd play more levels when you make them.

Ya, it could probably use a health buff.  Flamethrower plus choosing attack increases is ridiculously overpowered ;)

Really neat concept.  The pacing and cheats make the game into an interactive story, so on theme.

I skipped out on having each character level because of time, but I think if they were all leveling the timing would have been right.  Thanks for playing!

After the Bears it is just endless rabbits.  At that point you should go for the dragon.  I'll make a note on the game page.

I'm glad you liked it!  The flamethrower attack is really satisfying on the clumps, I agree.

That is curious on the text, can I get some more info?  Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, or Linux?

The characters are modeled after some friends, and the flamingos are an inside joke with them.  Thanks for playing!

I got to -3 health before it reset.  I also found the text at the top started obscuring too much of the screen.  Having to dodge the skeletons to get to the next weapon was nice.

I'm not sure I was supposed to be able to attack in every direction at the same time, but it was fun to.  It also seemed to mess with the movement when I did that.

I found the controls to be really hard, a target highlight or cursor would have gone a long way.  Some of the targets, like the water trough, didn't allow targeting from all sides.

You have to swim straight down to the ring that has the particles coming out, then back to the surface.  After that you get a lot more air to explore with.

The game design was really well done.  It was hard to use the melee weapons, and hard to navigate while holding escape.  The controls were also not clear, but maybe I missed an explanation of them.

This was a lovely game, and I love the upgrades you put in.  The upgrade paths really make it interesting.

I was confused when I was able to continue playing while the screen saying I'd have to diver deeper was still up.  I didn't see a way to dismiss the screen.

I saw the name and thought this was about diving really deep in scuba, because 'stage diver' refers to someone who takes many extra tanks with them on a dive.  Still a fun concept.  The art and music are especially nice, as is the menu effect.

I almost wish the mosaic levels were one gigantic one.  Great user of the shapes of the images to drive the puzzles.  I had a hard time with the first kraken puzzle, but the rest went really quickly.

I should show you how to do the VO with the AI.  Once you have the system setup, it becomes several times easier to do than recording yourself.  You just type in what you want the audioclip to be and move on.

The cost varies on the tools.

The audio and music are free.  The music requires you request access from Google, but they grant pretty easily.  I had to do a little editing on the music to make it loop properly.

You can get free image generation, but I paid for Runpod.io servers with Stable Diffusion Automatic1111, which are amazingly easy to set up.  They charge about 35c per hour and a 512x512 image takes 2s to generate.  I use the background remover tool, which makes it take about 12s per image, but I just let it run while I code and then come back to browse the image gallery of 20 images for the one I like.  I also used a bit of ControlNet on Scuba Steph to get the poses.  There was cleanup on a number of the images needed, and I did some compositing on Scuba Steph.

The voice over says to go upward, but that could have been made more obvious.  Thanks for playing! After finishing the line the only thing to see on the surface is the rubber ducky and the voice over saying you're done.

Wow!  200m is certainly the record.

I have to give the (not so) fun fact about diving that deep:  Oxygen at normal air 21.3% is toxic below about 57m, so you'd die long before you made it to 200m on the gear provided.

We have servers running that we will likely take down after the jam.  We can start them back up for the final playthroughs by the judges, but would love to know when you plan to play them so we can start it back up.  If you are up for playing the downloaded version of our game (hexagon tactics) then you'll get the real time generation of the character and enemies.

I tried to run on my mac and got

bad CPU type in executable: /Users/dgeisert/Downloads/Micro Management by MetaPhile/micromanagement  Saving session... ...copying shared history... ...saving history...truncating history files... ...completed.  [Process completed]

True enough.  We are using an LLM backend and a Stable Diffusion backend that we have running during the jam rating period.  We also have a set of predefined values from a run I did that will continue to work after the backends are shut down.  It is a pretty new space, and it can be difficult to know how to best handle situations with servers.  Some of the servers are high GPU costs and get expensive to run for a full week.

Putting the requirement for someone inputting their own OpenAI API key is pretty high bar to put on others to try a jam game.  If you are going to do that I'd recommend posting a video of a playthrough.

Thanks!  Your game was also really well done.  I just did the typical down - left strategy over and over, but it was still fun to have it be animals instead of numbers.

Thanks!

I think I've run into the problem you're build files are having before.  Sharing Mac builds is difficult, and if you rename the app or zip file it will break the unpacking process for the other users.  Make sure to build the app with the name you want to distribute as, and when you zip it don't rename the zip.

I love the concept, and it would be fun to take it a step further and do a flow of
Famous Painting > Clip > txt2img
Then put the real with 3 using that flow.

It really points to how art is subjective and the visual appearance of the art is not always the part that gives it value.

I got 10/13

No room to expand further.  Nice simple game that was complete and playable.  Well done.

Ya, 48 hours is tight.  We ended up getting Falcon 7B using basic descriptions to then prompt Stable diffusion.

What we did was we had the gameplay set, and specific strings used to define the enemies (e.g. "A weak long ranged enemy") then used the setup to ask the LLM for
"give me the name of an enemy that would be in a world {world description} fighting against {character description} with the description {enemy description}"
That then chained into
"give me the visual description of the character {Enemy Name} in the world {world description}"
Which chained to asking stable diffusion for an image with background removed of
"A figure in the center of frame. {Enemy Visual Description}. 4K. colorful. High Quality..."

I'd already been using this kind of chaining prompts in other projects.  It does require a decent amount of prompt engineering to get them just right, as a prompt early in the chain being off makes the ones later in the chain even further off.

I'm impressed by the TTS and LLM integrations.  The enemies were too large and got caught on the doorways so that I could just sit in the hall and kill them.   One thing to look at for the item generation is using a stable diffusion model, that you could train with your tileset, then ask it for an item fitting a specific description.  Same for enemies with background removal, although I admit animations for enemies like that would be a challenge.

The controls were not the classic WASD I was expecting.  It would have been nice to have it move up/down/left/right instead of turning and forward backward.

I was having the enemies moving and attacking a lot without me moving, that made it really hard, as some of them are fast!