itch.io

Oh, so I remembered this morning that while I got 12th Overall in the October jam, in overall, I got 79th in Story. It clearly did not affect my overall rating. And 1/4 of the people who entered that jam played and rated my game. There was a story IMO, but really it was all told through music, the feeling of a CRT monitor, and it was a very simple story. So not compelling. I'm guessing gameplay made up for it. All the top ranked games are fun to play.

So I recommend focusing on gameplay. If your game doesn't have a story, just focus on making the gameplay addictive.

Go for it. It's not against the rules. I don't think you're going to get what you expect out of it, but the learning experience will be good for you.

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I did a test in the GameDev.tv Halloween jam where I used LLM-generated music. But I had spent 6 months playing with the tool and I tweaked a lot of things and wrote my own lyrics and had a clear direction. I then played like 150 games in the jam so I could find out what people thought about my use of AI. 70 people rated my game. I managed to come in 12th Overall and 12th in Music. I got 66 comments, and some very long discussions on the use of AI in games, specifically from people who are musicians for a living. You can read those here if they're of interest to you.

We have spent a lot of time over on the Godot forum talking about LLMs and their use in making games - which is pretty non-existent. If you use an LLM to code your game, it will inevitably have problems that the LLM cannot help you fix. At which point you'll have a mess of spaghetti code that you cannot understand. If you try to ask for help, people will be able to tell by reading it that it's LLM-generated code, and may decide not to help you with it at that point. Even if they do, a game jam is not the time to be waiting for a reply on a forum or discord for someone to help you debug code you don't understand yourself.

Thanks for checking it out.

That's a neat idea with the points and upgrade. I really would like a modular gun thing. The bridges thing is cool too. Like basically use it like a grappling hook to allow traversal....

Overall can be calculated, but going back over the last two GameDev.tv jams, it looks like you got to vote for Overall. In the Halloween jam I had 70 people vote on my game and it brought my ranking down somewhat due to law of averages. (I came in 12th overall.) I literally watched it go lower in the overall rankings the last two days. But the game that came in second also had 70 votes. Two other games that beat me had 45 rankings, and all the others had 15 or less.

So it really depends on what the people who rate your game think of it. All-in-all jams, like any judged competition are subjective. Different people like different things. All you can do is do your best.

I've decided to do a daily DevLog for the jam, but unlike the last jam I did this for, I'm going to try and tell people about it. :) Here's yesterday's entry, where I talk about how I came up with my game idea, and the parts I'm still struggling with when it comes to connection. Also what I got accomplished, and the dead ends I went down to get there. I'm developing in Godot. If you'd like to journey along with me, please come by and read.

I plan on blogging every day in the jam, and yesterday I blogged about this and how I got to my theme. And honestly I'm still trying to figure out how to put connection in. But I just kinda had this idea and I'm hoping to make it into something that works. I might make it into a kind of puzzler and somehow bouncing bullets off things helps people out? Maybe an idea of helping out the neighborhood?

Not every jam has a story criteria, but this one does. In the past I've seen the story just be in the game description. People will write crazy little blurbs about how Timmy has to solve puzzles or aliens will eat his friends and family if he doesn't solve these games. Or the story is you're an office drone, and you'll get electrocuted if you don't do something fast enough and it's just a conveyor belt and stuff to sort. Story can also be conveyed through music, overall tone of the game, even the colors you choose. Tetris with muted browns and a dour song is much different from something with a cozy theme and happy, bubbly tetrris blocks.

Personally, I give pretty high marks for this one if people even try.

I really enjoy your music, especially, Epic and Melancholic. I've completed 2 Godot Wild Jams, and 7 Jams total. I came in #24 in the previous Godot Wild Jam. You can check out my previous games and DevLogs on my page. I believe that music and sound design is a very important part of the gameplay experience.

I am contemplating a Hero's Journey narrative game, either as a Pokemon style game or action/adventure RPG. I don't have Discord, but you can message me on the Godot Forum @dragonforge-dev or using my webpage's contact form.

Excellent! If I can be a bit more specific, it would be good to have something short and loopable because the problem I've encountered is that when I do find like a gravel slide or something, it's for a specific duration which means you have to tie your animation and slide/wall slide length to that sound, or lety it cut off (I chose the latter).

I got through it this time! It was a lot of fun. My biggest complaint was that I would have preferred one use button instead of half a dozen different letters. It made it really hard to think fast, and so beating the game became a game of memorizing the patterns.

Mostly works. A few issues:

1. On the main menu you cannot select anything with the controller. You can fix this with a grab_focus() on the first button in the menu in the _ready() function of the main menu or the button. You also will want to add the XBox A button to the ui_accept built-in action.
2. You cannot look using the right stick. So to look you have to use your mouse.
3. All the buttons seemed to work. Except I couldn't pick up the bobby pin with the controller. X worked everywhere else though.

Take a look at this plugin I made. You can either use it or steal code from it.

https://github.com/dragonforge-dev/dragonforge-controller

That would be awesome. I literally have thousands of sound files, and I use Windows search feature in a root folder to find something. Like the other day I was looking for a good slide and wall slide sound, so I was just typing terms in to try and find something in all the files I have. It does pick up folder names, which helps. Sadly I didn't find anything great.

I took a look and it looks pretty straightforward. I am now waiting for approval to use CSS. Thanks.

This is a very impressive Itch page. Would you be willing to share the CSS you used to highlight and tilt the screenshots? I'd really love to add that to  my game jam pages.

BTW, I was doing a Zenva course yesterday and I was thinking about your evaluation of them. I realized that as a now seasoned Godot developer, I just ignore all the poor choices they make in coding, and take what's useful for me. They definitely have some good programming tricks IMO. However, overall I find GameDev.tv has better, more complete courses. They still have issues, like using @export variables when they should use @onready variables, but at least they don't pepper their code with hard-coded node references everywhere. You might check their courses out, though I have to say that while I found their Godot courses above average, I found their Blender courses to be stellar.

This was a creative game idea. I played for a while. The music and sound effects were good.

It took me a few deaths to figure out what was going on. It would have been easy to add controller support, and taken only a few minutes. Getting achievements didn't seem to make the game any easier to play. Perhaps this just wasn't my style of game.

Very creative, and good game loop.

This was a creative game idea. I played for a while. The music and sound effects were good.

It took me a few deaths to figure out what was going on. It would have been easy to add controller support, and taken only a few minutes. Getting achievements didn't seem to make the game any easier to play. Perhaps this just wasn't my style of game.

Very creative, and good game loop.

This was a really creative game. Nice ramp up of challenged and introduction of mechanics.

I would have liked to see controller support, which would have taken 5 minutes for you to add. Playing with a keyboard hurts my wrist.

Overall really solid game.

This was a creative story well told through the intro. The music and sfx matched the feel of the old school game. I liked that you added controller support.

The lack of checkpoints quickly became frustrating. Also the lack of joystick support, while making the game feel more old school, just made me give up earlier because playing a game with a D-Pad is uncomfortable these days.

Overall it was  very solid game.

So I played again, and got to the fishing. Sadly, at that point I could not figure out how to actually play any of my cards.

This game has a lot of potential, but spending some time highlighting what needs to be pressed and a tutorial in playing the cards would be helpful.

I'll try again in a bit.

This was an ambitious and creative game. The music was pulse-pounding. The voice acting added a lot to the exposition. The turn-based combat appeared to be well thought out.

I was confused by the red and green skills. They did the same thing, but I could only use the red ones. I played very conservatively because I didn't know health reset at the end of the level. On the third level the monster difficulty increased significantly. Something with 250 took me out even though I used all my items on it. I lost interest when I died. The voice acting was cool, but the sound levels weren't balanced when the level music was blasting, so was hard to hear at that point. I was at a bit of a loss as to how powers worked, how much damage creatures did, and they swung for a LOT. Some sort of tutorial or additional information about the game would have helped.

This game has a lot of potential, and is very impressive amount of work for a game jam.

So I tried the Web version and it worked without being cut off, but I could not get past the first page where you can randomly roll your pirate's name. I clicked on everything I could think of on the form.

I tried the download version again, getting the new one you put up 2 hours ago, and it's still cut off, only showing in the top half of my monitor.

Thanks. I took a look and it's definitely inefficient if you have to reset the material every frame. But it seems to work pretty well. How did you save the changes made to the material?

Thank you! I appreciate the kind words.

You're in luck then. Got to Project -> Project Settings. In the General tab, go down to the Debug section and select GDScript. Scroll on the right until you find Untyped Declaration and change the value to Warn or Error. GDScript will enforce strong static typing.

That's good feedback. I thought it was too loud too when I played today. I'll turn it down.

This was a straightforward game. Reminded me of a phone game that amps up speed. I got up to 856. The graphics, especially the menu going to the game were really nice.

The tutorial crashed my browser. I came here saw your suggestion of downloading the game and did that. The tutorial still froze and when it loaded, it said "Let's try that newspaper!" I did and then nothing, so I played the game. It would have been super helpful to get some audio feedback of when something was recycled correctly or not, because I was always looking at the next piece and I usually missed whether my points were going up and down. And I couldn't tell if some of the models were apple cores or doorknobs.

It was a solid game loop.

This was a pretty original concept. I got to 205.6 before I stopped. I found that I could just shoot down the middle and keep going indefinitely.

Since you are new to Godot, I'd recommend you try using GDScript even if you already know C#. It has a number of benefits over C# when it come to game development, and since the last few releases has closed the performance gap on C# in most areas as well.

This was as solid first game.

Thanks. Feel free to use what you want from mine, they're open source.

You could not do anything with the credits other than get three achievements. In my Day 9 devlog I explain about that. You can read my DevLogs here: Katamari Mech Spacey DevLogs

Can you give me more info on which item pickups were not volume adjustable? I spent half a day on that and I could have missed something.

I have a plugin for that if you're interested. You can use it or steal the code from it you you like. Dragonforge Controller

Yeah that was a solvable problem that I realized the solution to about 5 minutes after the jam closed. I actually spawn inside a drawn polygon, so I could've drawn a hole in the polygon.

Thanks for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed it otherwise!

This was a very ambitious project. The art was great. The characters were animated. I really enjoyed the music.

The gameplay was very confusing. I assigned all my peeps to jobs and after 5 days I had no resources. There was no guidance on where to start, nor any indication that anyone was "out of resources". I slowly got the idea, but the pacing felt slow. The mouse edge scrolling was nice, but it was kinda slow.

It seems like from the comments that others had a better time at it than I did. It definitely looked and sounded good!

Yeah, I was using someone else's code. I've made a number of 2D and 3D shaders. I prefer using the visual shaders rather than code because I like how it helps me structure my thinking and also see all the options possible. But really I had to learn how to write them in Godot's version of GLSL before I could effectively use them. I've found that converting shaders from Godot's GLSL into a Visual Shader really helps me understand how they're working.

Yeah I spent about 1.5-2 hours every night writing them. My brother said it would help me to get people interested in what I'm working on for when I'm selling my own games as opposed to working on other people's for money. I would also recommend you check out my (FREE) course on learning how to be a software developer through game development with Godot. There are only 6 classes, but I spent a 40-hour week on writing each one. I thought perhaps I could make money that way, but it turned out to be too much work so I made them free to the Godot community. Some of the code is not the way I would do things in Godot now, but it teaches a lot about the engine, as well as source control, unit testing, and a LOT on game design. There are a ton of links in there on object-oriented programming, the history of video game design and development, etc.

Oh that's really good to know. I can easily add a color uniform to the shader. Thanks!

I was having the same problem with the curved text, and I just let it go, as the color was really only important to me. The player wouldn't notice. I just checked and I'm not using a shader there, and the color worked in the plugin test. I'll have to do some more digging there.

This was a very creative, full-featured game. I played for quite a while. I really liked the tutorial. The sound design was good. You had a whole tech tree.

I got to the point where I was training for Food Safety and Forklift licenses, but they didn't seem to actually get applied to the characters. That was my only issue.

This was a really solid, well-rounded game! Congrats!

Emailed you.

I appreciate the thought and the code. I actually have a parallax scrolling background in the game that worked great with an image. It just doesn't work with the shader I'm using. The shader itself maintains the same look no matter how you move the texture it is applied to. So I was trying to work with the shader. Unfortunately, the direction of the shader only moved with a float. So I had to change it to a Vector2, then rotate it, then turn off the constant rotation, then do this:

# Given a player velocity, animate the starfield. func _physics_process(_delta: float) -> void:
     if Game.starfield_panning:
         var limited_vector := player.velocity.limit_length()
         var panning_vector := Vector2(limited_vector.y, limited_vector.x)
         #print(panning_vector)
         starfield_texture.material.set_shader_parameter("pan_speed", panning_vector * 1.0)
     if Game.starfield_acceleration:
         if player.velocity.x < 0 or player.velocity.y < 0:
             starfield_texture.material.set_shader_parameter("anim_speed", 0.75)
         elif player.velocity.x > 0 or player.velocity.y > 0:
             starfield_texture.material.set_shader_parameter("anim_speed", -0.75)
         else:
             starfield_texture.material.set_shader_parameter("anim_speed", 0.2)

The problem is it always looks like you're jumping into warp speed, even if I use really low numbers like 0.1 (instead of 0.75). In this case I think I just needed to rebuild the shader from the ground up - and it's a bit outside my wheelhouse.