itch.io

Not a ton of progress lately. Been busy with work, the dog takes not playing with her personally, and generally was a bit unsure about where I was going with the project.

That said, given the progress so far, the timeline, and possible disruptions ahead. I think I’m steering the project in the direction of a short walking-simulator kind of experience. Mostly just try and tell a very short story, give spooky vibes, that sort of thing.

But enjoying playing around with blender, although I’m sure proper artists would cry at some of my choices, topology, and uv unwraps. I thought I was done with trying to get the general ‘feel’ of the ocean bits done, but I feel I’m becoming obsessed with trying to tweak shaders, fog settings, particles, and lighting to get something that feels right to me.

Anyway, small or large, progress is still progress.

So youtube compression doesn’t do it any favours given it’s already low res PSX style rendering. Still working on getting the vibe feeling right, but think that’s mostly there for me now.

Also started just roughing out some of the core interactions, fading teleports or entering buildings, vehicles, or just generally changing perspective in a big way. Item pickup and inspection, floating objects on the water, and a boat vehicle.

Next up I want to move collision to ghost objects that aren’t moving with the ocean, only which should remove the snappy jitter when standing on those dynamic objects.

Once that’s done, I’ll have most of the individual components to start putting together an actual experience…. Just need to work out a couple of locations to visit/explore, a story to somehow deliver throughout those locations, and a butt load of PSX style art…. so lots of learning blender to be done XD

Hey, so personally I find the Itch community thing a bit limited and less favourable.

There’s no official discord for this Jam it seems, so I’ve taken the liberty of creating an unofficial discord server for anyone who might be interested.

https://discord.gg/Mkm2WZqdzK

All welcome to join. Chat, talk about projects, progress, etc.

Or if nobody joins, come and sit awkwardly in silence staring at the lack of notification…. everyone needs a hobby right?

Interested in this Jam because 100 days is a real comfortable time line to work with, and the theme stuff seems interesting.

Not got a real plan as of yet, just some random Ideas floating around the noggin.

For now, just experimenting with vibes, going for a sort of PS1 era look/feel. So breaking out the old PSX shaders to experiment with the feel.

Agreed, oddly I actually think the idea works better in reverse, in that you start manually creating bigger blocks, and to automate the inputs you go down a level into the block providers to rank them up, and that pattern continues. But not 100% that it would work that way either.

Thanks for the feedback though.

Poor execution is an understatement, I really dropped the ball on this due to distractions over the jam period. But thanks for the feedback, giving the idea itself some more thought to maybe execute on it better in the near future.

I still can’t explain what my actions were, but at least I worked out (I think) what I was meant to be doing, always fun to try and work out what’s going on with no text. Great job though, felt smooth, and juicy. Some of the automatic repositioning after a merge was a bit of a pain, but I get that that’s probably not a simple solve.

Appreciate the kind words. Maybe one day in the future I’ll revisit the project/idea and make it a bit more complete.

Just doing a self-reply in case anybody else wonders this.

Based on joining the discord and scanning some of the conversation in the Just-Chatting channel. My understanding is that either the words real meaning, or the ‘recursion’ interpretation from the movie are both acceptable.

That’s my understanding at least.

Curious on the theme here, do we mean inception the word, or inception the movie?

Just asking as most people mistake inception for recursion because of that movie so just don’t wanna miss the mark if I come up with an idea.

Really been enjoying nodding my head along to these in the background whilst I work.

The lofiamp skin is also great for that retro nostalgic feel. Great work.

Ah that’s kind of you to update, eventually I’ll get my lazy ass in gear and sort out a bespoke script for my needs but in the meantime this will save me a lot of effort so thanks again.

Really appreciate this plugin as much prefer to work in Aseprite than GBTD from a workflow perspective. So this has made that much easier.

That said, I don’t think the name prefixing is working, no matter what kind of prefixes I use Everything ends up in a single array instead of being split based on prefix. So having to just separate my tile and sprite files.

Not a show stopper at all, and if I can find the time I might look at the script to wrap my head around it and maybe make changes.

But again, great little utility to use, thanks a lot.

Wasn’t immediately obvious what was going on, but once I worked that out it was a great little challenge. One of those ‘feels easy at first but things quickly start piling up’ energies.

Great job.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks for the kind words. Yeah I don’t imagine it’ll be something I look at immediately, but definitely something I’d be keen to come back to at some point.

One of the things that I love about large split flap displays is that wave of sounds as large changes occur. Thanks or playing.

Nah I don’t mind at all, knock yourself out! Be curious to see what others could make with it.

Nice challenge, would’ve loved to be able to rotate the blocks (even if just around the claw axis) but still, was fun to try (and fail because I’m terrible at so many games).

Nice work.

Edit: Oh one thing I did notice, at some point the camera movement seemed to bug out a bit, and I ended up at weird angles which seems to then have made the WASD controls not always work. Minor bug, just mentioning in case you continue work on this one.

Nice little game, cute little tape art. I struggle with the longer term strategy on these kinds of games, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. Nice work.

Feels like the challenge ramps up really quickly with the drop speed. But was a fun challenge all the same, and I like the idea of playing inside a game of tetris, but not playing the tetris part of it, that’s a neat twist.

I need to give this one a bit more time I think, I’m still not entirely sure what impact the different block types are having, but I’m keen to find out. Either way it’s a clean little game, fun to play, and the subtle sounds are really nice.

Failed at the dragon, but otherwise was really fun. All the issues I had at first were just because I wasn’t reading things so that’s on me. Once I worked out what was going on, it was a really neat idea.

Great work.

Great little sprites, and a fun challenge. I did find myself sometimes snapping down onto a block when trying to jump over it, but otherwise didn’t come across any issues. Great little game, nice work.

Neat little game, interesting challenge when you cant spin the blocks but can only shuffle the order.

A fun challenge, felt so frustrated with myself every time I spent just one moment too long focussing on the wrong side of the screen :D

Super fun little game, I am however… utterly terrible at it :D not that that stopped me trying though. Nice work.

Got stuck in some of the later levels, but super fun regardless, and really nice variety of block textures. Had a lot of fun on this one, nice work.

Love the low res, low colour count style, an absolutely gorgeous little entry. and a fun challenge too. Really nice idea for a game, great job.

There is no rom no. It’s not actually a real game boy supported game, just a game made with similar art limitations.

Whilst it might be possible to create a Gameboy compatible version of this demake. It would need to be done from the ground up as it’s own project.

Maybe one day 😅

Thanks for playing it, glad you enjoyed it.

Been a few posts mentioning various potential improvements with Jam filter, but not found one quite covering my request.

Improved Duration filtering: The current duration filters are very limited, and lead to still excess noise in the jam list. For example, if looking for a jam lasting 2 weeks, the best filter is “<=15 days” However this still shows all the jams that are micro jams of a few hours, or weekend jams, etc. The same issue would present with any of the filters.

An improved approach might be a duration range instead, allowing far more fine tuning of search results.

Or at the very least, a means to sort the graph view.

It would also likely benefit the user experience to reach a consistency of the search and filter behaviours/options between the main graph view, and the tile view that you get from selecting one of the browse options.

Additionally, filtering by type/tag would be super useful. For example, filtering for jams that are only Asset jams, or writing jams, or game jams, platform specific, or any other tag, similar to how you can search for games and assets. (However I note this would likely require adding support for tag on jams which I’m unsure if that support exists having never run a jam)

I love the idea, but my brain it seems is lacking the skill necessary to get very far and keeps mixing up my left and right hand controls XD.

But not gonna hold my shortcomings against the game, it’s a super fun idea and I’m sure very enjoyable to play for more skilled players.

Nice work.

I dare not admit how long I spent looking at what I now recognize as the cover image, and wondering why it wasn’t responding.

Once I remembered about scrolling on pages though, found the game and gave it a go. Simple controls, played well, audio settings were a nice touch, and it was easy enough to understand.

The binary choices were nice, but didn’t feel like they had a huge impact. It would be really cool to see each choice come with a downside, like “You move faster, but enemies have more health” or things like that. Just to give more reason to pick one over another. But It’s a jam and we don’t always get time to implement these things.

Overall nice game, fun to play, good job.

The idea of not being able to move backwards is actually interesting and would be curious to see the game developed further to see in what ways that could help/hinder the player.

However the lack of movement on the background when moving made it really weird in my brain to track my movement properly.

But it’s a game jam, and as you’ve said you didn’t have a lot of time, so with that in mind, things like this are understandable, nice work.

I have been informed that I should have made it clearer that there is a double jump. So if you fancy another try, take with you the idea of jumping again at the top of the first jump.

My apologies for overlooking making it obvious.

But appreciate the playing and the feedback.

Super fun game. Art was nice and simple but communicated well. The music was nice, and there were a bunch of really fun mechanics powering the puzzles.

Overall just a really solid job, great work.