You were smart enough to manage to leave a comment, though, and I genuinely applaud you for that!
I have to disable the CSS for myself (which honestly is annoying enough by itself because all the Edit theme + Custom CSS controls also spin...) to leave a comment! 😅
To save the animals, you must get close to them and do the RIGHT thing. Maybe that will click for you.
After dodging Black Yoshi's attacks, you must re-explore the map (a common theme) and in the bottom-right corner you'll find some help that will let you fight Black Yoshi off.
Once you fight off Black Yoshi using your newfound aid, talk to Sonic again.
And yeah, I love the music. The music in the first two levels is All Star but the lyrics are a beat behind the instruments. If you die or progress to the casino level, it plays the song again, but never stops the first loop so they just layer on top of each other infinitely as many times as you die.
The 3rd and 4th levels (and the loading screen between them) actually stop that music to play something different.
The music isn't the ear-destroying part of the game, but there is an ear destruction element later on.
I'll try to be cute and not say the exact controls / steps, but if you want to know specifically how to play it, just ask in another comment and I'll tell you. The game explicitly doesn't tell you how to play it because of the "Confusion (how badly do you teach your mechanics?)" rating criteria for the jam. All the NPCs give you very roundabout hints on how to play, but it's intentionally very poorly explained.
The progress through the 1st level (out of 4):
You must do the right thing and save all the animals
You must save Amy
You must confront Black Yoshi and not die
You must get help from your good friends
You fight Black Yoshi
You tell Sonic that you saved all the animals and follow his advice
Yeah there's a hard limit to how much a shader can render there due to the inherent limits of a floating-point number. When you start to see the pixels / how the more you zoom in the less detail you get, that's because the float is approaching 0. The code to get the pixel coordinates in the shader is:
float xx = (gl_FragCoord.x / u_fZoom) + u_fPan.x;
float yy = (gl_FragCoord.y / u_fZoom) + u_fPan.y;
So the bigger zoom is, the closer the float is reduced to 0 and eventually you lose information as the variable can only hold so many bytes.
All equivalent fractal shaders do this. See here how this Mandelbrot Set shader on Shadertoy (which houses much better / smarter shader programmers than I) zooms in, and you can start to see the set become pixelated, so instead of zooming in all the way they turn around and zoom back out.
I just give you full control to zoom in-or-out as much as you like. But also check out the zoom number, as you have to zoom-in a LOT to get to the pixels, I just made the scroll wheel double the zoom value every scroll tick, so you get to really big numbers really fast like Sissa ibn Dahir.
I actually don't really know why it eventually stops at the pixel-level. That is a ridiculously close zoom, but I thought it would continue forever at the same quality / detail no matter how far you zoomed-in. I'm going to ask some friendly shader gurus if they know why...
I had a lot of fun making my (somehow) first fractal / Mandelbrot program, as slow as it is with higher iteration times / slower computers, but I was still energized and excited to try again in a different way, so I brushed myself up on my shaders and made a sequel to this Mandelbrot Set program instead using GLSL! It's (obviously) much faster, despite still running in HTML5 / JavaScript and made in GameMaker! I also figured out how to get the zoom to automatically shift the pan values to make sense / keep whatever is in the center in the center. I'm very happy with it.
The link is expired so I can't play it... but the page looks great! And nice job copying all the diversifiers with the emojis and bullets as you did, that's the best way to do it, looks super clean haha!
Thank you! Yes, I fixed the problem locally, and we intend to finish up the game into our full original vision over the next couple of weeks. Now that I'm out of crunch mode I'm going a bit slower, refactoring it to be more scalable and dynamic.
Unfortunately no, none of the builds up work as intended with the full gameplay. I didn't manage my time super effectively, spending more time focusing on visuals than I ever have, which is very backwards for me. Normally I'm all about doing gameplay first, then AV, but here for some reason (e.g., how awesome my artist and musician are) I was compelled to do the opposite. Here I saved the core gameplay for last which obviously was really stupid 😅 I mainly do game jam games in 3 hours as part of Trijam, which has made me a bit too complacent with doing things at the last possible second haha...
The previous builds do show an interesting progression, for posterity, future dev logs, and my own future interests if nothing else. If you look at v001 you can see what the game probably would have looked more like if I had focused on gameplay first and not visuals... And in one of the earlier builds you can see an odd snake-enemy controlled with the arrow keys, being a proof-of-concept, as my artist wanted the player to get a snake-like tail like slither.io, so I made a snake enemy to be re-used by the player.
If you mean the differences between each version, I couldn't tell you. I made this game some 7 years ago; I don't remember the differences between them all, I just uploaded every build I had.
I'm sure the earlier versions are shorter and more buggy, at some point I added the intro and the pause menu, etc. But you'd have to play to find those out.
This is a really simple "game". Just play version 2.4 if you're interested. If you're curious what changed after playing version 2.4, then you could try version 1.0 and see all the differences, and then more from there if you're somehow still interested. The game is only a couple minutes long even in its longest version 2.4.
That's a bit tougher, especially in how you handle the "3 builds" equivalent, but sure!
Expect fewer plays / less feedback, though, and I probably won't be able to make a video on your board game. I'll try but I'm skeptical of how I'd handle it.
