The guilds are actually a barracks, so close enough. And it's one of those things that can just continually have stuff added to it, so when I have time there will be higher tier buildings!

Thanks, for the comment. And that's a really great idea about having negative tiles that expand themselves. I did plan to add workers and soldiers, that's actually why you can craft weapons and build a barracks/castle, but the idea was just to protect from rampaging barbarians. I'm already stuck into another jam atm, and have another one to enter after that. But when both those are finish I will be back to this to add in that idea lol!

Ha, I actually really like it. Because I know these assets from Kenney, and I used them myself once in a quick weekend challenge with a friend. They're just cuter shrunk down. And your version is more fun than mine was, I got 57 on normal! And the tones were a nice touch, almost musical.

Not able to play, there's no executable file for me to run...?

Nifty little game! As folks say this would work great on mobile, where you don't have to worry about miss-clicking the mouse. Some of the guns had parts that weren't actually connected, lol, that was odd. But otherwise great animations and sound!

Nice wee game. Similar to mine in some aspects, though my windmill is way more powerful! :P

Would have been nice if it was more fleshed out, like finished shop/factory, and some sfx. But otherwise a job well done.

This is probably one you your simpler and shorter games, lol! But I really liked it, I haven't tried it multiplayer yet, though I think I will later. Good use of space, fun animations and derpy AI! :P

I'd say it's more unforgiving than it is hard. I can see the solutions but actually executing the moves is where I fall flat on my face, lol. It requires a lot of precision!

Upload it as a separate "fixed" build for now. Some people will still want to play the one made fully within jam time, with all the glorious bugs. :)

Let me know if you have contacted me, if your name is different on those platforms, etc.

If you're late to submitting I can help you submit your game after the deadline. Stuff happens that can't be helped, afterall! But you have to contact me directly as I have to provide you a private link to submit your game. You can find me on the Discord chat or DM me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/f_oatley

Note: You will need to provide me with a link to your game's page.

You need to contact me directly, either on Discord or Twitter: https://twitter.com/f_oatley

Create your game page and everything else. Submission will be closed in 40 mins but I should be able to manually add your game after the deadline, make sure you remind me if I don't, you can DM me on Twitter. You will have to wait a little longer as I'll be asleep by the time you have power pack, I'm afraid. But this stuff happens and I will try to help asap. :)

I guess I'll put a post here and see who's out there. I'm primarily a programmer working in JS/HTML5. Looking to do something a little less tech-heavy for once, and try something more story-driven. A short visual novel for example. So I guess I'm looking for an artist with an interest in that sort of thing, and if you have a story to tell, I'm all ears.

Here's most of my recent jam games: https://jackoatley.itch.io/

Yeah, you can keep uploading builds until the deadline. :)

Hi, I'm Jack. I'm a indy game dev in Dundee, Scotland. I moved here from London over 6 years ago to work at YoYo Games, and been indy for nearly 2 years. I live with my girlfriend and help look after her disabled sister. I love game jams, have been entering them for years and usually do OK. And, as of writing, I am currently hosting #LOWREZJAM 2017, which is a new experience for me and has been super fun.

I guess I'm primarily a programmer, though that's more a typecast from employment, lol, I can do the rest too from design, art, audio and music (though my audio and music is rusty these days). I enjoy working on 2D and 3D projects. And I truly do this for the love of it, I make very little money off the games that actually do make anything lol.

I usually make jam games to explore things I haven't tried before, this can end up being stressful when it doesn't work as well as I thought! And, being a jam with a short period of time, I have to stick with it whether it works or not. So I think for this jam, just being hot of the heels of another jam, I'll go with something a little simpler and concentrate on storytelling for a change.

I entered last year and enjoyed it. It's an interestingly different kind of jam. :)

People keep finding ways to bend the rules, lol!

While you're technically rendering a game to 64x64, you're rendering a scene around it as well. It's generally been agreed that black empty borders are OK, and the rules state you can render a graphical border if it's on the web-page rather than in the game... I mean, you can do it if you like, at the end of the day "authenticity (use of 64x64resolution)"  is a thing people will be rating on. so people may interporate that in your favour, or not... ;)

If it's an option for user preference, I don't see why not. If it's some weird thing you're doing for gameplay then I think that's stretching it (and not sure what benefit it would supply.) So I assume the first. :)

The shop seems a little out of place, I think you could tie that into the aesthetic a lot more, and avoid the black fade. And gosh, you just reminded me I need to write the bitmap font stuff as well, HTML5 Canvas can't do non-blurry fonts, AT ALL. >.<

This was answered on the Discord chat, however I will amend the FAQs. You can clip the game into the center of the screen, leaving the rest blank if it otherwise can't be removed. On a similar note, it;s OK to add blank space to keep a certain aspect ratio as a lot of engines do this anyway (such as when in fullscreen.)

Great style, look forward to seeing it in action!

Thanks for the comments guys.

And yeah, custom engine. I've made and finished 2 jam games using JS with no libraries so far, and some other projects, And I know my needs are minimal, so when I eventually iron out all the bits I hacked in, I think it'll be the quickest way for me to make games. And it solves the problem of languages that have a lot of APIs, and that's learning all the APIs, lol.

Thank you for posting this. If anyone has other methods then please post here as well!

Itsybitsy

Day 1:

It was an otherwise busy day today, but I've had plenty of time to think on and talk about my idea with others and it's got enough shape I think. I've been playing with the art, which is generally where I start these days. And I'm happy with the look and style, and even managed to squeeze a full UI into the 64x64 space.

The game will be a mix of world building and town building. The player is periodically given a tile to place down in the world, these must conform to neighbor tiles but can otherwise be placed in any order. Tiles will slowly produce resources for you, which you can collect in your inventory. You can use the resources to create buildings (by dragging them onto a tile), or upgrade existing buildings (by dragging them onto a building). The most basic type of building is a house, and it is the base for most other buildings. Houses home a worker who will walk along roads to other buildings and help boost their resource productivity. And produced resources can be placed on tiles and buildings to discover new buildings. The aim is to allow free growth and a lot of experimentation.

As for code, I still haven't started a project yet. I fixed up some older code and fixed an issue I had in my last jam game where the keyboard didn't work due to the game being run in an iFrame (finally discovered window.focus()).

Anyway, here's my tiles and mockups:

Day 2:

I haven't got much to show for day 2. My GF has her first car so I've been out with her so she doesn't panic so much, and today we went to the zoo and I finally saw the bears there! Enough excuses. I have been working on the engine, seeing as I'm working in JavaScript without any libraries I'm having to write everything myself. Most of it is derived from previous jam games, though I've changed a lot so it's all consistent. All the basics should be in there now; game update/render loop, sprite and tile systems, audio, input, etc, so I can start putting the game together tomorrow. The goal is to keep the actual game code as simple as possible, my last jam game had about 3500 lines of code and I spent way to long just scrolling and looking for stuff. Ever since I first used Love2D, I've loved it's system of just creating/overriding the update and render functions, and they're executed automatically behind the scene, so my engine follows this system as well. Yes, I named the engine TOAST for the lack of any logical name for it. :)

Day 3:

I was out for ages again today, but managed to get some decent progress done. I started actually implementing parts of the game, rather than all engine work like yesterday. I included all the existing tiles and UI graphics, which I have to define manually from the texture sheet, as I have no system for doing that easily yet. So you can select the tile from the UI and place it into the world, and then shortly after a new tile becomes available:

And this next image is just to show how much of the project has been writing the engine versus the game. Hence why it might seem slow off the mark compared to my previous jam games! :) But I don't think it's going to be a complex game so it shouldn't get much more extensive than this.

Day 4:

Out all day again, urg. So I've only managed to create a camera/view system in the engine and apply that to moving around in the game. I don't plan to go out for long tomorrow (today was a 6+ hour thing), so the mission tomorrow is to implement natural resource spawning and building creation! That should start to make it feel gamey.

Day 5:

Brought some Steam games on sale today... So that was half the day gone. But I did complete my mission for today, which was to add in buildings. This meant some new engine stuff, such as high-level handling of grids (2d arrays) & adding layers to my tile system. It's set up so that you can only place buildings on the "dead-end" road tiles, this means that you have to more carefully think ahead when placing your road systems and other world tiles. My goal tomorrow is to add natural item spawning, such as wood, stone, wheat and metal, that will give the game some self-sustainability.

Day 6:

Still mostly gaming! >.< But I got resource spawning in. Works well, the only issue is that picking up a resource in the world is not the same as picking it up from the inventory, you have to place it in the inventory first to place it in the world... So I need to make them the same. And make it work for things other than trees. Then it should be all good. The plan tomorrow is to make buildings upgradable, should be easy enough so will likely get a few things done tomorrow, I hope!

Day 7:

OK, so I failed my plan today! I did fix a few things but was otherwise getting distracted (had to go shopping, and we ended up with kids round (and there's a drumset in my GF's sister's room right above my head, fun. + general girly screeching)). I have written up a to-do list however, and plan to get through that, there's some front end stuff in there so that should make a nice change at least!

Day 8, 9, 10:

I forgot to log a couple days because I was having to get up early. But I've made a fair bit of progress. I've now got a working main menu, created a font and the systems for drawing it, new buildings and resources, improved system for upgrading buildings, some animation (I didn't build this into my sprite system from the start, so I'm kinda hacking it atm.) While there's not really an objective to the game it's starting to feel fun, I personally am a fan of peace games, where you can just build and grow and experiment with no end. Anyway, here's my progress in a picture:

The application surface was added so as to PURPOSELY ALLOW clean sub-pixel rendering for scaled up views, which is an issue is you want to keep 64x64 but scaled up. But seeing as you don't have an application surface in GM8, you simply don't need to worry about it. As long as you set the correct view/port sizes you should be good to go.

Good tutorial. There were a few games last year that fell foul of this subtle difference. It's particularly easy to make this mistake if you don't have rotations, actually. So I'll sticky this.

JavaScript. Notepad++. Paint.NET. I'll wait and see what style develops before I think about my audio/music.

Hey guys, glad to see so many first time jammers! I hope you all enjoy it. :)

After some discussion on the Discord chat, it became clear some people wish for a "theme" or other such jam challenge. So I settled on this idea of bonus challenges that you can try to undertake if you wish, just some of them or all of them! While they won't be considered in the global jam ratings, if you accept the challenge and post the link to your game page in this thread, we'll have a mini-vote here at the same time as the global voting. Just for those who undertake the challenge(s)! :)

How that'll be handled logistically, we'll see, lol. Depends how many people come here!

Challenges:

• Pacifist - In an otherwise violent game, your protagonist must be a pacifist.
• Yin-Yang - Where there is light, there is dark.
• Eco-Friendly - The player can control the environment.
• Freak - Random changes occur outside the player's control.
• Mitosis - Something in the game must be able to split itself into 2 copies.

How To:

As this is only a small sub-competition (as it were), please post the link to your LOWREZJAM game here if you attempted any of the bonus challenges. Only post once for your game, if you have more than one game then you can make a separate post for it. This is not a discussion thread! Any post other than a submission will be removed. You may edit your post.

My pleasure. Great to see so many from last year taking part again! And good luck to you too.

These are some pixel fonts I made ages ago, "Ikkle" was actually for the previous LowRezJam. It's only 3 pixels high so is very good for space, but some found it a little illegible. Still, someone might find it useful. I'll see if I can upload more before the jam starts, as I have a fair few original fonts lying around.

• http://www.dafont.com/ikkle.font
• http://www.dafont.com/little-monster.font

Looking for a more organized way to create and/or join a team? LOWREZJAM now has it's own page just for this task thanks to the folks at CrowdForge. You're welcome to use this tool, with a topic here and the Discord channel if you wish!

https://crowdforge.io/jams/lowrezjam

We have a Discord server for chat and sharing anything related to LOWREZJAM 2017, if that's what floats your boat then drop on in! :)

https://discord.gg/cTFrsxg

I used to work for YoYo Games, so I know my way around GameMaker! If you need more help on this you'd be better off searching or asking on the GMC https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php. In most cases the manual will have good information and examples as well, particularly on views.

Alright, I created a channel, I don't use Discord often so let me know if I forgot anything! I'll also create a sticky topic here later today. :)

https://discord.gg/cTFrsxg

That should be fine then! :)

GameMaker has an easy way to do this, you should look into views. You only need one view, set it's width and height to 64x64 and set it's port to whatever size you wish (such as 512x512) although usually it'd be the same size as your window. You can set up views in the room editor. Make sure interpolation is off in the Global Game Settings and it should scale nicely. :)

You can scale the window however you wish, as long as the game still follows the 64x64 grid resolution. If this means making sprites larger (like 4x4 sprite to represent a pixel), then that's fine. Remember though, doing it like that means you'll have to snap everything to the 64x64 grid so you're not drawing at sub-pixel positions.

There will be a category for user to vote on that determines authenticity. This is basically a way for people to say how well you handled using the 64x64 resolution.

Also, what's the tool you're using? I'm sure there will be a more elegant solution than scaling your sprites. Try Googling your tool and "pixel-perfect scaling" or "scaling pixel-art" and I'm sure you'll find a solution. :)