itch.io

Hi!

VERY SOLID entry. I love those platformer puzzles that challenge specifically my ability to maneuver through the mechanics. In terms of mechanics, this was the most solid entry I played.

I missed the application of the jam's theme: Giant Monster Foot and Maze, though.

I loved the graphics. You went full minimalistic but took the time to actually design shapes that communicate the objects' behavior (like the bullets being triangles in contrast with the character being a square, meaning that the bullets are dangerous and would hurt the character).

I also missed some SFX and BGM, but I can't say much since my own entry doesn't have those as well.

This entry could definitely make some use of moving platforms as well and I see a lot of potential for a casual audience. I have a friend that launched a similar game for this niche, if you want to I can connect you guys so he can give you some insights about his game performance and what you can expect if you decide to release a full version of it, his game is Steve is Alone.

Here's my play session of your game:

Hi!

VERY SOLID entry. I love those platformer puzzles that challenge specifically my ability to maneuver through the mechanics. In terms of mechanics, this was the most solid entry I played.

I missed the application of the jam's theme: Giant Monster Foot and Maze, though.

I loved the graphics. You went full minimalistic but took the time to actually design shapes that communicate the objects' behavior (like the bullets being triangles in contrast with the character being a square, meaning that the bullets are dangerous and would hurt the character).

I also missed some SFX and BGM, but I can't say much since my own entry doesn't have those as well.

This entry could definitely make some use of moving platforms as well and I see a lot of potential for a casual audience. I have a friend that launched a similar game for this niche, if you want to I can connect you guys so he can give you some insights about his game performance and what you can expect if you decide to release a full version of it, his game is Steve is Alone.

Here's my play session of your game:

Hey, bold move on going 3D!

Handling camera is definitely a challenge when working with 3D platformer and you managed to workaround it nicely by fixing its rotation and the overall game grid to 90 degrees increments. Something I'd suggest is to make the light follows the character instead of the camera. This would had helped me a lot navigate this maze!

Regarding the overall game, I missed incentives to keep playing it. There were no mechanics that gave a feedback about my progress or if I was doing any. Using the Hazard recipe to make the lava deal damage helped me understand I shouldn't fall on it. But I didn't actually understand what should I do, so I fell back to the usual "put your right hand on a wall and you will find your way out" approach. This helped me progress a little bit more, but due to a lack of incentives I felt more likely to quit than to stay.

You could fix this by offering a score system with some collectibles just so players can understand if the current run went better than the previous one, You could apply a breadcrumb pattern to hint players about where to go or at least where they already visited.

Since there's no story  to hint a goal or anything, I think there's room for improvements in terms of actual game design (creating systems of incentives).

I liked how you made use of moving and path following platforms, though! You could've definitely checked their boxes in the "Recipes Used" forms.

Here's my play session, btw:

Hello!

I loved what you did here, Fox. A creative approach to platforming with a lot of challenges. You're getting really good with visual communication, I can tell you're using some good techniques to communicate state transitions, like squash and stretch for jumping. This really upgrades the overall visual feedback of the game.

I think your major strength is the visuals, though the sound effects also match the internal game events like the jump and stomping. Your art style is simple yet meaningful: the frog actually jumps, there's a clear visual distinction between blocks you can pass through and ones you don't. Overall, great!

I would add some incentives to make players want to stomp the enemies and something to measure players' progression. With that, you would have a solid game to distribute for a casual audience.

Something like: each "floor"/platform gives you 1 score point and stomping enemies could give you coins to spend on new characters. Or even experience to upgrade skills, like double jumping or jump height.

Talking about jump, I realized you implemented a wall jump, right? But it doesn't work smoothly. Do you have access to the book? There's a Wall Jumping Character recipe that could definitely fix this and make this entry a solid infinite jumper. I'd bet some success on mobile with it and if you managed to add some rogue-lite features, definitely a solid product for Steam.

Here's my play session:

Hello!

I loved what you did here, Fox. A creative approach to platforming with a lot of challenges. You're getting really good with visual communication, I can tell you're using some good techniques to communicate state transitions, like squash and stretch for jumping. This really upgrades the overall visual feedback of the game.

I think your major strength is the visuals, though the sound effects also match the internal game events like the jump and stomping. Your art style is simple yet meaningful: the frog actually jumps, there's a clear visual distinction between blocks you can pass through and ones you don't. Overall, great!

I would add some incentives to make players want to stomp the enemies and something to measure players' progression. With that, you would have a solid game to distribute for a casual audience.

Something like: each "floor"/platform gives you 1 score point and stomping enemies could give you coins to spend on new characters. Or even experience to upgrade skills, like double jumping or jump height.

Talking about jump, I realized you implemented a wall jump, right? But it doesn't work smoothly. Do you have access to the book? There's a Wall Jumping Character recipe that could definitely fix this and make this entry a solid infinite jumper. I'd bet some success on mobile with it and if you managed to add some rogue-lite features, definitely a solid product for Steam.

Here's my play session:

Great entry! A simple, elegant, and smart design solution.

With only 4 basic systems you managed to create a cool experience. I liked how you relied on a established well-known story. At first I thought it would be an infinite runner and I thought to myself: hmm if only there were some collectibles to at least provide a score so we could compare ourselves with other players.

But then that thing about the mask hit me: OHH YEAH THE MASK. The whole point of the Minotaur Maze was the mask. Genius design, there's a winning condition.

Something was indeed poking me in my head to keep playing because there would be something in the end.

By the way, I even thought about complimenting the overall level design, we can progress really smoothly through the challenges and they show up in a compouding difficulty from easier to harder. I was about to ask you (if it was an infinite runner) how you managed to make such good distribution of the challenges: if you made a procedural generation algorithm that ensured some rooms appear first or such.

You managed to make a solid entry! Regarding the sound, I loved that it is thrilling, definitelly giving the vibe that "something is coming for you". I think you could make it loop smoother and make the loop a little bit longer. I would also decrease the BPM to make it more "mysterious" or "eerie" or even "creepy".

The choice of the Minotaur tale perfectly matched the theme. It would get beyond perfect if you made the Minotaur giant and kill the player by stepping on it. But nonetheless, this entry made me really happy. Thank you for that and congratulation on making such a cool experience with so little time and resources available. Here's my play session!

Regarding the overall art, it's a definite plus that you used a monochromatic palette and that you managed to communicate exactly and accurately what each object is and what it does. I just felt we could had walking cycles to make it better. But definitely a solid approach.

Hi!

Here is feedback about the entry.

I gotta say rage games are not my favs. They typically appeal for streamers because it makes sense to be challenged by your audience and persist on the challenge so they can watch you overcome it, generating watch time and engagement.

This kind of game, when done right, especially when taking into account the right audience (gaming streamers) can be super successful.

For me, it doesn't quite work. The whole game design is not about figuring out solutions but rather discovering hidden features by trial and error. It leans towards adventure, but instead of testing my ability to discover the game content, it explicitly punishes my lack of information about the game world, making death the main vehicle for discovery. This wouldn't be much of a trouble, as rogue-likes appeal to the same discoverability system.

Something I would suggest adding to your entry to diminish the churn (players exiting rate) is to use checkpoints after each test you applied to players. You can even make the checkpoints erase if players quit the game for good, making them persist to the end of a level to maintain their progress.

Here's my play session, as you can see I decided to quit before finishing the game (take note that I'm definitely not part of the partget audience).

Overall, for a game made in less than a weekend, this was a solid effort. The level design is good, we can progress through challenges with a steady learning curve. Congratulations on that.

Hey there, this post is meant so we can share our progress and engage with each other's entries.

So far I have the mosnter's giant foot stepping and smashing the player. It follows the player all around. So, to make this interesting I'm going to add some pick-up items, I'm thinking about adding asteroids from time to time and make this something like a score attack. As for the maze part...well let's see what we can get! 😂😂

What about you? How's your entry going? We only have 2h left!

Hi, can you try again? I think we've fixed it. You should only check the boxes of the featurs you actually implemented

Mine are still not working 😭

MONSTER FEET MAZE LET’S GOOOO

And the theme is:

The jam is about to begin! We have 12 hours to start making a platformer game and submit it by Sunday.

We are going to reveal the game jam theme during a livestream, where we will also participate in the jam.

The jam's theme will be chosen through a dice draw using two die from Rory's Story Cubes:

• One from the Cosmos series
• One from the Fantasy series

Stay tuned

— Henrique Campos

Hello! For some reason your posts were tagged as spam. 

But let’s go through your questions.

First of all, thanks for the comment, I'm sure there are more people with the same questions. 

A game jam is simply a game related gathering. It roots in the music jams where musicians gathered together to play and improvised without the burden of "making a hit".

Answering your questions:

1. Yes, anyone can participate
2. Yes! We made a free chapter available on top of the demo chapter available in the book page exactly so  people who doesn't own the book could join as well. So you can join and use only the free available chapters
3. The theme will be revealed as soon as the jam starts! So it’s currently a mystery 

I hope this helps! Let me know if there are any other questions.

No problem! Thank you for asking. I bet other people have the same doubt.

Definitely can be told through environment or any narrative elements, really.

The very fact that a player moves to the left instead of to the right to progress through the game can already tell something. Maybe is a revenant story.

Or the fact that the player can fall up to 2 seconds before taking falling damage, this can tell a story as well: the character is fragile and is on a path to become stronger?

The important aspect of the Story Criterea is judging if this underlying narrative progression: is this revenant good? What happened prior to it? Do players end up understanding the events that proceed the game when they finish it? Does this character actually go through a tranaformation and becomes stronger? How? What happened?

This is the kind of things I wanted to entice: how are you going to progress the player through the game events (the medium doesn't matter much, though there’s no direct "punishment" for using cheap approaches like text to tell the story as well).

Hey there,

As you may have noticed, the recipes presented in the Cookbook are somewhat abstract systems. So I decided to create a series of videos to help you come up with creative applications of them. Starting with yesterday's Making a Bomb with the Hazard Recipe, which is the very chapter that is free for you to read during the jam:

Your turn

Did it light up anything for you? Share with us: what would you do to create hazards in your entries?

Good morning, everyone! Here's where I'm going to keep you guys updated about the current prize pool. Help us raise the prize you'll win by sharing the Godot Platformer Essentials Sales

In two days, we raise $40! This is 20% of the goal to pay for the production cost of this event. We are missing 11 sales to reach the goal!

That's it, let's share!!!!

—Henrique Campos

Heyo! I'm trying to keep everything within itch.io for this iteration to make it easier to read in the future (Discord has too much nooooooise).

So let's make the best out of this Community right here~

The official response is silence as it seems.

Sounds like they managed to use game incentives to create somekind of "incentive" to bond with the characters of the world. Really interesting approach.

From what you said, the game makes you actually care about the characters you're rescuing.

Yep! You just need to export the page as a PDF. You can check out this link for more info from the official documentation:

https://www.notion.com/help/export-your-content#export-as-pdf

Astrobot sounds like a great reference to draw some insights from! Do you have any "woah that's awesome" moment to share already?

Sure, would a PDF compilation directly from Notion work? I think we can definitely make something like that.

Though, some features (like interactive media, dynamic content (secret recipes triggered by pressing a button)) would be lost in this process.

Just so you know, creating a project called "Blog" to create posts not directly related to any project is an awesome idea. I just copied it haha.

By the way, immediately following you.

In raw numbers for you. A Godot-niched game development book. Note that sales/bundles numbers don't get into account because they count as sales/bundle's revenue, not item revenue. Book was published on November 11, 2022.

Goooood morning!

I'm not an artist myself, but I have to improvise. I found out Oil-6 around one or two years ago when I had the idea for my game, Milkyway Mailing Inc..

The game is a space shooter and the colors on Oil-6 mathced perfectly the idea of a "Sun/Star" powered spaceship flying through the space. The contrast is great, even though most colors are pasteau you can achieve some meaningful color coding to provide the right kind of message to players. Look:

And it gets even better in motion, this is an early test of the game to keep track of updates, the dialogues are in PT-BR so please ignore them.

I got the palette on Lospec, of course. Back then, it was just published, so there were few references about what could be done with it. Now I see a lot of great art works TOTALLY RECOMMEND IT: https://lospec.com/palette-list/oil-6

How about you, what is the palette you're using in your games?

Great question, may I ask you how you are tracking conversions? I tried using  url checking for "constains '/download/'" but I'm not sure it worked as I had some sales but the Google Ads didn't trigger any.

Any updates on this? .gifs are single handedly the Top 1 factor for conversions exactly because they show how the game plays. Without animated GIFs conversions drop a lot.

This should be an urgent issue to be fixed.

It's a lot easier to manage and gives you the double benefit of reusing them on other objects!

One trick I always use is saving my AnimationTree Finite State Machines to reuse on other nodes if I need to.

Any chance this is caused by the backend SOMEHOW defaulting to "Disable animated GIFs" for SOME REASON?

Is this fixed yet? I'm making a tutorial and I was thinking about showcasing the progress with gifs, but the last time I tried (last week) the gifs were merely the first frame still

But of course, it all started with your request!

I understand this concern, and it's a valid one with pretty good points. I've been using Notion for almost two years, and I'm using some redundancy.

This is a problem, like she says, any distribution platform that's not your own has.

My mitigation for that is that you guys can duplicate the Cookbook to your own Notion profile and handle your data however you like. So Notion becomes just for distribution, not storage.

For instance, by duplicating you can export the content as HTML packages and store it elsewhere.

yes, I always do.

Thanks! Glad you liked it!

Hey, I just read the devlog and realized itch.io's code parser is very bad. The code isn't formatted correctly.

It should look like this:

Sim! Uma vez feita a atualização, ela também vai ser replicada no Ko-fi, inclusive deve sair um post amanhã sobre isso lá também explicando basicamente o que tá na página do pacote aqui no itch.io.

Se você tem o livro lá, pode ficar tranquilo.