Do it for the fun of doing it.

Begin with the part that you enjoy the most, be it graphics, programming or music. Choose some tools you want to learn, it is more rewarding than using tools you already know. Work on your project bit by bit, your first iteration will be weird prototypes. After some time the prototype will become somewhat playable, then pretty decent to finally be a full featured game. Just never forget that the goal is not the finished game, it is to enjoy making it.

I wish you all the best in your gamedev journey

Oh? What did you try? The ROM, the linux version or the web version?

On which browser if you tried the web version? It requires a pretty modern desktop web browser :s

Yeah terminal stuff!

A keyboard "twin sticks" (with ncurses limitation of only one keypress at a time) is a bold move bit it works. Lots of fun to mash the keyboard like crazy, it kind of make any move epic :)

Gamplay wise I love the reflection. Having to fight against my instincts that want me to grab birds in the reflected area while it only consume time.

Nice puzzle game with a cool concept.

I though particle accelerators wa just big boring tubes! Fixed, particle accelerators are awesome!

Sorry, I did not understand how to play and so, not rated the game. Maybe fixing "Todo: Implement help screen" could help ;)

Oh, and, congrats to your wife and you!

Nice entry in the spirit of the original zelda ... without damn loading times between screens :)

If we should meet but actually don't, it may be because somebody do not want us to meet.

In this little game you play as a divine entity that nobody see. You are a guardian. Your role is to protect all this violent individuals from themselve. As any inter-species meeting will certainly result in bloody maneer you know what to do: Make The Never Meet :D

Will try to put something tiny with

• Vim
• Python
• Curses

Hey, thank you!

I fixed the default keyboard layout. Now both controllers have their keys bound by default, which is handy in this two-player game :)

You may have to click "Reset to Defaults" if you already played the game and let the default suboptimal binding.

About our entry: Make Them Survive.

Background

With my wife, we lurked around gamejams for some times without participating. With little to no experience in video-game making we waited for something really inspiring. I am a professional developer (not in game industry) and she is a skillful drawer, so we have the technical base to at least put something to life. For our first gamejam, we wanted something to do for a week-end so we can test the water without committing to a complex project, that's why we released so early.

The Fermi paradox jam

We heard about the gamejam Friday on the evening, that was a perfect time to begin.

Strangely, seeing the subject inspired to both of us the same notion: Death. The initial brainstorming came from "Dying is the way to meet" to the current "Meeting is the way to die", certainly because it was easier to translate to a simple gamedesign.

The rest of the evening was brainstorm about the game design and sketches of character concepts. If you are really curious, you can see some of our notes here.

Saturday was the day to begin the implementation and digital drawing.

For the implementation I decided to go with a little javascript gameengine I did some time ago as a hobby project to learn HTML canvas. It is not a super good piece of technology but one I am familiar with, so we earned some time here. I also decided from commit one to go with steering behaviours for actor's AI because it is simple, it is appropriate here and I wanted to implement it since I read an article about it.

For the digital drawing Margarita (my wife) chose to go with Photoshop. While she wanted to learn Krita, the idea was also to go with familiar technologies to save time. While the look of survivors and zombies was been found immediately, the guardian was a tough cookie. After thinking of angels, we preferred something without too much of a religious connotation. A fawn, like forest spirit was an interesting candidate !

By the end of the day, we had a functional game with final assets for zombies and survivors and no sound.

Sunday we finished the graphical assets and added a (very) little polish to the game. We also began to search for libre sounds for the audio then though that it was lame to reuse sounds while we have a midi keyboard gathering dust. As we have no decent recording equipment, we improvised an installation using the line-out output of the keyboard and audacity. That's far from perfect but we were tired, not musicians nor sound technician, so I'd say the result is pretty great for something we never done before and we do not have tools. The result being that the project is almost 100% ours (the font is an old GPL one), and we are pretty proud.

Conclusion

It was like all first experiences: too short, too good.

We are eager to see what amazing other ideas you guys have. We already are in love with Fermi Pasteladox.

Other note

It is too late for a progress report (as the title of the topic expects), you can always have an automated one on the commit history ;)