itch.io

Very nice.  Why don't you make a game that is more ambitious?  Spend like 1 full week on it?

NICE game!  Very relaxing

It's not actually finished yet, but I'm just hoping to get an idea of whether i should bother doing so or not by seeing if there's any interest in it.

So it would be a bit like a project management too, but specifically designed for games.  You would create tasks that need to be accomplish and assign them to team members, but it would have a different calendar display, and it would have features that allow you to "force" the game to be one by certain deadline.  Of course it can't *literally* force you ... it just "makes a big deal" out of getting it done on time, even if it's not quite what you imagined.

It would be quite a lot simpler than a regular project management tool, and it would have a UI that would be a lot more fun to use.

Does that help?

Yes, sorry, that's fair.  I'm not actually trying to sell anything, I'm literally just curious to know if people who do game jams would find something that helps them meet their deadline intriguing; Nothing else.  For example, answers might be something like, "yes", "no", or "maybe".

I have a tool that is designed to help people finish their game jams with maximum quality, by the deadline.  Is this something anyone would be interested in?

Hello Jammers, 

I am currently in the process of finalizing a business plan for a startup based in the United Kingdom. Our focus will be on creating independent game titles and developing tools to aid in game development.  One of the main features of the game is tailored to  people participating in game jams like this one to meet a hard deadline.

If you are a game developer residing in the United Kingdom, whether professionally or as a hobbyist, and have a moment to spare, I would appreciate the opportunity to provide you with more information about our plans, and to hear your thoughts on whether you believe it to be a viable and useful endeavor. If you are interested in participating, please reach out to me via direct message.   Additionally, if you know of anyone else who may be interested, please feel free to forward this message to them.

I can be reached on Discord as JoeAnderson#9155

Thank you!

Hello Jammers, 

I am currently in the process of finalizing a business plan for a startup based in the United Kingdom. Our focus will be on creating independent game titles and developing tools to aid in game development.  One of the main features of the game is tailored to  people participating in game jams like this one to meet a hard deadline.

If you are a game developer residing in the United Kingdom, whether professionally or as a hobbyist, and have a moment to spare, I would appreciate the opportunity to provide you with more information about our plans, and to hear your thoughts on whether you believe it to be a viable and useful endeavor. If you are interested in participating, please reach out to me via direct message. Additionally, if you know of anyone else who may be interested, please feel free to forward this message to them.

I can be reached on Discord as JoeAnderson#9155

Thank you!

Hello, 

I am currently in the process of finalizing a business plan for a startup based in the United Kingdom. Our focus will be on creating independent game titles and developing tools to aid in game development.

If you are a game developer residing in the United Kingdom, whether professionally or as a hobbyist, and have a moment to spare, I would appreciate the opportunity to provide you with more information about our plans, and to hear your thoughts on whether you believe it to be a viable and useful endeavor. If you are interested in participating, please reach out to me via direct message. Additionally, if you know of anyone else who may be interested, please feel free to forward this message to them.

I can be reached on Discord as JoeAnderson#9155

Thank you!

Interesting game.!

Nice!

I loved Asteroids when it first came out in the arcades.  I can't play downloadable games though, only HTML5 games.  Looks great though.

Got it.  

Love the storyline.

The "give" didn't seem to work well.

Comment #1: Most of your games have very loud music.  Maybe cut the music volume by 50% in general?

Comment #2: I'm really enjoying watching you learn and try out game styles and ideas.  I'd like to see something more dramatic when you win or lose, like a "game over" screen, with sounds or a "congrats" screen when you win.  

Commend #3: Love what you're doing.  (-:

Well done.

Tilemaps.  Nice. 

3 hours eh?   Do you think you could do a game in 1 hour if you had 2 others to help you?

Nice game play.  (-:

Cool.  (-:

This game is magnificent!!  It's hilarious and insane and stupid and wonderful!  I love it!

Welcome everyone to Squid Jam #2 ... Return of the what?  Squids.

This time, we've allowed 50 hours of development time.  That's enough to make a AAA blockbuster game title for sure!

Love the graphics and sounds.

Seemed to be some technical issues ... but was able to find my friends.

Nice work!

Love the graphics and sounds.

Seemed to be some technical issues ... but was able to find my friends.

Nice work!

Love the animated fish and the lantern!

Wasn't sure why I was supposed to throw the lantern and never saw Atlantis, although it said I arrived there, so a little confused about that.

Great effort!   Love the little diver.

Hello everyone (all 6 of you).

Squids library, 24 hour game jam starts soon!  Limber up those fingers as you're probably going to be doing a lot of typing.

I had the same issue/question, but couldn't find any mention of the jam needing to be approved.  It's perfectly sensible, and I suspected maybe that is why ours hasn't appeared yet, but it is NOT at all obvious.   A message right at the bottom of the Jam editing page near the Save button saying, "Note: your Game Jam will not be listed until it has been approved ... blah, blah."  Just a suggestion.

Hey all you aspiring indie game devs!  Sleepless has been working on little a 2D game development environment.  Its goal is to make it as quick as possible to make indie games of good quality.   You supply image files, sound files, and code.  The rest is up to your skills, and creativity.  

In a nutshell, you write a script that loads images, and sounds from files.  You provide a function in your script (just 1) that receives events like mouse clicks, time-ticks, key presses, etc.  Then your script has available to it just a few low-level functions.  One for drawing an image, one for playing a sound 3 or 4 other misc. things like querying the display size, etc.   The sounds can be looped, and you can control the volume (currently).  Drawing images supports scaling, rotating, and transparency.   That (in theory) is enough to build just about any 2D game you can imagine.

It only provides you with the simplest possible, low level interface with which you can have maximum freedom to do what you want.  We're looking for people who want to try it out.  We'll provide quite a lot of assistance in this early stage to help you use it, and provide game-dev/design expertise.   We'll have a web address soon with some info on how to start.   Trust me, it's really easy.  Stay tuned, and if you'd like more info, feel free to reply here for the time being.  If you want to ask questions of us directly, you can join the free Discord server here .... https://discord.gg/mNPBJGt

Graphics look great!

FYI ...

Sleepless Games now hosts a Discord server where we do our development. We're building a new game that should be done around 31-Jan-2020. If you want to watch it be created, come and hang out with us!  You can ask questions, etc.   Here's the Discord invite link  -- https://discord.gg/mNPBJGt 

If you like Swords, you may find this interesting ...

Sleepless Games now hosts a Discord server where we do our development. We're building a new game that should be done around 31-Jan-2020. If you want to watch it be created, come and hang out with us!  You can ask questions, etc.   Here's the Discord invite link  -- https://discord.gg/mNPBJGt 

If you like PocoMan, you may find this interesting ...

Sleepless Games now hosts a Discord server where we do our development. We're building a new game that should be done around 31-Jan-2020. If you want to watch it be created, come and hang out with us!  You can ask questions, etc.   Here's the Discord invite link  -- https://discord.gg/mNPBJGt 

Sleepless Games now hosts a Discord server where we do our development. We're building a new game that should be done around 31-Jan-2020. If you want to watch it be created, come and hang out with us!  You can ask questions, etc.   Here's the Discord invite link  -- https://discord.gg/mNPBJGt

Only days left to the launch of Wrecker. 

Don't forget to rate the game for a chance to win a free copy of the full production version!

Play this game.  Destroy everything.  Protect your base at all costs.  Don't let the alien hordes overrun you.

See the Dev log for recent improvements.

PocoMan lives again!

Brilliant!

Kadabura, is this game entirely your creation?  Artwork too?

Hi everyone! 

So my name is Joe Hitchens.  I create the Swords game.  I will try to answer a few of your questions about it.

"Angry Dragon" is indeed the first of what I'm calling "chapters" in a hopefully longer saga.  "Bog Beast" is the second chapter.  Those are the only two so far.

Yes, there are other modules in the list, and yes, they're really just test modules.  And yes, I should make them invisible to avoid confusion.  I'll do that.

Regarding the idea of carrying loot and attributes across the chapters.  There are a lot of issues with this, but I do intend to have "something" carry across the chapters to tie them together.  But it may be limited.  I also have to figure out how to do it as I'd like to let the player go back through previously played chapters (for top secret reasons).  So that's something I have to work out.

My intent was to make each chapter rather small, and short; Something you could play within the space of 30 to 60 minutes ... just a little fun thing to do when you're bored.  It would be an epic story/adventure, but it would be broken up into many very small chunks of game play and not heavily dependent on each other.

Regarding voice/sounds: The voice option enables the speaking of the output for you.  It does not allow you to speak the commands.  HOWEVER!  There is an Alexa version of this game that does!  The Alexa version was actually created first and includes only "Angry Dragon".  If you have an Alexa say, "Alexa, open the Swords game" and you should be able to play it with your voice.  The web based version is unlikely to have voice input anytime soon though.

Regarding iOS Safari, I didn't test that, so I don't know how well it will work.  In fact, it's only been tested in Chrome on a Mac.  It "should" work in any desktop version of Chrome or Firefox.  It might work in other desktop browsers or in in browsers on mobile devices, but can't guarantee it.

Regarding commands.  You can type in the full verbs like "inventory", but there are some common abbreviations that work, but not all the verbs have abbreviations.  "I" for inventory should work, as well as N, S, E, W.  I think "x" is short for "study" (examine).  Perhaps "t" for take.  The abbreviations are all one letter, so just try them out until I can include the list in the instructions.  You can shorten the noun to just the general portion in most cases, if it wouldn't be ambiguous.  For example, if there is a red potion in your inventory and no other potions, you can enter "quaff potion"  and leave off the "red".

I believe you can "study" bad guys without them attacking you.

You do currently lose your loot when you play a new chapter, but again (as above) I hope to have at least sort of carry-over.  One of the main issues is that in order to carry items across chapters, those items would have to balanced in terms of game play across the whole saga.  For example, a magic sword that is crazy powerful works okay in Angry Dragon, but if I carry that over to the next chapter then does that make me super-powerful and able to murder everything in sight right from the start?  Or do I somehow increase the power of all the creatures on subsequent chapters to take that into account?  What if the player doesn't happen to have found that sword in the first chapter?  Then they'd be way too weak.  So, although I want some continuity across chapters, I still want to preserve the ability to have each chapter be a very small, self-contained little adventure unto itself.  It's a work in progress.  Ideas are welcome.

Yeah, it just keeps saying Game Over at the end.  All you can do is Reset or New Game.  It's lame.  I'll try to improve on the UI there.

Hope that answers some questions. 

I purposely wanted the game playable with your eyes shut (if you're sighted), hence the abbreviations and the voice.  I did this mainly because I wanted the player to user their imagination rather than include graphics in the game.  It's sort of as an experiment.  It actually didn't occur to me that it would be a good game for unsighted folks, but I'm glad it is, and would like to do what I can to make it as accessible as possible, so please give me pointers on how I can do that better.

I appreciate you all having a look and asking questions.  I may not be able to check this forum often.  A more direct channel to me would be to email swords@sleepless.com or contact@sleepless.com.  Please don't hesitate to give me feedback and suggestions.

Thanks everyone.

j.h.