GMC Jam Discussion GMC Jam 30 / XXX / Discussion

One day left for me to complete the entire reviews and Im about to do one last playthrough of the remaining entries soon.

https://www.twitch.tv/misumeow

 

I posted my votes in the voting topic. Due to health issues I didn't have time to write feedback for all of them(I did play them all however). I sincerely apologise. If anyone who would like specific feedback on their game, feel free to PM me and I will get back to you.

 

Votes are up! This jam has been a blast and in my opinion the quality of the games have been great this time around! It's been tricky to rank the games for sure. Well done everyone!

 

Alright, I've finally submitted my votes and reviews.

Guys, I had a ton of fun with your games! I'm so glad I made time to play them all this time around!
I hope a lot of you guys check out the feedback in my reviews, and I really hope it's actually useful to you (I tried my best, but I might have overstretched myself in trying to give deep reviews for everyone).

~ WHAT ABOUT THE PLAYTHROUGH VIDEOS, YOU MAY ASK? ~
(or not, but here's the answer, regardless)
I do have my initial playthroughs for maybe 75% of the games. The other 25% or so had technical issues which ruined them.
I decided to only upload videos per request, due to life and bad internet.
Please send me a PM if you'd like me to upload my initial playthrough of your game.

If your game is among the listed games in the spoiler, feel free to ask me to upload it for you:

Spoiler

• Robot Ranchers
  (I forgot to turn the game audio down a bit so you could hear me well, but it's mostly okay)
  
• Misuware
• SlimePrince
• HiddenBullet
• Stick Together
• (!!!)
• FarmSim
• STTTAT
• Less Than 3
• Last Convoy
• Prism Palace
• SuperCharger
  (there's a regrettable childishcomment, but uh.. I'll upload it anyway, if you want)
• Caves and Lasers
• 'Tato Lazers
• Swing Me
• AEGIS
• Base Camp
• Energized!
• Spud Pump
• Sticky Tanks
• Not the Bees
• Starship Skedaddle
• Blade of Light
• The Uncompleted Gravitation Machine
• The Best Game Ever
• Cavern Business Balloon
• Void Swarm

Last note: I'll be keeping the video files at least until the end of the month, if not indefinitely on storage someplace, but asking me for the video sooner is better than asking later.

 

Those were some nice reviews, @Micah_DS . I enjoyed your breakdowns and formatting.

Thanks for the kind review, you're right about my story being rushed. All the text in my game I wrote on my phone on a bus ride home from an exam I had on the last day. I really wanted to explain it all better in-game though. The idea was for the lifeform to bond with you to give you the charging abilities, I planned to have some cutscene/story art in that first bit with the dialogue box, and then have the little blob guy at the start of the game yo make it more obvious he was the gun(hence the pew pew noises and how the gun disappears when you change modes, good eye, @Misu XD).
Couldn't come up with a good way to visually show the lifeform bonded to you in time sadly.

Edit: I'd maybe like to see my video Micah, if only because I'm curious about the childish comment

 

@Micah_DS thank for the very indepth review! Yeah I could have introduced the fact that the Captain and Bullet are friendly form the beginning, but the tutorial kinda carried me away with formality - I kind of see it as a "formal mission briefing", but I should have worked it in differently anyway. However, their friendship and the way the tutorial is "part of the story" is because of how the storytelling of this works in general, given that it is part of a larger project I've been working on for a while.

The reason that there is a very low amount of gameplayis that I focused on getting the hard bits in the beginning (gameplay and basic story), then started tweaking on the second day, planning to add more gameplay on the end of day 2 and throughout day 3. But an audio bug hit me and it took me forever to fix it (cause it turns out it was caused by my audio drivers, and it affected everything up to the final, compiled game executable). It really killed my mood and I was only able to fix it 12 hours - and a sleep night - away from the jam's end :/

The button bug is because to prevent the player from transitioning tons of times at once, the buttons become "already clicked" when you click on them once (the audio one manually resets itself to "not clicked"), and won't be able to be clicked again in that state. However I later made the transition block itself from starting if another one is happening, so that fix is now a bug, because clicking on it while the menu fades in makes it become "already clicked" before it can actually transition. So you were kinda close with the fading in guess lol

EDIT: a yes for the gameplay you don't have to upload it, I understand the pain of slow internet.

 

If the mods could be so kind to extend the voting another two days, I can get my votes in, otherwise you'll all have to just be okay with these tiny reviews from me. Sorry, this is what 6-day work weeks do to me.

 

Cool! I have about twelve more to do. They'll be kinda rushed, but with tomorrow off I can finish. Thanks NAL and Alice!!

 

Thanks for the awesome review, @Alice!!! Above and beyond. Much appreciated. Gave me the 'warm and fuzzies'.

 

It's become very apparent to me that no one realised they could aim the gun upwards or diagonally upwards in my game...
I mentioned aiming in my readme but i could have been clearer.

 

Thanks for video reviews of the games. I’m Mac and I think these are all windows exe.

All the games I’ve seen are great in their own way.

 

All dun voatz and ruhvyuze.
Thanks again for the extra time, youze modz!

 

I did some more reviews. Unfortunately I still dont got the time since I have to do some irl stuff atm. I will finish tomorrow everything if I can.

@NightFrost I mistaken your entry with FrostyCat entry so I had to fix the review again (in case you had read it yet or not).

@Maximiliano I finally got to play your game and wrote a review for it. You can check it out in my voting post.

 

@Misu The reason I used GM8 was because that's what I had installed on the only machine I had access to. It doesn't really use any advance functions so I don't see why it should lag so much for you. It didn't lag on the ten-year-old computer I built it in and it doesn't on my main gaming computer either so I doubt it's a common problem (unless your drivers are actually quite much older than you though ). Unfortunately, I don't really understand your review, did the game not work? Since the only thing you mention is gravity I assume you didn't manage to any machinery going at all which either mean the game has some really serious issues on your computer or you didn't realize you could control conveyor belts and cranes by adding commands to the timeline. Anyways, thanks for trying it out, even if it turned out lackluster for you!

 

Your game (and your game alone) ran at a snail's pace while Misu had his screen capture program on, and he quickly lost patience with it. Chances are that the 8.1 runner is cross-interacting with that program or something else on his machine, such that it gets starved for resources.

Watch your game start at 19:50: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/307064226

By the way, I didn't have that problem on my Windows 7 laptop and everything was smooth and responsive, but again I wasn't doing a screencap while running your submission.

 

Wow, yes that looks painful. Sorry you had to experience that @Misu, guess I'll have to make sure I've got a newer version for next time.

 

@Misu thanks for the feedback and the playthrough, sorry you didn't like the final product I had at the end. In my defense, there was going to be way more gameplay and possibly a stealth section too, but I had to spend from half of day 2 to nearly the end of day 3 trying to fix an audio problem that was unrelated to gamemaker but somehow affected the game (even when built and moved to a different machine) and that not only took tons of time but also kind of lowered my morale. The story was pretty much all there since day one, so I had plenty of time for gameplay in theory. Next time I'll throw in the gameplay first.

Interesting way to look at games though, I kinda agree and disagree at the same time but that's beyond the jam. Again thanks for the feedback, will definitely keep it in mind in the future

QuickEDIT: yes the year is 329. It makes sense in the bigger picture of which Hidden Bullet is part of, I swear!

 

No probs. It was OBS causing it to lag horribly but this case isnt new to me since I knew it had something to do with GM8 because Ive had like this before due to some programs multitasking. I ran it again and manage tp pass one stage. I cant change my review though but I did gave you a fair score. Hope you do well.

Im happy to hear that. Just for the record, i gave you best Of Story since its the one story with deep drama and elaborate storytelling.

Btw. I finallyuploaded and completed all voting results in the voting thread. Congrats to everyone in the jam and hope you all do great.

 

If Alice doesn't get chosen as the best reviewer, I don't know what to think.

Misu did absolutely fantastic as well, as usual, and I'd personally choose him for second best reviewer, but what Alice has done (and is doing) is just above and beyond. Each video has a lengthy and well-written review within the video description, the video playthroughs give the developers highly valuable feedback on how she played the game, and she's even editing videos and adding captions, which is very time-consuming. She's even gone beyond that, adding in post-jam gameplay with her thoughts on that as well (at least, she has with HayManMarc's game - I haven't seen all of her reviews to know if she's done it with all games that have post-jam versions).

I really look forward to when she gets to my game's review. On that note, I've read everyone's reviews for my game and I watched Misu's gameplay (if anyone else has recorded gameplay of my game, I'd love to watch it!), and I'm extremely thankful for all that feedback. With Alice's video and written review, I think it'll solidify a lot of previous feedback, as well as give me even more new insights.

Even though it does suck to have messed up in so many ways, in the end, I'm grateful for the feedback, because it'll help me become a better developer.
I hope everyone checks out all the reviews for their own games as well. You'll be doing yourself a favor, and it does take time to write a good review, so it's nice to respect the effort of others by reading/watching the reviews.

 

I personally believe that Micah_DS would get the Best Reviewer award because tbh, I find his way of reviewing entries highly elaborate and well dedicated. Not to mention you took much time for each entry to critically analize the contents and info. I personally believe you got better chances than I do.
I simply did not had any time at all during voting phase with too much things going on that blocks my freetime and accessibility. Therefore my reviewing didnt seem quite elaborate as they used to be and was thought out too quickly. Been trying to complete the most I could during the time I had with both job and house errands occupying my life this time. It was quite a hard challenge but atleast I complete it on time. I appreciate the good reply from many users here about my reviews. Thank you all for taking the time to check them out. Hopefully I might continue to participate next time if I ever want to that is. I might just come up with a huge surprise maybe ... *whistles and disappears into nothingness*

Edit: I fixed a small score on one of the entries. It was a small typo on number and had to rearrange the score for HayManMarc's entry. In case you wonder any changes to my scores, do check them out.

 

Honestly it's hard to choose between Misu, Micah, and Alice's reviews. You guys all did great jobs in different ways.

 

Voting is now closed! Results will be tallied and posted soon.

 

The results are in!

 

9th. That's a new personal best for working on my own.

Thanks to everyone for your reviews and thank you NAL for hosting!

 

17th Better than I expected for like 30 seconds of gameplay, that's for sure lmao

thanks for all the votes and feedback, I'll be sure to keep them in mind in the future! was a really fun jam despite wasting 24 hours on a single audio bug.

 

Oof, 25th. That hurts a little bit.

 

I... wow... 4th place. That's a new personal best for me. Thanks for all the reviews, everyone! This really made my day

 

6th place and best use of theme! I'm very happy with that.
I had a lot of fun guys, I'll see you all next year

 

Well done everyone! There were a lot of interesting games with a wide variety of gameplay.

@NAL great job hosting and the puzzles to work out the themes were really entertaining and must have taken a fair bit of work to organise. Long live the XXX Game Jam!

 

Oh look! Me and Alice won for Best Reviewer. Thats cool. Congrats to her and everyone else who participated in the jam. We all did good. There is a small chance for me to coming back at december for the next one. Till then... *goes to slumber*

 

Not bad, I'll take it. Also, big congratulations to the winners!

 

Congratulations to the winners! And big respect for all the participants!

 

Congratz to the winners and to all! I got 34th! WOOT!!

 

Congratulations to all winners! There were a lot of worthy entrants in this one, though regrettably my schedule has been such a smoking disaster I still haven't had time to properly play them all yet. -_-

I also want to extend a sincere thank you for everyone who took the time to review all the games, and to the event organizer.

Had a great time, and hoping I will be able to be in the next one as well.

 

This is my second time getting 12th, so I've matched my previous highest rank. I'm pretty happy with that.

In the end, it looks like I'll have to work harder in both reviewing and game making.
Well, tbh, reviewing doesn't come all that easy to me, and I actually overdid it this time (i.e. I used almost all my free time and became a bit stressed at points), meaning that's probably as good as it gets with me on reviews. Part of why I tried so hard is because I didn't offer any prize this time, but I still wanted to give something useful. I'd like to continue giving better feedback, but I should probably avoid screwing myself over too much in the process.

Anyway, congrats to all who succeeded in submitting something! It was fun.

-
BTW, I plan to play everyone's post-jam games soon-ish and give some feedback on those. Might not get much of a chance to really play until the beginning of next week though.

(EDIT: For shame! I forgot to say thanks to @NAL for hosting! You did an awesome job!)

 

Thank you to Nal for your hosting efforts and thank you to the members who took the time to do thoughtful reviews. I look forward to the next one. I’ll have a second kid by then so I may have to make a game in less than 4 hours

 

Great jam. Congrats to the winners.

Did not see video review of TehPilot.
Could someone post a link if there is one?

I would enjoy watching a bit of gameplay.

Congrats again. This looked like fun might join in the next one.

 

I thought my initial playthrough of Screens was one of the messed up vids, but I checked again and it's fine, so I uploaded it:

It's not exactly a review video, but I do make some comments as I play. I play through the whole game as well. My voice is a tad quiet, due to being tired and also not wanting to wake up my roommate.

@TehPilot tagging in case you want to watch me play your game. Congrats on the win!

 

Thanks!!! Enjoyed watching.
Very cool game. A deserving win. Well done.

 

What a fantastic jam, I could hardly be happier to have taken part alongside such skilled people and I really appreciate every review of my own entry, which was my first completed game! I can hardly overstate the amount I learned from both participating in the jam and reading the advice of the members of this forum outside of it. 28th place is much higher then I expected for my entry, so thanks to everyone who voted for my humble mess! I think I'll try and enter something in every jam from now on.

 

Late congratulations to all winners!

It's amusing how, when I published my jam game, I thought it would be nice if I could get at least to around halfway on the list - and my rank 19 is exactly there. Even happier about the averaged rank, ~14.6, and with so many absent rankings I consider it a bit more accurate reflection of general opinion than the scored rank (you can see on the score table how those with more rankings tend towards top spots).

I enjoyed participating in the jam. Too bad real life conspired against me and I couldn't rate all the entries in time (I noticed the time extension too late). I did not want to release a partial ranking as that wouldn't do justice to those who were left out. So when's the next jam?