GMC Jam Discussion The Classic GMC Jam 32 - 8 year anniversary

Don't worry It's perfectly fine with me ^^. Actually what is a friend who can't tell you when you do crap ?
Plus, I'm not taking the jams as a serious thing at all but just for fun.

As the game itself, it is some kind of "poetic essay". Like an "inverted gameplay progression" telling the story. It is explained at the end of the readme -can't spoil-

Thank you for your concern though :° ♥

 

It was just I set it too high

I originally had it so they could move but my grid system broke and I couldnt fix it

Regardless Thank you for your comments @Alice

 

I didnt really like the game the first time I played. Played again today and its started to make sense. I didnt last too long but I understand the game now. Had to bump it up in my rankings. Its actually quite good especially for a jam game...... well done.

 

I feel like that's a pretty good rule of thumb with jam games, trying them again later. Sometimes it takes that for me to understand the gameplay and change my mind. I try to be patient as possible with these games and it pays off.

 

Thanks for the second shake at my game. Both you and @Siolfor the Jackal have a good mindset to consider revisiting a game. I don't regret it but an RTS was a tough project for my 2nd jam. I can see a lot of people bouncing off it not knowing what to do - which I understand. In the last hours it was a choice between having an AI opponent and a tutorial - both really required for a RTS lol. Hence the wall of text trying to explain what to do.

 

Last jam you didn't know which theme I was using (despite it being spelled out pretty clearly in the opening few screens of the game) this time you don't "get" my story even though it's clear. The main character goes around halting mass extinctions on various planets, and to do so on Earth he has to neutralise the military forces here. The following is a direct quote from the opening cutscene:

"Their destructive behaviour will surely kill their own race and all living creatures on the planet"
"So you want me to go there and stop them, save their world, and then I get a break?"
"Exactly"

Sure you might think the alien is wrong in the way he seeks to save Earth (through violence), but you probably understand.

By the third level you have in fact seen 4 different enemy types (soldiers, tanks, anti-air guns and helicopters) and since you need to destroy them all the complete the level, you can't possibly have missed them and be telling the truth about getting as far as you did. That or you did get that far and you're exaggerating the deficit of enemies in your review.

Honestly, I'd rather get 15%, be ranked in last place and receive genuinely useful feedback on my game than get 87% but have no useful criticism to work from... this is all compounded by your attempt to tell me I could have made a better game if only I would give up an extra day of my personal free time to run the jam longer. PSA: That's not how you get the jam host to do things for you, and as it happens I finished my game with around 18 hours to go and just didn't want to do any more work on it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Submitted my votes on the games.

@Lt. Farfetch'd , @JacobV and @Bingdom 's games were the top 3 for me! Well done guys.

 

Can't win in this community. Always seems perpetually and infinitely hostile and sensitive over everything. Every day it feels like a scene in one of those 80's movies, where I'm being getting scolded by an angry superintendent over something trivial. This place is zero chill.

Not in the mood to be lectured or given "the speech" over some trivial mistake I made in a review.

I gave your game a high score. Sorry I forgot the tanks and helicopters. I don't remember seeing them. It was an honest mistake. JFL at you not wanting to work on your game anymore, getting mad about not giving a perfect review, and giving me a lecture about me not giving useful criticism. I gave plenty of useful criticism, instead you want to dwell on a trivial and honest mistake I made and ignore all the other stuff. State of 2019 society I guess. JFL at not caring about your own game enough to polish it on the last 18 hours, but getting mad at my review for not giving enough tips as to improve your gameplay.

I sometimes wonder why I was ever born on this rock in space. Can't win. It's always some new person wanting to start a drama. Like every day. Literally can't escape it.

 

@Misty There's no real drama about it. My critique of your review is no more harsh than your review of most jam games, I just pointed out the inaccuracies.

My 18 hours comment was more to point out the problem with your support for a 4 day jam than anything else you might be reading into it. I spent 25.5 hours on my game, I would not have spent longer if I had an extra day because I have other things to do. Sorry if it was a bit spiky for you, but if you're attracting "drama" elsewhere it might not be my fault!

 

I've updated my review page with playthroughs of the following games:
- Pontatot Conquest of da moon
- Simple village conquest
- Click to conquer
- Spirit of the forest
- CardQuest
- Conquer the treasure
- Kingdom Conquest
- Pixle Cleaner's pixel conquest
- Island of Risk
- Victory
- Professor Heinous
- Conquest of the Olympus
- Britskrieg
- Stellar Destiny
- The Conquest of Castlecrest
- Spirit Walker
- Conquest of Lem
- The Empire
- Bow before the Queen

 

@ghandpivot

Fair points about the troop placement, I didn't quite remember how Risk did it, and I probably should have just started with 1 troop in each territory and let the player place 30 or so troops where he wished, instead of having 10 in each and only giving 8 to place.

I also was not aware of the rule of multiple adjacent territories combining troops to launch an attack, my main version of RISK is the Ubisoft release on PS4 which I'm fairly certain only lets you attack from the territory you select.

As for neutral territories being taken over instantly and the inability to see what the AI is doing, or if indeed there was an AI at work, I was aware that the neutral territory take-over is needlessly time consuming and the AI can be confusing, unfortunately I didn't have time to add animations for the AI doing movements so you could understand their turns, which I really wanted to do, so you could see them doing attack moves, instead of a window just appearing when their attack phase began, but it took me a good 10 hours to program the AI, over 1/3 of my development was spent just getting them to attack weak territories, reinforce their vulnerable territories, they check which nearby territories are player-owned and have a lot of troops, and they'll draft in their troops to the adjacent ones, to try and prevent an invasion, when and when not to initiate attacks, they only attack if there's a good chance of them winning etc. I probably should have gone for a simpler AI and given myself a couple of hours to slowdown their turn, rather than have them act instantly.

With regards to retreating in battle, yeah, it's quite useless in the build I got out. The plan was to have the retreat speed be slightly quicker than the "attack" speed, so you could put distance between you and the enemy, which might help if you had siege weapons, because you could keep firing siege at them while you ran away, which might turn the tide. Obviously it could only work once per battle, as the AI are permanently set to attack.

Thanks for the feedback!

 

Loved to see you playing game and I just subscribed to your channel!

You run into a bug I did not find during the game. I'll have to take a look at it....

Also, I saw you struggled for a few seconds before getting the hang of it, so I might have to do something about it too. Maybe having the tutorial be like a guide to the first few rounds.

As per the randomized field, I tough about doing it but the enemy AI consumed me too much time and I couldn't do any other randomization. Even the game end screen did not get done before I submitted it....

Again, thanks for the feedback!

 

I have been remaking one of my old jam games. I am considering joining these again. It has been a while.

 

I noticed my readme file for my game doesnt get linked in the game jam player, is that because I named it Click to Conquer readme? should i have named it just'readme' or is there another way to link it for next time?

 

Yep, just readme.txt. I almost didn’t do this as there was no mention of the Jam Player this time around and I haven’t been doing this long enough to know if it is the status quo or not.

 

Thank you for the honest feedback of Britskrieg!

As somewhat of an explainer: I ran out of time to make the game fun, and for the most part it is designed for my future expanding rather than being a great game as is for the jam. Almost all of Britskrieg's actual content is based on real life statistics - country sizes and positions are based off of a somewhat hastily compressed and ID-coded map, the "power" of each square is each country's 2018 population divided by its number of squares, etc. A lot of time was spent making all of that GM-readable and then more still was making it a game at all, so it's fairly horribly balanced from an actual gameplay perspective right now.

As it stands, the best tactic I have found from testing Britskrieg in its jam form is to use Recruit in the UK to build up troop counts initially, then spread them across four major landmasses/continents (the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia) and send them on individual Recruit drives, building a town each on captured (light green) spaces to increase Merchants and Churches and make their costs as small as possible (10%) and then their speed as fast as it will go. Blitz any smaller country and upgrade those capitals to generate troops cheaply, and let armies you're not focusing on use Recruit on uncaptured (dark green) squares to build up troop counts while also making the capitals weaker when you can Blitz them.

The zoomed view of the play area will likely be resizable in future versions of the game, but I had to hardcode it for the jam version to save time. I don't think it's too bad though, since it's relatively non-essential - the same captured information is shown on the minimap, and army and town information is accessible in a friendlier form through the bottom-left part of the HUD.

It's still extremely slow. I've worked out the game in its current form takes tens of hours to actually "finish" even if playing optimally, which is a side effect of me running out of time to give it any further substance or any better balancing. Hopefully I can address this in the future with whatever I do with it though, making it actually engaging!

 

Yes. There is something rewarding of watching a video of people who play your game. The shortcomings quickly become obvious.

Your reviews are great @ghandpivot.

 

Finally started playing and reviewing. Hopefully I can get a decent amount done today and tomorrow.

EDIT: Just a note about my entry...

Spoiler

It is incomplete. I had intended to add a "tower defense" mechanic to the game but ran out of time. The town would erect guns to shoot at you and your potato zombies as you tried to capture buildings. Your abilities would have been limited at the beginning of the level. Captured buildings would grant you money/points to spend on upgrades.

Getting the mp_grid working and the Potato pathfinding working took too long to accomplish with my feeble skills.

I appreciate your time invested playing my game. Extensive reviews of this entry are unnecessary, but a quick comment is always fun to read. Cheers!

 

Ok...I think I gotta go replay this game now...

 

Cheers! I would also love more videos
"I played xxx by xxx, a game about xxx. Story goes xxx and there are a lot of music and well drawn sprites. 8/10". I'm always very grateful when someone has voluntarily taken time out of their day to play my game, but writing reviews like they are some sort of presentation is a poor use of your time. The dev already knows all that, and it's not as if someone other than them will benefit from reading the review. "Ghandpivot: Boss too hard, UI confusing, goal unclear. Still kinda fun". Quick, short statements like that take up much less of your time to write and is in my opinion a much more constructive review, which one can expand from if they have the time. Suggestions on how to make something better is always super constructive!

I'll try to play through the rest, I'm working this weekend though but hopefully I'll get an evening off during the week. When is deadline?

 

I think March 12 is deadline.

 

I've reviewed 25% of them now. @SamSam @BraydeeJohnson @TheMiningBoyAlpha @iBlackpen @Bart @Alice @Siolfor the Jackal @Relic @Toque @EvanSki let me know if you have any concerns or queries.

On the topic of review format, I think that text reviews can be pretty poor pretty easily. However, in the past I've appreciated text-form reviews, provided they were critique and advice-centric (as @ghandpivot highlighted). The thing that for me really gives a review an edge is if they tell me what could have enhanced their experience. If you can collate a range of opinions about what people would like to see improved or changed, you've basically just had a focus group analyse your product!
For that reason, my biggest concern about GMC Jam reviewing is that the quantity of reviewers, and indeed the quantity of reviewers who take the time to consciously review a large number of games, is a bit lacking. This is something I think most of us have been guilty of at some point, and could potentially be combat by the implementation of some reviewing rules. Of course, that has it's own disadvantage in that it might discourage people from reviewing even further if they feel like they can't do it on their own terms. It's a complicated issue, but perhaps one that should see some discussion in the GMC Jam Suggestions thread.

 

Setting rules about reviews (other than “be civil”) probably isn’t required - we are all here voluntarily and you pointed out this may just make result in less members committing to reviews.

That said, guidelines could be useful. Saying “I felt that the platforming was too floaty” is infinitely more useful than “I didn’t like the platforming”. Same as “I tried to open the chest with ‘e’ but nothing happened” rather than “the game is buggy”. Constructive criticism that doesn’t take more time to write- just requires being particular about the experience.

But I also believe most reviewers already do this to a whatever level they are willing to commit to.

 

This was my first GMC Jam. I just want to share that I find incredible value in the time people take to review and critique. It is definitely a skill and it does take time to create constructive criticism. This is something I struggle with, even as an aspiring developer.

Like many first timers, I didn't know how to manage my time... My weekend was somewhat busy and I split my days up between art, coding, and prototyping. I ended up rushing things at the end without including sound and an adequate ending. I had to trim a lot of fluff and simplify things, and yet, I ran out of time haha. I'm glad I was able to participate though. Events like these, everyone is a winner.

 

Thank you so much for your detailed review of Britskrieg, seriously impressed you managed to finish the game - although I only got my troops’ action speed up to 400% in my testing. 1100% must have induced some serious wrist ache! Bulk upgrading is definitely on the cards for the future. (As is a mute button. Fwiw, I made the music intermittent because I only had time to make a few minutes of music, and it got boresome listening to it when looped continuously.)

One big bit of counter-information though - the game automatically saves progress after every significant action, as well as every few minutes or so. It will load it back up when you go back into the game. Sorry it wasn’t made clearer that the game did that.

But thanks again. You’re a real credit to the jam - your in depth reviews and deep, committed playthroughs of each entries give incredible, and seriously useful, feedback, especially when I’m intending on using Britskrieg as a foundation for a bigger and deeper game in the future.

 

I'm honestly surprised I wasn't last on that list of reviews from Alice.
I had maybe a total of 6 hours to even work on the game, so I'm glad it's not total trash in the eyes of reviewers.
I'm super rusty working on anything non farm related.

 

@2Dspessman @Alice
Thanks for the feedback. I feel like I spend too much time on implementing trading, not enough time to balance gameplay and create more depth. Also the build instruction at the start appears to be quite confusing. Didn't have enough time to add combat, but I'll definitely continue to work on this game since there's a lot I like about it.

On the subject of reviewing, it takes a lot of time. That's just what it is. I'll try to review all games before the end of this week. Also I noticed being down the alphabetical order is a major disadvantage, so I'd better pick a name that starts with an A next time.

 

How is alphabetical order a disadvantage? A lot of people play and vote via the jam player which randomises the order of entries you play.

 

I'm almost half way through - finding it hard to find the time to review and rank this time around. I will finish providing feedback (I appreciate all yours so wish to respond in kind) - but maybe not before the due date. Is it better not to rank at all if I don't get in before the 12th? Or should I still rank those that I played?

 

I know I'd prefer you rank everyone or no one. Not really a fan of top 3 of top 10 rankings.

 

We are still using the system where a top 3 vote lets all other entries share 4th place, right? If that's the case I dont mind "Top x" votes, as long as it is clear that every entry has been played. Currently there are some voters who seem to have written their "top X" based on the games they've played so far. If they do not manage to get through the rest and the temporary ranking gets counted as a final, it will impact your jam results profoundly if you managed to get ranked at all, especially considering how few people tend to vote.

 

Is that how it works? I get so confused by the explanations every time haha.
In that case, I agree with ghand, seems a bit wrong to rank a couple withour playing them all if that's what some people are doing.
I only have a couple games left to try myself.

 

This is what the voting topic says;

 

I think the rank scoring should go from bottom up. For example if there's thirty games and someone's ranked list is three games, they would score for positions 28, 29 and 30.

 

Hope we're using some robust floating point arithmetic.

 

Games outside of a reviewer's rankings will all score zero points. I don't think any jam host has ever counted un-ranked games as scoring points but I could be wrong.

As for ranking going bottom up (last place gets 1, 1st place gets the same amount of points as the number of entries) I have no objection to it on principle really, but 1/vote+1 does nearly the same thing. The difference being that 1/vote+1 is sort of "weighted" to favour games that get a top 3 vote. Whereas bottom-up would mean that one person going against the grain of public opinion (even as a joke, which we seem to see quite a bit in the jam) could alter the table more drastically. (e.g. if they wait til the end, put the person currently winning in last and the person currently in second in first). I don't think people actually sit around waiting to do that but I think that might be why we chose 1/vote+1 in the first place? I'm not really sure.

EDIT: here's a fictional example of what I mean:

Code:

In a jam with 49 entries:

McPotato The Game 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 49th
Bobby Dolittle 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 2nd, 1st

== 1/(vote+1) ==
McPotato The Game 4.52 points
Bobby Dolittle 3.5 points

== Bottom-up ==
Bobby Dolittle 481 points
McPotato The Game 442 points

Clearly there was more appetite for McPotato the game to win the whole jam, but in the "bottom-up" voting scheme Bobby Dolittle overtakes it thanks to 1 person.

 

@GameDevDan

I might be misunderstanding Nightfrost, but they may have been meaning that if someone just rates 3 games, not the full 36, those 3 votes only count for low points, because that person didn't play the rest, so their vote is unfair and should count for less.

As in, if they only rank 3 games, their 1st place vote is counted as 1/(34+1), 2nd place is 1/(35+1) etc. As though they ranked the games as 34/36, 35/36, and 36/36.

If someone only played 3 games for example, my game, Britskreig and ALPS, and they rated them #1, #2 and #3 respectively, that would be an unfair vote.

They might have voted my game #1, which gives me a ton of points, but it absolutely doesn't mean I made a good game. Alice for example, rated my game middle of the pack, which means although she thinks my game is better than 50% of the entries, she put it quite far down the list, so it doesn't really give me any points. Had she only played 10 games, not all 36, I would have potentially placed 1st, had the other 9 she played have been in the lower half of her ranking.

Having 2 people play 3 games, and those 2 people both happen to play my game, gives me a huge advantage, is what I'm saying haha. If I get ranked in their top 3 just because mine was one of the only games they played, I won by default, not because it was the best game.

TL;DR, unless the vote contains all entries, or the voter makes it clear all games were played, the vote shouldn't count, as it's unfair.

 

I might be wrong but I think we had it like that for quite a while. There's no real downside to counting all the games that have not been voted for as a shared place below the last ranked one. With the current system people who rank fewer entries have way more impact on the results, and in general the results will be further away from the opinion of the forum as a whole.

Anyhow, last batch of reviews are up:
Games in order of appearance:
- Tank-You
- Chroma Crown
- I'd Move mountains
- Apocalypse Chronicles ~The Horsemen Clash over Hearts
- Super Mana Force Ultra
- Oh Canada
- Sci Dominion
- Conquest Royale
- ALPS
- King of the Ant Hill
- Axem Conquest
- Mini Civilizations
- Banana Toss
- The Imperialist
- Goating Up
- These Planets Are Mine
- My Righteous Conquest

Give the video time to buffer, it's a few gigs

 

I had no problem working out what to do - the intro told me as much. I also played on easy mode though so I guess that was a factor. I've already made video reviews of all the games, just the editing and posting left to do. Thank you for actually making a conquest-themed game

 

No Problem! I love that these Jams make me work toward trying new things in a response to an unknown theme. I thought for sure the theme was going to be contrast or constant based on the clues but in the end, having the unexpected conquest made me scrap all pre-jam ideas and just go with something else completely. Loving the games with strong ties to the theme more than those that don't - no matter the polish.

Pro tip: the hard mode toggle is bugged so everyone is playing easy!

 

ghandpivot:
"You have one disadvantage here and that's I hate RTS"
*Makes a few paths for ants to follow*
"This is pretty cool though, I like it"
*Ranks game 2nd place*

LOL! Happy I could break through your tendency to not enjoy this genre. Was the video legit your first play through? You picked up the path creation, food collection and path removal so quick!