GMC Jam Discussion The Extremely Aestival GMC Jam #5 Discussion Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
O

Oyakiiv

Guest
High score boards really do make a difference. even I want to go back and get back on there now...
 
D

DocNogloff

Guest
So I figured out what happened to my game for people who were experiencing crashes on pressing Z.
Just don't press Z on level 1 (where there are no movable boxes), and you should be fine. You may press Z whenever you like on the other levels (because they have movable boxes)

If any voters skipped ranking my entry because of this game-breaking bug, you don't have to revisit it because it's a big oversight on my part, but if you do, then thank you!

I might eventually make a fixed post-jam version with more levels.
 
M

Misu

Guest
That was a typo Matharoo. :p

Also Im still waiting for @Coded Games to reply back with his feedback about my entry since I sent him a shaderless version of my entry. Its been several days already.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Avast is a bit annoyed at one of the games, just figured you might wanna know.
upload_2017-9-3_14-8-23.png
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
Just giving a shout-out for @The M for great and detailed reviews.
Not just because I've been scored in top 3 by TheM.

Either way, they raise some pretty good points and may help with expanding the games further. I recommend to check these reviews out. ^^

(now waiting for what Misu has in store for me...)
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
When the jam ends, I am thinking of continuing working on my game (Duality) to make it better and make a thread in the games section. I guess.
 

chance

predictably random
Forum Staff
Moderator
I've made considerable progress on playing and reviewing the games. There are some good entries. I'm hoping to review all of them before the deadline.

Oddly... at least three games (so far) fail to run. Just blank screens. Don't recall having this issue before, and I'm using the same hardware as in earlier Jams. So I'm not sure what's going on. I plan to check my graphics card drivers for updates.
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
I've made considerable progress on playing and reviewing the games. There are some good entries. I'm hoping to review all of them before the deadline.

Oddly... at least three games (so far) fail to run. Just blank screens. Don't recall having this issue before, and I'm using the same hardware as in earlier Jams. So I'm not sure what's going on. I plan to check my graphics card drivers for updates.
Same happened to me, hitting alt+enter to disable fullscreen fixed it
 

ghandpivot

Member
Wait, @ghandpivot, is it just me, or combos give literally no bonus compared to regular score?

I mean, after you score a ball, you have your combo counter increased by 1 (or apparently 20 for golden ball), and once the combo is collected, the exact combo count is added to the score. Which means that each ball gives 1 (or 20) points immediately, then 1 (or 20) points once the combo is collected. And if you lose, the accumulated combo is automatically reclaimed, so there is no mechanical difference between racking up 5x combo 10 times or 1x combo 50 times. With no hi-score being odd, each ball giving its score twice (on hit and on combo reclaim) is even more likely.
Hey, it's combo, don't overthink it :rolleyes:
But you are totally right, it makes no sense. I pushed that game out in about 5-6 hours spending the last 2 on figuring out how to do the online highscores properly, which worked out alright but not perfect as I wanted them loaded ingame rather than inbrowser. The combo system should be reworked to scale up the bonus depending on how high of a streak you can pull off, or made to matter in some other way.

It is however interesting how well it works even when it's completely pointless. For some reason, even when knowing there's no point to it I still like stacking up as high of a combo as I can.

As for the people scoring super low, I'm not really sure what you're doing. There is a bug that makes the ball move out to the side upon restart, which requires you to quit and reboot the game. Are you playing with that bug? Then it'd make sense to have a hard time surviving for more than 8 points. Otherwise I'd say stay closer to the middle and try to counter every push you recieve with moving in the opposite direction.

In the end of the day I focus on making fun games, and all games I review are based on how fun I think they are. If people actually came back to play my game and try to score higher it's a success in my eyes, even if it could have been way better with some more effort and polish!
 
Last edited:

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
@Siolfor the Jackal It is by all means solvable; it even has one extra condition that isn't necessary (there is only one solution satisfying all the other conditions, anyway), though it would be really devilish and guessworky without it. ;)

Feel free to shoot me a PM if you want to share your progress and want some hints (or just the solution altogether). ^^
 
O

Oyakiiv

Guest
@The M I love how thorough your review was. Though unfortunately I am aware all of those flaws, there just wasnt time to do it better, since most of the game was coded on the last day since it was my only day off. But my wife was a real slave driver, kicked me outta bed at 10:30 and said get to work! spent at least 12 hours on sunday and had to give up around 2 am due to mental fatigue...

Anyway, me and the wife will be putting more time into it after all the reviews come in.

PS: I put strings on the bats cuz my wife thought it would be cute/funny (I honestly love it too)
 

ghandpivot

Member
@ghandpivot Did you somehow update your game? It is easier now, and I get a lot of golden balls (I did not get even one before).
View attachment 12482
Cool! Nope, just RNG-esus being on your side this time combined with you being more skilled than before.


I just recorded another hour of gameplay, I'm done with all the games. I'll need to convert all the audio files since my phone (which I record audio with to reduce noise) uses a weird format that after effects doesn't support, fix the audio levels so that they match through all the games, render the videos and upload them on youtube. I've changed my video format so it's only 5gb this time around, though post-rendering (which will take soo many hours) it'll probably be closer to 20.


Edit: All video recordings are in FLV. Will need to convert those into .mp4 which apparently VLC can do. Converting one worked perfectly until I opened it in AE, then it looks like this:

Any ideas?
 
Last edited:
M

Misu

Guest
@ghandpivot I dunno which video software you using for recording but I once encountered a problem although it isnt too similar but it feels like it might be it. I had to ensure to use the right encoding for my graphics card and avoid using 60fps, I dunno if that will help since I am not familiar with the settings you have or what software you use. Care to share more info?

nevermind, I didnt see your post that said VLC converting until now. I never use VLC actually, I tend to record my videos using OBS under mp4 format. It always worked very well for me although I run in low quality because of not so powerful computer.
 

ghandpivot

Member
@ghandpivot I dunno which video software you using for recording but I once encountered a problem although it isnt too similar but it feels like it might be it. I had to ensure to use the right encoding for my graphics card and avoid using 60fps, I dunno if that will help since I am not familiar with the settings you have or what software you use. Care to share more info?
All the raw footage is fine and can be played back with no problem. It's when you open it in AE that it goes green 3D-glasses looking. I'll see if I can work around it somehow unless someone has a simple answer. The videos are 30fps and 3D-mode or anything isn't activated.

They're recorded in OBS, sadly the default output is .flv.
 
Last edited:
M

Misu

Guest
I always use defualt output mp4 knowing tha tI cant rely on most video converting softwares. I do use Any video Converter though but I only use that for converting video to audio format. Not sure recommending a different converter would be a good idea.
 

ghandpivot

Member
I always use defualt output mp4 knowing tha tI cant rely on most video converting softwares. I do use Any video Converter though but I only use that for converting video to audio format. Not sure recommending a different converter would be a good idea.
It would have been a great idea, that was what I tried on my own and it worked perfectly.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Played through what felt like a dozen games this evening, reviews and stuff are up in my post. Sumoball is awesome, add a little Geometry Wars / Danmaku Unlimited 2/3 VFX to it and it'll go from 'awesome jam game' to 'awesome game in general'. What is it with me and silly arcade games with online scoreboards in these jams :p

I still fondly remember that finch infinite runner thingie, btw~
 
D

Deleted member 467

Guest
@chance at the stone area you pick up the stone with Z, from there you enter the building or cave and continue until you fight the boss

Saw one other review mention something about the Plus and Minus symbols changing screen size, not sure why lol

But so far Soul Catchers is still being worked on. Some changes include:
1. No choosing game at the title, you kind of pick it later
2. Redone story that makes more sense
3. Soon I'll add attack animations that I didn't have time to implement
4. More things to fight
5. More differences in the Plus World and Minus World
6. A couple more bosses
7. More items
8. New places to explore, pretty much no area is being kept
9. Like I wanted to do originally but scrapped due to time restraints - catching the souls of enemies you defeat and have them fight with you in battle.

I'm not planning on making the game super full fledged, just a short little RPG.
 
Oh, šŸ’©šŸ’©šŸ’©šŸ’© off @Yal
I know my game was unfinished but an unplayable mess is completely off-base. I have no idea what you are complaining about with the menus, the menu uses a very standard Arrows + Enter... And the only difference with the game controls is I don't use enter(it was going to be my pause button but I ran out of time), since the menus and the normal game still uses the arrow keys...
The jumps are easy, no idea why you had so much trouble, I give more than enough space to make the jumps.
And check my bloody readme, you Twot, attribution is in there.
 

ghandpivot

Member
Oh, **** off @Yal
I know my game was unfinished but an unplayable mess is completely off-base. I have no idea what you are complaining about with the menus, the menu uses a very standard Arrows + Enter... And the only difference with the game controls is I don't use enter(it was going to be my pause button but I ran out of time), since the menus and the normal game still uses the arrow keys...
The jumps are easy, no idea why you had so much trouble, I give more than enough space to make the jumps.
And check my bloody readme, you Twot, attribution is in there.
Your game looked really cool. Sadly I had to quit the game because I couldn't make the jumps. The jumping height was super inconsistent, and the length of the jumps were too far for me to be able to make. My only complaint about the menus is that they exist in the first place. I was surprized to see a full options menu considering that you were the one to argue that there was no time to even include the controlls in the game. I'd recommend a simpler menu, even though the one you have is great.
 
I forgot to include in my readme that my menu was created before the jam. I have a template project with all the menu/scaling stuff.
The jumping height/length is based on your horizontal speed, so getting a short run up will make you jump higher/further. Sort of like Mario.
 
D

DocNogloff

Guest
Taking clues from the reviews I've gotten so far for my game, I've been trying to change up the controls so that left/right would rotate the reflectonauts and up/down would change the radius of the circle they rotate around, which is more intuitive than 8-directional for my game.

That part is fine, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do accurate collision checking with this kind of movement. Everything I've tried so farā€”checking place_free in front of player using a vector with origin at player in the movement direction, and checking place_free at current angle + rotate speed with origin at the room centerā€”still resulted in the reflectonauts getting stuck in walls repeatedly.

Anyone have any suggestions?
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
Taking clues from the reviews I've gotten so far for my game, I've been trying to change up the controls so that left/right would rotate the reflectonauts and up/down would change the radius of the circle they rotate around, which is more intuitive than 8-directional for my game.

That part is fine, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do accurate collision checking with this kind of movement. Everything I've tried so farā€”checking place_free in front of player using a vector with origin at player in the movement direction, and checking place_free at current angle + rotate speed with origin at the room centerā€”still resulted in the reflectonauts getting stuck in walls repeatedly.

Anyone have any suggestions?
I don't think it should be that hard. If you know where the 2 bois are going this step before you apply the movement, you can use those vars inside a place_meeting function and only let them make movement if both of them don't find a collision.
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
@0.Bytes If the game did not open, then why do you put it in your ranking? I guess you should skip it. It does not deserve getting that low rating - you did not play it.

Now, what is happening and why is it not opening?

(And please remove it from your ranking, thanks)
 
0

0.Bytes

Guest
@0.Bytes If the game did not open, then why do you put it in your ranking? I guess you should skip it. It does not deserve getting that low rating - you did not play it.

Now, what is happening and why is it not opening?

(And please remove it from your ranking, thanks)
First of all I must say that I ranked all the games that did not open in the bottom of my rank, for example the 2 games I helped to make were the last is the rank, because I did not have in mind that(the rank thing). But anyway I fix it already.

Anyway the games that I had problem to open and show a error message I posted that error on the comments, the ones that did not open and had no message errors were simply not opening for some reason, I dont know if it is my computer or whatever, but around 4-5 games were not opening, I was clicking to run but nothing was happening.
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
First of all I must say that I ranked all the games that did not open in the bottom of my rank, for example the 2 games I helped to make were the last is the rank, because I did not have in mind that(the rank thing). But anyway I fix it already.

Anyway the games that I had problem to open and show a error message I posted that error on the comments, the ones that did not open and had no message errors were simply not opening for some reason, I dont know if it is my computer or whatever, but around 4-5 games were not opening, I was clicking to run but nothing was happening.
Maybe try running it as an admin, or with compatibility mode
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Fixed up my factual-error-unfounded-accusation thing for Treasure Hunt (though I'd preferred if credits would've actually been in the game when you already had a menu and stuff in place...).
 

Coded Games

Member
So far my only complaint with some of the voting is people not giving constructive comments or being too nice.

For example my game got a rating of 25th out of 27 games, pretty low, so I check out the comment: "A game about games, really interesting, it looked quite well done for a jam, good job!"

Well that's nice, most of the comments are, but that doesn't tell me why you though it was to be that low. Did you get lost? Do you just not like reading?

In this example I'm just picking on one reviewer but this is true for a few others. When you review a game you should explain what you thought was bad so that I, and many others, can actually improve our games.
 
Last edited:
O

Oyakiiv

Guest
@Coded Games I liked your game, personally, and have it ranked well up there. But anyway, I agree that the comments could be better, and I'm not really helping the fact either. I had decided that this time I really really really want to actually play and rank all of the games, since last time I think I only got through half of them. So in my case I'm keeping my comments simple.

I am also not happy with my current scoring method, as I feel that decent games are getting underscored just because they dont have a story. of course I cant fix this now, but I intend to have a better scoring method for the next jam. (and hopefully better commenting.)
 

Coded Games

Member
Thanks, I'm glad that you like it!

Anyways, the main critique people are having about my game is they are not sure what to do, and that's completely understandable. In this game I tried to give as little guidance as possible and obviously the little hints I did give were not enough. To continue the story you need to keep collecting the rotating squares, these I now call "memories" and explain at the beginning of the game that you need to collect. The white particles that fly around randomly and spawn when you collect anything fly toward the next memory. I think I have made that more clear in the new version of the game. If you didn't get past the first couple memories then you really didn't see when the game opens up more.

The other critique was that people didn't think it was a game. That one confuses me a bit, what makes something a game? Does a game need gameplay? My game was mainly inspired by The Beginner's Guide (I very highly recommend this if you haven't played it) which also is mostly walking around. I almost added a shooting segment in my game where I would break the fourth wall, acknowledge that my game doesn't have traditional gameplay, and put that in as a joke but didn't because time. I might still add that in.

Anyway, if any of you all got stuck not knowing what to do, I'd really appreciate it if you gave my game a try again and let me know what you thought of the story. You don't need to change your rankings, the game I submitted had big problems. It takes 10-20 minutes to finish.
 
M

Misu

Guest
I havent tried your game yet... Wait till I do so you know better what went wrong or what have you not notice (unless your game is really good)
 
M

Misu

Guest
Matharoo... Avast cannot be deleted and the one way to do so is a horrible procedure that is most likely wont work.

What I dis was disable it entirely by right clicking the icon on the menu bar and selected disable
 

matharoo

manualman
GameMaker Dev.
Matharoo... Avast cannot be deleted and the one way to do so is a horrible procedure that is most likely wont work.

What I dis was disable it entirely by right clicking the icon on the menu bar and selected disable
Well I did not seriously mean it, but hey, Avast can't be deleted? That's weird. I've had it in my PC quite a few times, and the only way I no more have it is because I deleted it. Not once, several times.
 
M

Misty

Guest
Taking clues from the reviews I've gotten so far for my game, I've been trying to change up the controls so that left/right would rotate the reflectonauts and up/down would change the radius of the circle they rotate around, which is more intuitive than 8-directional for my game.

That part is fine, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do accurate collision checking with this kind of movement. Everything I've tried so farā€”checking place_free in front of player using a vector with origin at player in the movement direction, and checking place_free at current angle + rotate speed with origin at the room centerā€”still resulted in the reflectonauts getting stuck in walls repeatedly.

Anyone have any suggestions?
Use Box 2d.
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
I did add your game to the global exception list, and yet Avast still found some reason to kill it. Antivirus is a fickle thing, sadly. It also won't run on my Linux build that doesn't have Avast (I don't think any GMS2 games run under Wine).
GMS2 has linux exports included in the desktop module... but I guess it might be a bit late now.
 

Dr. Wolf

Member
Right then, so, first of all, thanks to everyone for your feedback (whether you liked UpGo or not)!

Anyway, a brief question for people: how many actually got to a level where it felt like the typing mechanic mattered?

One thing I went back and forth on when designing UpGo was how quickly to ramp up things like energy consumption, passive energy drain, and fuel consumption. Initially, the plan was to start with values around what you get at Level 3 now, and then ramp them up a little more, with variations from level to level (I was even kicking around the idea of having something like that one level in SkyRoads where the level itself is very simple, but your consumables run out super fast...). These days, though, gamers seem to have a lot of trouble handling certain traditional genres that used to be common. Cave flyers were always a relatively hardcore subset of the old turn-and-burn space games, and it seems like the whole turn-and-burn category really struggles to connect with people who have trained a lot on "twin stick" or "third person" strafing-based shooters without momentum. If I were releasing the game 15-20 years ago, when, even if a player wasn't familiar with classics like Thrust, Space Taxi, or Lunar Lander, they might at least have some non-trivial practice with the likes of Asteroids or SpaceWar, I'd gladly have kept to the original plan...but I really worried about what would happen if I asked a modern player to come to grips right away with the idea of trying to squeeze in words to charge up in mid-flight. That made me consider the idea of trying to ease the player in to the idea of charging, rather than ask them to perform mid-flight charging right on the first level.

In the end, I actually wound up deciding based on narrative considerations. The typing mechanic, after all, is only half about reflexes-- the other half is to try and get the player to internalize the main character's thoughts (since it's natural to say words to yourself in your head as you type them). So I figure, here we have this story about someone who decides to live a more interesting and ambitious life, but learns too late that the other side of that coin (heh heh) is that such a life is also more chaotic and dangerous. As you get further and further in, the charging strings get more and more complicated, which, mechanically, adds difficulty, but also reflects the inner turmoil of a more complicated life. From this perspective, it made a lot more sense to have the charging on early levels be something that you could just do at a landing pad, without any particular challenge (unless you're trying to beat your previous fastest time, I suppose).

Unfortunately, it sounds like not many people are getting past the "easing in" and into the part where (IMO) it all comes together. I'm kicking around some ideas for a slightly upgraded (no big changes, just...a little nicer) version at present and am not really sure whether that means things need to be cranked up, further down, or what...

Cheers!
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
I only got to the second level, and I didn't yet feel like the typing mechanic was relevant. I think one of the biggest problems is that the game itself is very unforgiving in general, especially since it provides no indication about whether the ship has the right angle for landing or not (and it seems like the range of valid angles is really narrow). I guess if landing wasn't that much of a pain, the game itself would be more enjoyable overall.
 

Dr. Wolf

Member
I only got to the second level, and I didn't yet feel like the typing mechanic was relevant. I think one of the biggest problems is that the game itself is very unforgiving in general, especially since it provides no indication about whether the ship has the right angle for landing or not (and it seems like the range of valid angles is really narrow). I guess if landing wasn't that much of a pain, the game itself would be more enjoyable overall.
Thanks!

Right now, you can land with the ship angled up to 10 degrees from vertical. Ideally, the landing procedure would be to kill your momentum at a spot a fair bit above the landing site, so that you have some time to adjust your angle before you deploy the landing gear (which locks the gimbal, possibly to prevent you from burning off your ship's legs by mistake). Of course, reality is sometimes far from ideal, so you'll often find yourself coming in for a landing with some horizontal momentum remaining and no way to get rid of it-- thankfully, unlike Space Taxi on the C64, where that situation was also common, UpGo endorses the principle that any landing you can walk away from is a good landing.

I'll have to play around sometime with the range of acceptable angles. I feel like the ghost of Jebediah Kerman might strangle me in my sleep if I build a game that trains people to land spacecraft at angles more than 15-20 degrees off vertical...but that does leave me a bit of a range to work with.
 

ghandpivot

Member
My second batch of reviews are up. It covers - SSJCoder, Oyakiiv, GhostlyFeline, Nallebeorn, Alice & 0.bytes, Dr. Wolf, MikeeyBikeey, TheM - and can be seen on my voting post.

Uploading stuff is super fast now when I'm back at the student corridor with 1 gb/s internet, however I'd say youtube will need at least 10 minutes to handle the file since it's 5gb.

Right then, so, first of all, thanks to everyone for your feedback (whether you liked UpGo or not)!

Anyway, a brief question for people: how many actually got to a level where it felt like the typing mechanic mattered?
Cheers!
I didn't enjoy your game too much playing it, a lot because I sucked at it. However, thinking back on the jam it's probably pretty much the only game I want to try again and I remember it being kinda fun. I never passed level one.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top