GMC Jam Discussion The Thunderous 34th GMC Jam - Discussion Topic

Status
Not open for further replies.

Micah_DS

Member
Oho, it's that time again already?? Looks like I picked a good time to come back.

This is probably the best opportunity for me to help myself get back into gear with game development. I've had a hard time getting back into the swing of things after life threw a few curve balls.
I'm really looking forward to jamming again! I think this is exactly what I needed, but first, I need to sleep, because I still have one day of work before I come to my free weekend.

I'm excited to do this again!

( BTW, I did finally get my community prize for LAST JAM :eek: to the winners - it was just a spinning trophy gif for pagefault... so that was disgustingly late. Really sorry about that. )
 

NightFrost

Member
Originally I wasn't thinking of taking part, since my time is limited over the weekend, but an idea for a simple game popped to mind that I should be able to fit in. It will be about... herding sheep. I'll be using steering behaviors, which I'm pretty familiar with, so implementation of a prototype shouldn't take too long.
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
I'm going to be mostly preoccupied by the Jam utilities this Jam. Still, I'd like to participate, so if one of you has simple programming for me to do, I'll gladly help.

Just two things:
- as I mentioned, simple - something like endless runner, sokoban or point-and-click is easy enough, something like jRPG or platformer is not (also, I have zero experience with physics and 3D)
- I'd rather not take part in brainstorming, but instead work on an already defined idea
 

curato

Member
I actually had an idea for that theme. I might participate. We will see if everyone has the same idea I had by time I get a moment to work on it.
 

Bart

WiseBart
Oh, the jam started already.
I hadn't planned on participating this time but I started on something small anyway :) (trying not to overscope it this time)
 

NazGhuL

NazTaiL
Perhaps I will join. I was thinking about a young pilot with some kind of magical force Power who must fly through canons and lasers to fire a torpedo in the single point of entry of a terrible orbital space station called the death star. This is never seen before.
(Or at least I will take time to review).
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
Perhaps I will join. I was thinking about a young pilot with some kind of magical force Power who must fly through canons and lasers to fire a torpedo in the single point of entry of a terrible orbital space station called the death star. This is never seen before.
(Or at least I will take time to review).
Use the force NazGhuL
 

Toque

Member
Several of my previous jam games have been made in a few short hours for various reasons.

Profanity Bot was made in a few hours because I had food poisoning most of that weekend, Just Pop Bubbles was made in a couple of hours because work at YoYo had kept me busy, Blabbit in the Headlights and Ballooning over the Ocean were made in 3 hours each, and the greatest game of all time - Spud Pump - was made in just 1 hour!

If anyone feels they can't enter because it'd be a bit of a crunch / bad for their health that's fine & you should look after yourself. But if you're really keen to enter and you have a few hours spare, don't let the time constraint stop you! You can still make something goofy / fun even if it's not gonna win :)

I was going to skip but you may have just convinced me.
 

Evanski

Raccoon Lord
Forum Staff
Moderator
Looking for a pixel artiest to draw sprites because ive lost all ability to make anything with pixels look good
 

Gizmo199

Member
Got an idea working. Interactive poem idea taking shape. I just hope I can make it intuitive enough to work. Might just be a mess. Gonna get some sleep. Got all day to work on it tomorrow. Best of luck guys!
 
P

ParodyKnaveBob

Guest
Hey, Alice!

I'm going to be mostly preoccupied by the Jam utilities this Jam. Still, I'd like to participate, so if one of you has simple programming for me to do, I'll gladly help.
Here's a simple one we can do: a Pong-like game! Simple enough? Right? I mean, y'know, we gotta make it "our own" and all that, thus I figure, like, make it a 3D MMO with stealth and deck-building aspects, but we got this!

*pfft* $:^ P lol

In reality, though, to anyone bothering to read, I'm actually considering trying to finish my little tic-tac-toe exercise (intended to get me back into things) this weekend, since I started it this weekend, and enter it (which would also help get me back into the community & fun-publishing side of things).

Otoh, I had another idea today, for real, that would be perfect to suggest to @chance to get together on, but ~shrug~ available time and all that. $:^ J
 
M

MikeDark_x

Guest
Well... it's been years ever since I have participated in a Jam isn't it? ever since the old forum... hmmm guess I'll give it a try this time, doubt I'll be able to make anything good tho
Hey everyone, don't forget to take breaks and drink water!
Coffee it is
 

NightFrost

Member
So Friday was a total bust when it came to gamemaking. Today though I've been able to concentrate on getting some steering done.


The sheep avoid obstacles and each other, and give the dog even a wider berth. Their wander routine is a braindead "pick a direction and walk N frames" so they will repeatedly bang their heads into corners if that's the direction they pick. (Also I should have mentioned this is context steering system, not just a base steering behavior one).

Now to add some flocking behavior to sheep to get them group up, and a flee behavior that gets called when the dog barks. (And of course the gate you need to get the sheep through.)
 
P

ParodyKnaveBob

Guest
Your above post made me lol quite well! Funny by itself, this is what made the punchline:

Perhaps I will join. I was thinking about a young pilot with some kind of magical force Power who must fly through canons and lasers to fire a torpedo in the single point of entry of a terrible orbital space station called the death star. This is never seen before.
(Or at least I will take time to review).
$X^ D
 

curato

Member
If anyone feels they can't enter because it'd be a bit of a crunch / bad for their health that's fine & you should look after yourself. But if you're really keen to enter and you have a few hours spare, don't let the time constraint stop you! You can still make something goofy / fun even if it's not gonna win :)
I don't usually make them with any concept they might win. If I think of an interesting idea I use the limited time to see if the mechanics I envision are practical or not. Actually, I rebuilt a concept from a previous jam and that is my main project now that I hope to get released.
 

Micah_DS

Member
So I scrapped every concept up till now and just started fresh about an hour ago. Because of this, I've had to go much simpler with movement mechanics and such.

Now my single point of entry is a portal in the center of the screen which transports you to different areas based on the direction entered, which is totally not a knock-off idea from my beloved childhood games, Chip's Challenge and Adventures of Robbo:

At this point, I have no idea where I'm going with this though, and I was just informed that my family is celebrating my niece's birthday at a park in about an hour (yeah, we're really good at giving the heads up, haha), so I'm gonna let this sit for a bit in favor of going to that, and hopefully I'll get some idea on where to take it by the time I come back tonight.
 
My entry NO SMASH THE WALLS is feature complete : Game Entry Post

I estimate I spent around 10 hours on it give or take. As I may have no more time to work on it, I've posted the completed version now so I don't miss the deadline.

The game is fairly straight-forward, it's short and sweet, has three levels, minutes of challenging gameplay, cheat codes, and a secret level of my different earlier prototype if you finish the game.

No sounds yet, which I'll add in if I get some spare moments.
 

Micah_DS

Member
@Micah_DS -- you're probably planning on changing it, but I love the simple cartoony look of those sprites.
Thanks! I'm going to try to keep the spirit of the character, but yes, I'm planning on updating the character and the portal's design to match all the other graphics I've added:
I made a number of changes since my first post of it, but I don't feel like I should spend time explaining it all, since I'm too far behind - gotta crunch, ahahaha.
 

NightFrost

Member
Well, some progress.



I hadn't touched steering in a while so unfortunately I had forgotten that it is a bit hostile towards non-steering agents, especially if you're trying to do avoidance. You can easily chase a sheep into a corner and it will just shake there. This is because context steering is about choosing the direction with least danger, and as distances change it will keep oscillating between the wall and the player, so preferred direction will keep switching. This is because player is not a steering agent so the sheep cannot push it back through mutual avoidance. Other related problems I managed to solve.

However, flocking behavior was not easily transferable to context steering (I had not attempted this before). In normal steering, movement is about summing acceleration vectors, so flocking and avoidance will find a mathematical balance eventually. Context steering however, since it is about finding the lowest danger direction and not balancing vectors, will not. The first sheep to be checked will feel the avoidance pressure and move away. With less avoidace pressure on other sheep they will, more or less, attempt to flock together and follow the one that moved away. This creates a clump that instead of gravitating towards a mutual center will perpetually move to some direction. (The behavior is turned off in the above gif for this reason.)

Looks like this weekend turned into a steering workshop instead, but at least I was able to put some progress into that code.
 
N

Nacky Slocker

Guest
Okay, this is a stupid question, but how on earth, from the brain capacity of a toddler, do I share a screenshot? Like a step by step guide. I thought google photos could help, but they're giving me an insanely difficult time.

Please help.
 

Alice

Darts addict
Forum Staff
Moderator
@Nacky Slocker I use this website: https://imgur.com/

First I upload the picture I want using the "New Post" functionality.
Then, after the image is uploaded I open the triple-dot menu (it appears when hovering the uploaded image) and open the "Get share links" option.
From the links, I choose the BBCode and paste it into the post.

Tada!
 
N

Nacky Slocker

Guest
Blegh, I'm too lazy and tired to set up an imgur at the moment, so here's a link
https://photos.app.goo.gl/U7VRmRAdxFUx8FrBA

Does anyone else seem to have the problem where right when they finally learn how to use something, someone makes a drastic change to the interface?

Thanks for the help Alice! I need a nap.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top