Silly New Years 2015-2016 Jam

I'm still only up to day three. Busy time of year. But I should get some clear time between Christmas and New Years to finish off.

 

Still on Day 3 with mine. Had to get my Mom into the hospital. She's OK again, and they're figuring out medical stuff.

I should resume work on my little kooky game in the next two or three days.

 

Does turning Unity on then turning my chair around to watch ferris beuller on the tv count against my time, because that's what I did yesterday before turning my seat back around & logging off the pc

 

I haven't counted those days. There are times when Unity is open for several hours, yet I still managed to build a research base on Minmus and crash a rover into the surface of Mun (apparently putting solar panels on only one side of the craft is a bad idea. Tonnes of fuel for the landing, no electric charge to ignite it).

 

Planes, Trains & Automobiles.
Tommy Boy.
Billy Madison.
Stepbrothers.
Workaholics marathon.
....
....
Oops, maybe next year.

 

Seems my family has decided to watch Christmas movies all month.
And my boy doesnt believe Gremlins is a Christmas movie.

I did get them into the theatre for episode 7 which I passed off as a present for them!! Win

Cant wait to see all - ya'lls creations.

Maybe I'll have time to get in next year

 

Maybe you could knock up a stealth game? One where the dad has to use various excuses & stealth to escape sitting in front of the tv watching Xmas movies so he can work on his game?

 

Well I've finally finished work for the year. Got to clean the house for the boss this afternoon. Do the special stuff tomorrow. Then I've got a three day stint I can try and make something out of.

 

I don't think I'll have time for this, but I am working on a game for my sister's bf in the WIP, which will be extremely basic compared to the entries here, as it is totally unrelated to the old and new theme and will be a biggish file size, not suitable for webgl I won't be entering, but I will upload a windows standalone and mac standalone if anyone wants to play.

Good luck to everyone else, can't wait to see the chickens and game logic.

 

Okay, I gave myself a day off today between projects and downloaded UnitZ and a couple art assets that I picked up on sale over the years. I was surprised by how complete UnitZ is. This is little more than a reskin. I only wrote one tiny script for a disco ball bomb; everything else is all UnitZ. So here's the first draft of my game jam entry:

2016: The Zombie Survival MMO FPS RTS! ​

​

This is your enemy: Father Time -- well, Fathers Time. They get stale at the end of the year and turn into zombies:

​

But don't let that stop your revelry at Fantasyland Castle! Arm yourself with a variety of traps and weapons, some of which spawn new units.

If I have time (I guess technically I have 6 more days, but I'll be lucky to get a few hours), I'll add some voices to the zombies of 2015. I'm thinking things like "It looks white and gold to me" and "2015 and chill" -- I'm open to suggestions! (And if someone feels inspired to record some lines for Father Time, I'll put 'em in and give you credit. )

 

@TonyLi great work on customizing the asset. Kind of crazy all of the people flipping it on Steam and not one (as far as I know) thought to reskin it and do their own level design.

Your level design is very nice and interesting. Excellent graphics style. Reminds me of the older 3D games I used to enjoy. Well done!

 

Take sound bites from political campaigns, & are you Dr. Who fighting the time zombies?

 

Nice work on the reskin!

 

What happened to your capsules game boredmormon?

Any progress, you said something about using a secret sauce on day 3/4. Have you had anymore time?

 

I can't take credit for the level design either. (Did I actually do anything on this project?!) It's one of the demo maps from Hedgehog Team's Toon Level Kit. I just customized it a bit and added colliders.

I'd thought about something like that. These were the art assets I had to work with, so I stuck with the fantasy theme.

 

Id be real curious if that game could get through greenlight. Just throw it up there and see what happens

 

Gentlemen, Behold! A human!



...It's not very good, but the point is that I'm working on an enemy that can cause you to lose...at least, as long as you're a chicken. People are kind of scared of phoenixes (the fire is part of it), and ignore piles of ash.

 

Hope he doesn't throw a spanner in the works

 

I just realized when you said that, his fork looks like a wrench.

...

I'm keeping it. In this game, people eat chickens with wrenches.

 

It's not called 'chicken forker' is it?

 

I feel like that's a reference, but I do not know to what.

The game itself, I'm going with 'Phoenix the Chicken.' The main mechanic is managing a timer; the first timer, you are a chicken avoiding humans, while ascending to phoenixhood. As a phoenix, humans flee from you, and you can revive dead chickens by proximity. However, you burn out for a short time after that, and are reborn as a chicken. The idea being, as a phoenix you should seek a safe location for your ash phase where humans won't detect you.

The goal of the game is to survive as long as you can, and revive as many chickens as you can.

 

That sounds pretty awesome

 

I'll pretend it looks like one of those 2-pronged grilling forks. Anyway, a 3-pronged fork might look like the devil's chasing the poor chickens.

 

Christmas took me out, spent the day with the family. The wife then hit the boxing day sales, so I've been building bikes and a trampoline and playing pirates and all the other stuff that goes with six year olds. Plus I got some new amour for Christmas. I've been investing a lot of time into building soft kit for SwordCraft. I'll post pictures once we officially go public with out designs.

I did get some of the framework for the secret sauce built. I ran into a few technical difficulties. Nothing I can't overcome with time. But time is short on a jam. With any luck I can squeeze out a few hours tomorrow.

Don't expect anything like @TonyLi's work. I'm only half the developer he is. And I'm building my framework from scratch. So it will end up just being capsules and boxes even when done.

TL;DR; I'm still on day 3.

 

Great! That's what the season is about, not building frameworks, or reskinning existing frameworks if you're lazy like me.

 

I hear ya on the busy busy part. It's kind of crazy really. I planned on spending time with family and also time to just do whatever. But geesh this past week has been so busy I am actually looking forward to getting back to work the next two days just to be back to normal routine again. At least then I'll get a couple free hours each evening to work on game stuff.

 

Day 4 is over for me.

I have human AIs that spawn in, cause a game-over if they touch you as a chicken...and, that's it. They need some smarts, but on Day 5, I'll turn my gaze to phoenix form, ashes form, and getting that to work properly. Also, reviving the dead chickens since that's one of the goals that is scored.

 

So done for the day. Here are the results from day 4. Not a lot to see, but I spent ages on it, so posting it anyway.

Webplayer
WebGL

Its been an interesting run today. One of the key mechanics of the game is influence. The original design involved updating a 10,000 * 10,000 model/texture every frame. You can imagine how well that worked. So I dropped the resolution and implemented occlusion culling. What you can see is a 200 * 200 model/texture. The model updates across the entire size each frame. The texture only updates the pixels that are on screen. The model has enough resolution to work with now. But the texture looks ugly. In the final product I'm going to have to completely separate the model from the texture, and have both running at separate resolutions. But that's going to have to be a post game jam job. I'm running out of time to build in game play. And without game play I'll have wasted my time.

 

The WebGL version works fine on Windows 7 running Firefox. I did get an exception at one point while moving around.

Have you considered modeling the influence map in a more abstract data structure and then just drawing the result onto a texture? Then you could use a sparse data structure like a quadtree that would probably reduce the update workload and also take much less memory.

 

This jam is pretty cool. Personally I'm on day 1 & will have to crunch when I get back from visiting family, but instead of a usual jam where everyone is making a game & competing it is everyone making a game with hints/tips/input from others. It's more like a jam where everyone is on the one team trying to get as many games out at the end as possible.

 

That's very cool in itself to produce something at this level in such a short period of time by relying on those assets.

I've always thought that for 3D gamedev Unity is the best way to go. I know when I looked for assets previously I saw all kinds of cool things for 3D but not so much for 2D.

Anyway I agree with @Aiursrage2k it'd be interesting to see what people think. Many would probably not even recognize the asset. Others would from the menus at the beginning. Wonder what Jim would think?

 

Thanks to the wrath mother nature, I suddenly have free time.

Submission date is before January 7th, right?

 

It was basically submit the game for the next feedback Friday so deadline is whenever that one is due, for some reason I have it in my head that it is approx 9 January.

 

January 9th is Sunday. If the info is incorrect or if there were some changes, feel free to post an update.

 

It's a pretty casual jam, supposed to be fun/relaxed, & it's a busy time of year. The op had the 9th but also said anytime within that period so let's just make it anytime within that period of the first January Friday feedback allowing time for people to check them out.

 

UnitZ's UI system is designed well. It would be easy to make it look completely unrecognizable. If someone else wants to reskin UnitZ with Zombie Father Time and Baby New Year Egg "RTS" units and put it on Steam, please be my guest. I might add a few audio clips for the Feedback Friday version, but that's about all the time I'm going allot to this one.

I can imagine reskinning UnitZ for all kinds of settings -- prehistoric, alien planet, etc. -- with the right art assets.

To give credit where it's due, I used UnitZ, Hedgehog Team's Toon Level Kit, Redhead Robot's Giant Fantasy Cartoon and Mega Cartoon Packs, and Unity's free 2 Million User Party Pack.

 

I second this. The Feedback Friday takes place over two weeks itself; if you're a latecomer who can put a week into a game, and that week lies within the Feedback Friday, then I say do it.

As @Gigiwoo suggested, we can wait until the FF thread to do any "judging"/awarding/whatever. This isn't a contest, though motivation is seldom a bad thing. You can't "win" the Silly New Years Jam, but by participating, you don't lose.

 

Err. I don't have anything against sunday. Or saturday. Or whateverday. Just had the impression that that it is tied to specific day of the week but you don't remember at which date this day of the week happens.

 

Well, "Feedback Friday" spans over two weeks in the Design Forum as it is. "Feedback Two Weeks LOL!" just doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as "Feedback Friday." So...FF it is.

As far as the 9th, that was a calculated decision. The FF for January 2016 should start on 8 January (9 January is actually a Saturday.) There are two weeks of FF, but the spare day gives some leeway for stragglers to finish up their prototype, iron out any bugs that would make the prototype hard to play, and get it in there. Also there are people in circumstances like @BoredMormon who have other obligations.

Also, @Gigiwoo has obligations of his own; he runs FF, and sometimes a new thread doesn't go up until Saturday. I think it fair that we give each other some slack with this, as we're all busy people jamming for love of Games.

This Jam is for fun, and designed to be un-stressing. Sure it lacks some strictness, but in this case it's by design to ensure that people A) make games, and B) have fun doing it. Also, as noted before - Jam. Not a contest, per se. It tastes of raspberry.

 

Im using the photon car, fun car and another kart kit i have from the asset store.

If you remember i actually started a battle kart game before -- but i couldnt do anything with it since I focused on bots and local-co-op which was a stupid thing too do with it and was too far into it to add multiplayer at that point. So its an old project but new (I started fresh).

 

I actually feel a bit dirty. I made a clicker construct 2 game for Kongregate.....

http://www.kongregate.com/games/PenguinEmporium/super-button-punch-be-a-man

I mean, I wouldn't mind some rating boost but it isn't the game I should be working on.

 

That looks cool. A good foundation for a game. Really like those trails on the shots. They'd be good for my current game project casting out magic.

 

I got them like everything else from the asset store.

 

LOL When I finally get Internet restored I will have to head back to the store. I was actually thinking of using a particle emitter attached to the magic shots. But there might be something really quick n easier than me needing to tweak values setting up a pe.

 

I'm wanting to get in on this jam.

Since this is for a non-commercial purpose, what flies for borrowing assets?

I see that there's Dr. Who sounds used, so if I'm putting a twist on a classic game are assets from the original okay to use? Given that I'm not selling or distributing the game in a significant way.

 

Since it is being hosted on gamejolt just abide by whatever their rules are. There's some way to put the game up on there so only people with the link can actually play it but I've never managed to get that to work for me.

 

I would still suggest respecting the relevant IP owners. That's just my take on it.

 

The trailer park scene, it's a start, hand crafted using my amazing 3D modelling skills.

 

Fair enough.

 

Looks good! Before I saw the text below the image, I assumed you used one of the polygon world assets from the store.