itch.io

Great lil game ^-^. Thanks for making it. Really enjoyed it. Just got a B, and I gotta stop now before I waste all day trying to get an A, haha. 

Well in this case, I basically meant posting to different VR subreddits, just because I heard that someone had quite a lot of luck in one of the VR related subreddits. Are you making sure that you're following the rules of the subreddits? Your post might get eaten by a spam filter if you're new and/or you don't follow the rules. I think it'd be worth looking into that more.

For the record, I'm definitely no expert about marketing. I'm pretty shy about sharing stuff, I'm just making games for fun. But I'll tell you what my understanding of marketing a game would be. First off,  from what I've heard, if you want people to play your game, marketing can't be an afterthought, it's generally as much effort as making your game. It isn't something that you're supposed to do only once your game is finished, it's supposed to be a gradual build up of anticipation while you're developing it. 

Some things you can do are:

• Find games/indie games (and in your case VR communities) and tell them about your game (facebook, reddit, post using VR related hashtags on twitter/tumblr, make nice gifs of gameplay, etc).
• Pay money for some advertising.
• Contact youtubers/media outlets and ask them to try it out. Try smaller content producers rather than just big names. If you're contacting someone to write an article, make sure you do most of the work for them (write about your game, include some cool screenshots, so that writing the article would be really easy for them).
• Keep a dev blog to garner interest slowly while you're making the game. Maybe make some tutorials if they would be of interest to others.
• Have a mailing list so that you can let  interested people know about new updates or releases of your game.

Good luck!

I've heard the VR community are pretty receptive to new games, have you tried marketing to them specifically?

Those treasure chests are especially sweet!

Working on this lil guy (he's actually much littler but I made him a bit bigger for this thread so you can see him). I'd really appreciate any feedback anyone has (not sure if this is the right place to post this?). I am a total baby when it comes to animation, I think this is the third or fourth thing I've tried to make, so any criticism would be really welcome :).

I use GIMP, mostly.

I love that it's open source and free, but of course that comes with some drawbacks. I've learned to work around most of them now. I wish I had a better set-up for animating, although I probably couldn't make use of one very well if I did anyway.

I'm not really sure how to describe my style, but its 2D and I suppose it's quite messy and low-tech.  I have to work quite small because my laptop/GIMP can't handle big files, but I'm also not very careful and I don't use a restricted palette usually, so it doesn't look like pixel art although it's often small enough to see individual pixels.

I have tried sprite lamp for dynamic lighting, but I didn't like the look of it in my style. I probably need more practice with it.

I would also really like this!

For me, I will have games and comics and I really want to make them obviously separate... but for other people maybe it's games and software or different types of games.

I'd just like to be able to have the games displayed under different headers. I think it would make other people's profiles easier to look at, too. Some people have a lot of different projects... Often I want to be able to see at a glance which ones are playable in the browser, instead of having to click on every game page. When we upload our games we give them their own noun (custom or "game" or "comic" or whatever), so maybe it would be possible to group them on a page with that.

Entry 2: 10/12/15

The only thing I managed to look at in the last 5 days was the isometric house idea...

Here's the latest screenshots:

So, as you can see, I made the colours a bit less eye-burning and added first try at a roof and a door. Still not much to look at, but it's a little progress... From the last entry, I managed to:

• make the "house" rescale to the "correct" dimensions with according to the change in viewpoint

• make the tiles walkable/not walkable
• finish the house nicely, with a roof/doors/windows, etc.

Entry 1: 5/12/2015

I've never kept a devlog before, so any hints on keeping a tidy/useful devlog would also be nice if you have any? Also, I wasn't sure how to embed videos... so for now I just link to where I uploaded them on tumblr. And I'm really new to games stuff, too, so obviously feedback would be excellent if it's even at a stage where that's useful yet?

So here's some stuff I've been messing around with so far... I'm working in pygame by the way.

1. "Isometric" map with "houses"

Isometric is in quotes since I'm not sure if the term applies when you have very uneven views, which is what I have. Houses is in quotes for obvious reasons haha :P

So far I have:

• a very general "isometric" map where you can change the size and orientation of the tiles really easily
• the camera follows the player (the green square in the middle)
• there are different types of tile and it's easy to make different maps

So, I don't have much :P. Next I want to:

• make the tiles walkable/not walkable
• make the "house" rescale to the "correct" dimensions with according to the change in viewpoint.
• finish the house nicely, with a roof/doors/windows, etc.

2. Hair animation/simulation with pendulums

It's possible this is a completely insane way of doing things(?), but I am approximating each "piece" of hair as number of connected pendulums (I think in this case maybe 3), and then connected them with some kind of curve.

There's a slightly jerky video here... it runs smoothly normally so perhaps this is the effect of running the screen-capture at the same time? And there's an older video here that I made the day before as a proof-of-concept, so you can see where it came from.

Well you can see what I have going on here so far.... next I want to:

graduate to more chunky hair shapes. with a little added bounce.

3. Cloud generation and general sky animation.

(Here is a (bad) video of the sunrise/sunset... I fixed that stray pixel since. And here is a video of the clouds moving across the sky.)

Next I want to:

• Combine these two things!
• Make the sun (or moon) the light source, with the appropriate light colour to light up the clouds using the normal maps.

So, that's it for now... Hopefully I will update soon! Thanks for looking :)

Congrats on finishing your game :)

Just gave it a go and I enjoyed it :D so thanks for making and sharing it! It took me a few turns to beat it (I think the right sort of amount of time) mostly because it took me a few turns to get the hang of how often I could press shift (at first I was too cautious with it but it regenerates really fast). I like the running animation of the astronaut! I know you say for best results download, but for people who are too lazy to do that (like me): if you play it in fullscreen (without fullscreen the arrow keys made me scroll around the page) it seems to work fine :).

One thing I wasn't sure about was that sometimes it seemed like I could bounce off a few enemies without being eaten and other times they'd seem to get me straight away. I died a couple of times due to thinking that I'd have time to run away from one red guy if he got too near, because I'd bounce off him first, but then I died on the first chomp.

Really like the art and the idea for the game, both of them have the same kinda sweet personality which seems to fit together so nicely! Makes me smile :D. I'd be interested to hear what the music is going to sound like.

I'm a really big fan of the visuals (both the colours and the sci-fi feel) and I really like the idea of procedurally composed gameplay. I'd definitely be interested to try out the mouse controlled combat, too, although I can't tell if I'd like it or not. I'l be keeping a lil eye on this project :). Good luck with it!

Looks really great, I'll definitely be watching with interest :D

Hello :), I'm Nat. I'm a comp sci research-intern/PhD-student, currently living in Japan.

Skills I practice:
I can program (mostly in python, which I've been using for work-work for the last ~3 years, while I've been programming for around 5-6 years). I've been beginning programming games stuff in pygame for a little while (maybe around a year now). The main online evidence of this so far is the game dev thread I just made here... and a bit of stuff on my tumblr.

I did my undergrad/masters in maths and physics, which seems to come in handy for games/programming fairly often :).

I also do some drawings.

How familiar I am with jams:

This will be my first game jam of any kind!

What I'd like to get out of the jam experience:

Well, I'd like to be able to work with a cool person (or a few cool people) to chat about game-dev stuff with and hopefully work with again in the future :).

Ideally, at the end of LD we will have at least some kind of short playable fun/meaningful game. I'm not expecting any level of polish within this kind of time frame, haha, but I want to try my best and have a game we can show to others.

I want to program the game in pygame. I'd definitely be excited to work with other programmers, if they were okay to work in that environment. Apart from that, working with 2D animators or artists would be awesome and I'd be really interested in working with a sound/music person! I think sound really adds a lot to games and it's something I am not at all skilled in at all.

As for concepts and writing I'd to work together on those things (if that interests you as well :)).

I like a pretty big range of games; diablo 2, a dark room, animal crossing, Bayonetta, cookie clicker, theme hospital, spyro, pokemon, god of war, little inferno, plants vs zombies, mariokart, don't starve... I think the only genre I've never gotten into though is FPS, haha, maybe one day! I'm open to a pretty wide range of styles and types of game for LD, but I'd like to go for something short, because I'd really like some level of completion.

How much time I think I can put into it (also notes on timezones)

TLDR; Looking to work with sound/music people, 2D artists and/or pygame programmers, and ideally, I'd like to share the writing/concept stuff with any/all of those people :).

If you're interested in working together, then send me an email at pistachioNatalie@gmail.com

I'm not really sure exactly what's going to end up here, so it's a bit ill-defined and nebulous as a dev-log. One thing that I'm really interested in trying out is procedurally generated 2-D art and animations... So I guess that's my starting point!

EDIT: I've removed the first entry and put it in a comment, so that if when I make it to a second page, I can edit this front page with the latest bits and pieces easily.

I'm gonna do my best to enter Ludum Dare this time (although I might be on a plane for quite a lot of it so it depends if I'm going to have plug sockets)... I'm really curious to see what the theme ends up being.

There was one I came across that just said "Game"... and I think "snowman emoji" wins the prize for most perplexing theme I saw haha, but there were lots that gave me ideas, too! Exciting!

Ah, cool. I had a little go at a pseudo 3D game for my first attempt at game-making. It ended up being a little too ambitious for me, so I have since abandoned it, but I hope I'll make another attempt when I'm a bit more experienced.

I came unstuck when it came to making roads split.... I kind of managed to do it, but it was pretty buggy lol. So if you want to extend your tutorial that's something that I'd like to see :).

I used these as my main starting points, not sure if you've seen them before:

http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/

http://codeincomplete.com/posts/2012/6/23/javascri...

I just came here to say the same thing. I'd really like this, please.

Hi, I'm Natalie.

I've been playing around with pygame in my spare time for maybe a year now. I learnt the basics as I was teaching it to 11-16 year olds, but I found it pretty fun, so I kept playing with it afterwards, although I never really made anything with it.

I made a short comic recently and that kind of reminded me of what it feels like to finish something haha, so I have two little self-contained ideas for games, that I'm alternating between working on :).

I'd also really like to try a ludum dare, so I think I'm going to go for the next one... Fingers crossed for a fun prompt!

Looking forward to checking out other peoples games, too :).

Edit: I also have a tumblr and I recently made a twitter.