Ten minute game jam!

I don’t really know what I’m making yet, but playing with some simple crowd dynamics and lasers.

I also checked how Unity does with exporting to HTML5 since I hadn’t messed with it before. Seemed to export fine! However, it takes a REALLY long time. If you do end up using Unity, I’m having fun with this in-editor GIF recording tool: https://github.com/Chman/Moments

Wow, that’s pretty cool!

That’s awesome! I need to fire up Unity and brush up on the changes since v.4. Let us know if you have a GitHub (or other online) repository for your code. It would be fun to check it out.

I have two ideas that I want to work on. Both are small and pretty simple but both require the participation of my daughters for some content. If that ends up being too much of a limiting factor, I’ll come up with something else this weekend.

I’ve really wanted to make an inklewriter based adventure for some time. Maybe the time is now?

I’ve always thought that there is a neat game idea buried somewhere in flocking/crowd dynamics behaviour, but I haven’t revisited the field since grad school.

I put the repo up here: GitHub - porousnapkin/CrowdGame: A quick game for QT3 10 minute game jam https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/ten-minute-game-jam
Everything’s still pretty rough, but feel free to steal from there if there’s something of interest.

I made a fun explosion animation. Dodging circles feels pretty much the same as giant rectangles, but visual variety is nice:

Also experimenting with units with special abilities. There’s some spawners in there that add new units to your crowd every second.

And here’s an enemy that chases you. Just a death field that moves towards the center of the crowd.

I’m thinking it could cool turn some of your crowd into fighters who can go kill the enemies. Because they’ll chase the enemies rather than the center of the crowd, they’re a management liability. Might be fun as the next experiment.

Hope you all don’t mind me logging progress check-ins here. It helps me stay motivated and gives me an excuse to play with the gif tool.

MOAAR. I mean, that has to be the purpose of the thread right? We like seeing updates from other developers. The whole game at the end is just (unlikely?) icing.

So nice timing on the thread creation, I just started back in on a project I abandoned awhile ago. I had found a cool little dungeon crawler for graph paper that’s a mini roguelike and thought it would be fun to try and implement. I haven’t asked the original author if they would be cool with it yet though, and I don’t want to until I get a proof of concept working for the rule set. So mums the word on the rule set until I get a bit further.

I was attracted to it because of the complex set of interacting rules and I wanted to try and implement it in a sane way. You know, like every other roguelike or AD&D like game. So that’s the primary goal, and I haven’t even started in on it yet, I have been just toiling on the base engine so I can see output first.

Which would be fun if I didn’t hate CSS so much. For giggles I decided to try and do a responsive css/svg interface and fuck me is it fiddly. There was only so many times I could bang my head into the table trying to get some of those crazy css tricks to work. Finally said screw it and fixed the issue in 5 minutes of javascript.

Well clojurescript. Because that’s the other objective - actually finish a project in clojurescript.

So far you can walk the map turning around cards that are generated randomly. So now that I have the base done I can start working on the actual rule system next.

This thread is awesome.

It’s great! Please keep it up. I cloned your repo and ran it locally in Unity. Just to throw a twist on what you’re doing – I thought that the point was to try to get the flock into the laser as quickly as possible. I tried to destroy them all as quickly as I could. :)

On my own front, I’m going to have to shelve the ideas I had of working with my daughters, I think. One idea was to make a short game about putting my younger daughter to bed where you have to select responses with the proper tone to keep her focused without allowing her to procrastinate, all the while trying not to lose your sanity. It’s a daily game that we LARP at home.

Instead – I have an idea where you play as a gate agent at an airport and you have to determine the boarding order of the people at the gate to try to load them all on the plane as quickly as possible. However, they’re all free agents and do things like cut in line to foul it all up. That’s the one I’m going to work on.

Sure, I’m game. Doing it in JS and HTML Canvas. No cute animated gifs yet, but here’s my initial design document. I’m sure the holes in it will become obsolete an hour after I start programming, but it’s a start :)

Ten-Minute Tycoon

  • A railroad building game that lasts 10 minutes; no more, no less.
  • Single player, with a per-map online leaderboard.
  • Goal of the game is to maximize the net income over the last minute of the game. (Only income matters, not cash at hand).
  • Net income is defined as the sum of all revenue generated by trains, minus interest payments.
  • The game is played on a hex map containing cities (each producing and demanding some specific resources), and empty hexes with various kinds of terrain.
  • The player can take the following actions:
    • Build a track between a) any two cities, b) a city and already existing piece of track, c) two existing pieces of track. The game will automatically choose the shortest route. The cost of the track depends on the terrain.
    • Establish a shipping route between a city producing resource X and the city closest to it that demands X. (Distance following the track, not as the crow flies). The cost of establishing a shipping route is fixed, and does not depend on the length of the route.
    • Pay back loans.
  • Building track takes 1 second per hex, and a new track building action can only be started when the previous one finishes.
  • Starting a new shipping route exhausts both the resource production and demand (though the same city might produce / demand multiple copies of the same resource).
  • For each route, exactly one train will always be en-route from the source city to the target. A train will pick the shortest route between the two cities at the moment it departs, and follow it until it reaches the destination.
  • Upon reaching its destination, each train generates revenue based on how many cities it travelled through (higher is better, in some kind of a superlinear manner).
  • Trains generally travel at the speed of 2 hexes per second. However, each piece of track can only have one train travelling in each direction; so it is possible that trains end up moving slower than that due to traffic jams.
  • If a player has no cash and tries to spend some, they automatically take a loan. Loans have a 0.5% interest rate per second, paid every second. (More loans will be taken to cover interest payments as necessary).

That sounds fun! Will there be a different map every day or something? Kind of like the Spelunky Daily Challenge? Also – what will you use for the leaderboard? Firebase?

I’m having trouble figuring out a good idea for a game. Most of my ideas are straight clones from existing games (like Devil Daggers or One Finger Death Punch), or match-3 games, or something similar. I’m hoping I’ll have some better idea at some point. :)

You could always browse this Twitter account: https://twitter.com/gameideamachine

;)

I think starting with a clone is a great idea. You’ll find a million ways to make it different along the way and probably make something not even clearly inspired by it. Technical problems can help a lot with pushing you in new directions!

I have a fun idea (probably not a compelling and certainly not a balanced game, more of an experiment on feel) but I won’t be able to start until late February.

It should be super easy to implement, though.

[quote=“Clay, post:32, topic:127958, full:true”]
That sounds fun! Will there be a different map every day or something? Kind of like the Spelunky Daily Challenge?[/quote]
That’s a good question! I’m actually not sure. My suspicion is that while a lot of games are trying to get longevity with daily/weekly challenge modes, it isn’t actually working except for a few hyper-popular games. For example the weekly Infested Planet leaderboards were just pitifully empty when I played it late last year.

Meanwhile something like Devil Daggers with its single map had a really satisfying score chase. Sure, not a lot of people were playing it anymore at that point. But it didn’t matter when the board already had 20k entries on it. Improving your time by 0.1 seconds could improve the position by hundreds of spaces.

A pie-in-the-sky design might be to have a yearly, monthly, weekly and daily map. That way there’d always be a fresh map to play for returning players, but also some maps with proper leaderboard density.

I’ve already got a server running all kinds of random stuff, so I’ll probably host it there and just stuff the data in Postgres. The server-side should be the trivial part of this.

Right now I’m playing a Python game called “Your Dict Is Too Big It Will Not Fit”.

I’ve gotta make my dict smaller.

jsnell, I’d play that railroad game. Sounds fun.

Are you making a game for this in Python? Are you using pygame or renpy or something?

No, for another project, animation related. Was just making a python joke. Sorry. :)