I just finished shaders. They look a bit ugly, but I'll change a few things to make it look better. :P
The player will be the main light source in the actual game. The spores(being shot) will also light the way. The in-level lights will be pretty rare, but I think I'll adjust their light range to be larger.

You can play it now online: A Strange Package

It took a while but I was able to finish it, finally. Definitely a lot more work than I thought at first.

The result is a short but fun visual novel, with multiple choices and three different ending to get. I have mainly worked on the graphical aspect, polishing up the animations and graphics, but I also added more music tracks, a lot more dialogue and, most importantly, I did a lot of coding.

This last part is important because I am going to release, under the welcoming MIT License, the engine that runs the whole visual novel. It will take a few days, so you may want to follow me on twitter for updates (it is in my profile), if you are interested. Now, this may raise the question, why do something like this when I could have just used something that already existed, like for example the magnificent RenPy visual novel engine?

There are a few different reasons for this. First, I wanted an engine that run in a HTML5 browser. Ren'Py runs on desktop, and that a little limiting. In the fast moving world that we have today, being able to reach the user as fast as possible is very important, and playing directly in the browser is quicker and more relaxing. Second, I wanted an engine that allowed for fast development. I found a great compromise with a functional approach to Javascript, which makes the development quicker by keeping elements modular and flexible.

(I know that releasing such a small game more than a month later than when I started it may raise a few eyebrows as to the speed of development in this engine… Well, in fact the problem is that I had a few personal life problems that ate a lot of my time during this period. The engine was very benign under this aspect, by not having any major bugs and allowing for a fluidiy in development that warms my heart.)

I do not want to make this whole post about the engine so I just want to say: if you have a few spare minutes for a fun story, please play A Strange Package. It would mean the world to me.

I want to thank everyone that gave me feedback on the game because that helped make the final version much better. And of course I want to thank the Alakajam organizers for this beautiful event. I am very pleased to have been part of this jam, and you can count on my presence for the next jams. Until then, bye!

So I started off with this (Friday)

(click the gif for better quality)

And continued with this (Sunday)

(click the gif for better quality)

And here I am now (Wednesday / Thursday night)

(click the gif for better quality)

For my Kajam entry, I have decided to go with a top-down, twin-stick shooter. That should give me plenty of opportunities for finetuning the game feel and juicing up the action!

For my last MiniLD entry I tried the exercise of making a whole game design document before coding the game. Even if the actual game was quite small, it was fun writing the doc, and I think it helped keep the development focused and the end result consistent.

I won't do a full GDD this time but still, here's my notes on the upcoming entry:

Design notes

Theme/Art style

• Game set in a strange, futuristic place that feels like a maze made out of hundreds of similar rooms arranged as a grid, with straight corridors in-between them.
• Top-down view with either a pixel-art style (like Hotline Miami except simpler), or a smoother look with simplistic art like Prison Architect. In both cases it will be simple and in full 2D.
• Setting & atmosphere largely inspired by the Cube movie

Gameplay loop

1. Enter a room.
2. The room locks up and something happens randomly: you get loot, or robot enemies appear. Maybe both. Maybe nothing.
3. Kill the enemies until there is none.
4. The room unlocks.
5. (Optional) You see a clue about where the exit of the maze is.
6. You pick one of the 4 directions, enter a corridor to the next room.
7. Repeat.

The goal is to survive while finding the exit. I have a cool idea in mind for the ending, but I don't know if I'll have the time to implement it… If not I'll just make the difficulty ramp up until the player dies :)

Loot

• 1st room after the one you spawn in will always let you find a weapon dropped by a dead robot
• Health
• Maybe ammo (if so I should give the player a way to attack if out of ammo, e.g. by throwing his weapon)
• Maybe a 2nd weapon to have one in each hand
• Maybe maybe, some bonuses to improve the weapon

The problem

The jam was good, but the rating system left me cold. I have a total of three issues with it; let's see if you can spot them.

10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1

It is obvious right? Ok, I'll give you the first one for free: there are no descriptive words to go with the numbers. Let's fix that.

10 The best ever
9 Amazing
8 Great
7 Good
6 Above average
5 Below average
4 Bad
3 Terrible
2 Abysmal
1 The worst ever

Better. Now everyone has similar expectations of each grade, more so than before. Do keep in mind this is just an example, there are other fitting descriptions and they could even change based on each category.

Second problem? There is no average! In a big jam there are a whole lot of average entries, so-so stuff. With this rating system I'll have to score them slightly better or slightly worse every time. How annoying.

The last problem is more personal than the prior two. In my opinion a scale of 10 has too much granularity. What is the difference between Amazing and Great? How about Terrible and Abysmal? It is not clear and as such we can expect different people to use these grades in fuzzy ways, which muddles the results. In the best case scenario the grade should reflect the (hopefully written) opinions of each reviewer exactly, not close enough.

Suggestions

In light of the prior explanations some propositions are in order. The first one is obvious, simply introduce descriptive words and an average grade to the current system. I'd be fine with that. Next, two more ideas.

7-grade, zero centered model

+3 Amazing
+2 Good
+1 Above average
0 Average
-1 Below average
-2 Bad
-3 Terrible

The old 5-grade model

5 Amazing
4 Good
3 Average
2 Bad
1 Terrible

Conclusions

I rate the rating system 2 out of 5, bad.

Cheers

I'm working out the pixel art style for my entry right now. I have a pretty basic tileset already. ^-^

I don't want to flood the front page, so I'll just keep editing this post for now. I managed to get some free time to finish up the tileset. It looks a bit sloppy, but the level design should make it look a bit cleaner.

I have only ever done jams and compos that last for 48 - 72 hours. But I'm really loving the way Alakajam is coming along, so I figure I shoud give this month-long jam thing a try.

Usually I'm coding like crazy during a jam to make the game as feature-packed as possible. Unfortunately that often results in a buggy mess. So this time I'm trying to focus on delivering a polished experience.

This is how shiny my puzzle will be

The game won't be super innovative or complex but the menus will make you weep for joy! So, without further ado, here's my plan for the 1st Kajam:

Plan

I'm going to make a puzzle game because it's what I'm most comfortable with.

First week

• Make it playable
• Create at least five levels

Second Week

• Force a friend to play-test
• Implement suggestions / features from their feedback

Third week

• Create more levels
• Write music
• Create sound effects

Fourth week

• Polish the UI / user experience like crazy
• Create more levels if there's time

Fifth week

• Test rigorously and fix bugs
• Polish the music & sfx
• Create more levels if there's time

Congrats to all who participated the 1st Alakajam!

So I got a lot of feedbacks concerning the super difficult and unfriendly mechanics of WuXing Rush. The gameplay rating of the game is not good as well. Therefore I took like a week to re-design the whole mechanics, trying to make the game easy to learn but still challenging, and worked out a few new mechanics for testing.

In the GIF above you can see I repainted the main character and his animations. It now takes only one element (or essence as I prefer) as the 'core essence' for certain potion. There are up to 2 enhancers can be used for a single potion, in order to activate additional enhancements. Different essences work differently as enhancers with each core essence, and some essences are exclusive from others. In general, it becomes easier to decide what essence to choose, and you don't have to choose 3 ingredients before tossing a potion.

Another improvement inspired by @HuvaaKoodia is that the tree bridge now finds its own growing path. So the timing of using a tree bridge potion becomes less essential. I'm also considering to make the tree bridge more flexible (like not only to climb but also to cross water area) and more useful (like you can regenerate HP by walking on it). I'm glad there are just so many possibilities.

Hopefully someone interests in this developing game and I'll post updates whenever there is noticeable progress. ;)
Cheers!

The post jam version of A Strange Package is coming along quite nice. A new coat of paint on the graphics of the game and (finally!) choices have been implemented in the game! If everything goes according to plans, the game will be completed this Sunday.

So the first Alakajam! is over and for those of you who enjoy data and visualisations, I've made some graphs!

Categories

Let's start with something simple, but certainly important – which categories are the most important for a good result overall? Here is the correlation table of the six categories:

It seems that Gameplay is the most important for a good Overall result, which makes sense. Audio and Graphics correlate less, so good games with terrible graphics and bad games with amazing graphics are both conceivable. Also note that all the values in the table are quite high (values less than 0.5 would indicate negative correlation). In other words, a "good" game will usually get better ratings in all categories, a "bad" game will get worse ratings in all categories most of the time. More on this later.

Next up, category averages by rating:

This probably tells us more about our voting preferences than the games themselves – people rate games high in Graphics more often, while they are more critical of Gameplay, the actual experience and fun of the game.

What about the best / worst categories for ranked games?

Note that there were no games where Overall was the best or worst rating-wise. It is common to rate the game in Overall somewhat close to the average of the five other categories, so this is not a complete surprise.

Votes

Let's look at votes a bit more. These are the counts for each rating value:

This looks like a nice bell curve, though it is skewed somewhat towards 7, as opposed to the true middle of 5.5. We can also guess there are some psychological gaps between giving a game an 8 and giving it a 9. Similar gaps are then 4–5, and 2–3. 2 probably seems extremely harsh to many people, so they'd rather shift their vote slightly towards a 3.

This "spread" is the difference between the lowest and highest rating given to a game in any category. This partly explains the fact that a "good" game more likely gets high ratings in all categories mentioned above.

Popularity

Now let's see whether a game's results are at least somewhat predictable based on its popularity, measured in the number of received ratings:

Interestingly enough, there are quite a few games which ended up very high, despite being quite close to the minimum required votes (10). Some teams / developers may have forgotten about Alakajam! after submitting their games! Let's look at the same graphs, but this time measuring the number of received comments instead of ratings:

Once again not a super clear trend – we can only potentially observe that getting more than ~ 17 comments on your game means you are likely ending up in the top 40%. This may very well be within a statistical error, so until Alakajam! grows a lot and we can get better data, don't depend on this!

Voting days

And finally, let's have a look at when and how people voted. The rating period was exactly 14 days. We can see how many votes were cast on each day:

The first day (first 24 hours) was when most people did their voting. The spike on the third day may have been people coming back to AKJ after resting for some time. There is a minor spike on the Saturday of the second day. The results hype attracted the last spike. 40 or so of these votes were from our stream with Danae though!

And finally, I was interested in whether or not the voting averages differed over the days:

Although there is quite a sizable difference (1.26) between the voting average of the fifth day and the eleventh day, I am not sure how statistically significant this is, as there were not so many votes cast on those days. A possible factor could have been that entries which get rated later on more likely need to be "rescued", because their teams forgot to rate other entries. This, in turn, may have been because the teams weren't very happy with their own games. But that is just wild speculation at this point!

Nonetheless, I hope you found these graphs interesting. Stay tuned for the next ones :)