So, we did it!

Making a stressful game is stressful! Then again, making any game in 72 hours is stressful, I guess. This was our second attempt at a blitz game jam after we made a game in two days last year. Tried out new art style, discovered new techniques, lost a good chunk of time in the beginning and kept working til the very last minute after that. We need to do this more often, this is one of the most rewarding ways to spend a weekend!

And after all that, lo and behold: Divine Intervention! A game about a mystical device that lets representatives of higher powers intervene in real-world unstable (wink, wink) events. We hope you love reading manuals, because this game really requires you to read one!

Check it out! (And please read the bug description on that page!)

We went from planning about 6 levels to hoping to finish at least one to making the second one in the last few hours. With another day we could have filled this game with tons of content thanks to all the smart systems and pipelines we've built in. But there's never enough time, is there?

We'll keep working on it, but for now we need to recharge and pay a visit to the real life, then play and rate all your beautiful entries!

Divine Intervention had a few tiny bugs that were critical enough to stop players from ever winning. So we fixed them.

• The purple LED in Task 2 makes sense now;
• Task 2 now doesn't autofail after the first attempt;
• The book can now be closed in both tasks;
• Resolution doesn't cut off the sides of the game screen any more.
• Proper fullscreen mode!

The game now plays even better! You might actually complete Task 2 now. And make sure to go fullscreen this time!

Oh, and do you have any idea how hard it is to refrain from adding tiny cosmetic features here and there while fixing stuff like that? We commented new animations out to keep things fair, but you can see them here, exclusively:

Here's a short story behind the visual style of our LD#49 entry, Divine Intervention.

The very first mock-up was for a game about using your keyboard to stabilize complex machinery (or something like that, the idea wasn't very clear at that point):

As we generated new ideas and directions, we decided to simplify the presentation of the “subject” so we could create much more of them, ranging from everyday objects to abstract ideas, all controlled through similar interactions (we didn't quite pull that off in the end, because time). I wanted to have an analog-feeling display and a relatively primitive diagram on it, with just enough fidelity to highlight arising “problems”.

So I started putting colored blobs on the canvas sloppily. We were coming up with new ideas, and I kept sketching them in and scratching them without any intention of keeping any visual aspect of it. We added and removed stuff like buttons, post-it notes on the wall, scanlines on the screen, a huge green book titled “MAN UAL” appeared at some point, and by the end of the session we got this:

With that, @yogurtthehorse started coding, and it was my job to render the game screen using the ideas in the mock-up. It was my plan to reimagine it all from scratch. But thanks to the magic of the PICO-8 palette I used, something about the sketch just seemed to feel right. Idk, everything you draw with PICO-8 colors just pops for some reason. So instead I basically rendered it again in higher resolution, adding more details and actually struggling to preserve the very feeling of “sloppiness” I initially planned to get rid of.

And I ended up with the final result:

The objects appear to be made from clay, and some people started pointing out that it almost looks like The Neverhood — a one of a kind adventure game released back in 1996. I'm not gonna lie, I do see the resemblance:

If you've never heard about The Neverhood, I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with this legendary game. Its style, humor, and depth are unparalleled, and the amount of love and effort the developers put into it is insane. You might have realized by now that it's a whole world made entirely from clay! Even accidentally creating something that reminds people of The Neverhood makes me happy :)

Thanks for reading! And if you haven't played our entry yet, give it a go — we'll be glad to know what you think.

Are you using timelines in Photoshop for animation?

Then maybe you've been led to believe that Photoshop can't animate Rotation and Scale — just Position, Opacity and Style, right? I know I believed that before LD49 (if you already know the truth, you'll probably find my excitement rather silly).

Well, guess what:

BAM, animated Rotation + Scale right in Photoshop! 😱

Yeah. I know, right? Add another feature to it, and it's literally After Effects!

[whispering: sma-a-a-art o-o-objects...]

Sadly, that particular animation didn't make it to the Jam version of our entry, Divine Intervention.
But check it out anyway if you haven't already!

A friendly reminder: if you don't play our LD49 entry Divine Intervention during these last 9 hours, absolutely nothing bad will happen.

But why miss out?

Brainstorm = done!
Here comes sketch №1:

Stages of game jam: 1. Damn, so much work ahead, feels impossible (—> WE'RE HERE <—) 2. This doesn't make any sense, we'll probably fail this time 3. Hey, this is actually moving along better than expected 4. Wtf, how did we pull this off?

Can't wait to get to stage 3

The team did a lot of drawing, animating, designing and coding!
Looks like a good time to call it a day.

Stages of game jam:

Stage 1: Damn, so much work ahead, feels impossible
Stage 2: This doesn’t make any sense, we’ll probably fail this time
Stage 3: Hey, this is actually moving along better than expected
Stage 4: Wtf, how did we pull this off?

Stage ?: Not sure, just sleepy (—> WE’RE HERE <—)

It looks like we're done!

PLAY IT NOW

(the image may differ slightly from the actual product: the actual product is more loud!)

Tune in for post-mortem later. Right now? Sleep.

Part of the secret to creating detailed pixel art quickly is using all kinds of tricks and techniques, weaponizing the full potential of your creative tools. And oh boy, does Photoshop have a massive hidden potential.

I've adopted and developed dozens of techniques for pixel art over the years. Use layer styles to create live pixel-perfect outlines. Load my MacBook's touch bar with shortcuts and gestures for animation and brush controls. Write a custom script that reads directives from layer names and exports sprites and animation sheets with a single button-press.

But one of my all-time favorites is Dan Fessler's HD Index Painting technique published back in 2014. Back when I first stumbled upon it, I played around with it for a while in an empty document, drew some scribbles, said “huh, cool” and moved on — and I know other artists who did the same. Back then I'd been mostly doing tiny pixel art assets at the scale of 16×16 pixels, and the potential of the technique went completely over my head. But then the style of my projects shifted, and everything changed.

This trick can't create art for you, it's not magic. But I swear, tricks don't get much closer to magic than this. With the right set-up it might take you an hour to create something that would normally take days.

There's so much to talk about here, so many sub-tricks and use cases, I could write a book just on using HD Index Painting. The idea is delightfully simple and insanely powerful. If you're using Photoshop for pixel art, do yourself a favor and check out this king of time-savers (here's the link again!).

And in the mean time, check out our LD50 entry that makes heavy use of the technique.

It's unbelievable, but we did it and survived. Our third LD entry:

10 Snekonds: Play it!

Post-mortem coming later. The crunch with this one was real. For now, we're off to bed, can't wait to play all your games tomorrow!

Uh, just in case you missed the link earlier, here it is again: Play 10 snekonds!

Don't miss your opportunity to immortalize your name in the Hall of Fame of our entry, Squeeze and Wiggle.

Perform well, get to top 10 and end up on our leaderboard, visible both in the game and on the game's page.

| Place | Name | Time | |-------|-----------|---------| | 1 | Goossyaa | 2:48.95 | | 2 | dycc | 3:01.64 | | 3 | kiviman | 3:28.88 | | 4 | yogurt | 4:13.29 | | 5 | nobody | 4:24.53 | | 6 | Erl | 5:14.99 | | 7 | Nertsal | 5:22.41 | | 8 | Amolker | 5:26.93 | | 9 | Bryler | 5:35.13 | | 10 | Snake | 5:55.56 |

(Updated daily. Last update: 15:50 GMT oct 5)

Perform extremely well and earn yourself a place right on our thumbnail for the world to see!

Until you get pushed down by more skilled players of course.

Oh and by the way, if you want simple and easy to setup leaderboards for your game, check out this repo.

Slither on!

Mix elements by drawing glyphs to summon stuff.

Phase 1, Mockup 1: "We'll do this with shaders and particles, probably"

Remember this mock-up?

This is it now:

Feel old yet?

Come play Glyph Tower!

We have spells, cookies and a leaderboard!

Draw arcane glyphs!

Cast mighty spells!

Protect your Tower!

~~Be slightly frustrated by the UI!~~

Glyph Tower is waiting for YOU!

Give it a go while we're all waiting for the results!

This time around we're working on spiritual successor of the game we made a while ago for LD49, “Divine Intervention”.

This one is a bit more ambitious. Which means we have many more ways to mess it up!

Things are cooking!

>> PLAY HERE <<

>> PLAY HERE <<

This time let's see if we can make base building fun. So far we've got an idea(-ish), some art assets, some shader stuff, some music. So far so good.

Please follow the safety rules while operating this device.

We don't have the rules written down anywhere, you may come up with your own. We got other stuff to do.