My Compo is based on the idea of an imaginary Operating System (heavily inspired by BeOS) where the player will search for small jobs to do.
So far some basic windows management and task completion are in.
Tonight I will start to do some game progression and some proper task the player will do. I will regularly upload new build on itch.io https://nicmagnier.itch.io/jobos?secret=zueqURy6uTIKr0QqxrRO9NNPB2k
Day 2 starts with work on the quest/task system. I also wrote a brief generator of task so that I don't have to write all the text and avoid copy and pasting all the time. I should start soon writing some actual content and a nice progression.
To get the fake OS feeling I would love to add a task bar but that is not the highest priority task right now.
16 hours to go!
Yesterday I submitted my game and went directly to bed. So I guess is the right time to actually make a post about it.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/jobos
So the goal of the game is simply to take jobs and complete them in some fake OS environment (The more jobs you have, the worse it will be). You interact mainly be pressing any key to automatically fill the command lines.
There is some story progression and an ending, but you don't really need to pay close attention to everything that is written.
It was developed using L枚ve and the sound effect with cfxr. I did everything alone except the modem sound that was grabbed from a wikipedia page.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/jobos
So my LD40 submission was JobOS, a game where you play with an imaginary Operating System https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/jobos
The creation of the interface was directly inspired by this:
This is BeOS, an OS from the 90's which at the time was very advanced. You could resize the window playing a movie and it will not skip a beat. Yeah it was a different time. The System was also internet ready and was also one of the first OS having real multitasking (it could even take advantage of multiple CPU, crazy!!)
I used BeOS as main main OS for a couple of years. I've been always fond of its aesthetic: The bright yellow tab-like title bar (did you know you could shift the position of the title bar?!), the colorful isometric icons. It was so great.
So when I started to work on the game, I tried to use the colour code of BeOS to replicate its feel. But I tried to simplify as much as I can to be able to finish it in 48 hours. I ended up with an operating system being a hybrid of GUI and CLI, because let's be honest creating a full interface would have been crazy. I really like the crazy hybrid nature of having window but interacting mainly through a command line. I feel this is the type of unnatural product that could have been created by an out-of-touch company at the time to appear modern while keeping their technology an user base happy.
During the whole week-end I resisted to not make a task bar. I really wanted one but, my focus was on finishing the game and it was not essential. But in the last 10 minutes I thought I would do one and I ended up with the current version. I failed to replicate the elegance of the original BeOS, but at least it's there and it has a functional clock. :clock4:
Some of you recognised the influence of BeOS right away which I'm really about and hopefully some of you learned a bit more about this fantastic OS.
I usually do not update my games after a jam but after reading some comments about JobOS, I couldn't resist.
Minor Spoiler Warning
So in the game you are interacting with a fictional operating system (set in the 90's) to complete online jobs. One of this job if being game programmer. You smash the keys of your keyboard to automatically type dozens of line of code which I directly copy and pasted from a previous jam I did. And the end of the job you don't actually have the chance to play it, you just submit it and it is done. I mean who will be crazy to have a game inside a game for a LD compo!
I was not crazy enough to do it during the Jam but I did it afterward and it was actually relatively easy to do thanks to L枚ve2D and Lua. Just a couple of function call, some cleanup and the windows system I did during the jam just did the rest.
My original submission is still available here https://nicmagnier.itch.io/jobos
And you can rate it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/jobos
ok so it's maybe time to write a small post mortem on my submission.
The idea was to do a small top down shooter and mix it with a Idle game mechanic where you upgrade things to a ridiculous extent. This is a solid and safe base and I think it was too safe. The idle game mechanic is nice but working mainly for the money you get. If the balancing was too weak at the beginning the game was immediately less fun and if it was getting crazy with tons of bullet on screen it became confusing so I ended up with only few possible upgrade and gold being the main one that goes in crazy town.
At the beginning of the project I had much more enemy on screen which was quite fun too unreadable and hard when the game found its art style.
Art is definitively not my thing and I think this is something work on for the next LD especially by trying to find a more simplistic art style. Overall I'm still happy with some elements (especially the cactus) but the main character is definitively a bit underwhelming. Just look at him:
For the animation I again avoided to have keyframe animations. A thing I should really try out also for the next LD. I try to make animations mainly using easing functions which work I think quite well for many things. Except of course for the main character that was unfortunately too static.
I am using WakaTime to track my time which is always kind of interesting. For this Ludum Dare I work around 18 hours on my code which is much more than my previous project. This is bizarre to me since I feel the code was more straightforward and simple. The summary showed that I worked a lot on the upgrade and I think it might be because a lot of the balancing was done there.
One of the bad idea was to start the jam by creating a new system to handle entities. This is usually a bad idea to implement tools for a jam but while I lost some time it inspired me to create a new system in the next few days. The idea is registering entities with a list of class or descriptors. But the core idea is to have a simple but flexible query system similar to jQuery. So it would easy for example to get all entities in a zone of the game world that are one fire and not the player ("zone-2-3 on_fire -player"). It was really helpful on this project to get easily all the bullets that are flying without maintaining different arrays like I was doing in the past.
Anyways, thanks for reading and send your games in the comments if you want me to play them.
@NicMagnier
I finally got my 20 votes during the week-end and the comments I got for my game was heartwarming:
"Having piles upon piles on money explode everywhere is IMMENSELY satisfying"
"WOW! You did an amazing job on this!"
"This was super addictive."
"Great game, one of my favorites so far!"
"Oh man, you absolutely nailed the game feel."
"A very good game, one of the best ld41 games I played."
I am always very critical on my own work but all the comments and the overall very positive and welcoming attitude around Ludum Dare makes my tear up.
Play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/idle-shooter
I did a timelapse video of my development progress during the jam. It's nice to see the game taking shape and my panic in the last few hours when I realised I didn't had any proper levels yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWWk_hXTQvY
You can play the final result here: https://nicmagnier.itch.io/down-below
And don't forget to leave a nice comment on the LD page: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/down-below
https://nicmagnier.itch.io/unlevel
