Turning out great!

Turning out great!

We did the player animations. Our game will be a survival where you can sell body parts to robots in exchange for food and guns!

Our first day comes to an end. I programmed most of the code while the artist created the major part of the npcs.

Those are robots that want to become human, be careful!!!

So, this being my second jam it went much more smoothly. This time I personally knew the artist so it was easier to organize ourselves.

We started roughly at 1PM GMT+1 and finished now, roughly 13 hours later, ready to get some sleep.

What went right * I started by coding the basic movement and the camera, luckily the collisions were easy to do * I then proceeded to code the interaction with the environment, the text signs, the buttons and everything that doesn't have to be picked up * Our artist started drawing the main character, his name is still a secret! ;) * Once the character was ready I implemented the animations and the player's state machine * Then the troublesome part came: the main mechanic * If you still don't know in our game you can sell body parts to robots in exchange for goods and weapons, each lost body part is a specific malus for the player, I had to implement vendors that would buy the parts and give you money * While the artist was drawing the desert environement I started working on the vendors. I managed to do the basic selling part in a couple of hours, I could buy pretty much every good without any bug * After a short break I came back to the code and finished the body parts thing. It doesn't influence the gameplay but I could sell everything I had now! * I finished the day by composing our soundtrack

What went wrong * The code is a mess! * I started to create random events but they're not scalable at all * Not enough pauses * Seriously, the code is really ugly * The controller is still not as smooth as I want it to be * My code is slowly becoming spaghetti so I'm seriously afraid for tomorrow...

But for now, you can listen to our soundtrack! It's very chill and perfect for sleeping!

https://clyp.it/a5id0nkg

Hello, we just released out final version of the game where we fixed all the game breaking bugs. Last 3 days have been really wild.

We assembled our team in a couple of days from scratch, our artist never did tilesets and pixel arts before, I lost ~4 hours of work because of versioning. But we did it! We released Shroud. I stayed up up until 4AM GMT+1, trying to finish the game up until the last moment.

I'm very critical of my own work, but I think we did an ok job. Some people had fun playing it, and we certainly had fun making it!

It doesn't really fit the theme sadly, but we didn't like it anyways.

And balancing is awful. You have to play your game so many times to find what values to use. I think we still haven't got that part right, prices are really skewed.

Anyways, SHROUD is a survival game where you have to find the gates for New Nuric, while selling your body parts to robots and this is its definitive version. No more updates will be coming, unless under extraordinary circumstances.

Give it a try if that idea sounds appealing ;)

[Play SHROUD]

LD Page

(P.S. The game might be hard, be careful)

Hello, it's us again!

After some discussion and after reading some feedback, we thought it could be a great idea to improve the game in the future. Mainly by removing the "selling body parts" mechanic (that, let's be honest, wasn't that great and was used just to fit the theme), and by turning it into a "losing body parts because of random events" mechanic.

We'd love to expand on the story, add some more events and fill a bit that wasteland by adding more maps and more locations.

There are also the "days" mechanic that was pretty much useless, and we could improve on that too.

So now we need your help. If you haven't played our game that what are you waiting? If you played it however, it'd be amazing if you could answer to this strawpoll with honest feedback. It will take you just a few seconds.

[Strawpoll]

[Link to the game]

Thanks for your time, Stay awesome!

Come and say hi, and link me your game. I will get to you as soon as possible :D

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

Come and say hi, and submit you game. I will play it live!

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

Hello, I just did 5 hours of streaming playing your games, and I will be doing more at around 9:30 GMT+1 (In an hour in a half)

Currently I have some games in the queue that I skipped over because the creator wasn't there

The full queue is: * Devaluation * Demon Pact * Mind Over Matter * Sacrifies Life To Save * Gore

If you're one of these authors come back when I start streaming and I will do your games first!

If you're not in the queue you'll be able to submit your own game.

Also consider checking out our game: [S.H.R.O.U.D], we think it's fun!

See ya in the wasteland at 9:30!

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

You all know how it works :D

Not sure why you'd want to read my awful code, but I think that every piece of code should be open source, so here it is.

If you clone it then it should work on your machine as well, and you'll be able to remix it. Or you could fix bugs for me ;)

https://github.com/thevinter/S.H.R.O.U.D

Also check my game if you haven't yet, it's not that bad I promise!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/shroud-synthetic-human-radiation-output-determined

Come and say hi, I will play every game you link me and will leave honest feedback! I'd be very happy to do so :)

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

Had so much fun yesterday night, so many amazing games!

I'm going for another round right now, will be streaming for a couple of hours and the queue is empty. Will leave honest feedback and play all the games [hopefully] until completion.

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

Come and say hi :D

Come and say hi. Maybe sumbit your game as well, I will be happy to play it!

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

I will be streaming 4-8PM. Come and say hi. If you're in the queue make sure to be present!

I will only play your game if you're watching, so even if the queue is big I might skip some entries, don't be afraid to join and submit your own game. If I don't play it today I will play it tomorrow :)

Come and submit your game :)

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

At 9PM CET I will be streaming the remaining games in the queue: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17mRJVxMr7kskJ5fzjgauDcnkkmccfsjjGpaWdNfyM6Y/edit?usp=sharing

And you'll be able to submit your game as well.

https://www.twitch.tv/thevinter

At 10PM I will participate in the One Hour Game Jam, so come and watch me if you want :)

You can also try doing it as well!

This blog post starts with some apologies: to everyone that played my game and found some bugs, I'm really sorry.

My game's page is becoming really long, and I don't think it's worth writing this here. So I will take this opportunity and expand on my thought a bit.

You can play S.H.R.O.U.D.. Some of you already did, some of you didn't. It's fine.

I think it's a great game. It's not good, it's not bad, but it's great. And it's massive; it's massive for a Jam game. Let's talk one second about all the mechanics it has. Sorry for the long intro but I think it's needed for the point I'm trying to make.

• Shooting
• Eating and Drinking
• Health
• Radiations
• Using items
• Chests with random loot
• Vendors...
• ...that are randomly stocked
• NPCs
• Buyers
• Drops
• Interactions with objects (signs, unique models, etc.)
• A radiation zone
• Quests
• Selling body parts...
• ...which influences the core gameplay based on the sold body part
• One unique animation for every combination of sold parts
• Lore
• Sleeping
• Multiple days system
• Enemies

You might read this list and think i'm just trying to brag, but I assure you it's not like that. It's not like that because... Almost every single feature in my game is somehow bugged.

I guess that the point I'm trying to make in my post is that the more mechanics you have, the more likely they are to be broken. Especially in a jam, especially with spaghetti code.

And I'm really sad about this, because whenever I build a game I try to do it with passion and with love. For me it's not just a way of having fun while coding, it's not about the competition. I always try to consider as a piece of interactive media; so whenever it's not played at its fullest, it's just awful.

And that's why I'm really sorry when bugs happen. Not only I am sorry for my game, because I delivered a poorly functional product; but I'm also sorry for you, the player, that took the time to play my game just to find it unplayable because of gamebreaking glitches.

So as I did with the features list, I will do a bug list, just to make a point:

• Animations are not triggering correctly when selling body parts
• Ammo is not always spent properly
• When you use your rifle sometimes you use gun ammo
• If you sell the arm while holding a rifle really weird things happen
• Some of the chests have the npc dialogue box and vice-versa
• Sometimes the radiation zone doesn't reset
• Enemies get stuck in walls
• The cavern makes your game freeze (this bug is solved because I completely removed the cave event, but I spent 6h trying to fix it without success, so here it will stay)
• Sometimes you get twice the amount of items from the ground
• One NPC doesn't talk
• Balancing issues

Everytime I watch someone play it, I discover something new. In yesterday's build people didn't even get the final screen, the real reward of the game...

And let's not talk about the empty world, the poorly explained mechanics, and the not that fun or even useful ones.

What I'm trying to prove? A game doesn't need to be big to be fun, it doesn't need to be complicated, it doesn't even have to be innovative. The more you try, the more you fail. I'm not saying you shouldn't try, I'm saying that you don't have to try harder than necessary. Something that we did. During the development, after the first 24 hours, I was still thinking about things I could add to the game.

I was really overconfident, and you should never be.

So once again, I want to do some sincere apologies on my behalf. I know it's the Jam, I know shit happens. But I really feel mortified for bringing you a messy product.

I'm sorry, but I really still hope to see you in the wasteland.

Hopefully in a better one.