Jam Complete!

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First off, go check out all the amazing games people created here: https://itch.io/jam/advjam2023. The benefit of joining a community like this has been amazing. It's a great way to get free feedback on your own game, and analyze other games. Itch has this great feature where when you comment, it shows everyone who views that comment the game that you submitted. I'll definitely be looking into jams in the future, but I'd like to see Bobby Bleu's Big Break through.

After two weeks and with an hour left on the clock, little Bobby Bleu, the blue blob hit the internet. I suspect all the major games journalists are too busy with the ludicrous amounts of good games that have been releasing lately to review it. I'll report back on the ratings when it tops the charts.

I had a very generous jammer record his playthrough and I did not realize it would be so unfair. You can play it here: Bobby Bleu's Big Break. One of my favorite takeaways from feedback is the need for some ramping of the difficulty. I knew where platforms existed, but some are out of site unless you jump blindly. That was intended in later levels, but not in the first level. Thankfully, with all the tile map practice I picked up, it will be easy to generate some levels.

The whole process taught me a lot about aspects of Unity and publishing a game on itch.io. I'd like to go through some of the big pieces that threw me for a loop throughout the project.

Here's one thing that I don't want to forget: scene order matters when it comes time to build the game! The image below shows all the extra scenes that I imported.

By this time in the jam I didn't want to fiddle with too much to clean it up, but it sure was annoying unchecking dozens of scenes that I didn't need. I needed to drag all of the scenes I created to the top. I was scrambling right up to the submission time to make sure I exported a functional build.

I'm happy with what I submitted, despite not having any extra audio. I just couldn't land on any tunes that I felt were good enough to put in a loop. Like a dum dum, I didn't think to just add some of the ambiance of bird sounds outside that I have collected. It actually works surprisingly well now that I've tried to add it. The jam rules encourage you to keep the original build shared for the jam unless you're fixing game breaking aspects.

With the jam finished, I was delighted to let Diablo IV sink it's hooks into me over the weekend. A very solid addition to the franchise. I tend to get burnt out on isometric looters, but I definitely want to see the main quests through and jump on for some mindless demon slaying on the weekends.

Another piece of media I've been consuming is Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games. It's shaping up to be a really entertaining history of Sid Meier's experience developing games over the decades, as well as a historical recollection from as early as the late 70s. I don't think I really played many MicroProse games, but their logo was so familiar. We very well may have had some of the simulator games on a Macintosh when I was growing up. We'll see if they later developed games for Apple computers, because right now in the audiobook, he's discussing some of the hardware that Atari released.

As for other games, I finally picked up Ghost of Tsushima on the PS5, which has been amazing. Not overly keen on the massive time commitment of an open world game with so many others in my backlog, but I'm enjoying it. Final Fantasy XVI also releases next week so I decided to use a Best Buy gift card to preorder it. I've been away from the Final Fantasy games for a long time, aside from returning to the the SNES for FFVI (or III in North America,) and the FFVII remake. I never played FFVII through, so I don't have the nostalgia for it, but I would like to see more of it.

Lots of work, to do on BBBB, and lots of amazing games to play. Now I just need to make some time.