I just want to say this was such a beautiful and well articulated write up. I appreciate you taking the time to highlight these details in context & articulate what makes them so interesting. Indeed, now that you mention all this, it makes me realize how rare this kind of aesthetic is in modern times, between the guard rails of good/best practices/UX.

That's the whole point of the game jam! To actually finish something, since it's easy for projects without a deadline to go on forever. If this is how you're feeling I highly recommend you give a game jam a thought. I had tons of unfinished projects and started finishing things a lot more once I started participating in these jams

Yeah you shouldn't do that. But nothing wrong with building off ideas or mechanics you've done in the past. Like if you've made a game in a genre and you know how to code all the things, you can probably remake the interesting bits from scratch pretty quickly/you're allowed to re-use generic code like stuff for UI and physics etc for most jams

Have you tried participating in any game jams? I've gotten way more feedback & learned a ton more from doing weekend long game projects in these events vs working for months/years on games and just putting them up somewhere.

The main reason is that (1) for a lot of game jams like Ludum Dare, you get guaranteed feedback from other developers who participated which tends to be constructive & insightful (or other jams where there is a dedicated series of judges with a lot of experience designing successful games who can give you honest advice/criticism). And (2) you get a lot more attempts to learn from these short projects.

For example, one thing I learned early on was that my games were too slow paced. They had interesting / unique gameplay mechanics but they weren't introduced until after a 5-10 min of gameplay, and a lot of players had quit by then. So it didn't matter how much time & effort I spent on content & polishing that nobody really got to see. Once I got this feedback in a jam, I tried improving it in the next attempt, realized it was _still_ too slow, did it again and got a little better and so on. It helps a lot looking at other submissions that were made in the same time frame / on the same theme and comparing.

I wonder if there's some tension there around IP rights/copyright. If you made a mod that was really popular and got you some recognition, and then developers just took that and put it in the game, it might rub people the wrong way, even if the terms of service say the devs own all mods created with their engine.

I think if you're thinking in terms of commercial success, it's probably easier to stick to the same genre. You get really good at the fundamentals of what makes this genre fun & interesting. You make changes, you innovate slightly, you push the genre forward. Maybe you set a precedent that other games in this genre start to build on. (actually now that I'm writing this out, that sounds good even for creative success too, pushing yourself to do something really original that impacts other creators in this way)

One example that comes to mind is Epic Battle Fantasy (https://matt-likes-swords.newgrounds.com/) which I think has been something the developer has created versions 1 through 5 of for the past decade, and people love it.

That's probably a good way to get more data on this, take a look at some successful games/some of your favorite developers, what have they been putting out for the last few years?

I was reading an interview the other day that feels relevant here, this writer talks about the value of doing lots of practice projects, or as he calls it, just playing:

Have no hierarchy of importance when it comes to your work. Make whatever. Be at play, always. Get comfortable doing sloppy work, malformed, phoned in, wonky work—believe you can fix it later. Because you can.

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-bud-smith-on-putting-in-the-work/

This sort of framing has helped me a lot in the past few months. I left game dev for like 5-6 years, and am just now getting back into it, picking up a new game engine (Godot). I've found myself initially very slow, which was really depressing because I could make games really well and really fast when I was younger (in Flash), so it's like somehow I've gotten worse.

I think a big reason I've felt so slow is I'm working on this game and I'm just trying to make things work, but it's easy to be stuck. There's a lot of code, and I don't want to break things. It's hard to make big changes. It feels a bit stifling.

One big change I've made: I started going on the Godot discord and trying to answer people's coding questions. Often people are trying to achieve specific things, so to help them, I make a new test project, and try to code up whatever it is they're trying to do, then share it with them. Doing that has been super fun, gets me in the rhythm of making stuff, and also just gives me freedom to explore and do whatever. Every time I've done this, I've found I've learned something new that has helped me on the main game later.

I've tried to do this on the main game itself too: if there's a big feature I'm trying to do, I'll just be super sloppy and just have fun with it. Throw all the global variables wherever, it doesn't matter, I just want to see if I can get it to work how I like and tweak it. Once I get it working, I throw away all this code, reset the project to where it was before, and then implement it properly. It is MUCH easier to do it this way, rather than trying to keep things super clean in the first place, because you often get into dead ends when designing, and maybe you decide you don't want to go down this or that path, and it's just going to take you much longer if you're trying to be disciplined and clean about it the whole way.

I want to second this here and mention there's a great silver lining to developing on older hardware: it forces you to keep your game optimized so it at least runs OK on most computers, and runs buttery smooth on newer ones.

Of course if you're diligent you can always be monitoring how long it actually takes to render a frame in your game so you can notice when something you've added has a big cost even if it's still running smoothly on your high end machine.

This was incredibly beautiful and I got like, emotional watching it! Congrats to Emrox, thank you for creating & sharing this!

This is a really fun thought experiment! Now I'm thinking about what I was predicting at the time. I remember believing that it sucked that Flash was going away because I spent so much time learning it, but that you'll still be able to make a living with web games just with other tools.

I've been learning Godot 3 to make a mobile native version of this jam game (https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/853766) and I've been really enjoying it. It feels like a slightly awkward time to start now because Godot 4 is out and nice and shiny but not fully documented yet. I haven't figured out yet how to setup C++ or something else with it, but I think that'd improve the experience a lot. Attaching scripts to lots of nodes feels kinda very AS2/hard to keep track of.

In unrelated news, I was reading about this "tiktok for articles" and it reminded me of how I've always wanted to see that for short games. Like imagine this medium where you can make these little games, don't worry about title screen and all that, just launch the player into a fun/interesting mechanic, and players can kinda cycle through lots of different games like that. Feels like it'd be fun to design something for, almost like a game jam theme. I guess they'd all be somewhere between little warioware like tiny games and just general arcade games that are easy to jump into. Could even do something fun like, I remember this game jam where an optional theme was use this standard save file format so players can take save files from different games and see what happens.

Anyway, has this been done before? Closest thing I can think of was like Facebook trying to do a "instant games" platform in Messenger, but that was kind of very different.

First of all, congrats on the imminent release of your first game!! It's a big milestone.

What I normally do is tweet about it/share it in Discords/with friends etc. The best thing I've found is submitting the game to a game jam/competition etc is a great way to get eyes on it because at least there'll be some judges looking at it/giving feedback, and typically other developers will play each others' games and leave feedback.

I think that's something that would be cool to do in the forums here too, kind of like a "review exchange" type of thing.

What is your game about? Do you have any gifs/screenshots to share yet?

This continues to be such a cool feature of NG! I love that anyone can just kind of set the background music for their news post like that! And such a bopping song too.

I think for me it was probably Zelda Phantom Hourglass on DS - there was a puzzle where the top screen showed a pattern, and you were supposed to somehow transcribe it on the bottom screen. I couldn't figure out how to do it no matter what, so I fold the DS, go look it up online.

And the solution is...you have to fold the DS so that the pattern on the top screen gets pressed into the bottom screen...

I open my DS again and there it is!

I just loved how creative it was, but I also had this very serendipitous way of accidentally solving it myself.

Hmm, are you using the Newgrounds JS API to make these requests? The one here: https://bitbucket.org/newgrounds/newgrounds.io-for-javascript-html5/src/master/ (you can use the bin/newgrounds.io.min.js)

I'm comparing the request payload to unlock medals in your game with mine, and in yours it looks like this (I removed the "secure" param):

{
	"app_id": "55316:ApT2n2Uo",
	"execute": {
		"secure": "...."
	},
	"session_id": "66697958.20379b5f071436760ceeaf207deb076f7183bead94973a",
	"debug": true,
	"echo": ""
}

And in mine:

{
	"app_id": "55076:P1VzYJ0r",
	"session_id": "79025467.5bd0a95a171436675df1792c1b8159501aea835cde2d1b",
	"call": {
		"component": "Medal.unlock",
		"echo": null,
		"parameters": null,
		"secure": "..."
	}
}

I think the server needs to receive this "call" parameter, with "Medal.unlock" as the parameter. I'm not sure about the difference between "call" and "execute" in the API, but it does look like the request payload is different from a game where the medals are working, so maybe that gives you a direction to look at?

This is my game I was testing with: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/853766. The first medal can be unlocked within seconds of opening the game so it's easy to use as a reference.

Also, your jukebox game is really fun and cute!!

This is an old cartoon on here, maybe around 2007 or so, that told this story of a world where they invented brain implants that allowed you to push a button and it delivered an electrical signal into your brain that was very pleasurable. And in this world a lot of people started doing this, and abandoning all hobbies/social interactions/life.

And the main character tried to resist this, at one point debating with a friend how it doesn't sound like a good thing, and the friend being like "I used to think like that too until I got it".

Does anyone remember this by any chance or can help me find it?

Thanks in advance!

They are recorded, I'm not 100% sure if they'll be publicly available or if you need to pay for another ticket tier to get that.

Based on the code examples in the JS client (https://github.com/PsychoGoldfishNG/newgrounds.io-for-javascript-html5#usage) it looks like "Medal.getList" does indeed return a list of ALL medals, but it should contain a boolean flag "unlocked".

Based on this logic here:

for (var i = 0; i < medals.length; i++) {
	medal = medals[i];
	/* look for a matching medal name */
	if (medal.name == medal_name) {
		/* we can skip unlocking a medal that's already been earned */
		if (!medal.unlocked) {
			/* unlock the medal from the server */
			ngio.callComponent('Medal.unlock', {id:medal.id}, function(result) {
				if (result.success) onMedalUnlocked(result.medal);
			});
		}
		return;
	}
}

This web game dev online conference is happening next week, figured it would be interesting to people here!

https://jsgamedev.com/

I'm giving a lightning talk on WebGPU, and there's a lot of big names (like the creators of Phaser, and BabylonJS, and @killedbyapixel).

It's free to register and there'll be a Discord to ask questions of the speakers and mingle. I volunteered to help with introducing some of the speakers. Should be fun, hope to see you there!

Some of these questions do require some digging, and I'm sure we can find an interview or a thread on here where they talk about how Pico School worked (I think the idea was basically clever use of goToAndStop. So it's almost more like a power point, but if the Flash version at the time supported nested symbols then it'd be like having nested sets of slides that could reference each other).

I'm curious what these questions are for - personal curiosity? Or are you writing an article of some kind? I think that context will help people answer your questions better (in terms of how much detail is needed or what sources to point you to etc)

Woah, this looks, and sounds, absolutely amazing!! Congrats on the Early Access!!

How much more work do you anticipate before it gets out of early access?

The URL doesn't seem to work!

I'm not sure if you'll get a lot of sponsors on this forum but you can definitely get some good feedback. You might have better luck reaching to sponsors directly with your game. I think sponsorships are more common for web/mobile games anyway.

How long have you been working on your game?

Oooh, I forgot about this. That would be really cool! We've been having a "what are you working on" thread in the game dev forum (https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1475994) and it's been really cool & motivating seeing what people are working on at various stages of development.

Hey, welcome!! Hope you enjoy your time around here and talk to some cool folks!

We just submitted our entry, a challenging Titan Souls inspired game where you fight mighty gods above the clouds!

Yeah, I can definitely see that. I'm hesitant to change it just because it is kind of a very iconic part of Titan Souls. I think Titan Souls is even harder, and the first time you play you definitely get both that (1) I just died immediately, what the heck! and (2) I just one shotted the boss and now it's dead??

But it does have a big audience so I'm hoping there are those that will like this particular style of game.

On the other hand, the second boss (dragon one, on the left) is going to take "multiple hits", in that it's still one hit kill to its weak spot, but in order to expose its weak spot you have to hit a certain part of its body.

Yeah I think maybe one thing that could help here is having you respawn right in front of the statue where you last died.

Thank you so much for the feedback @3p0ch!

I'm in the final stretch of working on a game for Pixel Day! You can see a video in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/Omar4ur/status/1483910732886462465

I'd love to get some early feedback. It's Titan Souls inspired, so it should be difficult, but want to make sure people can actually beat it.

https://omarshehata.me/html/sky-titans/dist/

Controls:

* Arrow keys. E to toggle going under clouds. F to hook.

* Or WASD and I/J

Only one boss works, the one to the right side in the red zone. Hook the statue to begin the fight.

It's a one-shot kill type of game, so there's a trick to defeating the boss. Hopefully it's not _too_ hard to figure out.

I think in this case what you're doing is basically a "pay what you want" to play the game. As a player it would make sense to me if the game was also free on Itch.io but had a "$5 suggested price" or something.

I would feel a bit slighted if I later found out I could have played the same game for free on another site. So I think it's better to be upfront about it or to just add some extra content so it feels like there is a difference.

Is there an official deadline time that pixel day compo entries have to be submitted day? Roughly midnight EST between Sunday 23rd and Monday?

Updating to say we found someone!

Haha, yes I definitely kind of underestimated this. It's definitely a project of its own. I was thinking you could still maybe do something reasonably cool in a short time especially if it's the core mechanic to move the clouds and not just a visual polish thing. We did end up pivoting a bit with the core mechanic for Pixel Day but it's definitely something I want to revisit, so I appreciate all the thoughts & ideas here!

This would actually be a great thing for compute shaders, which are finally coming to the web with WebGPU! In maybe 6 months...

We're working on a game for Pixel Day Jan 23rd (see: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1491529) and we're looking for a musician!

I'm doing the programming, and Kumar (https://www.kumardaryanani.com/pixelart) is doing the art.

The game is basically "Titan Souls in the sky". You control a little airplane, you are the first human to go above the clouds and you encounter giant mythical beasts you must defeat.

Here's a work in progress gif:

I think this will be a really fun project to make music for because the gameplay will alternate between this very quiet, calm, serene of coasting above the clouds, and the epic intensity of the boss fight against these giant creatures.

I'm making a game for pixel day, where you're a plane flying in the skies. I thought it'd be cool to add some dynamic clouds that the player flies through and that will part / change shape as you do.

I'm having a hard time thinking through what's a good way to go about this though. I've done smoke effects before (https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-write-a-smoke-shader--cms-25587) but that doesn't seem quite right. It feels like it should be something that clumps more perhaps....?

I'm curious if anyone has any suggestions, resources, or even just references you can think of 2D games that have cool looking/convincing clouds. It doesn't necessarily need to be realistic, could be something stylized that feels fun.

My backup is just creating various sizes of hard-coded clouds and when you touch a big one it splits into two.