Hello! Just saw this and thought why not? I was working on the engine for a different reason a couple weeks before the jam and it wasn't working at all. So I figured why not keep working on it for the jam. I'm pretty sure that's still a valid entry? Anyways, I've been posting my work on twitter under the ogagamejam2 hash tag. I think I hit Alpha 0.5 tonight and decided to share my progress here.

The game is going to be a dr mario/tetris like with 8 enemies to defeat. I'm ONLY using assets from here, so I'm pretty sure I'm meeting the "at least 6" rule.

I am using haxeflixel, gimp, graphicsgale, and flashdevelop, and probably a couple other tools. Good luck everyone!

As far as legal stuff goes, I am going to do:

asset title by author with other attribution notices

@hunterko, Hi, yes i see your posts on twitter and shared them, it looks good.

However i have an issue at the moment with what you have said.

" I was working on the engine for a different reason a couple of weeks before the jam and it wasnt working at all, so i figured why not keep working on it for the jam. i'm pretty sure its still a valid entry?"

We have already had a discussion about pre-coded base code for projects for the jam, and have said that using such things is OK as long as any admendmants, changes, adding or what ever coding/programming is not touched or programmed until the start of the jam itself. In this case though it seems you have been coding 2 weeks before the event started, so on that basis i would have to sadly say no, its not a valid entry. :(

This jam is a fun competition and gives an opportunity for the assets here to be used is a fun way, and I have tried to set it up in a way where it is fair and open to most things with only a few rules here and there and i'm pleased you have used the assets here for your project. But this is a competition and your comments above from what ive read would suggest an unfair advantage on the programming side.

@Spring

Whoa, I like a lot of those. The one you recently made, I might actually use as an outro or something. Pretty great! However something recently happened on my end. Looking into options at the moment.

So the files I was using and building the game with have become corrupted. I'm using Game Maker Studio 2. Yesterday, I tried to test an underwater area I made only to be greated with the message "Error: Could not find any rooms in the project - could be caused by project file corruption (check for errors in project load)".

I'm currently looking into other options, but if I have to start again and recode everything, it isn't going to be done in time. I still plan on making the game as I love the idea of it, but unless I can recover all my work, It won't be done in time for the jam. 

I'm ok with it, it sucks, but not much I can do. Competition doesn't really appeal to me, so no disapointment there. I am participating in this mostly to learn how to use GML more proficiently to work towards one of my bigger projects and see what cool stuff everyone makes. I guess I learned a valuable lesson: "Make a backup more than once a week"

If I have to start over with just the assets I had, I'll still bring up the Game Jam and OGA, since it was originally made for this. And I still plan on going by the rules, mostly because I'm terrible at art.

Here are some teaser screenshots of what I was working on before the crash. I still have access to all this stuff, but when I try to compile, it blows up.

@mayorofgaming, that's sad to here you having to start again. I use GMS2 as well and I feel your pain, for I also have had projects completely fail to load or even save after spending hours on them. It is a good engine but it's not without the odd hiccups here and there, and it is still early days for the software. Fortunately I'm still using GMS 1 aswell. Look through your gamemaker files, is it saving the projects in documents? They advise to change that setting, that causes some issues apparently.

"Make a backup more than once a week"  - can't stress how true this is lol.

@Mayorofgaming have you tried saving your entire project under a different filname and then tried to compile it?

Also, are you using the VM compiler or the YYC compiler?

@chasersgaming

I'll see what I can do to fix it. It does save to my document's folder. I never saw them say anything about it, I guess I should have researched a bit more. Still It's not completely gone. I'm still working to see what I can salvage. If the code is there, then I have a chance.

@mayorofgaming, they never officially said about it, I just moaned about the problem and an elder suggested I change it and that I shouldn't of saved it there, but gamemaker installs it that way I'm sure. Just a troubleshoot really. Hopefully if you find the project files you may be able to recover it piece by piece.

@chasersgaming

Aparently I just had to complain about it and let people know my issues. Because now it's working fine. I couldn't tell you what I did. But something must have just suddenly clicked >_<. So yeah... Um... I'm back in.

@Spring

Yup, I did all that but it kept throwing out the error. I restarted my computer, moved the folder to a few different ones. Changed the names, checked where GM was looking for the rooms. Basically just throwing stuff at a wall. It's working now, so I'm just going to not question it and see if I can test the room I was working on.

And I tested it, the last thing I was doing before it corrupted was lost, but that's not too big of a hit. Thanks for the help!

GMS2 can be a bit buggy sometimes, but the engine is actually more solid than it seems, it appears. It just has those wierd quirks.

Yep, I've had this problem more times than I can count. Anytime you plan to do any major changes (especially renaming multiple, heavily used objects) save the project, then save as another name, which will change the name of the currently opened project. That way, when it overwrites, it's doing so with the forked version. I've tried changing how automatic backups work but it still seems to overwrite all backups within minutes apart. Since I've gotten into the habit of this, I've not had any major setbacks with corruption.

"Date created 2/1/2018" OOPS. That's a BIT more than 2 weeks oh well.

Sorry about that. I guess I was making the game in the spirit of the jam rather than the letter oh well.

Was gonna give myself SOME leeway but not with five months. XD

Good luck y'all!

@hunterko I have just PM you. 

@Spring

I'm totally going to use that song, unless you want it for your game. It sorta fits the idea I have for an underwater/crystal area.

@mayorofgaming I am using it in mine, but I see no problem with it being in both. ^^

@Spring

Thanks, but you made it, so I don't think it'd be right for it to be "used against you" in a Jam. But I will keep it favorited, I might use it in a future project!

I won't have much time  for the rest of the month, and I can't really get away with neglecting my real life any longer, so I've decided to put Kymiball up even though the game is FAR FAR FAR from finished. There are so many bugs, unfinished or flawed plotpoints, etc.

https://spring-enterprises.itch.io/kymiball

I'm a bit disappointed to be honest, I've been dedicating all the time I could to it for 20 days in a row, but it's still so far from being anywhere near a complete or polished game. That probably destroys my winning chances, but take it for what it is. 

I will still keep on updating the game even after the jam I think, though, with the hope of getting a decent product out of it sometime (even if no one cares by then)

Instead, I'll try and enjoy the other entries now.

That reminds me, how long does the voting period last for?

@spring the voting starts as soon as the jam ends. It's a 2 week period. No updates can be added during that time, but once it's up your free to update as much as you want. Thanks for taking part, il look forward to playing what you have.:)

@Chasersgaming

Good to know, and no problem!

@Saliv

Thanks for the encouragement, I guess no matter what, it would've been too unrealistic for one person to make a full RPG storyline in a single month. It's likely that many players will probably not even reach the areas of the game where the worst issues pop up, namely that you can get stuck if you pick the wrong dialogue option when you have to take certain decisions, because not all of the branching choices have been implemented yet. But I guess that's still somewhat better than every question you're asked being a but thou must question. Not that much better though. 

Bascially, nothing in the game after the cable car ride is beyond the prototype stage, and should almost be considered a bonus sneak peek into the next chapter of the story, rather than an actual finished chapter by itself.

Also several items, namely the Strength Glove, Pickaxe, Spirit Burner and Miner's Helmet don't actually do what they're supposed to be doing, so there's little use in buying them.

Even the Needle Plank I don't think actually does anything, at least not the intended effect.

@spring Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. I've been getting up two hours early most days to add code but I'm also running out of steam. I'm very impressed with the amount of content you've managed to pull off and the amount of features you've packed into it. My game is pretty simple by comparison.

I've spent most of my time on the project's foundation, making it as simple as I can to expand on later, if I decide to. So, between that and the optimization bandaids I've implemented to handle pretty large raw graphics, I'm not going to be able to use half of the enemies I've animated. I've also shaved off 6 areas/scenes/rooms and I'm probably not going to have the boss finished in time.

I'll be spending the next few days tying up loose ends on what I do have and removing what's implemented but incomplete for the sake of intuitive playability and submitting something that represents more of a draft of how I envisioned my project.

This all sounds sorta depressing, maybe, but that means I can start remaking what I do already have way better without a time limit!

Yeah I perfectly understand that you would be slightly disappointed if you had to cut that much stuff from the game, and indeed it seems like you've had to cut even more corners than I have. Your game could still be interesting though, but if it has as much potential as it looks, those corners cut could mean the difference between winning and losing :P so yeah, not exactly great, but your game is still probably the best looking one in the competition. The problem with remaking it later is that after the game jam people are likely not gonna care as much even,,,,,,;;;

In the meantime, I actually managed to make the Pickaxe do what it's supposed to do, but the dungeon where you need to use it doesn't exist yet :'D

Oh, yeah. It's kind of barren, honestly. Just about everyone with a progress report has more going on than I do! I was able to slam out WAAAAY more content and features in last year's oga jam in a shorter amount of time. Using these graphics is cumbersome and it's really all I have to carry me, which I pretty much anticipated, just not to this extent @.@ I was really banking on the fact that I would be using the graphics in their original vector format. For example, every room/scene had originally 9 layers and after changing them to png, I was mostly limited to 4. Either way, I'm happy (content?) with my progress!

Also, stop! You said you were done!

It ain't over till it's over!

Also, I think using vector graphics would have been bad for game maker's performance, but so is your workaround solution, I guess :P

Really, I'm just tying up loose ends just like you.

Uhhhg, I guess you're right. Carry on, then!

My workaround is not really good at all, honestly. It would have taken way to long to do it the "right way" and I already had the setback of tediously re-exporting everything from a 2004 software at the start of the race lol So, I did what I could with minimal effort. 

Vector can be heavier than raster in someways. For eample, if you have a sprite that's 64x64 px, it would be more efficient to keep it rastered because that's hardly a noticeable workload for the gpu or ram. But if you were using 2000x2000 px image, not only is that not a power of 2 image (does not utilize texture page space efficiently), it could easily spill over into the area where you're using texture page swapping. When that happens, you are working your gpu and ram much harder, and if you exceed the hardware limits, it will create spikes in cpu loads aswell. Even today's high-end gpu's struggle with 8 simultaneous texture page swapping(depending on size), which delta time won't even help much with the frame rate.

This is where the vector comes in handy. It's heavier on cpu workloads, yes, but any remotely new cpu will have multiple cores (each with hyperthreading), and if it somehow hits its limit (which I've yet to see in gamemaker) it will store excess into ram, which may cause lag, but it can be saved (made unnoticed) with delta. All of this is pretty universal with the engines I use and know pretty well (unreal, unity(which can vectorize rasters natively), and game maker). 

The only area where gamemaker (1.4, I haven't been able to get a working swf in gm2 at all) struggles with vector is when there's elements outside the stage, handling embedded ActionScript, tweening and apparently timelines(though their documentation claims it can do timelines). The last graphic intensive project I had that used vector ran very smooth (and I had multiple images over 8000x8000 px in a single room!) on both my PC and phone, though I also used tricks involving surfaces to store static images

, so it went well. There's no way I would have had time to do all of this from scratch, but it's exactly what I'll be doing post jam (probably reusing scripts from the older vector project)

I never really understood all the texture swapping stuff, which is why I make pixel art games that are so low res that eveything can fit on just a couple of texture pages ^^

But that doesn't look as good as your game of course.

I did however get curious and decided to take a look at Kymiball's texture pages, there I noticed that everything in the entire game could actually fit on a single large page!

That's better than 3 smol ones, right?

I disagree with you there. Most of my favorite games are pixel games. Granted, there are games that really hit you with the "wow" factor that pixel games rarely accomplish(eg ori), but there are really beautiful pixel games too. My favorite game, visually, is megaman 8.

But yes, if you can keep an entire game in one texture page, do that. If it gets bigger than a texture page, you can always scale it up to a certain point, depending on the target platform. Pixel games usually require little to no management. Good practice with tpage management would be to keep all of your specific level graphics (eg the frozen stage's tileset and enemies that only appear there) in their own tpage. Then have all the graphics repeated throughout the game in its own tpage (player sprites, pickups, switches, sprite-based fonts, in-game hud etc). You just have to play around with it and check performance to see where it needs or could use performance. If your target is always PC, you can just ignore all of the above entirely and you'll be fine with pixel games.

Some platform examples

Android and iphone are targeted at 1024x1024

Newer iphones and most contemporary android phones cap at 2048x2048

Windows phones max at 512x512 (though you can do some tricks to use 1024x1024 pages)

laptops with graphics chips built-in to the cpu (eg amd a8, intel family mobile), it's going to have a hard time with 4096x4096, especially when swapping happens.

None of this is indisputable fact, it's just what I've observed over the last few years.

Oh, I wasn't saying pixel games in general aren't beautiful! They are! Especially like the SNK games like Metal Slug and their fighting games, and the Capcom games like Megaman, just as you say.

It's just my game which isn't very visually impressive, it's really not where I've put the effort at all. It's still prettier than Ori though, because that's one of the ugliest pieces of shit modern games I've ever seen tbh. (the other one is Hearthstone) Talk about oversaturation~ 

Speaking of performance, Kymiball runs very smooth and fine, but then again I have a pretty decent pc :) I don't have any plans for mobile releases at all, so I guess the texture swapping won't be too much of a concern. The singe texture page that the game now uses is 4096x4096. Previously it used 3 2048x2048 pages, performance seems unaffected.

Oooh, yeah, I forgot about metal slug. That is a grand example.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that but uh.. I'm very impressed with Ori. That team managed to do a lot of things with that game that has never been done before, which is a pretty big accomplishment these days. I've played it several times and I've never found a glitch or a bug. Everything you see was made specifically for that spot and you will find it nowhere else. Like, if you see a mushroom next to Ori, that is the only place you will ever see that mushroom in the entire game world. A lot of the individual items also have a physics based animation that's even reactive to you walking by it. The entire gameworld is loaded in after one load time, so each individual scene is seamlessly streamed into the next without any indication. The way the collision works with the various art elements is also unlike anything I've ever seen. It's a metroidvania, which there are plenty of, but they've done things that no metroidvania ever has and really raised the bar in that genre and they've raised the bar in just about every genre when it comes to how artwork is deployed.

But yeah, I wouldn't stress texture page management with pixel games and pc. Toasters should be able to run them, even if they're big games. It's just been the bulk of my workflow with my project @.@

To each their own. I think Ori looks like a confusing mess and I much prefer pixel games, even though I can see that Ori is well made.

And do I need to mention that the character is a ripoff of Stitch, the Disney character :P

Well, here I thought I was finished.....

Turns out that the game has a zillion bugs that my tester hasn't really warned me of at all :p So I guess I will have to spend the rest of the month just ironing out those.

Eh, I see similarities in the two, mainly in the ears, but I don't think it's a "rip-off". They have two completely different body builds, colors and personalities. Ori is more sleek and graceful and looks more like a majestic monkey with legs akin to a goat while Stitch is pudgy and clumbsy and looks more like a demented koala bear. I'm speaking from a place where I love them both <3 

Sorry about your game :X at least try take a break for a few days. 

Nah, it's obviously not an intentional ripoff, I just find their looks very similar and Ori always instantly reminds me of Stitch.

I can't even take a break right now :P need to go through the whole thing trying to fix it all. The amount of bugs that I didn't know of is embarrasing...

That's another lesson learned I guess!

Always playtest your game from the beginning, not just the most recent features!

Hi all, noob here lol. I just joined OGA and recently got into using unity. I found this site while searching for assets and decided to join the jam recently! I'm looking forward to submitting my first ever game and have uploaded some assets today. I'm sure all the entries will blow my game away, I am having fun tho! Good luck to everyone!

Hey Saliv, thanks for the kind words! I actually entered the jam a couple weeks ago and have been working my game since. I just finally got around to signing up here and posting some artwork. 

It's going very well I think, thanks! I'm pretty close to finished. I'm not actually using those in this project lol. I I made them with something else in mind and decided to post them here if anyone wants to use them. I received a "Potentially Trivial Works" notice on the grid so I requested to have it removed. 

@Spring & VinnNo.0:  

Don't worry guys, trust me everyone is making lots of cuts and compromises in order to make the Jam deadline.

Good news is most folks voting on the Jam will totally understand.  I personally give consideration to ambition when I vote for entries.  

And seriously VinnNo.0, if what you submit is even a 10th of what appears in that WIP video on itch.io, you got nothing to worry about!

@JenosaidoZombie: Welcome!   Glad to have you aboard! 

@All:  My entry is coming along, but definitely feeling the crunch this week.  A month seemed like an enternity on July 1, but darned if nothing eats time like game development!