So, I've managed to fix most of the worst bugs in Kymiball and will consider the jam version of this game complete for now, unless more bugs pop up.

@withthelove it eats so much time! So much! It'll be interesting to see what your entry is about, you haven't revealed much of your progress since the beginning (unlike myself who's spoiled half the game lol), so you could even have some exciting surprises in store!

This is pretty much a clone of a post I made on itch.io, but my last planned feature, autosaving, has been added to Kymiball now.

@withthelove Hey, thanks! I hope it pans out! I've spent more time on getting gamemaker to handle stuff than I have actually making this game, so I've had to go back and rewrite stuff over and over and even remove things entirely T.T My work-flow has been anything but a straight line this past week.

I think after this jam, I'm going to try and remake it in unreal. Taking advantage of 3d space, streaming volumes, camera effects, mature particles and lighting might really make things pop and less of a nightmare. For example: I've spent a lot of time on parallax code in each scene/room with gamemaker and it's still glitchy, I'm disappointed with it, but it'll have to do. After testing on unreal, I just drop a layer in, scoot it back a little in z-space and it's done and perfect. I feel like choosing gamemaker was a mistake on my end but at least I'm learning from this!

I have finally finished drawing out the main dungeon and programmed basic movement to the main character. Enemies are going to be pretty simplistic, but workable. Since I want the focus more on puzzles than on action, I don't need anything more than standard enemies. I'm somewhat in the home stretch. I just need to code the monsters, place them, place the puzzle triggers, playtest it, and then it should be done. It will likely take me the rest of this week, but I'm feeling pretty confident.

Granted, it's scalled back FAR from my original plans (Boss gaurding every Gem, 4 Mini Dungeons, Bigger Mini Dungeons, a handful of NPCs, shops) but as a bare bones La-Mulana inspired game. I'm feeling pretty happywith it.

Hope everyone else is doing well too!

@MayorOfGaming doing ok but like most of us I've had to make severe cutbacks. I wish I could remake Kymiball with HD graphics too, but I don't think that would work at all. And I think your game will still have a nice world within it.

I have a humble suggestion of sorts though, would it be possible for you not to make the jump button Space, there are already 3 platformers in the jam which do this, but it's a bad control scheme in my opinion and I always get frustrated with it.

What I hoped would be a 45 minute game is probably more like, 10 minutes ;;

(gonna see if I can pull off some cheeky hack to "HD-ify" Kymiball)

I HAVE A CUNNING PLAN

Are you just wanting to render it in a standard hd resolution or redo everything in hd? You can do the former pretty easily via view in room = 640x380 port on screen = 1920x1080 and make sure interpolation is off. Also, if you just leave the port on screen the same, it'll match device screen pretty accurately in fullscreen.

@VinnNo0. Ah nonono I want a graphics syle like yours!

It seems like my solution is working out perfectly, heh I'm even smarter than I thought! lol jk

Looks good! Also, some engines tend to use space as jump by default and people don't think to change them because it's been the thing for like... Ever. But I agree with you, it's terrible. I'm not sure what the best keyboard scheme is because I typically avoid games without controller support but if it looks too good to pass up, I'll use my steam controller.

I didn't do space for jump on the psychopomp, though.

That's a snazzy pause screen, good thinking to make the controls configurable.

I would say the the keyboard scheme I prefer for platformers is arrows for movement and then A,S,D,F and so on for actions, with the rightmost of those being the jump button.  For FPS's I prefer WSAD and jumping with leftCtrl or leftShift. Space is also good for jumping in FPS's I think but not in any other genre imo.

for me it goes back to the spectrum days, Q- up, A - down, O- left, P- right, space bar jump, i cant for the life of me think what games though, i might actually boot that bad boy up during these summer holidays and give it a run out. i dont genrally mind the space key as jump, but for me it depends on the other controls whether it ends up being cack handed or not. if in doubt have a default, and also allow the player to select their own configuration maybe.. :)

I'm sort of on board with Spring. It always feels a bit awkward to me when a "function" button is assigned to a primary action. Space works in FPS, but side scrollers it just feels weird. I know in Game Maker, they have presets to "Space", "Ctrl", "Alt", and *shudder* "Shift". Honestly any of those usually feel out of place in a 2D game.

For those using GameMaker, if you want to use a different key in GML, there's some coding involved. Nothing too fancy.

For example, say I want to make the "z" button my Jump. It'd look like this in the "Step" event:

if (keyboard_check_pressed(ord("Z"))

   {*Jump Code Stuffs go here*}

Think I'm gonna give up that HD style attempt, while I can get it to work techinically it looks really cluttered and not pleasing to the eye at all.

@Spring:  Yeah, feeling like a hypocrite over hear because I'm really enjoying reading about everyone elses' projects but I realize I really haven't said much about my own.   Mostly that's just because I've been so nose down working on it, I haven't been up for air enough to post any progress updates.  But I can't it's also partly a bit of playing secret squirrel on my part.  I always like to wait until things are good and ready before I show anything.   But at the risk of ruining all the surprise, here's a little teaser for how things are working out for Yulpers...

@all:  Stop dumping on Game Maker!  You're making me feel good about sticking to my goofy home-brew engine, I just know that can't be right!  :)   If it helps, I just lost 2 hrs of precious time in the home stretch here because I changed the font for my in-game menus and my crappy home-made GUI code requires me to hand place all that stuff by twiddling text files until your head explodes.  Then I lost another hour hand drawing a new button because I needed a wider one to fit the word 'YES' on it.

PS:

Whoops, I totally mapped jump to the space bar and yulp to ctrl!   Sorry, didn't mean to make anybody shudder!   I've added mappings for x and z so hopefully that washes my sins a bit.  Would love to do user customizable controls but definitely out of time for that now.

@wtihthelove Control and Spacebar, while a bit awkward isn't nearly as bad as "Shift" *Has flashback to "Stickykeys"

Home stretch is fun, especially when I see all that I have left to do @_@. Maping was a HUGE chunk of my time. Here's hoping the rest of the coding goes smoothly enough.

OMG StickyKeys, I remember the old games that used shift for some vital function like picking up an object.

@withthelove maybe I should learn from you, I always rush out stuff too quickly. Yulpers looks pretty good though - that text placement thing can be an issue even in gamemaker, but probably not as bad as in your engine though.

@MayorOfGaming do you use a tile-based collision system?

I'm so tired, my posts probably aren't that well written here

@Spring Yup! I really like how it works. It took a while for me to figure out how to code it, but after that was out of the way, I basically just have a layer I paint that means "See this? It's a thing you can't go through."

It's helped me make better looking areas faster since I could focus on the design without making a dozen objects.

Ahh, I use one too, but I have problems with the player getting stuck in walls.

Hmm, I was having a similar issue. I can't remember how I fixed it. I think I rewrote the code a few times and watched a few tutorials, and in the end it just worked.

Main bugbear I'm having right now is swimming. I don't have time to make proper water physics, so I'm just allowing "infinite jumps" when under water (When you find the flippers). Sorta janky, but it works well enough.

Also I just became super excited because the game's main inspiration, La-Mulana just announced it's sequel is coming out SUPER soon! I got my steam key already since I backed it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc1koMMXWaY

Lol a knight in full armor swimming with a pair of little flippers, I can picture that :D

Also, the la-mulana 2 trailer has some cool ass music!

Bluh! I've had a close friend test my game and he's getting display issues that I'm not able to replicate on the three devices I have access to, all with various displays and hardware @.@ but I've seen it first hand and it's problematic because there are certain things that don't trigger while off screen/outside the view. I'm not sure where to begin with this problem. I miiiiight just shave more off to get better consistency? Flarglegargle xD

You guys have some cool stuff in your games, though! @mayorofgaming I friggan love puzzle games! I tried to make my submission last year a puzzle game.

@VinnNo.0 you must be speaking to MayorOfGaming because my game is kinda awful, it has similar problems to yours where it can't achieve everything it wants to do within the timeframe.

And it has a ton of bugs too....

You're selling yourself short, I think. You have tons of features and systems in place. All in a short timespan of implementation. It's looking much more diverse and complex than what I've done, for sure. Bugs are expected, in that regard.

I've got great results from the testing that I didn't do was able to fix them, but this device specific bug is aggravating, to say the least, as it can be replicated over and over on said device but I can't do so with my devices @.@

My method of drawing is device based (which is what fixed issues at the beginning, when testing on my devices), so changing it back to the standard drawing, it fixes the issue on my friends computer, but breaks it on one of mine. Jenga, man.

Maybe you should just ignore some obscure device specific bug?

Also,I really don't think my game has as much going for it as you say, but I guess it'll be up to others to judge that.

especially not when you can get stuck in walls...

How do you detect collision?

A sloppy solution I do in the early stages of projects is something like...

CREATION

xFree = 0,

yFree = 0;

STEP

if ( !place_meeting(x, y, whatevercollision) )

{

   xFree = x;

   yFree = y;

}

else

{

   x = xFree;

   y = yFree;

}

Ahh yeah, my collision system is tile-based, so it can't rely on place_meeting and as such the code is a little more complicated.

@Spring La-Mulana is known for it's music for a reason, lol. But yeah, you're selling yourself short. I played a bit of Kymiball and loved it. I've played all of the games submitted so far and yours stood out (not to speak too badly of others but some of them... are a little rough to say the least). I like the breakout style and the characters are friggin adorible.

The harshest critic will always be yourself on your own creation. Not to keep harping on about La-Mulana, but even their team had stuff to say about their and thinking that it's good, but they have more and more they want to do with it. I added a picture of one of their recent updates. And in the end, It's a game jam dood, just have fun with it! Competition is great and all, but don't even think about that. Just think about the fact you are making a game!

@VinnNo.1 It's fun thinking up the riddles, and solutions, but the hardest part is when thinking "Is this too difficult? If I had a hint that says this will it be too easy? If I say this, will they know they have to stand in this place without moving for three seconds to solve the riddle? If I say this will they instantly figure it out and miss out on the chance to discover the solution itself?"

I had two challenes for myself with this. No "codex puzzles" where you need to decode stuff with a cipher because I feel those are too easy (Find Encryption, Find cipher, decode, done), and no "Block Puzzles". Not that there's anything wrong with those, I'm just terrible at designing them.

I also wanted to make some puzzles possible to solve "by accident". Because sometimes it's fun to just be dicking around and then you hear the "Puzzle Solved" jingle... and have no idea how you did it! Not many of those, but there are some. I think one of the biggest hurdles that players will have to get through is the realization that some clues may not correspond to the area at all, but rather a much different place. For example, you could find a clue related to the "Cave Dungeon" in the "Main Dungeon" and vice versa.

So far it's been a lot of fun designing. I'm even trying to put in a few easter eggs. Something entirely pointless. Again, also somewhat inspired by "Hell Temple" from La-Mulana. Where the puzzles are very much not worth it.

If I had access to my game atm, I'd share what I have for tile based collision. Sadly it will have to wait until after work >_<. I forgot my laptop today where I've been doing everything.

Right. There's too many ways to approach that. I did a faked vector array (including calculated tile based boundaries) with an initial offset, followed by a secondary offset to handle any inconsistencies with higher speeds that exceed bounding height/widths. But, again, everyone tends to do tilebased collisions differently and generally, I like the secondary object based control because I can pass collision info to the "solid" and back again to the player object (eg for and with clauses) and even autotile with said objects.

@VinnNo.0 wihtout seeing your code I'm afraid that was complete gibberish to me :p

@MayorOfGaming, I'm glad you like Kymiball! I guess I don't like believing that I can win, because that will make me disappointed if I don't, and I will feel like I haven't done good enough. Easier to just dispel your hopes of winning I suppose :P  I'm looking forward to playing Knight's Labyrinth as well, even tho I suck at both metroidvanias and puzzle games, but it seems like you've put a lot of thought into the level design and that's always nice! 

And yeah some of the games submitted are a little questionable, especially all the Tyler Holloway games - not to hate on the guy, but most of them don't even follow the rules of the jam :P

ALSO

I think my newest version of Kymiball may fix the getting stuck in walls bug, so for anyone who's still interested in the game, I recommend you redownload it.

Oh noez, it wasn't even fixed yet.

Well, he has 4 different submissions so far... 

It seems like I can't think of a solution to these tile collision bugs!

To quote the legendary let's player roundTheWheel, this shit is muy frustrado

Speaking of Tyler Holloway.... tbh I'm not entirely sure what he's trying to accomplish with so many games :p

I've fixed several more bugs in Kymiball now, so anyone who wants to play it should really redownload it.

Testing 

Alright, Yulpers is a go!

Took some serious midnight oil but I just barely made it, even with a last minute patch to make the menus respond to all the face buttons instead of just B.  

Anyway, I gave it my all this year.  Don't know if Yulpers has got what it takes to compete with VinnNo.0's master work, but hopefully it'll at least make some folks smile.

ps

Sorry for the test post, wanted to make sure OGA would take a post from my phone as I've been having trouble with that lately.   Well it took the test post but sure enough after I'd pecked out my full on mangum opus on the tile based collision it failed to take so that one will have to wait for another day.   Right now I'm going to go get some sleep.  :)

Ahh, I'll try out YULPERS right away ^^

I would actually be very interested in hearing what you have to say about tile based collisions someday tbh.

Soooooooo... I sorta thought the deadline was the 31st. But honestly, even then I wouldn't have been able to finish in time. I am nearing completion, but I can see it taking me about 3-5 more days to completely finish and polish it up. I actually was originally coming here to see if a "Demo" of the first dungeon would be acceptible.

Still, no harm done. I went into this more as a learning experiance and learn I did. When the game is fully finished, I'll post it on the forums, and even drop a link here if you don't mind.

Once learning that the deadline was sooner than I thought, I figured "Hey, I could make it bigger and better, and then possibly sell it!" but honestly, I'd rather wrap up what I have planned out and put it up so I can go back to my original project (Now with a ton of new knowledge)

Good luck everyone! I'll be voting at least! Next time maybe I won't be so ambitious... or maybe just as ambitious but work a bit faster, lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNOrvQsh5Xg