WOW! I just saw the new 'Challenges' section on the upper left of the OGA home page. It looked great! Seems to be gone now, but that is a great idea, excelsior!!
@chasersgaming:
'policy changes', on OGA? Did I miss something?
@all:
I'm pretty sure using your own custom engine was explicitly allowed last year.
Well, I sure hope it was because I definitely used my own home brew engine for my entry!
In fact, I think the only restriction was that the game itself be made within the month of the challenge, but devs were otherwise free to use whatever tools they needed.
TBH, I can't see any point in restricting the tools people can use, or in trying to insist everything be done from scratch. I know some jams are designed around that idea, but the challenge here is to make good use of all the assets on OGA, not prove how amazing folks are at coding under time pressure.
Also, if Unity and GameMaker are allowed, there's no reason people's personal engines shouldn't be allowed. Trust me, if you're starting with my homebrew crapola, you're definitely starting at dis-advantage to anyone using those tools! :)
We have time for an OGA Game Jam Summer 2018 logo contest before the Game Jam begins?
Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - 19:18
Speaking for myself, time is definitely the number one reason I've missed some of the art challenges, although I will add that I didn't even know the last one was going on because the sticky posts on OGA now appear so low on the home page that I have to scroll down considerably to see them. :(
I really wish there was some way to 'subscribe' or otherwise be notified whenever a new challenge was posted.
I definitely get the sentiment behind surt's suggestion, it would be great to get artists more directly involved in the Game Jam by some method.
The TIGSouce folks certianly have some up with an interesting solution to the problem.
For OGA, I think the most natural approach is to tie the OGA Art Challenges to the OGA Game Jams. Of course, this idea has been discussed at length in the past and I think chasersgaming hit the issue on the head, there just hasn't been enough participation to make a go of anything.
Maybe one way to do it would be to have an open themed art contest the month before the Game Jam and then award bonus points in the Game Jam for using assets from the art contest. That would give artists a way to be involved without requiring a lot of artist involvement for the Game Jam to be feasible.
If artist had older sbmissions they'd like to see used, maybe they could post a link to them in the Game Jam message thread and again Game Jam submissons could get extra points for making use of them. Could do a limit of two per artist or something.
While I agree with VimNo.0 that creating some new assets while making an entry for the Game Jam is more or less inevitable, I actually somewhat oppose the idea of devs and artists teaming up and producing new assets just for their Game Jam submission. I know that sounds bizarre, since devs and artists working together is the whole point of OGA, but my concern isn't with the idea of folks working together. Rather, I don't like the practical aspect that no matter how you slice it, the assets a team makes for the jam will not be available for everyone else to see and use until at least a few days into the jam. More likely, assets wouldn't be finished enough to be made public until near the end of the jam, making it difficult (if not impossible) for folks outside the team to make use of them, which just seems kind of unfair.
Although maybe that's the wrong way to look at it. Maybe anything that encourages more art to be contributed to OGA is better. In that light, maybe Game Jam submissions should be given bonus points for submitting new assets to OGA.
Just a note, I don't think any of this is something that needs to be addressed this summer, more something to mull over for the future.
@Spring:
Embarrased to admit I didn't catch the Megaman reference with Monstropolis, but it's still a great game name regardless! :)
Yeah, I have the same issue with my SDL1 game engine. I googled around an found a pretty detailed MS article providing a way to do it, whether or not that way works with SDL (1 or 2), I can't say as I haven't gotten around to fiddling with it.
Interestingly, I recently linked GTK into my engine and I notice that as soon as I call 'Application.Init()'* all the window scaling stuff seems to turn off even for windows which I've opened through SDL. This happens whether the windows are opened before or after I call Application.Init(). Previously opened SDL windows which actually resize the moment the call is made. I am guessing GTK disables all the scaling stuff because it has it's own cross-platform scaling routines that it prefers to use instead.
So at the very least, there is definitely a way to it, and in the worst case one can always go spelunking in the GTK source to try and divine how it's done.
*I use C# and GTK# so subsitute Application.Init() for whatever your language likes to call the function (probable gtk_application_init() for C/C++)
just a nota buena, this is truism for /ALL/ licenses. No licenses can compell you to distribute something, rather they can only terms on how you can distribute it if you chose to do so.
Could be the result of 'Scale and Layout' options they added.
These attempt to scale an app to reflect the size of the actual display.
I use it on my 15" 1080p laptop as without it all the text is too tiny to read.
TrueType and other vector based stuff seems to scale fine, but I've noticed that bitmap based stuff gets scaled up with what looks like stock bilinear filtering which can definitely yeild blurry results.
There's actually some calls an app can make to tell windows what it's native size is so it can scale accordingly or not at all depending on what you tell it.
I am positive I read somewhere last year that using your own engine was ok but after some spelunking I can't seem turn up anything. :(
@whoever did it:
WOW! I just saw the new 'Challenges' section on the upper left of the OGA home page. It looked great! Seems to be gone now, but that is a great idea, excelsior!!
@chasersgaming:
'policy changes', on OGA? Did I miss something?
@all:
I'm pretty sure using your own custom engine was explicitly allowed last year.
Well, I sure hope it was because I definitely used my own home brew engine for my entry!
In fact, I think the only restriction was that the game itself be made within the month of the challenge, but devs were otherwise free to use whatever tools they needed.
TBH, I can't see any point in restricting the tools people can use, or in trying to insist everything be done from scratch. I know some jams are designed around that idea, but the challenge here is to make good use of all the assets on OGA, not prove how amazing folks are at coding under time pressure.
Also, if Unity and GameMaker are allowed, there's no reason people's personal engines shouldn't be allowed. Trust me, if you're starting with my homebrew crapola, you're definitely starting at dis-advantage to anyone using those tools! :)
We have time for an OGA Game Jam Summer 2018 logo contest before the Game Jam begins?
Speaking for myself, time is definitely the number one reason I've missed some of the art challenges, although I will add that I didn't even know the last one was going on because the sticky posts on OGA now appear so low on the home page that I have to scroll down considerably to see them. :(
I really wish there was some way to 'subscribe' or otherwise be notified whenever a new challenge was posted.
Thinking out loud, maybe it's just giving Game Jam submissions bonus points for using assests from /any/ OGA Art Challenge in the past 12 months.
I definitely get the sentiment behind surt's suggestion, it would be great to get artists more directly involved in the Game Jam by some method.
The TIGSouce folks certianly have some up with an interesting solution to the problem.
For OGA, I think the most natural approach is to tie the OGA Art Challenges to the OGA Game Jams. Of course, this idea has been discussed at length in the past and I think chasersgaming hit the issue on the head, there just hasn't been enough participation to make a go of anything.
Maybe one way to do it would be to have an open themed art contest the month before the Game Jam and then award bonus points in the Game Jam for using assets from the art contest. That would give artists a way to be involved without requiring a lot of artist involvement for the Game Jam to be feasible.
If artist had older sbmissions they'd like to see used, maybe they could post a link to them in the Game Jam message thread and again Game Jam submissons could get extra points for making use of them. Could do a limit of two per artist or something.
While I agree with VimNo.0 that creating some new assets while making an entry for the Game Jam is more or less inevitable, I actually somewhat oppose the idea of devs and artists teaming up and producing new assets just for their Game Jam submission. I know that sounds bizarre, since devs and artists working together is the whole point of OGA, but my concern isn't with the idea of folks working together. Rather, I don't like the practical aspect that no matter how you slice it, the assets a team makes for the jam will not be available for everyone else to see and use until at least a few days into the jam. More likely, assets wouldn't be finished enough to be made public until near the end of the jam, making it difficult (if not impossible) for folks outside the team to make use of them, which just seems kind of unfair.
Although maybe that's the wrong way to look at it. Maybe anything that encourages more art to be contributed to OGA is better. In that light, maybe Game Jam submissions should be given bonus points for submitting new assets to OGA.
Just a note, I don't think any of this is something that needs to be addressed this summer, more something to mull over for the future.
@Spring:
Embarrased to admit I didn't catch the Megaman reference with Monstropolis, but it's still a great game name regardless! :)
Yeah, I have the same issue with my SDL1 game engine.
I googled around an found a pretty detailed MS article providing a way to do it, whether or not that way works with SDL (1 or 2), I can't say as I haven't gotten around to fiddling with it.
Interestingly, I recently linked GTK into my engine and I notice that as soon as I call 'Application.Init()'* all the window scaling stuff seems to turn off even for windows which I've opened through SDL. This happens whether the windows are opened before or after I call Application.Init(). Previously opened SDL windows which actually resize the moment the call is made. I am guessing GTK disables all the scaling stuff because it has it's own cross-platform scaling routines that it prefers to use instead.
So at the very least, there is definitely a way to it, and in the worst case one can always go spelunking in the GTK source to try and divine how it's done.
*I use C# and GTK# so subsitute Application.Init() for whatever your language likes to call the function (probable gtk_application_init() for C/C++)
Maybe itch.io has some way of sorting/grouping accounts that could be used to handle this?
Is that the plot of the new (2016) Doom? Cause the one I grew up on was about opening a portal to hell and unleashing the demons therein.
game looks good! Seems like you are off to a great start!
just a nota buena, this is truism for /ALL/ licenses. No licenses can compell you to distribute something, rather they can only terms on how you can distribute it if you chose to do so.
Could be the result of 'Scale and Layout' options they added.
These attempt to scale an app to reflect the size of the actual display.
I use it on my 15" 1080p laptop as without it all the text is too tiny to read.
TrueType and other vector based stuff seems to scale fine, but I've noticed that bitmap based stuff gets scaled up with what looks like stock bilinear filtering which can definitely yeild blurry results.
There's actually some calls an app can make to tell windows what it's native size is so it can scale accordingly or not at all depending on what you tell it.
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