52-Card Pickup 2000
This game is from the old Ludum Dare platform. You can try viewing the original page on Web Archive
(may not load correctly).
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My first real jam (not counting a miniLD)! This game pays homage to (my probably rusty memory of) a parody found in the infamous studio chatter of one of the You Don't Know Jack series. I am not affiliated with the makers of that game in any way.
UPDATE: I found the clip I based this all on! Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTBBRcUIEEI at the 1:12:47 mark.
The instructions are found on-screen. You have until the music runs out (just over 3 minutes) to find all the cards.
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You can, if you want, say aloud things like this while playing:
- "Whoa! There are cards all *over* the place!"
- "There's a five of hearts underneath this table! I'm gonna pick it up."
- "There's a jack of clubs on the sofa! I'm gonna pick it up."
C.f. the Video Games section of http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Too_Incompetent_to_Operate_a_Blanket
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Made with Godot 2.1.1, which I downloaded yesterday morning. I had never tried Godot before. It's not perfect (let me know if you find something that is!) but there are a lot of things that are quite easy to accomplish with it, e.g. sound.
As a base, I started with the demo at https://github.com/khairul169/godot-cabinet/tree/master/templates/fps-camera .
I also used Bfxr, Audacity, and ImageMagick.
The following assets I found on the internet during the compo. They each have a licence that, as I understand it, can be used in a non-commercial game:
- Music: www.bensound.com
- Sofa: Yurii Burdukh
- Table: Gela Motskobili
- Floor: opengameart.org
- Wallpaper: public domain
...aaaand, I had misread the rules, and didn't realize that this disqualifies me from the compo. Shoot. And now it's Monday so it's a bit late to try making my own stuff. Well, JAM it is! But the code was done in 48 hours (except the quick mouse inversion fix)...
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CHANGELOG
1.0.1: mouse inversion is now optional, and off by default
1.0.2: arrow keys also work, as a fix for non-QWERTY keymaps
---------
I still can't make a blog post on ludumdare.com for some reason, so, here's my debrief :)
The 3D-ness of it was both made easier and harder than I anticipated by Godot. The majority of the ~20 hours or so were spent on procedurally generating the cards and having them be clickable, since a few key pieces for that turned out to be bugs in Godot, and figuring out the appropriate workarounds with its sparse documentation and my very rusty 3D math took a lot of research and, in the end, slow experimentation. (Again due to another bug in Godot, nearly every time I hit save & reload, it would give an error saving...sure slowed down the cycle!)
I expected some amount of this with an unfamiliar engine and scripting language, but it did take longer to get the core mechanic down, leaving not very much time and energy for polish and additional features.
One idea I had had was that the cards would fall, and then the furniture, and there would be an additional mechanic you would have to discover: ducking and jumping at the same time while touching furniture would overturn the furniture. Then you could trash the place. It would've been more fun, I think. However, not having done this is a bit more in keeping with the parody, keeping it laughably basic.
IIRC part of the parody was that you could play multiplayer online. If I had had the mechanic down in just one day, I think I would've taken the second day to attempt this aspect (which would also have been a first-time endeavour for me.)
Godot is pretty good, but if you're looking for help with 3D, the proportion of Godot users who can help you is apparently a small minority, judging by the lack of response I got on a question I posted on their Q&A site, but also according to the few people hanging out in the Discord chat, quote:
----
kjb - Yesterday at 8:26 PM
anyone got a quick sec to help with resizing 3d textures added in the editor?
my floor looks bananas, I just want the texture to look smaller and repeat. repeat's already turned on, but resizing my texture file does nothing (except make it blurry), changing UV values in the editor does nothing.
chef - Yesterday at 9:26 PM
guess no one had a quick sec...
Karroffel - Yesterday at 9:27 PM
Only few people know about 3D stuff
chef - Yesterday at 9:27 PM
dont worry, i'll be one of those people soon
soon...
soon......
blank_ - Yesterday at 9:36 PM
one year later...
soon...
---- (end quote)
That said, for such a relatively new product, Godot was quite nice to work with in many ways, and I'm impressed with the ability to export to Win/Mac/Linux in both 32 and 64 bit all from a single OS. It comes at the expense of a 12 MB runtime being packaged with your game, but that's not too bad, considering its capabilities. I was also impressed with the HTML5 output, even though it was not quite what I needed to be able to release the game that way. In particular, the mouse would not capture, so aiming with the mouse was not a very smooth experience.
UPDATE: I found the clip I based this all on! Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTBBRcUIEEI at the 1:12:47 mark.
The instructions are found on-screen. You have until the music runs out (just over 3 minutes) to find all the cards.
------
You can, if you want, say aloud things like this while playing:
- "Whoa! There are cards all *over* the place!"
- "There's a five of hearts underneath this table! I'm gonna pick it up."
- "There's a jack of clubs on the sofa! I'm gonna pick it up."
C.f. the Video Games section of http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Too_Incompetent_to_Operate_a_Blanket
-------
Made with Godot 2.1.1, which I downloaded yesterday morning. I had never tried Godot before. It's not perfect (let me know if you find something that is!) but there are a lot of things that are quite easy to accomplish with it, e.g. sound.
As a base, I started with the demo at https://github.com/khairul169/godot-cabinet/tree/master/templates/fps-camera .
I also used Bfxr, Audacity, and ImageMagick.
The following assets I found on the internet during the compo. They each have a licence that, as I understand it, can be used in a non-commercial game:
- Music: www.bensound.com
- Sofa: Yurii Burdukh
- Table: Gela Motskobili
- Floor: opengameart.org
- Wallpaper: public domain
...aaaand, I had misread the rules, and didn't realize that this disqualifies me from the compo. Shoot. And now it's Monday so it's a bit late to try making my own stuff. Well, JAM it is! But the code was done in 48 hours (except the quick mouse inversion fix)...
---------
CHANGELOG
1.0.1: mouse inversion is now optional, and off by default
1.0.2: arrow keys also work, as a fix for non-QWERTY keymaps
---------
I still can't make a blog post on ludumdare.com for some reason, so, here's my debrief :)
The 3D-ness of it was both made easier and harder than I anticipated by Godot. The majority of the ~20 hours or so were spent on procedurally generating the cards and having them be clickable, since a few key pieces for that turned out to be bugs in Godot, and figuring out the appropriate workarounds with its sparse documentation and my very rusty 3D math took a lot of research and, in the end, slow experimentation. (Again due to another bug in Godot, nearly every time I hit save & reload, it would give an error saving...sure slowed down the cycle!)
I expected some amount of this with an unfamiliar engine and scripting language, but it did take longer to get the core mechanic down, leaving not very much time and energy for polish and additional features.
One idea I had had was that the cards would fall, and then the furniture, and there would be an additional mechanic you would have to discover: ducking and jumping at the same time while touching furniture would overturn the furniture. Then you could trash the place. It would've been more fun, I think. However, not having done this is a bit more in keeping with the parody, keeping it laughably basic.
IIRC part of the parody was that you could play multiplayer online. If I had had the mechanic down in just one day, I think I would've taken the second day to attempt this aspect (which would also have been a first-time endeavour for me.)
Godot is pretty good, but if you're looking for help with 3D, the proportion of Godot users who can help you is apparently a small minority, judging by the lack of response I got on a question I posted on their Q&A site, but also according to the few people hanging out in the Discord chat, quote:
----
kjb - Yesterday at 8:26 PM
anyone got a quick sec to help with resizing 3d textures added in the editor?
my floor looks bananas, I just want the texture to look smaller and repeat. repeat's already turned on, but resizing my texture file does nothing (except make it blurry), changing UV values in the editor does nothing.
chef - Yesterday at 9:26 PM
guess no one had a quick sec...
Karroffel - Yesterday at 9:27 PM
Only few people know about 3D stuff
chef - Yesterday at 9:27 PM
dont worry, i'll be one of those people soon
soon...
soon......
blank_ - Yesterday at 9:36 PM
one year later...
soon...
---- (end quote)
That said, for such a relatively new product, Godot was quite nice to work with in many ways, and I'm impressed with the ability to export to Win/Mac/Linux in both 32 and 64 bit all from a single OS. It comes at the expense of a 12 MB runtime being packaged with your game, but that's not too bad, considering its capabilities. I was also impressed with the HTML5 output, even though it was not quite what I needed to be able to release the game that way. In particular, the mouse would not capture, so aiming with the mouse was not a very smooth experience.