zerofiftyone

My favourite part is that Luigi can jump higher and gets more airtime than Mario.

Yeah. I think it's actually called Payload.

When I was talking about sanding off the edges, I was specifically referring to the features surrounding the core game, not the game itself. Overwatch is a game that has removed potentials by limiting the maps you can play on to official-only maps; and has limited the play rules to the official rules by not having support and infrastructure for custom servers. It's a decision that makes the game a more controlled experience, which is good in the sense that players will get the developer-intended experience throughout their play session; but it does also reduce the potentials. The "Overwatch experience" and the "Team Fortress 2 experience" are different not only in the sense that the game content is different; but also in the sense that one is a tightly-controlled experience and one is a more loose and customisable community-driven experience. Again, this isn't a value judgement on either game. I'm just pointing out the different approaches.

Yeah I will do, it's a good one.

Ohhhh if only this episode title came out a week ago. Such strong wizard jam potential!

Armchairing here, but I feel as though there may have been a good reason as to why CTF didn't feature in Overwatch. As an objective, "Push that cart" is a far simpler concept to rally a team around than "Steal and then capture their flag while protecting your own". A payload or capture point setup generally has one big point of friction on the map at any one time, whereas in CTF there's more going on so perhaps that's harder to co-ordinate. Plus there's the degenerate strategies that would probably arise and force the game into a stalemate. I dunno, just speculating. Custom servers/maps is a thing that I will miss however. It feels as though Overwatch in general has a lot of its edges rounded off in the name of accessibility, but maybe it's at the point where the edges are so soft, it's caused the game's possibility space to shrink down in ways that are a little disappointing?

Oh man. OH MAN. Spenny this is the best idea! Making sprites out of photographs in classic Mortal Kombat style?! This makes me so happy.

That death screen is incredible.

It went well for me. It was really cool to go back to the Paris level; I hadn't played it for about a month, but since I'd played so much of it earlier it felt incredibly familiar and somewhat nostalgic to go back; like visiting an old friend. A cool thing I noticed in the first 2 minutes of my run is that the Elusive contracts have some unique NPC dialogue, to help frame the new character and give the player an indication of where they might be hanging out. My playthrough started in the attic, where I heard 2 bodyguards talking about the target and how excessive his art collection was. One mentioned in passing that he had an apartment on the second floor, so I took one of their disguises and scoured the second floor for more clues. I soon found his office; a place that I'd been to several times before to pick up the key for the speedboat. What surprised me is that all of the set dressing in the room was so clearly tailored to signal that this was where this character lived; but all of the previous times I had been in there I had had no context, so I'd had no reason to notice it. It was a really weird and good experience to have an area you're pretty familiar with be recontextualised like that. Anyway, I found his office, but he wasn't in there, so I looked around a few other places and eventually found him in the attic, poring over some paintings and talking to his bodyguard. At this point, I stopped to read a text message on my phone without pausing the game and I lost the target. It was pretty baffling and hilarious to run around the immediate area looking for him; and a problem I'd never had to deal with before since targets are usually marked on the map. I went back to his office to wait for him, and he arrived less than a minute later with his bodyguard and took a phone call. I lured his bodyguard into an adjacent room and knocked him out with a bust, then waited for the target to finish his phone call before throwing a screwdriver at him. (I yelled "screw you!" as I did this). I stuffed both bodies in a convenient wardrobe, and left the level by speedboat. Also, a thing that made the experience more fun/ridiculous was to play with this music playing in the background as I made my escape:

Taking on last week's title at short notice; I love it! Welcome to the forums, hellion!

This is a really good comment and it led me to the thought that what I love about TF2's classes having such a broad (if somewhat obscured) moveset is that they allow players to express themselves in different and interesting ways. Although the classes were explicitly concrete, it felt as though the roles and playstyles for them were a lot more fluid. It was not uncommon to encounter somebody in-game who played in a way that ran counter to the prescribed playstyle of the class and managed to pull it off. There were rocket-jumping engineers; ubersaw medic pairs; shotgun heavies; trickstabbing spies and demomen who could sticky jump so well they could reach the middle-point of a 5CP map faster than a scout. These playstyles weren't necessarily the "best" way to play those classes; they were just different and uncommon. Seeing an uncommon playstyle in a game gave the impression that that player was injecting their own personality into the class they were playing. It was that player's calling card; and would set them apart in a way similar to the hats and cosmetics that arrived later on in the game's life-cycle. I loved the 10 or so hours I played of Overwatch. The interesting class matchups are hitting the same buttons as TF2 did nine years ago and that's a really good sign for me. One concern I have though (which I should add is just a concern; I haven't played nearly enough to determine whether this is true, false, or even matters at all), is that the classes in Overwatch will have less depth to them in the specific way I was just talking about. It's totally understandable, given the fact that there are more than triple the amount of playable classes. And part of the game's accessibility is owed to the fact that each hero seems to have its own playstyle and strategy associated with it that's somewhat easily understandable. But what I would love is to watch a highlight or a replay of another player and think "Wow, that's a totally different way of playing Pharah that I've never seen or thought of!" as opposed to "Cool, that person plays the Pharah playstyle really well." As I say, time will tell if this is the case or not, or whether it even matters in the long run. I'm still hugely excited to play more of this game.

Yeah that is a great rat stack.

^ This is a good and thoughtful post.

Alright, shut it down everybody. Wizard Jam is cancelled now that we've found the Best Title.

I started work on a tutorial level today! As I mentioned briefly earlier; the control system isn't difficult to pick up, but it's different enough that I think it needs some explanation in-game; so this is what I've been working on. It's not totally finished yet; there's still some features that aren't yet implemented in the game, so I can't add them to the tutorial. It's getting there though.

Well that didn't take long at all. Well done SgtWhistlebotom!

This is the coolest!!!

Still plenty of time!

Atte! Really happy you're doing something for this jam.

The game now has things to shoot at. I started working on AI last night and wow why didn't anybody tell me how hard AI is. What I have right now is pretty janky but it's an okay start. The enemy will currently wander around aimlessly until it detects the player. Then it will either attack if it's close enough, or move closer if it's not. The attack is currently a volley of 3 slow-moving bullets which, as you can see, most of which are colliding with the bot as soon as they're fired. Gotta fix that.

Yeah, there was a lot of tweaking of values. I didn't do it this time, but something I have done in the past is hook up Unreal Engine to a MIDI controller, and use the knobs to control physics variables at runtime. I've found that to be one of the better ways to handle that process of trial and error because you can see the effect of the different values immediately. It's pretty cool. Another thing that I did do was increase the world gravity to something like twice its default value. A while ago I learned that if you have a higher gravity force, and balance the rest of your physics forces around that, the result is that everything feels less floaty and more immediate.

The movement is controlled with the shoulder buttons; LT/LB for left side movement and RT/RB for right side movement. So that frees up the thumbsticks for aiming. The hovering was pretty hard to get working. It would have been even harder if I didn't already have a rudimentary idea of how I would approach it going in. I can go into more depth another time if you're interested but basically, each corner of the vehicle has a custom BP component which I call a "HoverComponent"; and it basically uses line traces to determine the distance between itself and the floor, and enacts a physics force on the mesh with a varying strength based on how close it is to the ground. It's like a crude suspension system. So I have one of those on each corner of the vehicle and that's what keeps it floating in the air. As for movement, that's much more simple. Because the vehicle is floating in the air already so has no friction with the ground, I was able to just use standard physics thruster components (one on either side of the vehicle). The force they enact changes based on the player's input. I hope that mostly makes sense! Let me know if you want more detail. I'm generally not all that experienced with physics-y things, but I'm pretty comfortable with how this specific movement system works.

I dunno how deep into it you want to go, but Fmod is free for small projects and is good for this sort of thing.

These are some good updates.

I do. I've had the idea for a few months now to make a wizard jam game about snatching up new TLD domains. It would be called .gobbler