Official MEGA-THREAD for "Finish Your Damn Game" Contest

Make games! Discuss those games here.

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Official MEGA-THREAD for "Finish Your Damn Game" C

Post by KF Harlock »

Hey all. So this is the proposed MEGA-THREAD for the 2016 "Finish Your Damn Game" Contest. As I noted in the other thread where we were kicking around ideas, the idea of this thread is we'll all post pretty regular updates on our progress, get one another excited and motivated, interact with one another, help each other out, and so on. To incentivize this social side of the contest, the voting will include categories for "Best Dev Thread Updates" and "Most Helpful," which will have their own thematically appropriate prizes.

I'd like to encourage participation all in one thread for organizational purposes, BUT if you're already running a dev thread, let me know, and I can link to it from this first post, which I'll retroactively edit.

=== THE RULES OF THE 2016 "FINISH YOUR DAMN GAME" CONTEST ===

1. The contest runs from NOW until the end of the day, 11:59PM, Eastern Standard Time, January 31st, 2017. Note that this is an extension from the originally-proposed New Years' Eve deadline.

2. Between now and then, you have to turn in a finished game. No demos, nothing half-finished, got to be a complete experience!

3. That said, genre doesn't matter to me although I hope we get at least a few traditional RPGs out of this.

4. You don't have to have waited until now to start; if you want to resurrect an old project or just use this as an excuse to finish up a game, that's fine by me.

5. Games entered in previous contests are a-okay, as long as they move from "not-finished" to "finished" during the window of this contest. That movement is defined as some substantial update to content, either in the form of additional mechanics, additional play-time, additional features, or additional polish.

=== THE VOTING ===

1. The winners of the contest will be determined by a democratic vote from the community.

2. The voting window will run from February 1st, 2017 to February 14th, 2017. If we get such a volume of long-ish games that it is communally deemed improbable to play them all in that time-frame, we reserve the right to extend this voting window.

3. Winners will be chosen in the following categories: a.) 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place awards for the best games entered into the contest, and b.) the Ralfo Q. Hayman Award for Community Enrichment, awarded to the entrant who posted the most helpful or insightful updates in this mega-thread, spurring fellowship and a spirit of collaboration, throughout the duration of this contest.

4. The prizes will be:
-- Best Game 1st Place: $20 Amazon or Steam gift code (Winner's Choice)
-- Best Game 2nd Place: $10 Amazon or Steam gift code
-- Best Game 3rd Place: $5 Amazon or Steam gift code
-- Ralfo Q. Hayman Award for Community Enrichment: [[REDACTED -- MYSTERY PRIZE]]

5. In order to have a valid ballot, the numerical ranking part of the ballots (see below) will be kept secret and private-messaged to myself and [[an impartial figure later to be determined]] for counting. The written part of the ballots will be posted for the community to see.

6. To vote, one must fill out the OFFICIAL 2016 "FINISH YOUR DAMN GAME" CONTEST BALLOT:

[[ OFFICIAL 2016 "FINISH YOUR DAMN GAME" CONTEST BALLOT ]]

[[ type game title here ]]

-- Numerical Ranking (keep private and email to the vote counters) --
STRENGTH: [[ type a number between 1 and 5 here ]]
CONSTITUTION: [[ type a number between 1 and 5 here ]]
INTELLIGENCE: [[ type a number between 1 and 5 here ]]
WISDOM: [[ type a number between 1 and 5 here ]]
DEXTERITY: [[ type a number between 1 and 5 here ]]
CHARISMA: [[ type a number between 1 and 5 here ]]

- Strength refers to the game's ability to overpower you with its force. It doesn't matter if it makes you angry, makes you cry, makes you laugh -- the force of the game's impact upon you is its Strength.
- Constitution is a measure of the game's lasting appeal. Is this something you play for 30 minutes and are done forever, or are you likely to keep playing, or at least keep *thinking*, about this game long into the future?
- Intelligence is a measure of the game's ability to surprise you and force you to think. It's not quite a measure of the game's challenge, but something like that. How satisfied did you feel upon besting the game's challenges? Did you feel like you beat a fool at tic-tac-toe, or that you beat a genius at chess? That's what is meant by the game's Intelligence score.
- Wisdom is a measure of the game's ability to make you think... in a different way. Did the game make you think at all about the world outside of the game itself? Did it make you consider looking at the world differently in any way at all? It doesn't matter how minor; if a game causes you to see things differently, it should have a goodly ranking in Wisdom.
- Dexterity is a measure of the game's ability to avoid common traps and pitfalls. Did the developers go out of their way to avoid easy outs that would have made for a less satisfying experience? Did the developers think of new ways to dodge around old problems in the world of game design? These are the markers of high Dexterity.
- Charisma is a measure of the game's chrome and polish. Does the game jump out at you, beg you to play it, and draw you in with its overall presentation, graphics, packaging, and put-togetherness?

-- Impressions (this part of the vote should be publicly posted on the Slime Salad forums in the official FYDG Contest voting thread (to be created when the voting window opens)) --
[[ type your thoughts on the game here. This can be as detailed as a full review, or just a short paragraph conveying your overall feelings. There's no word count involved here, but the more substantial your feedback, the better this contest and community will be. ]]

=== END OF THE OFFICIAL BALLOT ===
Last edited by KF Harlock on Sun Nov 06, 2016 5:58 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by KF Harlock »

LOG UPDATE 0:1

So, my entry for this contest is a game I started way back in 2012, got pretty far into, but never finished. I think it deserves to be completed, so I'm using this contest as an opportunity to see it done. The game is called GALYA: Legend of Hell Castle!

Image

In this game, you play GALYA, pictured above, who has to rescue her girlfriend from Duke Satan's HELL CASTLE. The title really says it all in some ways.

Mechanically, it operates something like a "Metroid-Vania." The castle is composed of interconnected areas and you won't be able to exhaust the possibilities of those areas on the first visit. Instead, you'll collect items and gain abilities that will allow you to unlock new paths and new connections between the various areas of the castle.

Image

As this screenshot shows, each area of the castle will be filled with nefarious traps and fiendish puzzles! You'll have to encounter them in order to confront the devilish masters of each zone, each of whom will present a unique strategic challenge.

I've got a lot more content to show, and now that this contest is underway, I should have more and more each day. I'm going to leave it at this for now, though, and hold other things back until future updates, after other people have had a chance to introduce their own projects.

UPCOMING: The Unhappy Triad! Lord Palesword! The King of Lies! ETHICS LESSONS!

See you then!
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Post by guo »

Epic!
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Post by Foxley »

Consider me sliming hyped.
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Post by Gizmog »

Why does she have a robot arm?
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Post by Willy Elektrix »

Looking cool. Are there RPG battles, or is it all puzzles?
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

Image
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Post by kylekrack »

I don't know why, but right now I'm just really excited to see games being made. The past couple months have been awesome, just seeing that everyone is working on something. So much respect for you all. Everything looks great.

I've been working on some of my own stuff lately, and I don't have a Huuuge amount of spare time right now, but I'm going to do my best to enter this bonanza. Such a great idea.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

So weird seeing James's old no-outlines graphics next to shiny new black-outlined graphics. Has been since he added portraits.

Anyway, I have a game development thread on another site:
ChristianFurs.net - posting it there shaped the development of the project and made me decide to make it an SFW project instead of tossing nudity and crude jokes into it.
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Post by Feenicks »

[s]Still going to be tentative with this, but I want to try and do a small project [like, everything fits on one tileset-small] to experiment with some stuff related to battles that I've been thinking of doing for a while now.

Should be nice after doing a project that had no battles in it whatsoever.[/s]

EDIT: nevermind the game's already blown up massively in scale, whoops
Last edited by Feenicks on Fri Nov 04, 2016 2:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by marionline »

Yesterday I read about this contest, and decided that's what I need to finish a game.
Soon this question came up: "Wich of the many unfinished ones on my hard drive can I finish in about two months?"
Two months, where ReaLife is claiming it's share of time as well - no holidays. And also Christmas -a busy time of the year- is getting near...
So part of the problem is two months are actually quite short, and like Pheonix I'll first have to think/plan about what I'm going to do.
I went and looked throug my old game files, some progress seems to be lost or backup-ed in an unknown place (read: lost), but all in all there are plenty of unfinished games waiting for effort and time to be spoend on them so they can one day in the futur turn into a finished game.
Among these games were nonsense game like slimes - a game where you play as a slime living in a cave and a demo for a monster-hunting-game a la pokemon but also more serious attempts to make a game like the one about aliens and pupils or the secretly planned Remake of Kim and Jose.
What I would like to finish is a game with the inofficiall name 'Magic and Monsters' and a game about Aliens as Computers.
Both games need plotscripting, I am not very confident in my plotscripting "skills".
Also they are missing graphics, maps, dialogues and so on. But I am feeling most motivated to work on these two games, even if other games might be easier to finish. So, I'll stick with these two, even if they might not be finishable till new year.

How did you guys choose what to work on?
(Just confess that you also have plenty of unfinished games as well ;) ... )

Here's some pictures of what I drew yesterday:
Image
Image

I also "played" the unfinished game to take a look at what to do next:
Image
Seems like that's what happens if you are not carefull where/when you place npcs on a map - the heroine meets a clone! (Could be a nice story, but not for this game...)

Image
This game has the best sprites I managed to draw so far. But it might not be best presented as an rpg, since it should be a learning game and teach stuff. I wonder how far I can use the OHR for eduvational game with as less plotscripting as possible. Or if it would be wiser to make an webbased read-youir-own-adventure-game out of it...
I remember the last thing i tried was something with menus, and that is was difficult. I'll take a look at the "engine"/programming stuff, after the maps and graphics are done.

How do you handle that?
Do you have a fixed approache how to make games?
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Post by KF Harlock »

Hey, everyone. Thanks for getting us off to a good start. This is just a heads-up to let you know that the rules of the contest have been determined and the first post up above has been edited to reflect them. It also describes how the voting process will go. Most importantly is that, in light of the heavy holiday schedule between now and the end of the year, we've extended the deadline of the contest until January 31st. We lose the "start the new year with a new game!" thing that way, but hopefully it'll make the whole thing easier on everyone and encourage more participation!

Keep posting your updates! I'm about to put down another one myself!
Last edited by KF Harlock on Sun Nov 06, 2016 6:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by KF Harlock »

LOG UPDATE 0:2

Updates this time are from the opening of the game. As part of the game's prologue, the main protagonist, Galya, is visited in a dream by the nefarious DUKE SATAN, who subjects her to a variety of ethical conundrums and miserable choices.

Image

She has this nightmare a lot...

Image

The choices DUKE SATAN requires you to make are meant to be difficult, and to give you a moment of pause. There's no real "good" option most of the time. What is he trying to do by holding you in the dream world until you respond to situations like this?? What's in it for him??

Image

Whatever the case, when the time finally comes for you to play GALYA: LEGEND OF HELL CASTLE, take the time to answer wisely, and in a way that reflects your true values. Your ability to successfully overcome the power of the Hell Castle may depend upon it!!

[[with thanks and acknowledgement to Ultima IV]]
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Post by KF Harlock »

Marionline: I'm really glad you decided to participate. That's exactly the kind of response I was hoping this contest would get. If you want help with scripting, just ask. We've got a lot of people who are good at it, and we're usually willing to take a look at scripts and help you out. You can also always ask in the IRC channel (and might get an even faster response that way).

As for how I decided what to work on, Hell Castle was a game that I intended to finish in a short window of time when I first started it... back in 2013. I made substantial progress, then a lot of things (many of them good!) got in the way and I didn't work on it at all for quite a long time. I've got some big ideas coming up for projects I want to work on soon, and I knew that I'd always have some regret if I just never finished Hell Castle, so I launched this contest partly as something to make me jump on it and finish it up once and for all. I'm glad it's finally going to see the light of day.

Do I have a particular approach for making games? The games I've finished up to this point have been collaborations with Shizuma; Hell Castle will be the first one that's all me start to finish (besides the great and powerful Sodapiggy on Music, and the countless bits of assistance from damn near everyone in the community, that is). In the collab games, we traded the file back and forth on a daily basis, and that helped a lot for keeping up motivation. We approached the projects pretty methodically, drawing all the tiles and hero/NPC graphics, then making all the maps, then all the battles, then all the scripts, basically in that order, on a chapter-by-chapter basis. What I'm doing for Hell Castle so far, I think, is to just finish up the entire rest of the game besides what I have "finished" -- just use placeholder graphics and get it all FINISHED as soon as possible. Then, I plan to go back and replace the placeholders with real assets. I'm not exactly sure why I chose this method of working, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

If you want any info on what I handle any specific parts of a game, such as enemy statting or whatever, just ask. I'm happy to help!
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Post by Spoonweaver »

I love the border.
Top notch game!
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