Making a Game With FREE Art - Mouse Only Jam Devlog

this video is sponsored by squarespace hey there how's it going i've been part of the 8bits2 infiniti community for a couple of years now first taking part in their platformer jam all the way back in march of 2019 they were the first online community i found that ran regular game jams as well as the first place i saw the restriction and theme format that i love to this day i've taken part in many of their jams and over the last year or so i've moved into a judging role to encourage others and give feedback because of being a judge i often don't make anything for the more recent jams but when a particular restriction piques my interest i sometimes just can't help myself this is one of those times but before we jump in this video is sponsored by squarespace squarespace is by far the easiest way to make your very own website with features that make the process as painless as possible whether you've built a website before or jumping in for the very first time i've had many struggles trying to create websites in the past and so far using squarespace has been an absolute dream as a content creator the things i make live on so many different websites all across the internet so it's great to have a central place to send viewers to really show off what i do as well as host other common need things like an faq and community activities on top of being super simple to use and create squarespace is also incredibly easy to keep updated with straightforward simple to use social sharing and blogging tools as well as a whole host of analytics that will help you know what your audience likes and how to give them more check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.comlark and use the coupon code vimlark to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain from july 9th to the 19th 8 bits to infinity hosted the mouse jam you must create a game controlled only by mouse inputs they specify this even further meaning the mouse position three buttons and the scroll we can't expect everyone to be this kind of league gamer if you follow my channel you may know that i recently gave myself the mouse only restriction as a final self-imposed challenge when i did three game jams at the same time so why would i want to do it again so soon as a designer for me experimentation and iteration are crucial i revisit similar ideas in different forms all the time in this case the game i made called pick up prison was a pickup and move game where you had to carry a group of unmoving goblins out of a dungeon now i do think the game came out all right but it's not very elegant and not super clean with its mechanics i find it a bit clunky which usually happens when you try to add too much to be fair i had three themes and three restrictions so i don't think i was really going to be able to pull out much of the clunk in that situation but we're no longer in that position and i don't have those restrictions now there really is something about the pickup and move mechanic that stands out to me besides point and click it's probably the easiest and most understandable interaction we do on a computer to complement that simplicity i want to make a game similar to the pickup prison concept you must pick up and move characters to keep them alive but remove all unneeded complications like moving cameras and power ups because i just want to focus on needing to pick up and move several objects out of harm's way with the tension and challenge being that you can only move one at a time the jam is 10 days long but i've only got a few streams and some late nights to dedicate to the game so it's going to be absolutely vital that i pay attention to my scope and not let it creep too large the theme for this jam is considered semi-optional you don't have to follow it but it is 10 of your score as one of the voting categories is theme slash limitation again i'm a judge so voting doesn't really matter to me and right now i just want to get the mechanics in and see how they feel i added an object to the game and gave it the drag and drop behavior threw in a little bit of code so that it would snap itself to the grid when moving and dropping this just makes movement feel a little more deliberate and allows the player to place objects with a lot more precision and for the idea i have here this is much more preferable my plan is to make a small tight play space so the player has to really pay attention to this area here to keep with my general theme of iterating off previous designs i pulled from the boulder idea that i added to my tri-jam entry called dimension hop a simple hazard that signals where it's coming from and where it's going spawning on one side of the play area and moving to the other destroying anything it touches the player's job is to stay out of its way i added spawn points to each of the four sides and set them up so when they fire the shooters are divided into two sections when a shot call is made one random spawner from each of the two sections will fire the combination of two shooting at the same time covers more of the play space and forces the player to divide their attention between two shot paths so that's the basics in and so far not too bad i then spent the rest of the night i had left making sure that the object stayed bound inside the play area and would continue to move nicely even if you tried to drag them off the side i picked the game back up on my twitch stream where i brainstormed with my chat on how to implement a theme of another world we spitballed a bunch of concepts for what the objects and projectiles could be in the end the one i chose is that you are moving cows out of the way of aliens that are trying to abduct them i really love the idea but oh man did it make a long week of cow puns which i have to say was just utterly ridiculous one more limitation that i'm adding for myself for this jam because you know i can't just leave it alone is that i will only use free assets available online i see comments and hear from people all the time that they can't make games because they can't make art or they're not any good at it well it can often be easier when you have bespoke art for your games because everything is made to work with your mechanics it's not the only way to approach it there are thousands of free assets out there that were created with the specific purpose of helping you make a game also i have like two other jams planned over the next couple of weeks so this will help with creative fatigue to not have to make art for this one as well so with chat at my side we started our search on itch.io to see what was available i found the farm puzzle and animals graphics pack from camigo and thought i hit gold this is exactly what i wanted for the levels checkered grass with fences and farm animals but we have a problem sadly there's no cow damn getting the terrain is pretty good though and i really like the ui elements that come with this pack as well this style reminds me a lot of other assets made by kenny so i figured i would hop over there and see if they've made a cow before after searching through kenny.nl for a bit i found the animal pack redux which has a cute little cow all ready to go i figured we're in for a penny we might as well be in for a pound and i use the kenny alien characters that i feel are kind of a rite of passage for game designers to use at some point in one of their games i've never actually used them up until now so i guess it's about time let me know in the comments if you've ever used these sprites before the last element we need is some sort of portal to spawn the aliens i found these sprites from elfin's pixel art shop which are great but they don't really fit with the aesthetic of the other elements we have but i was getting tired of looking so i just grabbed him as a placeholder for now the rest of the stream was spent adding the bass sprites to everything to start getting a picture of how everything was going to look in the end the overall aesthetic has a cute mobile feel and for a pickup and move type game i think that fits well on the next stream we continued adding art assets to make the game look nice camigo's asset pack has some really nice ui elements as well as two cursor states a pointed finger and an open hand i also wanted a closed hand so i did make a slight modification by making a version of the pointer where i just removed the fingers to make it look like it was a closed fist then to give some flair to the cows being abducted and not just have them disappear the aliens now put the cows in a tractor beam behind them and carry them away this made for a mechanical change as well so now each alien can only pick up one cow at a time before if all your cows were in a row and an alien was on that path they would pick up every cow that they came into contact with i feel this gives the player a little more leeway and makes the game feel a little bit more fair we also added a score counter that increases every time an aliens spawn to discourage just killing off all of your cows so you can just move the one around to make it easier you get a score multiplier equal to the number of cows you still have as well as making the alien spawn more quickly as your cow count decreases i don't want the game to be too easy but i also don't want it to be too hard either so finding the balance was definitely difficult so i continue to make adjustments and tweak the spawn raids throughout the entire build with most of that in we now need to address the portal issue again these sprites are great but they in no way fit with the look of the rest of the game after searching for a while i looked closer at the alien pack from kenny and realized that i could use several of the tractor beam pieces to get the effect i wanted i used the circle portal to slowly grow and indicate where the alien was about to spawn then when it reaches full size it spawns a couple of other effect sprites as well as the alien and i have to say i'm really happy with the result it fits perfectly and i think it clearly signals the next spawn location to the player i then ended the stream off by adding some ui buttons which are pretty self-explanatory that night i added the finishing touches like particle effects menus credits as well as sound effects and music i used a song from tallbeard studios and sound effects from kenny but one thing that was missing was the cow's moves finding a moo is an oddly specific sound effect so i headed over to freesounds.org and while i was going through different cow sounds i found a file called human cows by alex quest 42 and it's amazing it's just a bunch of people saying seriously listen to this and then it's got this gem at the end i cut up the file into single moves and used the best one as the abduction cry with all that in the last thing i had to do was make the how to play panel the game is super simple so i figured i could just make a small repeating animation to show that you pick up and move a cow out of the way of the aliens and this took me so much longer than it ever should have i tried using the timeline feature that was added to construct a while back and i have to say it's not quite ready yet it was a super pain to use and get set up and then ended up crashing quite a bit once so bad that i could no longer run my project so i yielded that feature out and went with the trusty tween all the things which still started to act weird on me but i finally had to just say enough was enough it works fine the first time but after that the portal gets super slow for some reason at the end of its growth cycle and honestly at this stage i can't be bothered to figure it out anymore this is literally just a little animation there's no bearing on the game at all so we're leaving it i don't care even though the jam ends on the 19th my deadline for myself was the 15th so on the stream that day i exported the game uploaded it to itch and let my chat play test to find bugs while i set up the itch page it's weird i'm usually scrambling at the end of the jam and lucky enough if i get to playtest myself let alone have other people try it too and it makes sense that this is a much better way to go about it they found several bugs that were fairly quick to fix but could have caused some serious annoyances if they had been left in i feel that i scoped appropriately for the time i had but i did have to leave some good ideas on the cutting room floor had i had a little bit more time some ideas that i think could have been fun to explore are bonus hay or grass that would spawn randomly throughout the playfield that you would have to move the cow over to pick up and score more points i really like the idea of larger alien ships that cover more than one row or column as well as the concept of possibly gaining more cows over time to replace the ones that you lost these are all ideas that i think could change the gameplay up and make it more interesting and probably more replayable but with the time frame i had my goal was to make a small game that could be played and enjoyed in about 5 minutes and i think this game does that in its current state i was also convinced to change the terrible logo that i put together at like two in the morning and rightfully so this one was awful i have no idea what i was thinking so the game is done but there's still one problem i said i was balancing the spawning of aliens throughout the entire build to keep the player engaged everything felt great at this point until you got down to one cow left which you just kind of picked up and held the whole time moving it away from the aliens this started to feel tedious and boring and it didn't really feel fair to just increase the swan rate to the point where you could no longer keep yourself alive then i got the ever so sensible suggestion of why not just make it so you have to have at least two cows left you know because otherwise they can't breed so you won't have any more cows in the future i don't know something like that story-wise it doesn't make a whole lot of sense but sometimes a simple solution like that is the best thing to fix your problem and it fixed everything instantly it also fit better with my main mechanic which i wanted the player to be moving multiple objects out of harm's way but only being able to pick up one at a time and with that last minute fix this is it came from counter space you must pick up and move your cows out of the path of aliens that have come from another world to steal them from you the longer you stay alive the more frequently the aliens spawn until they finally get one of your cows which will then reset their spawn rates to keep the player from becoming overwhelmed to quickly it's the type of game you can open up really quick if you have a few minutes to spare and that's pretty much exactly what i wanted i think it's also a good example that if you can't make art you can still find the pieces you need to make something a huge thank you to the creators that share their work for others to use if you like any of these assets or the styles please check them out links to all the assets used are in the description this was a quick fun idea that i had a great time exploring it has the elements i liked from pickup prison but the simplicity that makes it much more approachable and easier to understand also be sure to check out all the other cool projects made using only the mouse for this jam what would you have done with this restriction let me know in the comments thank you all for watching if you want to see the dev process live or just chat with me stop by my live streams at twitch.tv we have an amazing community and would love to have you i'd like to give an extra special shout out to all my patreon supporters that helped make this possible especially aaliyah cam clone 13 cortland massam david scott nightfall jed jed kevin halgow kormai matzi makes nazar salim salty pretzel scott hansen soapy gnome straight up gruntled and warren steven rose you're all awesome people and i truly truly appreciate the support thank you again to the sponsor of this video squarespace remember to use the coupon code vimlark when clicking the link in the description if you've enjoyed this video please consider liking subscribing and hitting that bell so you don't miss any of the uploads which i've been hearing has been happening to some people lately thank you once again for watching and i will talk with you next time have a good one [Music] later [Music] you

Channel: Vimlark

Views: 41,443

Keywords: game, game dev, indie, indie dev, Construct, construct 3, photoshop, aseprite, pixel art, pixel, video game, madewithconstruct, devlog, Indie Devlog, Indie game devlog, dev log, indiecade2019, indiecade, nick, dufault, nick dufault, Ultimate Game Jam, Game Jam, Jam, GMTK, GMTK 2020, Miziziziz, Game Developer, Kenney, Kenney Jam, VimJam, 8bits, 8 bits, 8 bits to infinity, Ludum Dare, Ludum Dare 47, LD jam, ldjam, gamemaker, game maker, gamemaker studio, gamemaker sudio 2

Id: 6K1SZzHCgvA

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021