Coding Blocks - #CBJAM 22 Recap

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

We have a retrospective about our recent Game Ja Ja Ja Jam, while Michael doesn't know his A from his CNAME, Allen could be a nun, and Joe still wants to be a game developer.

You're listening to Coding Box, episode 178. Subscribe to us on Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, wherever you like to find your podcasts. And hey, while you're there, if you would leave us a review or give us a thumbs up or a plus or, you know, whatever they do. Yes, and while you're up there, visit us at CodingBlocks.net where you can find our show notes, examples, discussions, and more. And you can send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at CodingBlocks.net where you can find our show notes, examples, discussions, and more. And you can send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at CodingBlocks.net. And we got a Twitter at CodingBlocks.

If you tweet us what you're working on and stuff, we'll take a look, retweet, all that jazz. Also, if you go to www. CodingBlocks.net. I think you added like three too many W's to that. That's a few W's. Yeah, you're going to have to set that up,net. I think you added like three too many W's to that. That's a few W's. Yeah, you're going to have to set that up,

Alan. I'm sorry. In case everybody is listening. We got social links there at the top of the page. With that, I am Joe Zach. I'm Michael Outlaw. And I am Alan Underwood, the controller of CNames. Subdomains.

That's a c name record this episode is sponsored by data dog the cloud scale monitoring and analytics platform that unifies metrics traces and logs so you can identify and resolve performance issues quickly and shortcut formerly known as clubhouse you shouldn't have to project manage your project management. All right, and tonight we're talking about the aftermath of the CB jam 22. But first, a little bit of news. I like how you put it as like the aftermath because it was like just so, you know, tearing of your soul to like get it done. So much pressure and stress, you know, it was a lot of work. Oh yeah.

You're participating in. Yeah. It definitely took a toll on my marriage and life. It was difficult for me to watch. I'm telling you next time we are going to have to go somewhere so that we could all do it and not have the the eye of sauron or our wives on us right so yeah yeah yeah yep okay so uh we do podcast reviews like people leave us reviews and we are always appreciative of it and we try to pronounce the names unless they're just

symbols and then i guess i i'm gonna say that this one is supposed to be elements oh yeah yeah i see it okay elements man elements where's the t there's no t but elements that's what it would be yeah okay elfin in elfin scriptures yeah so i see uh a lira in there a dollar sign there's some is that a pound yeah a pound yeah a couple of those yeah i you can't you can't possibly get onto me for my pronunciation of that i we none of us are wrong There's no wrong answers here. You can't just put symbols there and get mad. No, I think good.

I like it. It takes a review. Yeah, definitely. You'll see. What? Oh, sorry. Well, in addition to this episode, we also cut together a video of all the top games so if you want to go and just watch what all and see what all the games look like also spend some time talking about basically all the top games we're going to be talking about tonight

but you can see everything all the games on youtube will have a link on the show notes here that you can use and by we we definitely mean j Yeah, totally. Yeah, we don't want to shortcut or shortchange him on this. He made an amazing video. Put some time into it. Pretty good video. Yeah, go check it out. It is good. Well, now he says that. We've got to take it down a notch. We can't give him too much of a big head about it.

Yeah, so we made it. Yeah, let's go back to the we. Alright, so what about uh we start this uh retrospective game jam retrospective that's what we should call this episode that's good um with like lessons learned yeah and this time uh i did things a little bit different like after the last game jam i think we had an episode kind of like this but this time i thought i'd kind of pull back the curtain and talk a little bit different. Like after the last game jam, I think we had an episode kind of like this, but this time I thought I'd kind of pull back the curtain and talk a little bit about what it was like kind of just putting together an event and running it. So the actual lessons here,

lessons learned here have more to do with just kind of putting on the event. And so I thought it might be interesting to kind of hear about that. You know, maybe not. Hopefully, hopefully it's a great episode. Let me know. How about selling yourself short right

there at the beginning that was good yeah i like to make sure that you like this episode i don't know maybe and and if you do cool but you know if you don't like don't hold it against me yeah exactly you've been warned so the first thing i kind of uh learned this year that i didn't really grok last year but itch.io is really a social network. Everyone who participates, everyone who submits a jam has to sign up for an account. And then you can follow those people. So if you think they did a cool job, you can follow them. If they say that they got their assets from somewhere and you like the art in the game, you can go follow the person that made the art or the music or whatever.

And sometimes they sell stuff. Sometimes they put stuff up for free. But it's just kind of cool. It's a cool way of keeping in touch with people that you think do really creative and cool things. Like-minded people. Like-minded people. And, yeah, I mean, like, we'll get into the games later. But so many games are just super cool.

So, I went through and followed a bunch. And I don't remember when I started. But somehow I missed this totally last year that you could just follow people and so I plan on going back through and following some more. But yeah, it's just kind of like a realization to think it's like, oh, that's exactly what this platform is.

I wonder now because we talked about the other game jam platforms. Now I'm kind of questioning if they also are, you know, game social network type of setups yeah we definitely looked at a couple last year and i honestly i don't even remember it's just so dominant in this space uh i don't even know of another another one honestly at this point like offhand i'd have to you know search. Well, we definitely talked about a bunch of them back in like 19, 20.

I don't even remember. We've been recording for so long. Like, who knows? Right. I haven't left this chair in years. So this is, we collected some better stats this year. And so this is something that we kind of knew, but I just hadn't really seen it. You know, first game I ever did was last year and this is the second one.

So browser-based games this year, we had a 44 playable games out of 46 submissions. There were two, one got disqualified. I don't even know if you guys saw it. I don't know if we could talk about it now. Someone else flagged it. I don't know if it flagged it or if a person flagged it, whatever, but it got removed and I didn't even do it. Um, but for what? Uh, so it got removed, and I didn't even do it. Flagged for what?

So it had been submitted to basically every game jam. Oh, okay. So I don't know if it was a bot, maybe it just did it, but it was an old game, and I actually looked at the game. It looked like a clone of somebody's repo, and it even had information about the other person. The repo looked like it was years old and had just been submitted to like every jam in the last couple weeks so

i didn't bother looking at that one and there's one game that just uh there was a problem with the upload and couldn't get to run i've checked out a few times it's still not runnable so that's unfortunate so i don't i don't know what the game was like. So 44 playable. But out of those, actually, this is, yeah, out of those, 40 were browser-based. So you could play it in the browser without having to download anything, which definitely the recommended way to run as a user because, you know, you don't have to worry. It's a sandbox. You don't have to worry about it deleting all the files in your hard drive or installing a keylogger or whatever. But also, in terms of getting votes and feedback on your game, you absolutely a key logger whatever um but also uh in terms of getting votes and feedback on your game you absolutely want to target the browser because if you look

at the the number of votes and number of comments for games and just sort by like say number of votes or number of comments you know instantly which ones are not browser based because they're all the way at the bottom unlike a fraction of the interactions that everyone else got. So just a side effect. What stinks is the games run much better if you download them. So, you know, that's,

that's the deal though. Yeah. But like you were saying though, there's the risk of, you know, there's a lot of trust. If you're going to, you know,

if you're going to download that and run it on your main computer. Now, if you have like, you know, a sandbox computer that you could run that on that you don't have anything of value on and then fine but yep absolutely which yeah i don't know why you would do that unless you're planning on judging a lot of games in a short period of time which is worth it but yeah just a target for the browser if you want feedback definitely recommend it uh so here's a point this is more kind of almost like a general kind of entrepreneurial But yeah, just a target for the browser if you want feedback. Definitely recommend it. So here's a point.

This is more kind of almost like a general kind of entrepreneurial whatever. Writing text and communicating with people is really tough. Knowing how often to communicate. And even like if something, you know, you think about changing a date on something. Like you think about giving a little more time. Like you want to be fair to people. You want to let them know but you have to weigh that decision with the overhead of actually trying to communicate it because it's so easy to word things poorly or cause more confusion by making updates so sometimes if like if you're not happy with something it's an hour off or

whatever you're probably better off just leaving it because sending another email, you know, first of all, most people aren't even going to open that email. Second of all, when they do, it just kind of causes some confusion and gets weird. And so you have to be careful with, you know, making updates. And so it's just kind of funny to think about text being this kind of living document.

Like maybe some people read this variation of the text. Maybe some people read it after you fixed it and you know trying to decide whether or not to fix you know problems with copywriting and knowing how often to send and have you driven people nuts is it worth sending another email blast to let them know that you know it's this time zone or that time zone or you know whatever well i reworded that because because in the notes there you had copywriting and you just said it. But really we're talking about writing copy because I don't want to get it confused with the copyright from a legal perspective. Again, just illustrating that writing copy is hard.

Yeah. It's like flipping communication on its head from communicating with teams versus communicating with large groups of people that you don't necessarily know right yep yeah it's it's interesting so you almost want to under communicate a bit just just to keep the like you said the the confusion or the churn or or the additional questions coming in right yep yeah it's interesting yeah absolutely yeah it's it's tough and say especially if you're trying to fit stuff into a tweet and you want to be precise you want to be you know correct but you also you don't want to spend the whole tweet like being pedantic about you know whatever so it's just kind of difficult to to communicate and so you know that's why i write with computers you know um play testing so um lots of games or i don't know what i wrote my notes here are really messy but um there's two kinds of play testing

that i wanted to mention uh one is playing your own game while you're writing it uh one thing we noticed and we like everyone mentions this and people mentioned the same exact thing last year the games are frequently way too hard right especially if you think about people playing 46 games or whatever 44 games yeah because you end up playing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over while you're doing the development of the game yeah that you're like you're pretty good at it yeah you you figured out you're like oh let me add this one more element

but but like you know you spent like this game jam was four days long the previous one was three days long most people are going to spend three days three solid days of playing that game. You know, uh, you just, from a game jam, you know, like maybe one, you know, you keep polishing it and it becomes like the next call of duty or whatever. But you know, in a game jam, like we're not, I don't think we're expecting that low, that caliber of game. So you're not going to get three days days three solid days worth of gameplay out of it from someone else yep now there's some really excellent games that i saw that had really cool stuff that happened in the later half of the game but it's hard to get there so i hate the idea of

like they're being you know there's almost like this kind of thing where you want to have the end of the game be the coolest it's got the most stuff going on you know like everything is building up to that moment and it stinks when most people don't get to see everything that you worked on because they couldn't get past uh you know some earlier level so for game jam games just make them easy focus on just like make it easy and winnable fun so i guess here's the question though are they hard because it's just a hard game hard puzzle whatever or is it just because mechanics typically aren't as polished as well in a game jam game? Like,

did you find any kind of balance in terms of why they were hard? I know. Yeah. Oh, oh, go ahead. Well, I was going to say from my perspective,

it's, it's a mixture of things because sometimes like just trying to figure out the objectives can be, can be a challenge. And then there's also, you know, the mechanics of the game, like what buttons do I press? What keys? Cause some, some will have like, you know, instructions and it'll either be like, you know, spelled out within the game or it'll be like on the landing page of the game where it will tell you like the details of it and objectives. But

then there's some games where like, uh, you know, and I mean, I'm not trying to, I'm not saying this to fault anyone. Uh, you know, it's not like even my own game was better at doing this, but, um, you know, you get caught up in the development of the game that sometimes you forget about. Like, it's so easy. It game developments, like every other type of development, it's easy for you as the developer to just assume things right like you don't intend to and so you're like oh everybody's going to know that these are the keys or this is the objective or whatever yeah you know i don't think i said it in the start but all the games are fantastic so i don't want to sound like i'm being negative at all like yeah i mean every every everything was just awesome but it's just

these are some kind of observations like after the fact like so these are things that i'm like i'm going to try and get into like the text for next year's game jam for example to kind of encourage and steer things you know if i'm seeing common problems like they're probably gonna be problems next year and like maybe there's a sentence or maybe there's a way i can phrase things to kind of help that a little bit none of this is directed at any one game this is like this is like constructive criticism for like you know anyone developing a game ever to be like hey you know these are these are things to consider you know oh and play testing uh i revised my game several times after submitting it after people kept saying it's hard it's still too hard it's

still too hard it's still too hard and every time i thought i made it better because i could beat it you know with my eyes closed and yeah so i'm getting that feedback like outlaw and out and uh my friend jonna did a lot of feedback and it was like oh yeah of course oh my god but it just when you when you are spending so much time with something like you know it inside and out you know every little thing you don't think about that user experience and someone who doesn't know anything about your game. That first one, man, I don't know how you beat it. I still don't. You have to play it perfect. I still don't.

Yeah, you could not afford to miss a single opportunity and win the game. Right. You had to get it perfect. One of those rocks flying, yeah. Yeah, it was basically like imagine you're playing Mortal Kombat and you don't win unless you get a flawless victory. If you get a flawless victory, then you win the game. But also, by the way, we're not going to call it flawless victory because you just simply won.

Don't be special. Don't think you're special because you did it flawlessly. You're not. And also, you've never seen a fighting game in your life it's like completely foreign right yeah it was it was fun yeah yeah it's fun and you know you'll see like all the top games like that is the number one thing they had in common is they had a great focus on the user experience right from the get-go a good ramp up every single one of them uh had that had the users kind of in mind from right from the get-go so that was really cool.

I mean, I don't know we've talked about this yet, but man, the submissions were so good. I don't know if you were playing against it, but some of these games, there's some serious talent that is participating in this game jam that submitted games.

Yep. Because some of them, I know Alan too was questioning this because some that submitted games yep because like some of them i know i know alan too was questioning this because some of these games you look at you're like you did that in a weekend right yep yeah i went and looked at several of them because like no way and uh so we've got some stats we'll talk about in a minute but sometimes it's a team of people so there would be like three i think the most i saw was four people uh working on game. And you could tell that they all worked together really well. And, you know, each person did their part really well. It was really great.

And there were also times when it was fewer people. But I would go back and like look at games they've done for other jams. Or sometimes they have Twitch streams or whatever. And be like, oh, wow, they're actually super good. Or you can follow them on Twitter to see like, hey, this is what they're doing this Saturday. And it's something that looks really amazing. So it was really cool. We had a great mix of just people that have never made a game before.

There were people that were students. I think I saw one that was like a like pre high school student made a game. That's amazing. Super cool. And there's some people that are like full time game devs. So, you know, it's a wide variety. And it was really cool. No matter what um there's something absolutely there were many things to love about every game uh duration we kind of mentioned this already is basically uh you know you really want to aim for a really great i would even say try to make a game for a really great

minute maybe try to have a really great two minute experience maybe if you try to make a game for a really great minute. They try to have a really great two minute experience. Maybe if you try to make a five, 10, 20 experience, most people are not going to make it that far. Well, what if you had like 600 hours of content in your game? Yeah.

Uh, well you should sell it. Probably. Let's be honest. Yeah. Yeah. And so a lot of games are really good but um you know when it comes to game jam you got to think like most of the people voting uh probably also made a game

and they're going around and giving feedback which that was my heart by the way it was so cool to see like people who were spending games going around and playing other people's and playing you know submitting really good feedback so that just that was good you know what i don't remember seeing this year that i remember from last year was multiplayer i didn't see any multiplayer i think we had if i remember right there was at least one multiplayer submission last year there was uh and it was an npm car racing game and i got it working locally it was exclusively multiplayer though so i like i got it kind of working locally it was like kind of like trying to race myself it's pretty funny so you you had like two keyboards two computers set up no i would just go to different like one window and then go back to the other one

yeah it was cool it was cool game though uh time zones definitely it's so hard to say it's this date to that date right because like when does that start when does it mean does it you know bias whatever so this year what we did is uh you know i'll already mention it we kind of did four days but it was kind of like a quiet four days so we said it started from january 21st to the 24th but it opened at uh midnight gmt so you know utc whatever so the earliest it could possibly be and then it closed i forget what times i'm gonna done pacific in the u.s so it like opened at midnight and it closed uh you know on one time zone and closed in another which like how confusing is that right what

terrible idea and it was so hard to communicate that but i what i wanted to do was like try to just be as forgiving as possible. So, you know, I hated the idea that maybe someone was going to miss a window because they thought it was their time zone or whatever. So I tried to kind of like open it wide on both ends just to be more forgiving and error on the side of being more open. But it's constantly a pain. And I would do things like, hey, game jam starting in six hours or whatever on Twitter. But it was hard to just say like the date because it was always so confusing because. Yeah. Where are you?

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I still don't know how to solve that. And what I don't know if you know, but we did a whole episode or three on like why dates are hard. Absolutely. And what's funny is it's I know you enter the date in your time zone. So I created the jam.

So it was in Eastern time zone. And it was really difficult for me to try and get that because I had to go, you know, do a little bit. You know, it's not exactly hard math, but I had to set the times weird. So like every time I would look at the page, it always, you know, the times and everything when things when things would start looked funky yeah because you're doing mental math to try and get it back to utz so you were c0 yeah you were setting it to utc time in in eastern time right not easy okay so it's like again it's not hard it's like you said it's not hard. It's like you said. It's not hard, but anytime you're having to do math, it's like, you just want to look at it and know. It just bothered me every time. I carry the one.

I'm telling other people, hey, it starts on the 21st. And then I go to the page and it says it starts on the 20th at 7 p.m. And it's just like, ah. So, yeah, no one complained about it. So know hopefully i was okay i think just communicate it all in utc let's just standardize the world on utc and be done with it like and then also store the offsets for right so we know how late you're working that's right not that that matters oh and i should i should mention too same thing last year you know we talked about people spending all weekend making the game i definitely did but there's lots of people who

like did what they you know took a couple hours on saturday and submitted on saturday and that was it and you know and it's always incredible to see those submissions yeah somewhere fantastic like yeah like wow oh my you didn't have like three hours? Really? Yeah. That's all? That's all it took you? I would still be working on that. Now, I did notice. So, I did go through and look at how many projects were explicitly submitted as a team and how many weren't. And we had 16 teams out of the 46 submissions. Asterisk.

So, yep. But still, it's like a third, which is way more than I expected. Yeah. Which is really cool. Putting an asterisk on that with a footnote. Yeah. I know what your footnotes wouldn't be,

but why don't you share with the class? Share with the class. Okay. Thank you, miss teacher. Uh, no, cause like,

cause like you put you, you, you made me you made me put me as a contributor of yours, but I didn't write any of the code. You did all the heavy lifting. You did all the work. But you provided the soul. You provided more of the value. So I spent more time. Yeah, you spent a lot of time. You put more value into it. Cause like when I look at the game, especially like the, the art style that I kind of like went with was like this weird kind of

really, um, almost like kind of like a modern, like washed out, very cold looking game. And then outlaw did all the audio, mostly, you know,

pew, pew, get out of the way. Like mouth noises, but also some rocking guitar tracks. And yeah, it was, it was really amazing.

And, but it provided so much soul that it made the, the graphics just didn't fit very well. So I wanted to redo the graphics, but I just didn't have time. But without that, I mean, it was just like sterile and boring.

So I was really happy to list you as a collaborator there. So 15 teams is the takeaway so some number about a third uh were teams and even that communicating that you know i talked about how it was to write the text to like let people know it was okay and it doesn't make it easy the way you have to add collaborators on there is um it's kind of convoluted like one person basically has to do the submission but then uh you can go and add collaborators and then they have to go uh approve it so it's like this multi-step process so that might there might very well have been more teams and you know maybe i missed it they put in the comments or something or it was in the credits of the game i just didn't

log it um so yeah uh how much is too much i don't remember what that was about oh maybe like in terms of like uh how much you plan to take tackle within the game you know like because you know it's really easy to like have this like pie in the sky kind of view of like you know what you want the game to be rather than just kind of like narrowing your focus down and like getting those mechanics down pat focusing on that like couple minute really good experience rather than saying like okay first level is going to be but wait because there's an epilogue level and then before that though you really gotta go through a training module yeah now you get through all that you're into level 1 and then in level 1 you're gonna fight this boss but

he's not gonna be that big a deal because when you get to level 5 it's too much especially for a game jam game these are supposed to be quick development have fun, crank out something and you know I think I started saying it and got distracted but basically most of the people voting submitted a game have fun, you know, crank out something and, you know, yep.

And then we kind of, I think I started saying it and got distracted, but basically most of the people voting, uh, submitted a game too. So this is, you got to think, you know, they're,

they're tired. They're also playing as many games as possible to give as much feedback as possible. So they don't want to spend 10 minutes with each game. You know, that's 460 minutes, right? Uh,

it's a lot of minutes for, we've done, this is the second year we've done this, and both times I forgot just how much time I needed to set aside to play the other games. Not even time to like, forget time to like actually try to think of something constructive to say about the game, just the time to play the game.

Because like you said, like if you if you spent just 10 minutes playing each game out of 46 games that's 460 minutes and then like you know you want to like write something some of the some of the things that people wrote i mean they wrote like you know a dissertation about somebody else's game with like really good constructive stuff you're like oh that's that's pretty detailed like yep you know i mean they probably spent 10 minutes at least writing writing their feedback on it if they did that that's another 460 minutes per game yep oh you know there was a funny phenomenon there too i wanted to mention them

have you ever noticed that the things that you like the most are sometimes the things that you'll complain about the most like this is is something I do, but, uh, like pick a TV show that I didn't really care for. And I can't tell you much about it. The 18. But you asked me, yeah,

see, I remember the music and that's about it. I didn't really like it, but you asked me about a show that I like, and I can tell you 20 different things that I hated about it. Just hated. But it's because I cared. It's because I put a lot of attention. It's because

I thought about it a lot. So you'll see. Tell me your 10 things about Gilmore Girls. Go ahead. I mean, obviously the witty banter. Lorelai cracks me up. There's something about her facial expressions. She smiles, I smile. I'm really surprised you came back with a name.

I can't remember the other one. Alex Bledsoe. Anyway. I've never watched a name. I can't remember the other one. No. Alex Bledsoe? Something? Anyway. I've never watched the show. I couldn't tell you. Oh, you're missing out. So the point was that a lot of times people who got some of the most constructive feedback,

you would think if you see someone writing three paragraphs about what's wrong with the game, you would think, at a glance, writing three paragraphs about what's wrong with the game you would think like oh you know at a glance you might think like oh crap like that person you know skewered them right the feedback was really rough but then you read the feedback you realize like oh it's because this person obviously spent a lot of time in this game and really thought about this stuff and so like it's kind of almost like in a weird way like the worse the feedback is the more uh the more better the person really enjoys the game. It's not even the worst, right? The more critical feedback you get indicates that, hey, you were hitting on something, right?

Yeah. They spent more time in it. The amount of time they spent in the game is probably relative, which now makes me feel bad about the feedback I said. So I want to change that uh yeah less is more and so the less feedback equals the more time spent playing the game yeah and obviously it's not always like that but it was just kind of a funny thing where it notes were like um you know sometimes you would see like paragraphs written about games that were like almost perfect like perfect you know just like fantastic games and three paragraphs about how the audio was a little too

loud when you jumped backwards or something you know it's like right pretty minor clumps but just funny you know i i can't wait till we get to the to the talk about some of the specific games later but yeah i'll hold yeah i'll bite my tongue for now yeah we'll be going through the top games later but yeah i'll hold yeah i'll bite my tongue for now yeah we'll be going through the top games later um oh one other thing i want to talk about too is uh i mean all the games are you know really fantastic it's really hard to to kind of rank them and makes it competitive in a weird way which i don't love but uh one thing i did notice this year and looking at the uh the voting i think a lot of people uh sorry my phone is buzzing hopefully that's not coming to me fix that a lot of people

I mean we've only been doing this show now for like you know nine years but we'll figure it out one day like how to turn off devices how to like you know start recording and I know I turned it on silent early I swear my phone is like putting itself

back on vibrate but anyway I think that I know I turned it on silent early. I swear my phone is like putting itself back on vibrate. Yeah. But anyway, but I think that, you know, every year we do a theme, this thing, the theme this year was it's following me.

It seems like people vote lower on games that don't follow the theme, even though the theme is kind of optional, but we didn't have a theme category, but I just happened to notice like if it didn't, if the game didn't really kind of adhere to that theme, it seemed like everyone would kind of take a point off. And there were games that were just fantastic that ranked lower than I would have expected. And that's the only thing I could think of.

And it was kind of a pattern. So I think next year we might add a category for voting for themes so that people don't feel like they have to kind of nerf other scores in order to kind of balance that out. But I get it, though, because if you're going into a game jam to create a game and everybody votes on a theme, then everybody kind of wants everyone to play by the same rules, right? Yeah. I think it's fair because, I mean, looking at it from my own point of view, there were games in there that I played that they were submitted that i'm like i

don't understand how this fits the game and i don't recognize the name so is this a person who just like randomly submitted to every game jam because i mean that's a possibility and and they don't they don't care about what the theme is so i mean i feel like that that's it's a fair thing to say like if the if they um you know to if people discounted a game because of that you know i mean that's we had categories so the categories were like fun creativity and quirk and it's like you know if it didn't follow the theme does that make it less fun oh that's point. Yeah. So that's why I was kind of feeling iffy about it. And I think we had some text on the page basically saying the theme is kind of a suggestion. So follow it or don't.

Yeah, I didn't realize that. Yeah. So I think next year we'll just have a separate category for it. And that way, you know, if you want to make a game that you have an idea and it doesn't fit with the theme, just do it. And, you know, hopefully people won't kind't take it out on you on your other scores. What did we get from the competition? We're doing this whole episode about it, but for me, my favorite part was going

through and actually compiling the footage that I took and making the video. This was in the montage because I did this thing where I did four games at a time on a screen. Just seeing all the vibrant I did this thing where I did four games at a time on a screen. Yeah. And just seeing all the vibrant colors and the different art styles and the different sounds and the different style of games. And just seeing four at a time, flash four at a time, flash four at a time, over and over and over again.

It's just like, wow, there's a lot of new, really cool stuff that people put a lot of you know sweat and work into making something creative and fun just to be creative and fun and learn something new and it's just super cool but the takeaway is supposed to be that you learned something from this process not that you made a video about other people's stuff like that's supposed to be where you're supposed to get out of it right i learned to never attempt to art I thought you did some pretty good stuff, man. I don't know. I don't know. Kind of hurt myself.

It was kind of agonizing and I didn't like it. And so it just like, it kind of like, I don't know. It was a, it was a heavy weight. I mean, it is a profession for a reason. I'm just saying. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that's actually interesting though, because I would venture to say that's how

the teams end up doing what they do, right? Like you have somebody that likes doing the game design and then there's somebody that's really good at art and putting those two things together, you know, from two different people is so, you know, learning that about yourself is good, right? Like, um, can you make a logo for a website sure is it going to take you 10 hours or it's going to take somebody else you know 20 minutes right yeah are you going to enjoy it i can make a logo now the question is is it going to look good right and the answer is yes i think it's a conflict of interest too where it's like uh you

know if you're doing the programming and the art like you kind of want to either hurry up with the art in order to get back to the programming you just want to make it work and so you do little shortcuts of the programming to make up for things you don't feel like animating or doing whatever or vice versa where you're like you kind of go in heavier on the art because you know you so you're just competing you know back and forth and so yeah it's kind of like with full stack and you know i've said that's about like full stack development, you know, where it's like if you kind of are more interested in one area or, you know, maybe you're just kind of doing more of one thing. And if you have to pop over to the JavaScript, for example, or the CSS for five minutes to fix something while you're in a back end frame of mind, you know, it's like that kind of stinks. Yeah.

Or you're like, OK, let me just pass it off to this other side of the other tier of it and I'll do it there. Yeah, I'll do that later. Yeah, or you're like, okay, let me just pass it off to this other tier of it, and I'll do it there. Yeah, I'll do that later. Yeah, exactly. So a couple of questions, I thought, and then we'll get into some stats. Do you think that making the event longer, like more days in the event, would have gotten more submissions or less i mean you'd probably get more but i think it kind of defeats the the the intent of the jam like because you know you okay let's say you made it to span over two weekends but i mean i'm not going to take a week off to do a game jam right no so i like the the idea of like it being a three-day thing where you like you could

just take a friday off and have a long weekend and you know do this a fun challenging thing and learn something new while you're at it you know so i mean i think the three three-day time is a good fit. Yeah, I like the three to four, too. I will say if you did have one that spanned two weekends, that gives people the ability to sleep on something and come back to it, which is nice. But I don't know how many people would actually do that, like how many people are going to take two full weekends to do something. And so I do think that the duration of three to four days is probably really good yeah i want it to be like an acm competition like it's quick you know it should be rough unpolished like although some of these games are super polished but you know like right you you

should be hurried yeah i kind of like one thing about doing, it was like, what if we said, okay, you have all of January to do it, but don't spend more than four hours. Have you seen the polish some of these games do in four hours? Could you imagine what we would get if you gave them a month? Just put it on Steam. Don't even submit it back to games. Yeah, why would you even bother? Exactly. But yeah, it was just kind of the idea. on steam don't even submit it back to game yeah why would you even bother exactly but yeah it's

just kind of the idea like i hate the idea that there were some people i heard of that were like hey i'm going to visit my you know my mother-in-law this weekend or you know my husband's birthday whatever so i can't do it on saturday so i'm not going to do it at all and like that it's like that stinks like i you know i'd like them to be able to participate if they want to regardless of whether they have plans that one weekend so that kind of stunk but there was something really cool about having it condensed so people were all making the game at the same time and then people were all voting at the same time and it was having a shorter experience i think kept people in it together and kind of had that more of a community feel yeah i was gonna say the camaraderie of it all because

everybody's like in it together at the same time. So it's like a shared experience. Whereas if you had it spanning a weekend, like maybe you did all your work this weekend and I'm doing my work during the evenings during the week because I can't afford to do it on a weekend. It's not the same thing. Yeah. Yes. Ultimately, that's where I ended up too. It's like, yeah, let's just leave it. Um, at least as,

as it is, cause I'm really happy with the results. So why mess with it? Uh, one thing I did consider doing this year, uh, was, uh,

changing how long you got to vote. But the reason I didn't, it's cause I didn't want to send out an email to say, Hey, there's more time to vote. Uh, and, and I also noticed that it was also much,

a lot more of the voting happened early. It was kind of tailing off. So I hate the idea of people not playing all the games that they want to because, you know, they just ran out of time and as I mentioned, it is a big commitment. So, you know, I was kind of torn on this. There was a week basically after the submission closed to play all the games. I felt like I had to rush to do it. Yeah.

A week feels good. You have the next weekend to do it. Because like you said, when you tally up the amount of time just to play a game for 10 minutes each, you're already at over 8 hours of time. Right? So I think the following weekend

is probably good. What if there were 100 submissions? Good God. I mean, honestly honestly i don't think people are going to play all of them yeah you can't no yeah so i think uh you know if we did get like a you know a double the event size or whatever last year i think we'd have to do something like probably work with a few people to get some judges and kind of make sure that all the games are covered all the games got played this year anyway but it just you have to probably be a little smarter about that because it's just not feasible for most people to play all 100 games or whatever right yeah that's fair

i mean i don't know that makes me feel like then okay a two-week window you know yeah at most yeah i think i would have been fine um the only The only downside about that is like it's kind of you lose a lot of steam after the event. And so it's kind of like coming back to people two weeks later to say, hey, congrats, you won. Or here are the rankings. It's kind of you've moved on a bit. The first jam last year, though, we didn't do a week to vote, right? It was just days, right? It was like you had a day or two.

Oh, no, it was definitely more than a couple of days. I think it was a week to vote, right? It was just days, right? It was like you had a day or two. Oh, no, it was definitely more than a couple days. I think it was a week, actually. I thought it was like immediate. I thought like by that Monday or Tuesday after you had to play and get your votes in. I remember really spending some time

after submitting my game like oh man i forgot to like devote time to play yeah yeah i don't remember yeah but hey uh got a couple interesting stats we'll blow through here real quick um so language framework uh we asked people uh so they could submit it but also um most people didn't submit a language or framework so i just went through and like unity's got a really uh obvious splash screen if you are on the free plan and so i was able to see that you know i was able to fill in a lot of the blanks or a lot of the engines had splash screens so no surprise uh unity was number one with uh 32 of the 46 games so that's uh 70

roughly okay uh good oh i still want to mispronounce every time i see it it looks like go dot uh that was number two at five i see costco made it in there so alan will be happy so it should be so uh unknown was five and that's moments where i just couldn't tell so you know either they had a pro license or or it was from scratch, or who knows what it was. This is interesting. Three were marked as JS. One for sure I know was just vanilla JS. And we're going to talk about that one in a minute.

Like, when you say vanilla JS, you mean as in the framework? No. I just mean JavaScript and HTML5, Canvas. Okay. Yeah. minute like when you say vanilla js you mean as in like the framework no i think it was regular script in html5 canvas okay yeah and uh i'll tell you right now i'll spoil it uh the game that did that was ducks in space really yeah if you saw this game i'm jumping ahead we'll talk about it in depth we'll talk about the game death but uh yeah it was really cool and that was that was the um i know that one was pure yeah okay and then uh there were there were two others that i didn't know if they used the framework or not i didn't uh i didn't read up on them uh lost my place here and then finally we had uh one each one submission each

from g develop cocos and construct oh it's not Costco, so I'm sorry, Alan. Yeah, sorry. Cocos. It's okay to be excited about it, thinking that it might have been. I know we've covered this on this show, but if you're new to this show and you happen to work for Costco, could you just give Alan a discount or something? He loves Costco. He promotes it so much

actually you don't even realize how much free promotion you get from alan for costco oh they should give me a membership for sure it's ridiculous a membership i think they owe you a little bit more than that by now yeah uh so uh some other stats i went through and looked at uh how many games were 2d versus 3d you know some of this is kind of weird because like you ever see this uh the notation of like 2.5d so there's like a top spinning game for example is that 2d or 3d it's like well it's using 3d objects i counted that one as 3d but by far definitely 2d so so you're making the distinction of if the player could move up down forward, forward, and back, like X, Y, and Z axis kind of movements in the game?

So I actually did it based on whether they were using 3D models or sprites. Right. Oh. Yeah, because I know the one you're talking about, that spinner one, that top spinner, that really was just an up and down thing, but it was spinning around a sphere more or less well again i mean two it only moves in two directions right yeah yeah so i was using your game as an example because like your game was almost like a side scroller and the player can only move up and down it was 2d yeah yep but but yeah you had 3d no he did he definitely did have 3d models in, in it.

Cause I watched him draw it and make the art for it. And if you notice, like there was one of the ship types that he had, that was like, it wasn't like the main boss, but there was one that had these, uh, it was almost like the wings floated around the ship.

They spiraled around it. But you know, if you were watching him do the development of that, you got to see like that 3D model at different angles. Like it was definitely like them. So that's why I'm making the distinction. Like there was definitely 3D models, but the game was 2D. Right.

Not moving in a 3D space. Why you got to bring up the low point? Well, I didn't. Oh, it's so painful trying to get the animation to work. I was just like, that was like, oh, it took me so long to get that stupid thing spinning i had such big plans i didn't do because i spent like forever trying to spin that thing around in the model but it looks so cool though i mean it did come out really cool but that's where i was trying to make the distinction of like when you say that you know uh what did you say how many games of it is now? It's like 34 were two dimensional. Yep.

Like, you know, I don't, to me, I don't think it matters if you're, you know, have a three dimensional object versus a sprite, like to define it, the game as 3d or two dimensional.

It depends on like how the player interacts with the game world. Yeah. I think that's fair. And now I'm trying to think of like what you would count as a three-dimensional game in there i can think of a couple yeah there were there were a few there was that one where you were like a ghost that was moving through so it was almost oh yeah sorry all right yeah there were a few spoilers uh open source uh five provided source and you can see it by clicking through the game so that's you know by obviously like a minority and that's really hard to do with assets and also just

checking stuff in unity um depending on how you kind of check it in uh i've noticed like if you download you know like a get ignore file for example for unity uh then it by default will leave in like um some of your uh like third party and i say third party like a lot of times it's like just optional unity extensions will end up in folders that get checked in and this packages directory and it's massive. And it's a lot of like code and other stuff like, you know, just CS files and art assets that are,

you know, free or permissive license, whatever, but just end up being a real pain to kind of check in. You're like uploading a 200 gig megabyte repository and it's you know that's not even adding third-party code yet somehow or sorry third-party art assets so did you put yours up uh no i meant to i never got back to it i totally could but it was the same reason it's just i you know i didn't uh i didn't upload it yeah i was curious how like how you

would have done the assets for that then like the audio, that would start bloating a repository. Man, the audio was so good, though. I wasn't trying to bring that up. Well, it's funny. I played, obviously, certain parts of this game, like the boss fight, over and over and over. And so I know there's probably... So Outlaw recorded a bunch of different like sound effects or uh so like even uh if the if the boss got hit by an

asteroid in the game for example uh it would say oh no or what joe or you know just a variety of different sounds and it would play it play them with random pitches sometimes it'd be sped up sometimes a little bit slow down just kind of add some variety and so i've heard every combination every permutation of the audio most people haven't also the you made um like guitar kind of songs or kind of noises for when the player loses those were phenomenal that was some of my favorite uh sounds that you did so good most people probably only heard you know two i don't know but uh there were probably 10 of them you know and they're all phenomenal so i hate little things like that like i hate people not seeing that it's so good i mean it was the only thing i could do to contribute it was i was

like happy to contribute but that's not what i was bringing up i was bringing it more like the idea of you know you we've talked about like committing binaries to a repo before and you know like audio assets to a game i'm like well i guess like this is an example of an exception where you would commit it because like for the same reason that you might commit images for your website to your repository then you would commit the the sound artifacts for your game as well yep right so they have uh has recommendations for setting up like gifs and you can do that in github and you just have to follow these instructions and or you could just not submit your source code. Right, right. The easy way, right? Yeah, do it in Dropbox. There you go.

Yeah. This episode is sponsored by Datadog, the monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Datadog's machine learning-based alerts, customizable dashboards, and 450-plus vendor-backed integrations makes it easy to unify desperate data sources and pivot between correlated metrics and events for faster troubleshooting. You know, I heard about Datadog on the news today as I was going to pick up my lunch because they had a phenomenal monster quarter.

So I haven't seen what it's done to their stock price, but they're crushing it. And they're crushing it because people love them, because they help, and they're happy to spend money with them because you get that money back in other ways, either via observability, being able to keep things up, being able to keep your customers safe, keep your data safe, and know what to do when things go wrong because that's their whole business is helping you out and it's super popular and not to mention that uh super cute shirts for uh creating a dashboard so by combining metrics traces and logs in one place you can easily improve your applications performance yeah you you stole my thunder man like i was gonna say like the reason why they're doing so good is totally the t-shirts. They had a super cute dog logo,

like who doesn't love dogs. Right. And when you sign up for data dog, when you start your free trial, your free 14 day trial, and you create that dashboard, you can receive a free t-shirt once you get the agent installed. Yep. So go ahead and visit datadoghq.com slash coding blocks. Again, that's datadoghq.com slash coding blocks to see how you can unify your monitoring today. Well, all right there, partner. It's time to leave us a review. If you haven't already, we greatly appreciate you find some helpful links there at www.codingblocks.net slash review.

And you can find some helpful links there at www.codingblocks.net slash review. And you can find some helpful links there. You know, Alan, our good buddy Alan, he updated our websites where you can find some helpful links there for Spotify as well. And, you know, Spotify added the capability to where you can leave a podcast review. And yeah, we would greatly appreciate it. Going once.

I was going to say, I was curious to see if anybody would catch the, the like a non-announcer voice. Auctioneer. Au was going to say. I was curious to see if anybody would catch the, like, not announcer voice. Auctioneer. Auctioneer voice. There you go. There you go. All right.

I mean, if we're going to, like, you know, every episode now, if that's going to become a regular thing where we, like, trip it up with a new voice, then I figured why not. Okay. So with that, it's time for my favorite portion of the show. Survey says. All right. So a few episodes back, we asked how many different data storage technologies do you use for your day job? And your choices were just the one, and it is our hammer. Or two to three, it's a quaint little data pipeline.

Or four or more. Oh, my God, why do we have so many? Or none. Keep your data crap out of my CSS. All right. So what episode is this? This is 178 so uh according to to techos trademarked rules of engagement joe you are first all right well i think the answer is two to three i think i'm

gonna say most people have a database and they've either got a i shouldn't explain alan hasn't guessed yet but i'm thinking they have some sort of cash or bucket thing going on if nothing else okay man what's your percentage? Crap. What are you going to pick? I'll tell you in a second. Oh, man. Oh, geez.

28%. 20%. Okay. Okay. So it's 20. Uh-huh. Mathematica strikes again. I meant to say 28%.

No, you already said 20. Oh, okay. Do you want it to be 28? I'll let it be 28, if that's what you really wanted it to be. I thought I said 28, but no, I like 20 better. All right.

So it's funny you said what you said, because it's exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking, okay, everybody's got a database, and they're going to have some like, um, file or bucket storage somewhere, right?

Like that, that's literally what I had in my mind. Um, and I hope nobody says one. So I'm going to go with two to three and I'm going to go 35% cause I'm, I'm brave. Yeah. 35%.

Okay. So, uh, Alan says two-3, 35%. Joe says 2-3, either 20% or 28%. Yep. We have a winner. This rarely happens that you guys, like, there's a winner and someone didn't also go over. Right.

I'll tell you later who won. Oh, just kidding. Just kidding. Alan won. Alan won. It was 41% of the vote. Wow.

All right. So the next one was what? Just one, just one and four or more were tied. I thought that was crazy. Four or more. But we also had that was crazy. Four or more. But we also had some nuns. Don't forget.

We had some nuns. Wait, what was the nuns as in the profession? Yeah. Right. None as in zero. Uh, I don't,

I mean, I guess you have to get something right. Like how could you survive? Yeah, food, an outfit. What if you found out they made, like, you know, like a whole bunch of money? Like, you know, would you, like? I'd be a nun. Yeah, that's fine.

Okay. Yeah, sure. All right. It's not a profession. It's a vocation. Oh, interesting. Yeah, but they get paid something, right? I mean, they have to survive. Nah, man.

We've gone off the rails, though. Hey, what was the second place percentage? I mean, we can't get past this one, Alan. 26% for the other two. Okay. All right.

So, how about this? Why don't skeletons ride roller coasters? Bones. Skeletons are bones. You are correct there. But that's not the answer I was looking for. I don't know. It seems like it should be obvious.

I don't know. Bones have got to be in it. Yeah. They don't have the stomach for it. I really thought that the way Alan was pondering it, I was like, he's going to get it. Watch, watch. He's going to pull this out of the hat.

He's going to get it. And then he didn't. I'm so disappointed. I thought for sure it was going to have something to do with bones. All right. Well, how about for this episode? We ask what percentage of time does your team devote to technical debt per

release cycle? And your choices are a hundred percent. It's all we do. I don't even know if we have customers or 75 ish percent. I don't even know if we have customers. Or 75-ish percent, we don't care for new features. Or about 50%. We're equally slaying last release's technical debt while we introduce this release's technical debt. Or around 25%, we're accumulating technical debt faster than we're paying it off. Or roughly 10%, we've got too many new features to deliver to care. Or lastly, technical debt? Why would anyone address that?

You'll completely rewrite the application before it comes due. Those are so good. This episode is sponsored by Shortcut. Have you ever been really, really happy with your project management tool? Most are either too simple for a growing engineering team to manage everything, or too complex for anyone to want to use them without constant prodding. Shortcut is different, though, because it's better. Shortcut is project management built specifically for software teams,

and they're fast, intuitive, flexible, and powerful. Let's take a look at some of those highlights. Team-based workflows. Individual teams can use Shortcut's default workflows or customize them to match the way they work. Organization-wide goals and roadmaps. The work in these workflows is automatically tied into larger company goals. It takes one click to move from a roadmap to a team's work to individual updates

and vice versa. Tight version control integration. Whether you use GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, Shortcut ties directly to them so you can update progress from the command line. They have a keyboard-friendly interface. The rest of Shortcut is just as keyboard-friendly with their power bar, allowing you to do virtually anything without touching your mouse. Let's talk about iterations planning. You can set weekly priorities and then let Shortcut run the schedule for you with accompanying burndown charts and other reporting. Give it a try at shortcut.com slash coding blocks. Again, that's shortcut.com slash coding blocks.

Shortcut, because you shouldn't have to project manage your project management. All right. So let's talk about the top games. And this is, you know, kind of breaks my heart to draw a line somewhere. But obviously, we don't. We can't. It's 46 games. We can't spend all night talking about them, although I want to.

So what I did here is i went and took the top five overall across the three categories that we mentioned creativity fun and quirk and ranked them in descending order so we've got game five i'll follow the four and we'll lead up to the number one game across all categories then we'll go back through and swing through the top five of every category and kind of fill in any any titles that were in those uh top five for those titles that categories that we didn't already talk about well just uh i thought it'd be fun to kind of talk a little bit about the games and just kind of hear our perspective on it it's like you know kind of coders and also just enjoyers of games uh and so number five uh top five was followers and uh this

one was the one that was done in construct and it's the game if you remember where you had two characters on the top half of the screen and the lower half of the screen wait this was g develop yeah this was not construct yeah what sorry to interrupt you there is it really yeah g develop it oh but yeah to finish what you're saying two two levels that you're playing simultaneously you're right so so you have two characters in each world looks like a it reminded me of like super mario brothers uh kind of graphics and whatnot like it was it was super i really like, I loved that.

Maybe, maybe that's a generational thing, but like it really did. Yeah. I thought the graphics were great. And, and like Joe was saying, you're trying to use,

you're trying to, to get to the end of the level for both games simultaneously that you're playing and you have to use the obstacles within the level to be able to sometimes control a character so that maybe you don't want one of the characters moving while you're trying to move the other one does that make sense does that sound like a fair way to describe it yes you hit left they both move left you know you hit right both right you hit jump they both jump but the the problem is like sometimes there'll be an obstacle or something so you'll walk left and the top one will move because there's no obstacle the bottom one will get stuck behind the obstacle so now they're almost kind of like out of sync on the screen

and you need to to do that to collect the fruit that's in the level and uh so you know it's kind of this funny thing where it's like okay well this person is going to hit spikes if I let them go. So let me kind of arrange it so they get blocked by an obstacle and then we'll have the top one jump. So now they've separated a little bit and get the fruit. But now maybe one's too far to the right and one's to the left. So I kind of need to figure out how to get the two characters back kind of towards the middle so I can go on to the next level. So it's a really tough puzzle. Super clever take on the, it follows me

theme. I loved this game for that perspective, but yeah, you're right from a challenge perspective, you got to put your thinking cap on to solve some of these levels. It was really well executed. Uh, you know, yeah, this it's no, it's no wonder why it was one of the favorites but challenging and you know the thing about it what makes it besides the fact that it is challenging like it's not flappy bird um frustrating like you you can make progress right but the the controls are really good they're simple and they're very responsive, right? Like it's,

it feels right. Like if you've ever played a platformer and you hit the jump button and it doesn't quite, you don't jump as high or as far or whatever this one feels right. And it makes it easy to play, but it's that, it's that easy to play hard to master thing. Right.

And it gets a good, a good mix of those. Yeah. One of my favorite ones to play in the game is that early on there's some platforms that kind of go left to right and so i had like you know i was doing so good like kind of getting through getting through and i had jumped in like one of them actually ended up on the platform the other uh didn't so like that i'm watching the character like kind of on the top screen like you know kind of like sliding away from me getting for kind of further i was thinking like oh no and then i you know so i was really careful i was watching them and i was like gonna get them jump back to land and okay the other

character looks like be all right i did the jump and my other character managed to like jump into a spike and because i just wasn't paying as much attention to that one and that was the kind of things where it's just twitched your mind up because you were like it was easy to focus on the one you wanted to get the next piece of fruit and you would goof up the one you weren't paying attention to yeah and you had to be careful like uh when your character jumped because sometimes there would be spikes above your character so you did sometimes you didn't want one of the two characters to jump but then you also had obstacles that you had to jump over sometimes like pits that you would have to jump but then you also had obstacles that you had to jump over sometimes like pits that you would have to jump over or like platforms that you'd have to jump onto so you were constantly

trying to you know deal with that but there might be like one level where you're trying to jump a you know one of the characters up platforms while you don't want the other one jumping at all or you know you want to do it in a very controlled manner because of the pits that are around him. It was a super fun game. Actually, I watched some of this being streamed over on YouTube, so I'm now following it. We'll have links in the show notes with Tomas Sariva.

Sorry if I butchered that. Super cool to kind of watch that coming into being. It seemed like he had the idea really early on and just spent a lot of time on polish, making it feel good. As soon as you press one button, you're like, oh, I see what's going on here. And it looks good too, right? It looks really good. It's charming.

Yep. The next one is Nokom.'em was not playable in a browser unfortunately but it's so good what happened is uh they used the hdrp rendering pipeline it's a it's an option in unity that like does really well for like kind of hyper realistic graphics it looks really great but it does not render to a browser i don't know if they didn't realize this when they started using the HDR, the high definition rendering pipeline. But so, yeah, it didn't. I'm afraid that not.

I wish there were more people that played the game. But it doesn't matter because everyone who played it loved it and ranked it really highly. In this game, someone else has to describe it so you're you're trying to evolve you have bowling pins chasing you down while you're trying to collect pins or knock pins down and it it reminded me some of the aspects of it were kind of have like a burger time feel to it the way like that sounds weird because the two games are nothing alike but if you remember how burger time like how this stuff moved you know yeah that's that was the part that where like the way the the pins moved that reminded me of burger time but so you're kind of a bowling ball knocking over bowling pins but the people in the bowling alley

are pins right so yeah it's it's kind of hard to describe but like everything about it's funny just like you like you mentioned like when you hit the pole the pins they go flying and uh two other pins come out with like a stretcher and pick it up and the sounds really great had this really cool like swing song going to it so just like fun fun fun everywhere yeah that was really cool really well done it's pretty i mean it really is a good looking game yeah i do wonder like if they had uh submitted it as a web browser game i wonder like how much more votes they might have gotten or how many more plays they might have gotten as a result of that so i mean that's like the you know the trade-off you gotta make right yep so that was the only game that wasn't browser playable that uh that didn't so it didn't have a lot of votes but like like i said everyone who played it loved it including me so yeah i mean it made it in the

top five so that's something good for a non-browser playable game yep uh now did y'all so we're moving on to uh number three now just down the hall uh this is the one where uh you this split screen but this time it was a vertical split screen so your character is on the right running and jumping over obstacles and you have a shadow following you on the left hand side and so if you jump over like a table and the shadow would be a little bit farther behind you it would probably run into the the table this would jump and you would jump into a little bit behind you so it kind of worked out in practice now if you run into an obstacle like a tv or something in this room then the shadow

would catch up and the tv also would get destroyed so it wasn't going to run into the obstacle so it's basically like if you kept jumping perfectly then you would stay ahead of the shadow and get a higher score. But if you start missing jumps, then the shadow is going to catch up and game over. Well, it's important to note you control both players. Yes. So you could, with the primary character who's on the right-hand side of the screen, you could jump over stuff and then purposely not jump over stuff as the shadow character. Or maybe you want to jump into something on purpose, And so you could time it to where you do. Yeah. So you can try and slow down your shadow and keep your front player running

faster, but it's challenging. Like you're having to use a split brain to do it. Yeah. You're just basically trying to run away from your shadow. Yeah. It's fun. It's actually a lot of fun. I mean, it's super simple mechanics, but it's fun. It's, it's actually a lot of fun i mean it's super simple mechanics

but it's fun it's it's a neat idea yeah and all the art was created for the game um so i don't know if you notice this i actually didn't notice this the first time or two i played but after you get caught by the shadow it kind of fades to black and then there's this uh you died screen that comes up afterwards i didn't somehow i missed uh you died screen that comes up afterwards so i didn't somehow i missed the you died screen but it has a really cool uh picture of the character just like drawn much bigger where they're basically um it looks like they were just ran into obstacle and the shadow caught up to them and so it's this cool picture of the main character like on the ground like about to be attacked by the shadow it's just really cool

looking and sounds and everything was just really really well done okay now i don't know if we should uh talk about like yo favoritism here oh yeah but this next one that we're about to talk about was up there for me without, if I could like not give favoritism, but also maybe give you a hint as where I might have lied, you know,

where my, where my thoughts might've lied with it. Do you want to intro it? No, you take it live in evil right away just from the name alone oh i loved the play on like the you know one being the inverse of the other uh of the game so they did a cool job with the logo too that had both words and like one was kind of flipped and up to down uh i don't even remember that i guess i because i guess you only see that on the splash screen i don't even remember that. I guess I, cause I guess you only see that on like a splash screen.

I don't remember it, but, um, this one you had level. Basically the idea of the game was there was always going to be like something that looked like a portal that you were trying to get to. And sometimes there might be like, um,

like a little fireball that you'd have to get to enable it and, and you know, get to that. And depending on if you're playing as live or evil, then, you know, the, the thing, the light in the portal that you're trying to go through might be bluish in color, or they might be red. And what would happen is, um, it was almost kind of like a Stranger Things, right? With the upside down. So live plays on top of all the stuff. And if you flip to evil, you're down below it. You're like literally upside down.

You're the inverse of it. And you had to use the ability to flip between them sometimes to get to certain spots of the game. And there were parts of the map that only a certain character could even see and even walk on, right? Whereas if you were walking on it as live and then you flip to evil,

you might just fall through, right? And so you had to use those kind of tricks as your tool to figure out, how do I get through here? I need to jump from here to there, but I, as your, as your tool to like figure out like, how do I get through here? I need to jump from here to there, but I can't do it. It's live. But if I flip to this as evil,

then it's a simple fall, but I would never be able to jump that high as the other guy, as the other character. You know what I'm, am I saying that right? I thought this was super clever, a super clever take on the theme. I just, there was so much on the theme. I just,

there was so much polish about it. I, it was just, I loved this game. This game is fun. This game is a lot of fun and it's cute. Yeah. And there was something kind of neat about like,

it's almost like you had to like use your evil half or your dark half in order to like, you need to kind of balance it with the light in order to make it through the level. So there's almost like something kind of interesting about that. You having to kind of like balance, are you having to kind of follow in order to make it through? And so I don't know.

It was just cool. Yeah. I'm trying to remember like the, Oh, I still don't see like, where's the logo that you're talking about? Oh, it was the ball.

You had to scroll. That's why. I never scrolled the page. Okay. Well, fine. Be that way. Yeah. This one is the kind of game that, honestly,

if it was on your iPhone or your Android or whatever, you'd probably sit here and play this. This would be a perfect time waster that people would play all the time it's it's that much fun yeah it's really great and everyone played it loved it so that was number two uh for overall uh number one and what i'm gonna call out first of all is that this actually ranked number one in every category i mean just a phenomenal game and uh this game is light of the world uh by uh was submitted by prodigal sons games but also um drums was a collaborator on it and if you look too at all the other games you'll see i should have said this too

for pretty much all of them a phenomenal feedback like these these two guys were fantastic about going through playing other games and like leaving really good feedback and and so it was really cool just to kind of see it like you leave a comment vote on a game and like see what other people wrote and they're constantly seeing them and you know several others do like um leaving really great feedback for everybody so it's just really cool but uh this game like is this is one of the cases where i talked about it's like when something's really good it's like almost hard to say anything about it other than to say i mean it's it's this 2d puzzle platformer it's really got this atmospheric kind of dark um kind of level going on with this

cool like these cool sounds and uh you've got these like light beacons that your character uh goes to almost kind of recharge the shield Shield of Faith. And then you use the shield almost like Captain America style. You can kind of throw out and use it to kind of hit traps or whatever, hit levers in order to make it through puzzles. And you can recall the shield. So it'll kind of bounce around until you tell it to come back, which is such a cool mechanic. And I've seen, so Project um projectile sons if you remember last

year there's a game where you had to fix robots and you would kind of they're like 3d and so he's been at that game last year and i've been following him ever since and i've played several of those games throughout the year and so i've kind of seen like the evolution and some of the the ideas like the and mechanics have kind of come along for rides in various ways. One of the games, I think it was actually called Shield of Faith, had a similar shield mechanic, which is just super cool. And it was so neat to see it done here in a way that solved the puzzles. I know they called it a shield in the game, but it seemed it seemed more like a, a ball. Cause especially with the bouncing, like,

you know, so like, even as I was playing the game, I never like would say like, Oh, I gotta get the, the shield. I would,

I would just like, I always thought of it as a ball, but like, I thought the game artistically, the game is phenomenal. Right. Because you have this, the,

the, the map world that is like super detailed, but then the character itself is, like, super 8-bit, you know? So, like, I love that aspect of the game because it kind of had this, like, old-school vibe about it, right? But, you know, so, yeah, so you're trying to figure out, like, how can I, you know, you have to, the object of the game was like you had those light sources and you had to get to those light sources before a, like a dark shadowy kind of ghost type figure would, yeah, a grim reaper, whatever, would get you. So as soon as you got into the light, then that was good enough to make him go away. Right. But sometimes getting to that light, there would be like these, uh,

you know, like, you know, laser beams or whatever they were like, they were, they were blocking your path and you would have to use that shield to like turn off other, other,

uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, to turn that, to turn that laser off so that you could get through the next corridor or wherever. Right. And, and some of them, the, the, the, to turn that, to turn that laser off so that you could get through the next corridor or wherever. Right. And, and some of them,

like the thing that was another one of the aspects about this game. Um, and you know, the, this game was super good from like a creepy kind of point of view because the music to it, like definitely like gave you that sense of urgency. Like,

Oh, I got it. I'm so close. Like, like you would kind of like, like you would get emotional about it. Like, you know what I mean?

Like you, you would, you're like, Oh man, it's getting creepy. I can hear the music. Oh my God. So yeah.

So it was super well polished, super well executed that, um, you know, I really enjoyed that game. Yeah. You know, another thing I like about this particular game, other than the fact, I mean, it's truly it's done phenomenally well. The backgrounds, the foregrounds, all of it is just so good. And the music is really good. But the developers really participated in the commenting right like when somebody would

leave a comment they would write back or they would you know they'd have feedback as well like hey did you try this or whatever like this is i think going back to what you guys were saying earlier about you know the duration of the game jam this is one of the things that why i think you do it over a four or five day period and you don't make it longer is because these people are dialed in right like when somebody would leave feedback they would come back like there's a whole bunch of comments back and forth on this and it truly is an amazingly polished game controls are perfect everything's just i mean it feels right the entire thing

and you remember the sound it would make is a you kind of spent more time in the darkness and you would hear the shadow coming like we're kind of like yeah and it would take this really cool swipe at you but uh the swipe was slow enough that like you could see it like swinging for you and if you made it to light just in time and it would just instantly disappear like you just made it is it kind of even played with like it kind of had these themes where it's like it almost felt like the longer you spent in darkness it was either like your own self-doubts or you know you're like it just it played with these kind of like some interesting symbology and kind of themes around like this kind of notion too or you know kind of uh it just played really nicely and there were a lot of times where i had to kind of decide like oh no i don't know if i'm going to be able to solve this enough puzzle in time do i

try to run back to the last light beacon or i try to rush and go forward and so it just left you with these really interesting decisions to make all the time oh i did that so many times man where i'm like i there's no way i don't know how to get to the next one yet and i would try things and i'm like okay let me rush back to my my home base right like that that's kind of what i would call it like let me get back to home base so i can be safe let me like study the screen base so I can be safe. I mean, it's like study the screen a little bit.

Like, okay, what if I use the shield? Can I bounce the shield? Cause the shield, like you could get it to where it would bounce back and forth in a given area. Yep. Sometimes,

sometimes there wasn't enough space for that. So there'd be some portions of the map where you would want to like, just have the shield bounce back and forth. But instead, because the distance was so great it would just automatically come back to you you're like no i don't know how to do this then like and you would like really have to struggle and think through it hey so i don't know if you guys notice or not but i think just showing how uh polished these guys were guys, gals. I don't, I don't know who they were. Uh, two guys

were that did this. Like if you go to the game page, like first off, there's a couple of things, right? Like they have a little YouTube video that shows the game being played, which is nice, right? Like this is like an advertisement for the game. So if you're curious, you don't even have to play it. You can just do that. But what's even more interesting is they show their assets right like you can go down and you can you can look at the player assets you can look at the um enemy assets so like that thing that he was talking about that wraith in the back that takes a swipe at you like they show the animations and stuff in here and it's it's really cool so as somebody that might be wanting to get into some sort of game development, you can kind of see a little bit of the behind the scenes stuff in how the game was even put together.

Right. Without even looking at the code or anything, just looking at the various pieces that got brought together. It's a they did an amazing job of. Of laying out the bits and pieces that they did. Even if you can't even see the code, even if there's no repo to go look at here, you can see how they put all these together to make it work. They did a really good job of ramping you up too.

So like the first puzzle was really easy. I think you just had to jump. And the second one, you throw a switch. And the third one, now you have to throw a switch, but you have to move a little faster or whatever. So like every step of the way, it was like kind one. Now you have to throw a switch, but you have to move a little faster or whatever. So like every, every step of the way, it was like kind of like teaching you how to play it.

So it's paced really well. Yeah. Yeah. This one's just fun. This is an amazing job all the way around from, from the actual implementation of it to sharing with what they did to make it happen. That's just awesome.

I mean, this goes back to one of the things we talked about last year with the submissions though, is the, like some of the games, even the submission page itself, which is kind of to your point was amazing. Right.

And like this one was an example, like where it's like, Hey, here's the controls. And it like lays out, like, here's all the different movements you can do. Here's all the different ways that you can do those different movements. Right. It's like, Hey, here's the controls. And it like lays out, like, here's all the different movements you can do. Here's all the different ways that you can do those different movements.

Right. It's super, super well polished submission page that took some time to put together. Yeah. My page was terrible by the way. Well, I think that was one of your call outs last year. Outlaw was the fact that you wish you had spent more time on that page and and it's because that's where you kind of make everything come together

right like anybody that has questions about what you've done that's where you give them everything yeah i mean last last year i didn't know that that was even a thing so i just thought like okay you submit your game and you know that's it done right yeah like here's here's some details about the game and i just assumed that like uh once you did that then there would be like this uh like standard kind of presentation of the game which i mean there can be but there can also be like super extremely like themed and polished pages you know that and some of these games are like that yeah and so before we go into any of the other ones that you have on the list here i have to call out dave follett's game the missile versus tank yes because i i actually had fun with this game only because my whole goal was

to see how far i could run the time up without actually doing anything. It's not the goal of the game, but yeah, I mean, it was, it was actually a lot of fun because I would try and figure out how to get the missile stuck behind some wall. Yeah. And it was,

it was a blast. Yeah. My favorite thing about his game is, um, the missile would push you. Yeah. She ran out of time, so it wouldn't explode.

So it would stop the timer and it would just kind of push you. And ran out of time so it wouldn't explode so it stopped the timer and it would just kind of push you so like i had a lot of fun just like i arranged it so it would just push me across the screen you know like an off the off the edge which it was just really cool i actually did like the fact that you could drive out of bounds yeah it was just awesome you can't see it but you're still running away so what's your time up to then alan i i stopped it i think my computer was going to melt at some point oh you're not still playing okay super huge thanks to super good dave fullett because i like he was the inspiration behind this whole thing last year and it was very instrumental in like helping to kind of decide like various

rules and themes and how to just set this whole thing up. And same thing that is here. So I constantly would go back to him with like questions about like, do you think I should change the time? Or like, what does the page look like to you? And it was just a really large help there. And so a huge thanks again,

Dave. Yeah. Yeah. And your game's fun too. Yes. Uh, so we, so we talked about,

um, the top five, uh, rated and, and so now we're going to fill in the blanks uh so the fun category there was one game uh that was ranked in the top five of fun that we haven't talked about yet and it was the path alone did y'all have a chance to play this one yes this is the one where to me i play too much overwatch so this is the one where it looked like Roadhog got you at the end. I didn't play this one.

Wait, no, this is a different game. Oh, this is the block game where you had, this was the puzzle game. Okay, I know the one, I know this, I remember this one now. You had to move blocks around in order to figure out how to get to, to deliver something to another animal yep so it'd be like the silhouette of something that would say like you know i need a light and you would go and grab a torch come back and whoa it's a polar bear and it would give you something you know like that in this case it was a torch that got you past the first level

that would uh help you in your next journey so the next level you go and i forgot what the message was but it was uh it was like a bird that needed its feather and so you would go and get its feather and by the time you brought it back to the feather it would give you some new ability so it had this cool ability to the game had this cool kind of ramping up thing where um every level you got some new ability so the next puzzle now instead of just being able to see where you're going now you would also be able to push the box now you'd also be able to jump now you'd also be able to reset time or whatever and so by the time you got to the end of the game you had like four or five different abilities that were gifted to you slowly and you got a chance to explore each one before finally in the last level you had to use like all of them so it had a really nice pace and

it had this um really cool atmosphere like music and kind of moody lighting so i can actually like imagine the music playing right now i had this cool like kind of like almost like heartbeat kind of um music and uh the art style was like the animals looked really cool and the main character was like this it like it looks like a human i'm not sure that it is so it was just like this kind of uh creepy little thing that was just neat and uh i don't know the the way that the character spoke to you like these kind of animals like like hidden in darkness somewhere in the level uh was really cool oh i remember the one i'm thinking of i think it was the, let me see if we're going to talk about it.

Oh, okay. It wasn't on your list. Is it the megalophobia? Yeah. That's the, that's the one I was thinking of that looks like, um,

road hog. Yeah. At the end. I mean, it gets you. Yeah, it does. Yeah.

That, that one, I mean, it's not on your list here, but, uh, for those who didn't play this game, basically you're trying to run from one campfire to the next campfire. And I'm trying to remember how, but at some point there would be these spiders that you weren't expecting that would come out of nowhere.

And they would scare the bejesus out of you because they would just scream. And then there was this giant, it reminded me of Roadhog from Overwatch, but it was like a, I don't know, how would you describe it? It looked kind of like a pig, a giant pig, except it was also like super big in comparison to your character. So it was like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man size, you know know relatively speaking to you you know and yet if so if you lost if it caught you then like it would pick you up and it would eat you but yet you had the perspective of like watching yourself go into the the mouth of the the beast yeah yep yeah and now that was hard you had to find like the bullets in order to get the gun in order to shoot the thing but the spiders like you would be like there were times when you had to like hurry to the next campfire or else you would freeze and so you'd be running and then you'd see this there's a spider in your path like oh do i have time to run around it because the

spider screams for it's really scary and then uh yeah the monster would come oh oh the scare the scare factor on that one was high yeah uh so moving on to creativity uh one of our other categories there were two games that ranked in the top five of creativity that we haven't talked about uh one is what am i supposed to do which this one we talked about before we recorded the show is like you're like a little knight or maybe a ninja uh running from left to right and you're being followed by this windy monstrosity this big tornado thing that's going to gobble you up and you don't directly control the character but you have the ability to like drag and drop or later you could hear hit one of the keys one two or three in order to place an item in the level in front of the character so you would drop a sword in front

of the character it would pick it up and slash right in front of it. So if you drop the sword in front of some blocks, it would slash the blocks and then it wouldn't have to run through it or wouldn't get stuck. Or later you could drop like a feather and it would jump or you could drop like a bridge kind of and it would be able to pass.

And later levels got really crazy and we would get into parts where it was giving you random items. So I think there were times where you probably just got out of luck and you wouldn't be able to finish a level with the random items that you got. But you would use one, use two, and then maybe eventually one of the spots that you had already used

would kind of regenerate, and so you'd get another random item. And so it was just really fast and frantic, and it kind of felt a little bit like a puzzle game, but it was also really fast-paced, so you had to be really precise with how you're dropping things you had to pay attention to to like what things were in like what spot or you know because you had these like three slots for the things but like you know from one attempt to the game to the next attempt they weren't always in the same position yeah so you couldn't just like muscle memory your way through it you know like like

super mario brothers back in the day right and do like a super speed run because you had to pay attention to like where the things were like you know where was the sword you know yep you know what's weird about this one to me is it's actually really pretty like the the game looks the backgrounds are gorgeous and and the music whether it's your flavor or not is actually really well done yeah the controls are frustrating um and i think that if the controls had been better this probably would have moved up and yeah you have to be really fast about like dropping it where it's kind of stink if you're like oh i gotta get the sword here and oh i just missed it and i have to it again. You have to restart the whole level.

But I mean, it's actually it's pretty polished. Like it's a pretty game. It's got a very Japanese anime type style to it. And the music was very like kind of like this just cool driving music that was very intense. And we'll just roll the whole time. So you always felt like you're on your toes. I mean, the quality of these are pretty impressive. Yeah, absolutely.

All of the games were. So here, this is the game. I actually accused Outlaw of making this one because it seems like something he would do. This is It Follows Me. Remember, the theme was, it's following me. And so in this game. The theme literally was, it follows me. It following me. And so in this game, the theme literally was if it follows me, it follows me.

So it would show you a pair of words and you had to thumbs up it or thumbs down it based on whether the first word had the word me in it somewhere. And the second word had the word it in it. So get it. It follows me. And you had three seconds per word combination to say yes or no. If you get it wrong, game over. I guess technically the theme was it's following me, but yeah, it's follow, it follows me. So this was like a super, you know, like totally unique

take on the game. Nobody else came up with this kind of game, which you think like, okay, that sounds super simple, right? Like, you know, just two words and you know, does the first word have me and the, and the second word have it somewhere in the spelling of those two words. Right. And you're going to like thumbs up or thumbs down it, but you gotta be quick about those thumbs up and thumbs down. Like it sounds, it sounds easy enough, but you'd be surprised like it does get kind of challenging to do. Yeah, it's something like your brain sees two words and it wants to like make them into a sentence that makes sense. You don't see a collection of letters. Like you see like blig blap.

Like what the hell? Oh, time's over. You're still trying to reconcile like the meaning of these two strange words that like wouldn't normally be paired together and yeah in the meantime this time has run out yeah it was it was it was just such a simple wordplay game that perfectly fit the theme of the game of the game jam yep that nobody else did anything even remotely close because like you could say all of the other games that we did is like as amazing as they all were like they all like were kind of the same thing like in one way or another something's following something right and this was the only

one that was completely different while also while also honoring the theme of the game jam yeah it's fun too yeah i talked with mike rg a little bit about this he uh uh submitted a couple theme suggestions and one of them was electric boogaloo like game jam 2 electric boogaloo and i thought that was such a fun theme because it really kind of paints a like a funny picture in your head for a theme while also not really instructing you what kind of paints a like a funny picture in your head for a theme while also not really instructing you what kind of game to make so i i think next year i'm going to add some more um some more theme submissions that are like less action oriented and maybe something like the 80s or uh so just you know something like that because like you imagine if

the theme was the 80s right you'd see a lot of different kinds of games it wouldn't be a lot of like kind of follower games. And I think that might be interesting just to see the variety that comes forth from that. Yeah, a lot of GTA, Vice City-type games now is what I envision. Hey, maybe. A lot of hot pink. Yeah, neon colors. Yeah, neon clear.

Ferrari Testarossas and yeah. Yeah. So we've got two more games to talk about um this is the quirk category and you know in retrospect like creativity and quirk are kind of like oddly similar and and so it's kind of like i don't know the category so we'll talk about that later but um the first game here hold on let me get a drink of water yeah you're gonna need it because this title is amazing the title is i became a treasure hunter to pay off my student debt but now an immortal snail is coming after me with a knife and you're like but wait what's the game about yeah so this by the way this title blew out like every like if i had a spreadsheet

totally unusable there were a couple other pages where things were like listed or whatever and like it would totally like ruin the like the the formatting on the page and it's like submissions and stuff so sometimes they would truncate with dot dot dot and sometimes they wouldn't so it's just like the whole page layout would be screwed up. It was awesome. Well, even like, yeah, even on the game submission page for it, when you click on it, like my page is scrolling. I got to scroll to the right to see the full button to click the button. Yeah, I didn't get the same thing where I'm like, how do I play? Because I shrugged up my screen to record it. And so I was like, I don't see how to start this thing.

That's awesome. Yeah, so this game, you are a character running around trying to collect some treasure bags. And you've got this really slow snail with a knife coming after you. And so you go around. It's kind of like a small maze. And there's a couple of little Easter eggs in the maze. I don't know if you saw. There's like a smiley face.

And there's something else I thought I saw. But the snail speeds up with every treasure that you pick up. So the first time I was playing, I was like, well, this is easy. And I started getting near the last bags. And this snail comes flying up out of nowhere. Like, ah! And so, you know, of course, I realized what was going on there. So I kind of planned my route a little bit.

But it got really hard to get that last treasure. So it was really fun to play. And it was just such a cool title and just everything felt fun about it. Unfortunately, this one takes some patience though. Uh, I mean, they have a warning, they have a warning in there that it takes time to load up.

Yeah, that was weird. I don't know why that was, why it wasn't like that had a bunch of stuff going on. So yeah, I was curious about that, but yeah, actually thought uh my browser was crashing or something at first oh yeah like for me on on my computer it would uh you know i would get messages from chrome that hey uh you want to kill it yeah yes i don't know let's but we have once it once it got running it was fine and then we could be cached uh afterwards yeah i love the title of it though i'm gonna assume that they're not bitter

yeah no kidding so the last one talking about in the quirk category was ducks in space and this is the one we kind of mentioned earlier so in this one it's like a snake kind of game like remember on the nokia where you you play like uh this uh duck and you go around and you collect little ducklings that follow you and if you run into your own tail like if you run into one of the ducklings by you know because your tail gets so long then uh then you game over but what was amazing about this game it felt really different is uh it had this really cool like 3d kind of spherical planet that um that you would kind of swim around and it just felt really cool and it looked really good and uh the atmosphere and the music was really good it had this like kind of peaceful classical

music uh i can't remember uh it's like a famous classical song that uh just felt really good and it just looked so neat and there was these these cool herons that would try to pick off your ducklings too so you'd be like leading these things around you know trying not to run into your own tail swimming around these beautiful looking like lily pads and this kind of cool looking planet in space and then crunch the heron

and grab one of your ducklings like oh no so it was a really cool take and you know like saying it's a snake eye game does not do it justice because it just looks really cool ticket you know like saying it's a snake like game does not do it justice because it just looks so cool and it sounds so cool um the graphics were amazing so it was just a really neat game this is the one that you said was done with javascript right yeah so javascript and html5 you know canvas so no unity no nothing And it had this beautiful 3d spinning planet, you know, the whole game was very good. Yeah.

You can get dizzy from this. Yeah. Cause the world spins around on you while you're doing it. I'm playing it while I'm actually trying to. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's like your, your perspective of the, on the globe is constantly changing as you're rolling around the globe.

And you're like, wait, what do you mean? Cause I'm like, well, sometimes you're going like, say South on the globe, but then you get to a point to where like the whole globe spins around.

And now you're like still moving technically relative to the globe, the same perspective, but now you're going up, like you're going north suddenly or you know east or west like so like you you can get a little uh i think that i think if you were to be sensitive to like games that are like hyper motion or whatever like you get motion sickness from it yeah this would be like putting on virtual reality and going down a roller coaster. Yeah.

This is, this game though is beautiful though. Like the mechanics of it to think that this was just done in straight up canvas, HTML five JavaScript, no framework. It's good, man.

Yeah. It's crazy. That is, that is seriously impressive. Just to see the pictures of the game, and it's smooth. I mean, it is so fluid. Yep. Yeah, really cool.

And there's some really nice audio, too, so it just really makes some great use of what a browser can do. Yeah. Yeah, things have come a long way. Yep. And there wasn't, like, a category a category for like technically interesting or anything you know this is uh just a really quirky game it's very different like it you know it didn't no other games looked anything like it remotely all right well for the resources we like i guess we'll just have a bunch of links to the games yeah yeah we'll have a ton of links and most sense yep and uh remember we've got a video too so we've got a video you can watch so you can actually see all the games uh so and we'll uh i

did spend some time actually talking about the games that we just talked about here too but um you can scroll to like the two minute mark or something or three minute mark and to see like that montage it's got all the music playing so it's got this uh kind of hectic vibe to the video that was kind of fun um so yeah and it's something i mean everything just looks and sounds amazing so gotta go watch it so you got two game jams behind you now so do you want to be a game developer when you grow up or or no yeah yeah i i wish that the environment and pay was better for game developing it's game development it's such a punishing you know subdivision of our field you know it is it's unfortunate so yeah not me though i i'm not into it i'm not no i started a new

business making yachts in my attic this year. So the sails are going through the roof. Yeah. Very nice. I think you missed your calling in fully, though. What are you talking about? I was being serious. What's so funny?

That was excellent. Well delivered, sir. Yeah, I kind of set him up there. I'm like, do you want to be a game developer? I was like, oh, come on. Let me let this work out. Let this work out. All right.

Well, with that, how about that? Well, with that, we will head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. All right. Okay. So in this one, because I couldn't think of anything that i'd done that made any sense this past week i went into our slack channel which if you are not a part of you should be you can go to cuttingblocks.net slash slack and you can sign yourself in there

if you'd like um but i've got to throw out a few here from Simon Barker, who got mentioned several times in the past couple episodes for just putting amazing stuff out there. Right. And he had one post in the tips channel that just, he had a ton of them in there. And so I, I picked a couple of them out. Um, so the first one are there, there's this website called flat icon.com. Well, there's just tons of free use icons that you can download. So if you have any apps or games or anything that you want to, um, develop and you need

some icons for it, this is a great place to get them. And then there was another one that Simon had on there. And, uh, I was going to share her because I think Scott was like, this one has to be a tip of the week. Um, so I put it in here. This is, uh, um, uh, name a name, a dev. So it's N a M a E dot dev is the website. And basically if you have an app that you're building and you just can't think of a cool name for it, you can come up here and type it in like cool app and then hit search or

whatever. And it will come up with all these names that, that are just a nice little spin on it. Like cool app, a fire, cool app, sensei, like go cool app.

So it's just a way to get some ideas like if if your brain is stuck in developer mode and you can't be creative um this might be a good way to get something out there so um both really cool tips it also checks what's available right yeah that's the thing is they'll tell you like the domains the github the twitter npm so like it's suggesting coding blocksly but it knows us well so one of the other ones that it threw out there was coding blocks ml ah nice all right well i didn't realize that alan was going to talk about simon because i also was going to talk about Simon again. This is awkward. Yeah, so Simon Barker,

you know, got about town. Everyone's talking about him lately. He had a podcast that I had missed somewhere along the way, but then he rebranded it as All The Code. And he's going solo. He's got

a bunch of stuff planned that you should follow along with. But in his newly rebranded podcast, he's going to be talking to developers of all levels. So, beginners, hardened veterans, whatever, about all sorts of stuff. And I've listened to a couple episodes. Great stuff. Definitely got to recommend. Let me see.

Which episode is it? Ah, back in July of 2021, he interviewed Nicholas Markora, which I've talked about several times with QIT, also known as MVP, Minimum Viable Person in the Slack. So definitely got to check out that episode and make sure to smash that like and subscribe. So it's going to be a great ride. All right. Well, here comes the third one. Let's go for three.

Yeah. So he had another one in there also in this list where you were somehow like for specific to crontabs, but I actually have a better one for him on that. So he had this like link on there where you could like understand your cron tab formats and like, you know, experiment with it and it would tell you like what it was and whatnot. But there's a, there's a much cooler one that I've liked over the years called cron tab dot guru. That is the URL dot guru is a top level domain. And if you go there, you can, yeah, you have this pretty little website and you can actually play around in that field, you know, in that text box and start, uh, you

know, changing stuff around and it'll give you a sentence at the top to tell you like what it is. So it starts out with like five, four, splat, splat, splat. But let's say you did, you changed the first five to be like splat slash five, right? It'll change the sentence at the top to say at every fifth minute past hour four, right? To, you know, of what's going to happen. So as well as like, it has the, uh, you know, cron tab, just information to be like, you know, which one, which field, which one of these is the minute, which one of these is the day of the month? Cause I don't know about you, like as many times as I've edited cron tabs over the years, I'm still like, wait, which field was which again? I don't know why I can't remember this for the life of me.

So, and I don't have to, cause I have crontab guru. So yeah, so that's mine. So, um, excellent.

With that, I will close with RIP boiled water. You will be missed. I love when I get Alan like that. It's just so cheerful. Some of them are really good. That's amazing. All right.

So subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, you know, wherever you like to find your podcast in case of a friend like, you know, said, hey, you got to check out the craziness that these guys say. You know, you can find us wherever you like to listen to your podcast. And if you haven't already, you can find some helpful links at www.codingblocks.net slash review so that you could, you know, leave us a review. We would greatly appreciate it. Yep. And as always, definitely check out the website, codingblocks.net. This one would be slash episode 178. If you want to, go check out the links to go directly to some of these amazing games that we talked about tonight.

And if you have any questions, feedback, rants, whatever, head over to our Slack channel at codingblocks.net slash Slack. And you are muted, Jay-Z. Geez, I almost did the whole thing without me. We got a Twitter. I mean, jeez, CodingBlocks. You can go to CodingBlocks.net and find links in the top probably. There's probably a mute button. There's probably a mute button right there.

All the dillies are up there. All the dillies. And I guess pretty soon we're going to have to have a dilly for itch.io at some point. That's right. I think so. We should. We should put one up there. All the dillies. And I guess pretty soon we're going to have to have a dilly for HIO at some point. That's right. I think so. We should. We should put one up there. Yep.