inkspinnr

[inkspinnr]

Dimwood is a roguelike deck builder with unique modal cards, written with strings of 'pips' that do things like One Damage or One Block. It's pretty cool because all the over 500 cards are made of bits and pieces, by the end of the game you'll have salvaged a dozen cards for scrap and turned your humble lightswitch into an effective damage card that poisons your enemies.

There are 19 pips in the game, a lot of them revolve around the light level, raising, lowering, settings, and locking it; changing the effect of other cards. Cards are written with 4 phrases, the top one always works and plays it's pips, but the other 3 are only active one-at-a-time depending on the light level. Which means that cards basically have 3 different effects each! You aren't only managing the amount of damage you can deal, or the amount of block you can stack, but also your control of the light level and how your cards effect each other, and even your opponents cards!

The unicorn is fearsome because it can use it's cards to force the light level into LIGHT and impale you, no matter what light level you end your turn on.

Unless you can use lock pips to lock the light level and disrupt it's turn, giving it a measly 3 block and 3 damage. Dimwood has a free demo, available on steam. Check it it out! We've been working on this thing for close to 2 years now, it's pretty good!

[inkspinnr]

For GMTK jam last month, we made this cool little platformer in 4 days. We put a lot of focus into the controls and visuals and it came out really nice!

We placed 190th overall, and 84th in style! Which is pretty good for a jam with 7600 entries ahahaha We could have placed better I think, we lost some points to communication. A little bit more tutorial would have gone a long ways, but the game itself is very solid with fun mechanics.

The theme was 'Built To Scale', which definitely implies more size-based mechanics, but we couldn't think of anything we liked while brainstorming. So we went with 'built' like spaceships and robots and elevators and 'scale' like climbing a big structure. I would've liked to take the theme a little more at face value, but I'm happy with this interpretation of the theme.

The biggest mistake I made was forgetting to flick the 'optimize' Boolean on my function that generates the edges for dynamic lighting, meaning I was looking at *every edge of every tile* instead of only the edges surrounding solid areas.

That obviously caused the game to lag a fair amount in some spots. I won't make that mistake again!

My favorite visual effect is the ambient dust particles, it's pretty subtle but it adds a lot of motion to the screen and helps to set the scene. I used some fun tricks with the color lookup table to make the dust only show up near light sources, which indicates lighting even overtop of the backdrop!

A consistent bug for the entirety of the development of the game was this 'super jump,' where if you threw the core downwards at exactly the same time as you jumped, it would launch you like ten blocks where you're only supposed to be able to jump 3-6. I tried to fix it in a lot of round about hacky ways that never worked, and it even made it into the jam version of the game lmao It made me really look at my underlying physics code after the jam, and fix a real problem with how I was calculating forces. Definitely a good bug to squish.

I can't get another web build of the game to work, for reasons I can't pin down, which is a little worrying! But I still pushed the bug fixes to a windows build on the itch page.

I'm also a big fan of the spaceship I put together, was going for a sort of motorhome vibe, makes a fun little space. I did realize after the jam that I imagined the protagonist was a robot, but most of what I decorated their ship with is a bedroom and a kitchen ahahaha

[inkspinnr]

Last week I made a little jam game for Minijam 150, the theme was magic and the limitation was 'light is the way.' A pretty abstract limitation for sure ahahaha. We got 1st place! My goal was to play with my toolkit and make something small and complete, from start to finish. Across the projects I've worked on I have pretty good libraries for handling stuff like NPCs, conversations, interactable elements etc. that I wanted to play with.

Scoping out an RPG in 3 days is fun! We started with an outline for the story, magical girl beats up aliens. Combat system came next, that's the gameplay part of the game. You get 3 moves, that cover different areas and solve different problems, which makes the fights into super basic flow charts the player can solve. With 3 moves, we knew we wanted 3 combats and a boss, let's you make a super easy level up system where you upgrade a move after each fight, then fight the boss with your skills. Exploration is rewarded with little health upgrades that give combats a larger margin of error, a neat little package! The game also gave me a great space to work with my new lighting tools and experiment with some practical uses of the color lookup table. On the html build of a love2d project, canvases get compressed and lose color accuracy. But with a color lookup table, I can use a shader to cheat in the proper colors, pretty cool! My favorite part was modding in a secret boss after the jam though, spending a couple laid back days post-jam playing with the legos I made! A harder more complex boss than you should probably put in a jam game, but I had fun ahahaha

[inkspinnr]

Been a while since I've done some character animations, love these things

[inkspinnr]

Been playing with Devil Daggers' modding tools. Made me realize how cool color lookup tables are, and that I could definitely figure out how to do it lmao

Building the actual shader for the color lookup table was really easy, basically reading the colors of the pixels as coordinates on a gradient image which is cool stuff. You can apply lighting by cross referencing the color of the pixel (x coordinate) against another lighting layer (y coordinate).

The HARD part was mathing the shadows ahahaha, first I simplify the map into lines. You have to remove every shared face of the tiles, so there are no lines in the middle, don't need those. Then you combine what's left around the edges, simple enough! Then using the new tile edges I generated, I project polygons away from the light source to clip out the light where the shadows are. I had to learn some real math, (paste some formulas from Wikipedia) to get the point of intersection of the projected lines to get the polygons right. I pin the corners of the polygon to the edges of the light texture, which looks really cool when you visualize it!

[inkspinnr]

Dimwood was originally made as an entry to 1-bit jam, back in august. Since then, we've had a blast updating and polishing the thing, more than tripling the amount of cards, added entire new mechanics, unlocks, enemies, starting decks, and a whole 20 levels of ascension difficulty to overcome! Putting the versions next to each other is crazy, how much everything is the same while everything has changed.

[inkspinnr]

One of the best parts of making games gotta be modding stupid stuff into your games when you're bored

[inkspinnr]

Somebody stop him