Extended Loop Green

tolmera 2020-10-05 03:38

That was very cool :)

I read the details and expected less, but it's fully working, and you can walk from carriage to carriage while the train is moving, that's pretty awesome, I was entirely expecting the mesh and collision to knock the character around, but it didn't and it felt pretty smooth.

Mouse sensitivity would be a good addition - it's the only thing that I actually had to get used to.

I also like the fact you can turn the light off in the train, and have the flashlight, it was very cool to turn the light off and got a spooky vibe straight away.

I jumped off the train as well, and watched it drive away without me :) I would have taken a screenshot, but the game wouldn't let go of my mouse haha

Awesome work

fussenkuh 2020-10-05 13:52

I liked the graphics/art you've created. The lighting also added nicely to the game's mood. As even you noted, the controls are a bit twitchy and take some getting used to. But, alas, there's only so much time in a game jam to get everything configured the way you want it. Nice job!

voidsay 2020-10-05 14:09

@fussenkuh thank you! I could have "finished" the game, but alas the struggle with quaternions is still very much real for me. The only way to speed up is to use them more regularly. Give me a few more jams and I will produce more presentable games.

joonamo 2020-10-05 17:40

I felt a feeling after jumping off the train and watching it go on without me. Alas, I was not meant ride that train to my unknown destination.

Good job on the Mood.

voidsay 2020-10-05 18:00

@joonamo should have stayed on the tracks and waited for the train to return. It would have hoovered you right up!

linus-lindberg 2020-10-05 18:36

This is pretty cool! I really liked the aesthetics and feel of the game. It felt really cool to start the train and feel i fly through the tunnel, and walking around on the train while it was moving was cool. The biggest downside to me is the floaty controls and high mouse sensitivity, it made it very hard to control. Well done!

100th-coin 2020-10-05 18:45

I don't know if I missed a settings page, but the mouse sensitivity was super high. I really love the environment! The station is such an eerie location, the mood is great!

milestone-games 2020-10-05 19:11

The was very relaxing to play! I also managed to jump out of the train and started walking around the tunnel. Great start and I hope you continue!

neowedge 2020-10-05 19:44

It's a frightening experience xD. Maybe mouse sensibility is too much, bur good job!

voidsay 2020-10-05 19:50

@linus-lindberg @blobo @neowedge I always forget to make a sensitivity slider! I vow to remember in my next game! Probably something I should make a quick patch for.

lombax 2020-10-05 23:10

i cant believe i actualy got scared by the guy at the "exit" ..... im such a pussy -_-

arcus 2020-10-06 07:48

Seems to be quite a sensitive game. I feel like some ominous noises / ambient music in the background could realy spice this up. The walking around was quite odd - was the sliding intentional? Along with a lot of these types of games, I am often suprised by the lack of legs. (I thought the lighting was fine) The walking sound effects went quite wierd, and the jump sound effect went off at random times. I jumped out infront of the train and the game kinda broke? I thing the player was trying to stop, but the train just, *kept* pushing it. Honstetly no idea how to fix that kind of thing. Nice seeing you around :v:

voidsay 2020-10-06 08:17

@arcus sound is still an afterthought for me. But you know what's real spooky? There is no jump sound effect :eyes: ! For having spent so much time on the train there's still two things I would have needed to implement. Firstly to fix the rotation bug that occurs when parenting. (Now that I think about it parenting to an unrotated empty would have been an easy solution) Secondly upon exiting the character should have inherited the trains velocity. This way you would have had the chance to be rolled over by it. (Thou you can't actually die, it just sucks you up)

judgezedd 2020-10-07 14:50

Well, this was unsettling! Lovely time had by all (IE me) and I would definitely like to see it taken a little further, but please don't make it too horrifying.

voidsay 2020-10-07 14:57

@judgezedd happy you liked it! If I am ever to do a feature complete horror game I promise you to not include any jump scares (I am not a big fan of them myself) I believe that your head is the only thing that can actually create something scary it just takes a nudge.

oddmes 2020-10-09 13:11

I drove the train! Yep. Right in'nout, right into, right past. My pancakes are less sensitive then mouse here btw.

voidsay 2020-10-09 13:15

@oddmes yeah, sensitivity sliders. I always forget them...

gilad-bar-ilan 2020-10-09 17:32

Liked the graphics! But I recommend to make the sensitivity lower.

m8rix 2020-10-10 18:58

Spooky atmosphere... somehow expected a creepy jumpscare at any moment haha

rongo-matane 2020-10-10 19:24

Did you ever hear the tragedy of Mouse, the very sensitive? You did in this comment section, but nvm, it was playable, i was driving the train like a pro. There was one moment when i looked out in front, seeing if there would be anything strange coming up. There wasn't, but it's a tell that the setting is kind of eerie and scary, driving the train alone, with no people around. Kind of like a circle of hell, having to drive that train over and over, always in that loop, without any human or interaction at all, only indifferent machine. But driving a train in an unusual setup is kind of interesting, i think you can build on that.

Oh and i left the train at the wrong end at first, but i couldn't get back on the station or train. I thought about walking the tunnels, but was too lazy to do so, just as in real life.

voidsay 2020-10-10 19:57

@m8rix I hate jumpscares, they are cheap and I will never implement one in my games. One might argue that the ghosts are jumpscares, but they don't scream at you and don't get in your face (you might even play without noticing them at all), so they're fine in my books.

@rongo-matane the joys of making pc software with players mice ranging from office ball mice to high dpi flickshooter monsters (with nice leds to be fair). As I said somewhere above I always forget to make the slider. I should make a checklist or something. Regarding the setting sort of what I was going for. I watched an interesting video about British railways and their odd governmental obligations to cover certain routes. Some of these routes go from dead station to dead station once a week one way, just so they can say that they fulfill the requirement. Perhaps I could expand this prototype and include that lore. I should also think about making the walking bit more fun (and not in the definition off Death Stranding). In any case that's all going to wait until I learned enough about making games and find the patience to complete a large project.

danielblanco3d 2020-10-13 06:24

I like the use of the 3D graphics and the 3D lighting in this game, they are simple but very effective. They create a creepy atmosphere!

tygrak 2020-10-13 12:44

Spooky game! The graphics looked really good for a game jam. Especially when looking out of the front window driving the train the atmosphere is perfect - and when the light gets turned off suddenly it's spookyness overload! Oh and this is definitely just a bug or my computer being crappy, but after driving around for a bit and walking around the train the browser tab with the game just crashed - which is a pretty funny thing to get scared by.

Great job making the game :).

voidsay 2020-10-13 13:54

@tygrak that's definitely a bug. I wouldn't be able to do such a trick even if I tied. Did you get any error codes? The only thing that could have gone wrong are the lights. Haven't done much with them before and I have no idea about their stability (The light flickering at the station is a bug aswell)

kamuniaft 2020-10-14 03:49

I liked the lights. Very atmospheric! Moving feels like sliding on ice. Fell out of the train and been hit by it several minutes later :) Awesome work!

jk5000 2020-10-14 13:27

It's clear you did not have enough time to make this game, but what is here is okay, and I did have fun trying your game.

voidsay 2020-10-14 14:14

@jk5000 more like struggling to get the quaternions to behave

schwede 2020-10-19 20:50

Hey, you asked me to check your character script in my blog post on the Ludum Dare page. And here is my outcome. Writing a character script is not a simple task! I bet you already checked some tutorials on YouTube and you find an enormous amount of content. That’s because even the best developers can sit days, weeks, or even months to get their character script to fit the best needs of their game. Maybe you could explain to me what you mean by a foul mood on revisiting? Each code has always its own style and (in my opinion) even a culture sometimes.🤔

Here are some suggestions under reserve 📑:

* You could try to decouple the movement of the character and its interaction detection in two separate classes. If the movement it’s depending on the interaction: You cannot press a button while jumping, you could make the character movement to a singleton patter and then provide its status IsJumping per enum or bool variable. I like your decision of having the interaction decoupled (Door, LeverSript, ButtonScript). 👌

* If you want to get a better consistency with your class / variable naming, you could check out the Microsoft guidelines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/design-guidelines/naming-guidelines If you get a routine and use the same style of your code, you will gain speed in development. 🚴

* Check if early out is an option for you. I described it in my video: [Let's Code Review](https://youtu.be/DJODYG67058?t=524)

I hope some suggestions can help you in future game jams. 🎮

voidsay 2020-10-19 21:42

@schwede Thank you for getting back to me! I already watched the video that you posted in the morning (The video you have in your comment is broken, but I can find my way to it)

The mood part is mostly motivation. When I download professional code it is easy to read and intuitive to use. I can instantly start work with it (the big happy). In contrast I write code that ends up with a ton of functions (if I don't split them into different classes) and variables in a random order and big chunks of old code that I commented out (because I discovered something useful/cool that I might need later). To me this feels like a hoarders apartment (the big sad) Everything is there it all works, but when I return to such code a week later I just sigh. It's not ideal to quickly continue working and I sometimes second guess if I should even bother continuing. I do clean up, but I still have the feeling that it could look nicer (I sort of have a connection between my code being pretty and it being efficient, don't know if its a good rule of thumb, but I tend to find potential for extra functions and loops, so there is that)

Honestly the biggest thing might be my inexperience. I played with c and c++ before (kiddies first code), but I am new to c# and object oriented programming (little over 1 year although making games helped immensely), so the struggle with the basics is still real. Anytime I say "now I figured it all out" something new catches me off guard.

You're probably the first person that ever looked at my code and gave suggestions (my uni profs probably put in less effort grading my code), so I would like to express my gratitude! I'll make sure to check out your channel, but I'll give you my follow in the meantime

schwede 2020-10-22 19:35

Hi, thank you for responding to my comment.

I would like to give you two kinds of answers. The first one is a more mental awareness approach to deal with your connection to your code. And the second answer is referred to technical advice.

1) How can you appreciate your own code even though you can see the needed improvements? You could consider your code or project as a small garden. But in the beginning and maybe over time the garden seems to lose its shape. Weed is growing everywhere and some plants need a cut. I believe that universal things truly grow by compassion. What do I mean by that? Yes, the garden definitely needs your help to get a harmonic shape. But the key question is, can the garden evolve by judgement? Judgement in the sense of _the big sad_. Acknowledgment, do not fight the current state however, but still give you the chance to use compassion to give the garden the required attention and love is need to grow. This does not mean to ignore or pushing down your negative emotions that are raised. It’s more like to be aware of them but letting them past like clouds instead of creating mental stories of them, that will continue pushing you down. Accepting and embracing the current state of your code will lead you in a less fight, but will free your mind in a more harmonic way for new things and other solutions.

2) I believe every developers experience the split between finish their tickets or continue to improve the code. Sometimes I have the feeling improving the code can suddenly end up like a recursive function. An endless task. Therefore, I try to stop at the correct time. If you are new to programming and want to increase your skill, it’s a good sign you want to keep on growing. Be your own garden.👨‍🌾

For code cleanup there are also some tools you can use: * Visual Studio Code cleanup - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/code-styles-and-code-cleanup?view=vs-2019 * Visual Studio Extension Codemaid - http://www.codemaid.net/

With one or two clicks, they format your complete document. It's like an automatic cleaner robot.🤖

Get friendly with git. It’s one of my best tips. Once you felt the power of git, you can easily delete your old code, since it’s still in the history. Git have helped me very much in game jams. In a game jam I break things more easily than I want to. But I can easily revert my code, or go check how it worked before. I am not a friend of using git over commandline(cmd). I use therefore: https://tortoisegit.org/download . But there also other alternatives like Sourcetree https://www.sourcetreeapp.com

Here is my history of my commits during the game jam: https://github.com/schw3de/Ludum-Dare/commits/ludum-dare-47 Commit often or when you hit a milestone.

I will also follow you and maybe we see us again on the next game jam 🎮 or in the comments section of my next video on youtube 🎬?