Hey, I was thinking I might participate in the One Hour Game Jam this afternoon.
Just curious if anyone else here is planning to?
It starts about 1 hour from now.
Actually, I’m going to try! It’ll be my 1st time so I’m off to look at the previous 1hr game jams and the rules 
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No. Very tired and probably already missed it.
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It’s half over now. I just stopped. The theme is The Floor is Lava. I thought sounds perfect for an ultra simple platform game. But unfortunately, I don’t know AGK2 well enough to know how to work with both sprites and the drawing commands (DrawBox, etc) and I don’t have any system in place to easily work with tile maps.
When I returned to AGK2 last weekend I jumped straight into 3D so switching back to 2D was weird. I also found that having a theme chosen for me by someone else and not having any vision in my head of what I want to build to be very alienating. I normally have a pretty clear idea (overall concept) in my head of what I am building. And I also have a very good idea of how to do it technically. So when I actually start development I can work rapidly.
Didn’t work that way at all for this. Took a bit just to come up with ah platform game. Need tiles. Hmm… no time to mess with tiles. I can create the map in code. Well it might be better to draw it as blocks in a paint program (<-- this is where I went wrong… should have went with the idea to use code then everything would be using DrawBox) and so forth.
Makes you realize how much of this stuff you figure out away from the computer normally. I found it to be a great experience overall though. Made me realize I need to get a solution for ultra fast level building (basically create that image to level thing I did for my last Unity project) and I need to spend more time in AGK2 in general.
I will probably try another 1HGJ one in 3 months or so. The really weird thing is in contrast I found working in AGK2 on my Space Invaders game project last week to be very easy and fast. And it is in 3D. The difference is it was just cubes animating and moving. No level design involved.
Honestly it will be extremely difficult to complete any playable game in 1 hour. Maybe endless shmup or something like that. But when you get into level interaction and object interaction time will stack up fast.
What do you think of what I did?
http://onehourgamejam.com/?page=author&author=felineinteractive
I have to say that’s the fastest I’d ever made a game in my life, and it was fun and I’ll do it again!
I did some incredibly stupid things there:
1: The map isn’t infinite. It spawns 900 random boxes in Start and that’s the end of the level.
2: The camera angle is a bit too high, it should face down more.
3: The lava floor is just an asset I used, didn’t even spend more than a minute to try to make it look better. So the floor looks atrocious.
4: The ball doesn’t rotate because I made the camera a child of it since I didn’t want to spend a minute writing a script.
5: Due to no point of reference in the background, it gives the impression that the boxes are moving and not the player.
6: Had the Distance text not showing in the build, took me a while to fix that in 0.1.2. At least the stream isn’t up yet so no one will know 
Overall it could have been worse.
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Hey I think that is really good and certainly is probably one of the best looking games submitted.
I did notice I can fly by repeatedly pressing jump (even in air) so am in no danger of dying but completely get it you only had 1 hour.
Overall great job! Very smart idea on going procedural for the level generation. That saved a ton of time.
Actually I just checked out some of the others too. There’s some other Unity submissions there.
Well, here is the mockup I made for mine. I had scoped too big. Which is a change for me. This is level 1 of the few levels I planned to have. lol Lava flies up in the air so player has to time it.
It kind of all fell apart though when I realized I didn’t a) fully understand AGK2 enough to work with both sprites and rectangles (should have ditched sprites completely) and b) didn’t have anything to build the levels with. Thinking about it now I could have just use Tiled and used the data in csv format. Ha ha!
My mind has been so focused on 3D lately. The past couple of days I have been messing around learning shaders. So this represented a major mind shift. I’ll be better prepared next time around.
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Well thank you!
I noticed most of the games submitted are really simple 2D square-block games; many people are using much more basic engines than Unity. I pulled 2 assets off the Asset Store (the skybox and the floor), and I’m surprised that’s all it took to get a graphical quality advantage.
Yeah, by spamming space and right you can stay above the lava forever and get an infinite score. To fix that I’d add a script limiting the ball’s height and how many times you can press space in a time period.
I tried to be honest about the 1 hour limit, the only thing I did after the 1 hour was post the game and fix a bug where the distance text wasn’t showing because I didn’t properly anchor it in the Canvas. Since everything was already done but it just wasn’t showing, I thought it was OK to release a fixed version (hence the 0.1.2 on the game page).
That is very, very primitive procedural level generation. This is the script that generates the 900 blocks:
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using UnityEngine;
public class Generator : MonoBehaviour {
public float MinSpaceX;
public float MaxSpaceX;
public float MinSpaceY;
public float MaxSpaceY;
public float MinX;
public float MaxY;
public List<Transform> SpawnedObjects;
public List<Vector3> SpawnPositions;
public Transform Player;
public GameObject SpawnedObject;
// Use this for initialization
void Start ()
{
Generate();
}
public void Generate()
{
Debug.Log("COunt: " + SpawnPositions.Count);
if (SpawnPositions.Count <=0)
{
SpawnPositions.Add(new Vector3(Player.transform.position.x + MinSpaceX, Random.Range(MinSpaceY, MaxSpaceY), Player.position.z));
Instantiate(SpawnedObject, SpawnPositions.Last(), Quaternion.identity);
}
for (int i = 0; i < 900; i++)
{
SpawnPositions.Add(new Vector3(Random.Range(SpawnPositions.Last().x + MinSpaceX, SpawnPositions.Last().x + MaxSpaceX),
Random.Range(MinSpaceY, MaxSpaceY), Player.position.z));
Instantiate(SpawnedObject, SpawnPositions.Last(), Quaternion.identity);
}
}
// Update is called once per frame
void Update ()
{
}
}
Basically it spawns a cube, then it adds a random ranged number to the last cube’s position and does that 900 times.
I’ve done that before in this project (that I quit because I ran out of ideas for it): http://gamejolt.com/games/ball-jumper/193869
However I didn’t copy the generation script from that object, the script above I wrote in the 1 hour. The script in the older project was done better as it generated a truly infinite level while also deleting parts the player passed to keep the performance good on mobile.
That’s a really cool idea!
Just curious, why did you go with AGK2 instead of Unity?
THAT is something I have absolutely 0 knowledge of. Learning Git and Shader programming are next on my radar. I just want to make a simple game and publish it, but every time I start a project I scope it so big I end up with thousands of lines of code that then turns into a huge time drag and I’m never able to finish anything 
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A one hour jam. That’s an interesting concept.
I assume you are allowed to open visual studio in advance? Otherwise there goes most of my hour…
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Joking aside I wonder how many people use an asset to disable automatic compilation for these competitions. For that matter I have to wonder how many people don’t realize you can compile while your game is running and see the effects without having to stop and start play. At least most of the time you can do this.
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I’ve switched over to AGK2 just because it is a better fit for me. I should have made sure I had some way already chosen to build levels before considering the jam. And at least got my head back into 2D in it more. Although sometimes I honestly think 3D is easier for stuff like this so it might have been good to have gone that route as well.
Yep you are right about the simpler graphics. You won’t find many submissions at all in a 1 hour jam that are beyond the very basics. Just not enough time for people to make stuff and a lot of people are not using one of the big 3 game engines that have asset stores. I suppose that is another reason why I view the whole graphics thing differently than many people here too. I am used to seeing game programmers working and putting out games with very simple graphics in other languages and frameworks.
From what I have seen of shaders so far they seem pretty straight forward. But I have only played around doing the most basic of things. This is another example of why I switched. In Unity I hear people talking about shaders a lot and I have never seen where they are here, how to use them or anything. In a straightforward programming API I just write the shader in Notepad++ and save it to a file. Then in my program load it in assigned to a unique id and then can later use that id to assign to an object.
I just find this kind of approach much more straightforward. I mean it might be the same way in Unity I have no idea but because everything seems to always start / go through the Editor at some point it makes not as straightforward in my opinion. Just a personal preference.
Not in much of a game dev mood though. I might do some more work on the 3D Space Invaders tomorrow. Not sure. I have been dealing with a serious burn-out on game dev now for a while. I probably just need to truly stop it all period for at least a few months instead of continuing to dabble in it a bit each week.
OK Missed it!
How about I start now…
I generally probably won’t bother with 1 hour jams. My timeframe to do something useful is at least 4 hours. I mean I tend to prefer 3d characters, and making a 3d character with basic animation loops is a few hours. Sprites are faster, but I’ll probably to decide to make a one nice animated lava tile and waste most of the allocated budget.
Ludum dare has more comfortable timeframe of two days, where you can just waste 15 hours per day, and come up with something half decent. With 1 hour I don’t see much point.
It is also possible to cheat in advance - meaning try couple of practice runs in advance, figure out the fastest way to work, and then when the time comes go with the most efficient algorithm you figured out.
It is not something I’d be interested with.
No offense to people who participated, of course.
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Totally unrelated - but when I first went up for greenlight - I posted at the same time as another guy. Talked to him a bit - he was working on “Hot Lava”. I thought it looked kinda silly. The next day he got a post to the top of reddit’s front page, picked up tens of thousands of yes votes, and started negotiations with publishers (picked up by Klei, maker of Dont Starve Together, etc).
Video here:
Perhaps the definitive “floor is lava” game 
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The trailer fooled me into thinking it would be an action fighting game at first, and I was like:
This was my 1st game jam, and you’re right, 1 hour is insanely little. I first did the movement, then I got the floor and skybox, I got the floor to follow the player, I made the distance script and dying mechanic, and last I did the cube generation. By the time I was testing the cube generation I had 5 minutes, I was running into problems with List.Last(), but I fixed it just in time.
In the web player version, the distance text wasn’t showing so I worked overtime to properly anchor the text to the canvas. I probably won’t do 1 hour jams every week, but I’ll definitely do other jams!
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That’s kind of brilliant, I bet it will sell well.
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One hour to write a game phew. That’s pretty impressive.
Yeah, I donno how you do that - all I would get done is “get coffee” and “check unity forums”…
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@DroidifyDevs wow you did that game in just one hour, it’s reminds me of a similar one your posted in feedback friday once?
It’s possible to do some sorta 2d game, I guess. But I’m doubting a decent-ish game with sound fx and graphics is possible without cheating somewhat, could be using premade stuff from an earlier times.
It really depends on what you’ve already made before as to how good your end 1hour game would be.
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Really, it’s impressive for 1 hour? I never thought I was good at game development. The idea is similar to the one in Feedback Friday, only that the Feedback Friday one I probably spend 100 hours on and I ran out of content to put in it. Maybe if I think of something for it I’ll be able to finish it.
Perhaps I’ll screen record the next 1 hour jam I do as people seem to like the game more than I thought.
Now I’m considering starting a 30 hour game jam… and actually publish something for once.
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