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Holland

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A member registered Jan 20, 2016

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(3 edits)

Hello! I'm late but hopping in anyway. This is a super cute idea & I've been needing some direction.

  1. I'm Holland. Hol or whatever nickname you like is also fine ♥
  2. I'm primarily an artist and writer, but I dabble in voice acting, coding, and music as well. Not anything worth sharing, though -- I'm rather unproductive.
  3. No team. I can barely lead myself right now, nevermind a group haha
  4. The game I'm making is a very short visual novel. An enbie magical girl is recapping how they started doing what they did and where they ended up. It's a bit dark, focusing on pollution and vigilantism, but has the usual beats of a magical girl story with transformations and a cute mascot and whatnot. The player gets to choose how the other characters react to the MC, which affects the ending. I'll probably just get the skeleton of the game done in time for submissions and then have to clean it up.
  5. Reply to this post or get in touch via my Twitter (has some nsfw retweets) @ avgTrailerTrash. If you need my email for anything, just ask.
  6. There are way too many... This game is specifically pulling from my love of Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne (an "art thief" who is actually killing demons that replaced the original items) and Earth Maiden Arjuna (a near-death experience rapidly escalates into new age vegan propaganda, with a cool art style). I generally prefer solo magical girl anime to the big groups, as they're more likely to be plot-centric rather than trope-centric.

Edit 4/30/20: I've made good progress & am really enjoying this project. Thank you for the inspiration! It's not far enough along for me to feel comfortable submitting it, but I'm glad to have participated and look forward to seeing what else comes out of the jam.

The audio in this sounds really good (especially for a jam game), but the actual gameplay is a bit buggy at the start. Narration playing out of order, choices happening too soon / late / not taking you to the chosen route, etc. It'll be a really fun little game if that gets sorted out c:

Integrating the choices into the narration is also very interesting. But as someone with poor memory / attention span, it was tough to recall which order the choices were given in. I would cut them into their own audio files and add a VN-style "rewind" feature (to skip back and replay previous files).

I know this comment is old, but for anyone else running into this problem: after extracting the rar, move (or copy) the .exe file so it's next to the title folder (instead of inside it). 

Update: While I didn't get everything on my to-do list knocked off, I still made a ton of progress, and I've learned all the basics I need to continue on. The GUI won't be an issue from now on & the file structures / tools are being tackled as soon as I have the time for them c:

Jams are awesome because they give me an excuse to give certain to-do lists priority when I normally wouldn't, but long ones like this are a bit rough for that haha. Definitely puttered out near the end there (for good reasons but still). Congrats to everyone who made an attempt & double-congrats to those who submitted!

Thanks for hosting it! FFS jam was a ton of (productive) fun, and everyone's submissions are looking great ♥

All sorting stuff for the contacts page is now done. Just need to set up the groups / teams pages & add edit/delete features before I'm finished with that part. (I've decided to skip the Schedule & Published pages for now, so the related sections will be blank temporarily.) Will probably be testing out some stuff on the Tools page next to get an idea of what file structure the core program needs. Trello.


Whoops, forgot that this discussion was in a different thread, so I didn't explain much.

Just to tl;dr, it's a program that keeps track of your creative projects' progress and details, generating certain assets while you outline and design. It also supports collaborative universes for sustainable fiction development, i.e. where a whole new world isn't built for every project.

It's mostly inspired by the fact that I'm into a lot of different types of work, but I just don't have the time to do them all from scratch for multiple projects. Most creative dev work (at least on the indie end) is really inefficient time-wise for a decent production. This is meant to combat some of that c:

I'll only be getting the bare bones done for this jam, though. It's something I'll be adding features to as they're needed.

Been working on finishing up the launcher page's productivity tools. While they're not core bits of the program, they're really giving the front page a purpose and are actually turning out more useful than I expected, thanks to a couple last-minute additions. Github integration is getting harder though.

Below is progress on the Contacts page (a built-in address book that automatically adds contact info for people participating in your projects), plus a show of the About button actually pulling live information.

Still need to connect the sorting features, update the profile headers, and handle the notes sections (which are beasts of their own, since I'd like to give the notes a (simple) HTML editor for formatted text). After that: connecting to the schedule page & starting on the first tools (probably the Form Creator, since that'll be the basis behind the file structure I need for those buttons on the Home page). Almost onto the fun stuff.

My Trello board / current to-do lists are also here, since we seem to be sharing them in other threads c:

Side note: Thanks, Gif. I could've found that broken code when I wasn't taking a break. //time to go make stuff load properly hahaugh.

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No problem :) Glad you're figuring things out!

Yeah, doing games in Java is a little rough, especially Java/Swing. (Java/FX is supposedly a little easier to control graphics-wise but will have the same security issues.) It's great for desktop applications, but game design is way easier in engines dedicated to it.

Good luck with Unity! You'll enjoy C#. I found transitioning into it from Java was really nice.

Isn't it? I never thought about it until I was looking into cross-system video support in GameMaker:Studio. (I wanted to run a trailer the first time the game launches; it's a nice touch for those who picked it up from bundles / etc. and waited a while to see what it was.)

But it's apparently really hard to get all the right codecs playing nice on multiple systems, so there's not much support for videos in that engine. A lot of users on the forums over there recommended building cutscenes and trailers in-game as a result.

Turns out that's actually a really useful approach sometimes haha. You much have way more control over the scene in an engine than you do in most editing programs.

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There's always Windows Movie Maker (/equivalents) if you're on Windows. It's really not bad for basic editing. I remember hearing that Macs also come with a basic video editor?

There's Lightworks if you want more special effects (free version is limited to mp4 exports & needs to be renewed weekly). I'd recommend Filmora, but the trial version's watermark is just too much to ever recommend for trailer work. Blender (a free 3D modeling software) has some awkward video editing and export tools as well.

There might be better ones out there I'm not aware of. At the very least, there's dozens of miscellaneous freeware junk floating around from old college programming assignments.

If you honestly want to work with a lot of text and get some nice effects, etc. without dishing out money for a video editor, though, you might be best off just working in your game engine of choice. ex: Make a new branch, hard code the trailer effects there with the right timing, then record what happens. (That workflow isn't always an option, I know, but it is fun.)

OBS / OBS Studio is pretty solid for (a completely free) screen capture software. It's reliable for a lot of different long-term uses if you want something to keep around after the jam.

OBS is technically intended for live streamers, but I've heard a lot of youtubers and whatnot use it for local recordings (I do as well). You just need to reduce the compression/etc. for a decent quality. (There are / should be plenty of tutorials for this around.)

While they're simpler to use, OBS is also a lot less resource-intensive on your computer than Fraps (free version limits record time), Bandicam (free version has watermarks), and CamStudio (only records to .avi/SWF), which are some free-ish alternatives. (I might be missing some?)

Are you still having trouble getting the jar to show? Getting the file structure right definitely seems frustrating :|

This seems to be the sort of applet wrapping and whatnot that itch does on their end. Meaning the entry point they need is the class that either 1) runs the main class that you first call in your application, or 2) is defined in your (Web Start?) settings as the launch applet.

Basically, whatever class starts your game is what they need. (If they want the package as well, it'd be something like myPackageName.myFirstClassName instead, or possibly myPackageName.myFirstClassName.class since they don't seem to add the .class on their end.) I'm not sure if they actually need that "io.itch." before everything or if it was just an example.

You'll have to play around with it and see what works :o

\ \ Just as an aside, since it looks like you were using them in "Fly Squirrel Fly": I also read that jFrames do not run on their own in browsers; they need to be replaced with jApplets (which are the web equivalent & function similarly) for web use. That may be the issue if you have the class right but it's not running.

(Again, I haven't done applets before, so double-check my facts here lol.)

Sure ^^ But I don't have many screenshots with the meat of it since I'm still working on the launch (hub) interface, which has some productivity features and whatnot:

The core has a (modular) universe -> concept -> project -> asset -> publication workflow. It's intended for collaborative creative projects, so the overarching universe lets you keep track of any characters, locations, languages, etc., these being the concepts. Those can then be referenced across projects, like book or game ideas (which are the design doc side of things).

You can generate instances of those characters / locations / systems / etc. to export asset packs of their models / maps / scripts / etc. to use in testing or final publications. (There will also be some dev tools included to override what the program generates in case you have a talented artist / programmers / etc. on board already. But they're going to be the biggest pain to code tbh.)

It'll have limitations; all engines do. But I'll probably open source what I can in the end to encourage more technical growth c:

Just trying to finish up the skeleton of an (easily procrastinated on) software. It's intended to make an overlap in the "design document" and "straight to production" workflows in one program, by generating testing assets as you plan out their details.

For now, I need to build up the basic GUI (which is taking longer than it should; still learning how to do procedural Java interfaces haha), workout the final file structure, and add some standalone tools. Last goal for the jam will be to get the Github integrations working.

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I haven't used Java in that context, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong -- but isn't running jars in the browser just about impossible with the last couple years of security updates?

It used to be done by wrapping the jar as an applet, until Edge & Chrome blocked Java applets completely. Firefox is on the same path. As a result, Oracle announced it would stop supporting the feature completely in future updates.

But maybe there's another way to run Java in-browser that I'm not aware of?

Edit: Whoops, I see TerraCottaFrog beat me to it on another thread haha.

FreeSFX.co.uk is great for high quality sound effects and background music. Check their license page for the legalese; the gist seems to be that you can use them so long as 1) the site is in your game credits, 2) there are visual elements, and 3) sound isn't your core game mechanic.

(Their search engine is kind of garbage, so if you find a track you like, you might want to check its creator's profile. They've probably published other versions of it that the engine isn't finding due to a lack of tags / etc.)

I recommend downloading Audacity (its free) in case you need to edit/balance the lengths/volume/fade/loop of any sfx or music you're using. (It's obvious when you throw stock audio in without any [much-needed] editing.)

And if your project needs photography / icons / fonts, The Stocks archives pretty much all major free stock sites in one place. Be sure to check their individual licenses.

Not a game, but I'm programming with Java/Swing for a tool project this jam.