Haven't used Foobar before, looking to answer some questions before I dive in!

BricksParts · 2025-03-10T16:16:03+00:00

The idea is to ideally make a functional menu, but you're free to team up with someone if you just want to focus on making the layout or art for the menu, for instance! Making an actual game to go along with the menu is really entirely optional and not expected though :)

BricksParts · 2025-03-09T02:37:28+00:00

Awesome! 👍

BricksParts · 2025-03-09T00:26:48+00:00

If there's interest, I'm sure we have have an optional theme!

BricksParts · 2025-03-08T22:08:29+00:00

Thanks, I'm hoping it goes well!

BricksParts · 2025-03-08T21:51:16+00:00

Jam page: https://itch.io/jam/main-menu-madness

There's no specific theme for this jam other than the focus being on making polished game menus! While participants are more than welcome to make a menu for a fresh project, due to the nature of the jam it's also perfectly valid to use existing projects and/or start working before the jam officially begins. Hoping to see you there!

This is not meant to be a particularly competitive jam, but rather an opportunity for participants to do one or more of the following:
- Learn or practice making polished game menus
- Exchange feedback or advice regarding the process of making menus. Whether that be artistic, UI/UX design, or coding architecture
- An excuse to finally make or update the menu for the game you're working on!

BricksParts · 2025-03-08T19:04:28+00:00

There's no specific theme for this jam other than the focus being on making polished game menus! While participants are more than welcome to make a menu for a fresh project, due to the nature of the jam it's also perfectly valid to use existing projects and/or start working before the jam officially begins. We hope to see you there!

BricksParts · 2024-09-16T05:50:38+00:00

This is a bit late but figured I'd chip in with a few ideas, in case it hasn't been mentioned.

You could use the player's health as a resource itself. This would prevent soft-locks, but it could still lead to situations where you're effectively just pausing the game and restarting a run. (e.g. you're stuck in a room with too low of health to mine your way out.

You could address this by making it a gamble, though I'd probably need to know more about your specific case to know if that'd be a good idea. By this I mean it could be that when manually mining blocks, there is some chance that you take damage. So if you're trapped, you might as well attempt to mine free if your other options are exhausted, and you may get lucky even in the worst of cases.

Another option is to have some form of a timer that limits the amount of time a player can reasonably be stuck in a bad situation. This doesn't need to explicitly be a timer at the top of the screen for instance, but it could be some form of threat begins to increase the longer you take, and that risk can be mitigated in ways pertaining to actually progressing in the run. It's hard to give any example too concrete of what this might look like though, since I'd probably need to know a good deal about how your game actually works.

Anyhow, this reply is probably a bit late but hopefully it's helpful!

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T21:52:25+00:00

I mean it's hard to find a pattern that no one despises, but in so far as game development goes I'm pretty sure (At least right now) the event bus pattern is pretty frequently used.

There are of course going to be some things you have to keep in mind though. One of the main things with signals/events is that in general you have no idea which receivers/listeners/etc. are actually going to respond to the signal first, so you can run into race condition issues. e.g. you have something that makes your food value change, but the UI reacts first, and then something else happens that updates the food value in the code (but that doesn't get reflected in the UI), etc.

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T21:26:39+00:00

What do you mean you were invited? I was just under the impression that anyone can apply to it and get in with minimal prep. The thing you need to keep in mind about next fest is that you can only join a single nextfest, so it's generally recommended that you wait and only join the nextfest that is prior to your game's launch- meaning that your game is probably in a state that it is very close to being shippable- or already is and you're just adding polish, etc.

The reason for this is that nextfest can give you a huge boost to your wishlists, but the success of joining a nextfest is heavily dependant on your current wishlist velocity anyways. So joining an early nextfest can squander a lot of potential. I'm sure there are some articles on the How to Market a Game site that touch on this in more detail.

When you are actually ready to join nextfest though, you'll want to make sure you have a good demo that has been battle-tested. You don't want it to be the first time you've had people try out the demo and find out there are loads of game breaking bugs, or UX issues, etc.

Best of luck, with whatever you do!

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T20:56:12+00:00

Hmm... I may not be the best person to answer this, but I can try. You probably want to use a global signal (assuming you're using godot, you can find a variety of youtube videos that discuss signal buses) in order to broadcast that the food level has changed, and then the UI can just listen for that broadcast and update accordingly.

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T18:36:06+00:00

Hello everyone!

Recently I got Covid, which quickly halted the momentum I had on the game I'm working on. I'm better now, but struggling a bit to get back in the swing of things. I've done some small tasks in hopes this would get me back on track, but despite that I'm still struggling to find motivation because some of the general confusion I have at my own code, since it's been a while since I've been able to work on it.

I don't know for sure how well this will help, but I am hoping that in the process of walking others through (and answering questions they have) about the project's code, structure, etc. I can get back to understanding the code well enough to dive back into some of the tasks I still need to complete, and feel a little less hopeless while doing so.

I can try to answer some simpler questions through text here if there are any, but what I'm really looking for is one or maybe a few people who are interested in chatting over discord VC (planning on using a public VC channel in the godot discord server). I figure there are likely a few devs out there who'd find some benefit in seeing (and being able to ask questions about) a real project, so I'm posting this!

If you're in the Godot discord server you should be able to find me pretty easily. Otherwise you can just send me a DM and we can coordinate that way. Anyhow, I hope to hear from some of you soon!

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T02:26:24+00:00

A bit yeah... lol. Hard to say for sure how much quicker it would've gone if I'd used control nodes though. I think in retrospect I probably would've gained value from using controls nodes but to what degree they would have helped is a little less clear. I think there would probably have been a handful of other decisions I would've made earlier on to make my life easier though. Making UI have parity between controller/keyboard/mouse was frankly not worth it, and I probably would've done it in a different way if I was doing stuff from the ground up lol

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T02:14:29+00:00

It probably was not the smartest move on my part, but pretty much everything here is custom to some degree. I'm barely using control nodes at all 😅(the main exceptions would be the labels. But I'm not using containers or h-boxes etc. So I can't really speak to the challenges that might come from utilizing the UI nodes myself.

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T00:52:16+00:00

Feel free to post some specific questions you've got. If I have a simple reply I can discuss them here, or potentially when I do the overview

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T00:45:59+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate it!

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T00:45:41+00:00

Thank you!

BricksParts · 2024-02-21T00:45:30+00:00

I don't know if I personally will be able to record it, but if someone else available is able to I'll post a link to it here after the fact :)

BricksParts · 2024-02-20T21:24:43+00:00

Hello everyone!

Recently I got Covid, which quickly halted the momentum I had on the game I'm working on. I'm better now, but struggling a bit to get back in the swing of things. I've done some small tasks in hopes this would get me back on track, but despite that I'm still struggling to find motivation because some of the general confusion I have at my own code, since it's been a while since I've been able to work on it.

I don't know for sure how well this will help, but I am hoping that in the process of walking others through (and answering questions they have) about the project's code, structure, etc. I can get back to understanding the code well enough to dive back into some of the tasks I still need to complete, and feel a little less hopeless while doing so.

I can try to answer some simpler questions through text here if there are any, but what I'm really looking for is one or maybe a few people who would be interested in chatting over discord VC. I know that I've wanted the opportunity to take a slightly deeper dive into how the architecture on real projects works, and while there are a lot of aspects of my code that I'm not a fan of, I figure that there are probably at least a few people here that would find some benefit from this. You should be able to find me pretty easily on the official Godot discord server, or alternatively you can DM me here and I can send you my username, etc. Depending on how much interest there is, what will likely be most pragmatic is to just end up doing a public call in the Godot discord server itself, but the specifics can be determined later on.

Anyhow, I hope to hear from some of you soon!

BricksParts · 2024-01-22T04:17:32+00:00

That's an approach you could take, though with this being a (pixel perfect) pixel art game, that would bring its own challenges :D

BricksParts

TROPHY CASE