The Unofficial Waypoint Community Game Jam 2018

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UPDATE: Voting is closed and it’s officially Big Boy Season! I’ve created an Itch.io Jam Page that has more details on the jam, and includes a forum where I encourage you to post your ideas, provide advice, and group up to work together.

Hey everyone, It’s been a little over a year since the last community game jam (you can check out the awesome games everyone made here) and it’s about time for another! :smiley:

The jam will start on July 1st, and continue through the month, and end on August 5th, to give everyone one last weekend to get things squared away.

Last year we held a poll to name the jam and the winner was ‘New Jam City’ since the Mario reference is less relevant this year, and there have been plenty of fun events, games, and Waypoint jokes in the past year we might want to riff on, I figured we could give the jam a yearly subtitle, and change the name to “The Unofficial Waypoint Community Game Jam 2018: subtitle here” to make it easier to find, and clearer in purpose. I’ve set up a poll to suggest/vote on subtitles here. Voting will be open until sometime on the 24th, then we’ll take down the poll and create the Itch.io jam. I’ll copy/paste my disclaimer from last year:

  • Feel free to add new items as long as they don’t contain the name of any Waypoint staff, aren’t already on the list (I’ll be deleting duplicates by lowest votes first), and don’t contain any offensive or derogatory language (I’ll also be deleting those). Feel free to vote for as many as you like. The software I used was the only simple solution I could find that allowed users to add names and vote for multiple choices, so let me know if you experience any trouble with it.

Rules for the jam will be the same as last year:

  • Your game’s title should be a title from Waypoint Radio (all episodes are valid, not just ones from the past year) OR a Waypoint Forum thread title.
  • You may work alone or with a team, simply credit all members in the game and/or on the game submission page
  • Your game should not feature Waypoint logos, art, or other content
  • All content in your game should be original, or used with permission from the creator(s) and proper credit given. This can be in the game itself and/or on the itch.io page for your submission
  • Follow the Rules and Code of Conduct outlined on the Waypoint community forum
  • No NSFW games. With episode titles like “Don’t Kinkshame Grandma” this might be tempting but we want developers from all ages to be able to participate, so please err on the side of caution with this one.
  • Respect the Waypoint staff, and Waypoint extended family. Avoid including members of the staff or personalities related to Waypoint in your game in ways that are disrespectful, or might make them uncomfortable. This is another one I’d ask you to be careful with. When in doubt don’t do it.
  • When giving criticism make sure to highlight something you like as well, and consider asking a question about a choice or a bug rather than offering advice. Remember that all the entries were made in limited time and developers probably know about any bugs/things they could have done better, but just didn’t have time to fix/improve things.
  • Submissions can be non-video games, like card or board games. Don’t let lack of programming knowledge or development resources hold you back.
  • Stay healthy, the jam is a month long so that no one should need to crunch or overwork themselves. Remember to take care of yourself :smiley:

Feel free to use this thread to find partners, post your work/talents, and generally discuss the Jam. If you have any questions or issues feel free to contact me, @Wazanator or @OneGameDad.

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yoooo I’m 100% in for this

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Yuss, another WP Jam!
I’m very glad these jams aren’t only a couple of days long because I’m a code novice and need extra time to learn and implement and I don’t have much time left after to do art.
I unfortunately don’t have a unique name in mind but I guess I can vote on the poll. (I like the sound of big boy season!)

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My random Waypoint Radio episode picker has been running since last jam: http://randomwpr.futuretuesday.com/

I’m hoping to do something this year. Couldn’t get my idea for last year to work and then outside things piled up.

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I’m up for this.

Is this a holdover from Idle Thumb’s Wizard Jam? I’ve participated in that jam a few times, and it works pretty well because they do really wacky titles and have a large backlog of multiple different podcasts. But looking back through the Waypoint Radio archive, most of the podcast titles aren’t really jumping out at me, especially the recent ones.

Could we expand it to “Your game’s title should be a title from a Waypoint forum topic”?

This would include all Waypoint podcasts and articles, since all articles get their own forum post, so you could make a game called “I Don’t Know Anything About Rayman, and That’s Why I Love Him”, or “A Game About a Train Perfectly Captures the Horror of Life”.
But I mostly want this just because there’s a lot of forum topics that would make amazing game ideas. “Always draw dogs”, “Patrick Klepek vs Cat Mario”, “British Politics”, “How do you eat a Kiwi?”, and “Mecha Criticism” all sound like pretty awesome games.

Also, is anyone interested in collaborating? I’m pretty good at design, programming, and Unity stuff. Here’s my itch page, I made pretty much all of those games solo (sometimes with creative commons assets). I like to make weird colorful stuff, and recently I’ve been really into physics games and photography games. So right now, I’m thinking that I’d want to work with someone who can do 3D models and animation. But I’m also open to collaborating with 2D artists, writers, musicians, etc. if we can come up with a really fun game idea.

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I can’t code or use many programs, but goddamn it, I’ll make y’all a Bitsy game if it kills me

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There’s an episode titled “Devils don’t need no advocates” and I guess what I’m saying is I desperately want to see an Ace Attorney style game set in Hell.

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Using Forum topic titles is totally cool. Initially podcast titles seemed easier since people can just scroll the podcast’s feed but @Wazanator pointed out that there’s a cool Twitter bot that tweets new WP forum threads.

@futuretuesday Thanks for the link! I wasn’t sure if that was running of the RSS and included the most recent episodes or not, and I didn’t want to repost/tag you from the original thread without permission. sorry! D:

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Can’t wait to take part - this sounds excellent. Thank you for organising!

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Hey everybody, my programming/dev skills are pretty weak so I’ll probably sit out on making my own game but I’m happy to help out making music for other people’s projects! If anybody’s interested let me know here or on Discord (there are some examples of my work here)

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Really excited for this! Have to get my June game done on time so I can take part.

Here’s a nice list of all the episode titles in case anyone needs it in one place:
https://pastebin.com/qa76MPmS

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Hey everyone I put together a resource site for those that are looking for some tools to use along with art assets that are free, open source, public domain, etc.

If you have any suggestions or feel like something needs more added to it (such as tutorials for a tool) please give me some recommendations!

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I added a Random Forum topic/full list to the podcast picker http://randomwpr.futuretuesday.com/topics.html.
It can also be accessed from the main podcast picker url as well.

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I couldn’t stop thinking about making a game called “Always Draw Dogs”, so I made a little warmup Unity project that randomly generates dogs. I combined 9400 dog drawings from Google’s Quickdraw dataset with 7800 dog names from data.gov, and a simple algorithm for coloring the drawings.

dog1

I might upload the source code if anyone’s interested in using it. The line drawing stuff could be used with any of the drawings in the Quickdraw dataset. But keep in mind that even the “moderated” data they provide still contains some, uh, NSFW content. So, you’ll probably want to manually look over some of the data to catch that stuff. I generated a grid of all 10k dog drawings and removed around 20 drawings of genitalia and curse words for this project.

I’m still thinking about a bunch of different ideas for what to make during the jam. I’m a little bit tempted to use this dog generator and make “Always Draw Dogs: A Dog-Based Deckbuilding Game”. I think it would be kind of funny to have a deckbuilding game where every card just makes you draw more cards until you just have a giant pile of dog cards. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a digital card game with procedurally-generated cards, so that might be cool. On the other hand, card game UI can be tricky…

A fonts section would be very useful. Here’s some good font resources:

Lots of fonts released for free by Google. Very highly-polished, clean, and professional-looking fonts. Almost all of them are under Open Font License or similar licenses that permit free use, redistribution, etc. in games (some may require attribution). To download the fonts, click the “plus” button to select it, then open the little tab that appears at the bottom of the screen and click the “download” icon.

Open Font Library. Lots of overlap with Google fonts.

Has a much larger selection of fonts, if you’re looking for something weird or obscure. Be careful about the licenses, double-check to make sure that you’re allowed to redistribute as part of an application.

http://04.jp.org/
Yuji Oshimoto makes some really nice pixel fonts, if you can manage to navigate his very small website.

Also, I have a few more additions to other categories:

Code tools:

Visual Studio Community is the free version of Visual Studio. Really powerful, amazing auto-complete features, great debugging. Works with pretty much every language you could want. Free for commercial and non-commercial use, for individuals or organizations with <250 members and <$1 million annual revenue. Works great with Unity.

Audio tools:

BFXR. An updated version of SFXR. More options, better interface, etc.

LabChirp. Another little free tool for making retro-style sound effects. It has randomizer features, similar to SFXR. But it also give you multiple tracks to build up layered sound effects, and it lets you manually draw lines and curves to control pitch, volume, etc. Currently my favorite sound effects tool to use.

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Thank you! Added em :+1:

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@Wazanator Don’t forget to add Ink. It can make standalone text adventures or be integrated into Unity.

Here’s the resources:
https://github.com/inkle

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I want to try to make something for the episode titled “Breath of the Battlegrounds”. It’s a bit ambitious but I want to make a (single-player) battle royale game that draws from the world of BotW in some way.

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If anyone needs an experienced coder, either to help you get started, or be a team member, hit me a DM. This sounds great!

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I like this idea a lot! I’m curious, when setting a game within another game world, are there any hard limits for fair use in terms of using NPC character names/mentioning the original game itself? I’m thinking of making something set in/that references the Bunker in Nier: Automata.

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Legally, you’ve got very little fair use with names, settings, etc (trademarks are for more than names - anything you instantly associate with a brand is potentially part of their trademark portfolio) from existing IP because it’s all trademarks (not primarily a copyright issue when you’re not literally lifting assets - obviously, don’t lift assets). So you’ve got less ground to argue upon than we normally think of when saying fair use.

Now, if you happened to make things which are pretty obviously referencing things that are trademarked while absolutely never referring to them via their trademarks (also avoiding making something that a reasonable person would find confusing as to if it was an officially licensed product from that IP), then you’re a lot more likely to do ok. Note that trademarks are the few occasions where “the law forces us to act” is kinda sorta true because if you did make a Sonic fan game that used the name Sonic to refer to a character and Sega didn’t act then it would be counted as evidence that their trademark for Sonic was weakening or even becoming diluted (it is less likely to confuse a consumer when other things referring to a blue Sonic appear if there are already instances of it being used generically in the marketplace). This is why legal departments will go after fan projects. It’s possibly not necessary but they really don’t want to be the legal team at a firm who loses exclusive brand rights valued with lots of zeroes after a digit in the ledger - that is extremely bad for a career (or the continued existence of an independent legal firm).

As a jam, you can sometimes just decide to ignore all that. You maybe shouldn’t but probably the worst that happens is you get a letter with a cease and desist after the jam has concluded saying to take this thing off the internet right now and please never do this again.

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