I've made a lot of jam games myself, mostly in C# with XNA.
My most well-received game is probably
Conquering Oneself
which is an RPG/Puzzle hybrid in which you fight against yourself in a JRPG battle system.
My most popular game is a toss-up between
Hikikomori Manager 2012
which is a game in which you're a hikikomori trying to survive or recover, which to this day keeps getting short tiny bursts of local popularity due to its unique subject, and
World of Minimalism
which is a persistent world drawing game in which you simply walk around and draw the world on a central server; it received a short burst of significant popularity (being posted on freeindiegam.es and Rock Paper Shotgun) but has been dead ever since.
The game I made that I like most is MusicRunner, a still-unreleased game I worked 5 months full-time on back in 2012 but which ran into issues for publishing and couldn't be released until a couple months ago; to publish it now I'd have to contact the other developer that worked on the project, make it release-ready and somehow let people know it exists so it doesn't result in less than 10 downloads total.
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Originally Posted by Gan_HOPE326
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I think I beat your score (I got 588300 points, you're listed as having 528400), but it failed to submit, likely because I don't have a Gamejolt account.
I think the game wasn't bad, but it wasn't really fun enough to replay. I like the combo system that reduces your multiplier over time rather than harshly erasing it entirely when you're not comboing, though I feel that my main issue with unlimited combo systems, the fact that your early scoring is meaningless and the score practically only depends on how high you get the combo counter (aka how long you survive in a single life), is very much present in this game. Perhaps you could set an upper limit for the combo counter, or reset it periodically (like at the start of every new wave) to resolve this? I also felt that the difficulty ramps up too slowly, discouraging repeat plays as the early game becomes too boring.
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Originally Posted by WireframeGames
BTW: I don't see programmers very often. Am I blind or is your breed rare?^^.
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Depends on where you look. I'm used to seeing a lot of programmers and a shortage of artists. (And of course a lot of idea guys, there's never a shortage of idea guys.)
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Originally Posted by Gan_HOPE326
Personally I would like to be able to do everything myself, even.
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I'd love to do this myself, and I can do the programming, game design and sound and music. Unfortunately, I'm terrible with art, and that prevents me from making certain kinds of games (for example, you can't really make a point & click adventure without remotely decent art). The role art plays in people's first impressions also makes people less likely to try my games.
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Originally Posted by Gan_HOPE326
I use engines usually (Unity or Game Maker, have never tried Unreal) just because they make it easier and more fun to code.
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I prefer to do a lot myself (XNA is only a framework rather than a true engine; it's a set of features you can use rather than a whole you have to use), because often - and Unity is a good example of this - you have to work in the default way the engine was intended for, and if you go beyond that, you'll have to work
around the engine more than you work
with the engine. I'm a freaking programmer. The code should bend to my will, not the other way around.
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Originally Posted by WireframeGames
It is just so ironic that game development involves a lot of numbers and mathematics  . |
Most of it is hidden in low-level implementations and as game developer (as opposed to game engine developer or even lower-level stuff) you don't have to worry about it.
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Originally Posted by WireframeGames
One assumption that I see a lot is that blueprint scripting is inferior to C++ (which can be used to make Unreal 4 games too), but these are basicly just containers for native code based on C++. So it runs as fast as C++ code, because it IS C++ code . You know probably best that programming habits and efficient programming is the key to success, not the way, how you do it^^. |
And if you follow all the steps from code to eventual execution, even Javascript ends up being executed as machine code in the end. The relevant part here is how many steps are in-between; each step adds excess baggage that slows down the process further. Yes, properly written code is more important for speed than the amount of abstraction between code and execution; however, the amount of layers in-between does have a notable effect on performance as well (in addition to limiting just how much you can optimize your code).
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Originally Posted by Gan_HOPE326
and most importantly modern computers have computing power to spare, so yeah - in the end it doesn't really matter much any more.
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And this kind of thinking, multiplied by dozens of implementations, is why Spelunky lags on a freaking PS Vita.
While I don't disagree with the prioritization of convenience above performance, this issue cascades further and further until it reaches ridiculous levels. You should try coding Assembly for the NES, and you'll be surprised just how fast 1 MHz is. With that knowledge, it's utterly bizarre that something as 'simple' as Spelunky would lag on a machine with 4x 2000 MHz. But it happens because of countless cut corners in the dozens of underlying implementations it makes use of.