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Software Developer

big man with red beard, write much word on think rock.


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As of late, I have been having a hard time completing the projects I have started. Many of you are familiar with the feeling. That persistent, progress paralyzing panic that comes with the anxiety of having to work on something that may fail. Sometimes it helps me to think back on times where I had a goal in mind for a project and executed it to its end. This was one of those.

It was my second solo Global Game Jam, third overall. The theme that year was waves and somehow my brain cell fixated on waves of grocery items coming down the conveyor belt at a grocery store. I ran with the idea, hooked up an inverse kinematic script for an arm and made the aim of the game to scan groceries and chuck them into a basket for points. The cashier had to be an elderly woman named Flo, as is tradition.

The executable available on this page might still work (Windows only), but attached is a video of the game in action.

People I have interacted with in the past still bring up this game from time to time. Hearing them talk about it usually gives me enough warm and fuzzies to carry on with my current projects in hope that, one day, those will be the projects people ask me about in passing.



A text adventure and/or visual novel themed around being a kid during the late 90's and early 00's and having free reign of a family themed hotel in the evening while you are on a vacation with your extended family and/or with a larger group. Remember those nights of running down the halls, riding the elevator up and down and hanging around the arcade and mini golf course after the water park and pool closed for the evening?

The aesthetic would include photos and renders filtered to look like a Gameboy camera picture, as if the night had been catalogued on one.

Not focusing on the liminal aspects either. The hotel would be filled with annoyed workers and other vacationers who you can challenge to JRPG style combat via those stretchy sticky hands, nerf blasters and pool noodles. You would collect quarters and the rare whole dollar bill in order to buy upgrades and potions which are just cans of off brand soda.



zanzlanz
@zanzlanz

And I call it ✨ Zanzlanz's Collector's Bundle ✨!

After I ported 11 of my games to my game engine (see yesterday's post), I decided to make a launcher to keep track of all 100 achievements!

I just wanted to make this post to highlight some fun parts of making the project:

I got paid in Oreo Cookies

In one of the trailers I made, I joked that you could buy it with Oreo Cookies (@1m19s):

And -- maybe I could have predicted -- a friend of mine actually shipped me this package in exchange for some keys of the game. I was absolutely beaming about it for hours!

4 packages of Oreo products presented on a wood table.

I devoured the cookies and rained itch keys upon his inbox.

Coincidentally, there are exactly 100 achievements

I still can't get over the fact that when I counted up all the achievements for all 11 games, it came out to be exactly 100 achievements. I sat there confused and recounted 3 more times before I was convinced the numbers added up perfectly.

But all of the achievements came from the original medals I set up on Newgrounds.com!

A gif showing the scroll behavior of the list of all 100 achievements.

Getting all 100 achievements is a big feat, which is why one of the rewards for winning is the ability to hijack my Twitter with an automated tweet about your win. A few people got close, but they stalled out at 90%, so anyone can still be of the first 10 winners.

The trophy is my marketing team 🏆

The trophy is just a dozen stretched cubes I manually entered in with code. There's a larger version of the mesh masked out underneath to add the black outline.

All things considered, doing the "branding" for this project really just meant I slapped the trophy asset on everything and anything :)

A promotional image of the 3D trophy and the text '11 games, 100 achievements.'
Just a spinning trophy with a starburst background.

The launcher is secretly a 3D scene

At first I was going to arrange it like a DVD scene selection menu, if you remember those days. But then I settled pretty quickly on a flat grid instead. It still makes use of 3D through a neat interactive effect.

A grid of 11 game thumbnails, each slightly downscaled and rotated inward.
A tight grid of 11 game thumbnails, each pivoting elastically when the cursor passes over them.

The way this is achieved is by using a perfect 90 degree field of view and setting the elements at exactly the correct scale and distance from the camera.

The 3D effect may play a part in the win sequence too.

Link

It would be weird to not link the bundle after writing a whole post about it! But better yet: all 11 games are totally free in your browser. Just, you wouldn't get the opportunity to take over my Twitter if you win :)

A promotional image featuring a screenshot of the bundle.