I didn’t update my game past update 3 because of needing to prioritize FSH but I do plan to update the UDGJ1 project into a full game after FSH is released and maybe putting it up on Steam too. 
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I just sent out a mail through itch to all participants, but it might end up in the spam folder, so here is the content as well:
Hi!
The first UDGJ is now over, we hope everyone had a blast, we sure did!
As previously mentioned, everyone that joined the jam will get the “UDGJ Participant” on the forums, and everyone that submitted a game will also get the “UDGJ Jammer” badge. We’ll go through the participant and submitter lists soon and add these. If your itch username is not the same as on the Defold forums, let us know!
We want to do this again, but we would really like to get your feedback first! Should the jam period be longer, shorter? Should the submissions be ranked with voting?
Please take a minute and fill in this survey so we know how to make an even better jam next time: https://forms.gle/ozeS3A5xeEb4L7XN9
Best regards,
The UDGJ Team
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I’ve handed out badged for most of the participants and submissions now:
For participating: https://forum.defold.com/badges/105/udgj-participant
For submitting a game: https://forum.defold.com/badges/106/udgj-jammer
However, there are still some itchio users that I couldn’t find/remember the corresponding forum users for:
karteczqa
jaibeer72
Qzma
Vbif
doc hooi
Cotu
triaal
enriquecdl
FerBareFeet
Fish Pond Studio
Lace06
ElVenom03
monokuka
Wise Hedgehog
hejdetemil
Please let yourself known so I can fix this!
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I finally have some time to spend with the jam entries, so I’ll be posting my thoughts here as I get through them. Edit: Seems I can’t have more than three consecutive comments, so I’ll be adding further reviews to this one.
- I’m not a big fan of this circle-shooting genre, but it was fun.
- I am definitely a fan of the presentation, though. The retro graphics are awesome, the sounds even more so. I love the little details - how the enemies flash when shot but not killed, how the purple thingies jitter nervously as you blast everything around them, how the menus fade across one another… everything is great.
- There doesn’t seem to be much point to spacebar enabling/disabling shooting. As far as I can tell, the only scenario where you’d want to stop shooting is after all the dangerous enemies have been cleaned up and you want to keep some static purple guys around so you can collect powerups in peace. I think it would be better if powerups persisted across levels and shooting was fully automatic.
- About powerups - maybe they should disappear after sitting on the big circle for a while?
- Greater variety would be nice: +attack speed, piercing bullets, bigger bullets, temporary shield… and maybe even some negative ones you’d want to avoid?
- Energy and score are way too far from the action. I can only just about make out energy in the corner of my eye, but not how much of I have and it’s a little bit distracting. Score is covered by unfortunate placement of the itch.io overlay, but even without it it could be a bit closer to the centre and a bit bigger.
- Pause key! In a retro game like this, I sort of expected it to be there.
- Like the high difficulty. Continues are a lifesaver, obviously, and losing all the powerups isn’t as much of a hit as you’d expect. Still, level 10 took me quite a few attempts. In the end I beat it in y run where I didn’t pick up any speed-ups. I think it helped me dodge better?
- The boss is great. Later attack patters are mesmerizing and the whole spinning mass looks immediately threatening. When I first saw it I kept thinking “please don’t have a lunge attack, please don’t have a lunge attack” and… it doesn’t. Phew. It would be cool, though.
- What I’d love to see is a damaged stage of the boss with new attack patterns, but of course, there probably wasn’t enough time for that given the excellent polish of the rest of the game.
- The start of the game is bombastic. The title screen sets the mood of the game immediately (the mood is weird) and the yellow/black colour scheme looks loves.
- The debris you have to avoid is awesome. I imagine that at some point during the making of the game someone said “let’s put some eyes in there” and that was possibly the best idea they could have had at that time.
- The click and drag controls took me a while to figure out and were uncomfortable even after that. Why not just have Petra follow the cursor at all times?
- I played until the music reached the end (with tons of restarts), so I’m not sure if the game has an ending, or if everything just keeps speeding up until you can’t keep up. The “story” kinda makes you want to reach the lost page, but since all you do is avoid death, the gameplay felt kinda depressing.
- Did Petra like the game? Did anyone get fired or promoted for this? =P
BlockOperatedSnakeSystem by @sven
- I think this is potentially easily the best game in the whole jam, but I have no way to confirm that hypothesis right now. Back in the day I somehow managed to beat the two-player mode of Ugh! by myself, but this game is just a mess. I have no idea what’s happening, why it’s happening and how to use it to kill the other snakes. I find that this kind of confusion is perfect for this type of game, so I have high hopes for it, but for now I have absolutely no idea if this is the best thing ever or complete trash. I’m leaning towards the first one, though.
- Love the music. Reminds me of Neverhood. It’s Kevin MacLeod, I presume? Works perfectly with the trippy visuals.
- I’ll get back to this later, once I pressure some friends into playing with me, even though it’s probably not going to replace the best couch multiplayer game ever.
E Street Fighter Band by @jhonny.goransson
- This is all kinds of hilarious, shame it’s unfinished. I tried to play it against myself a bit, but that’s no fun.
- I would love to see this as a side-scrolling beat-em-up.
- The music gets very annoying after a while, which might be the point, actually. Not a big fan of Springsteen myself, so I didn’t last long.
Pixel Art Witchcrafter by @Pawel
- This is quite ambitious for such a short jam.
- Kinda hard to figure out.
- Using an ability when low on EE freezes the character, which caused me to die quite a few times before I figured out how to refresh it.
- I like how the boss can be beaten by jumping over his attacks with careful timing. However, you can just buff your health to arbitrarily high value and then just chop at him without a care.
- I didn’t really have the motivation or space to try out all the different spells. Recharging EE is easy, but annoying and there’s only one standard enemy to target anyway.
- For the demo, I think an endless wave of weaker enemies would serve better than the one boss, so that the player could play around with different options and playstyles.
- The graphics are fantastic, but the sounds could use a lot of improvement. This is slightly off-topic, but I’ve found this interview very interesting. tl;dw: Abe’s Exoddus has such a good sound design that a blind guy managed to finish the game through trial and error. Impressive stuff, both from the player and the developers.
- I feel like W would be a better key to jump than space. Maybe it’s just personal preference, but I feel like platformers should default to “up” being jump if the jump is vertical (unlike say the horizontal jump in the first two Oddworld games) and there isn’t any other function that would make more sense for that (such as looking up or activating stuff).
- Soooo cute! Plus when I first launched the game, a small smudge on my monitor happened to be in exactly right place to look like a little mouth. Good developer foresight on that, no idea how you knew =D
- Those gray boxes on the foreground look great! I kinda want to have all kinds of much bigger crap floating in front of the screen now, visibility be damned. Kinda makes me want to play it with a VR headset.
- The horizontal movement speed when jumping increases way too fast for my liking, but then again, maybe that’s intended as a part of the challenge.
- I spent the first half of playing with this game terrified that I’d fall off the map and the second half disappointed that you can’t fall off the map.
- Overall it looks like a good basis for the kind of game that’s a pleasure to watch speeduns of.
- HAHAHAHAHAHA!
- Oh man, this is great. Forget what I said above. This is the game I want to play in VR. So I did.
- I was going to complain about FoV being set too high, but it’s actually perfect for VR. Plus it doesn’t have any pesky interface so it works really well on my setup (which is a V30 phone forcibly insetrted into a GearVR headset, held by rubber bands and supported by Trinus and ReShade on the software side… it’s still a work in progress).
- The mouse sensitivity is way too low though. I increased the headtracking sensitivity so it nudged me to “turn” by turning my head rather than just using a mouse like a chump. So it actually worked out pretty well.
- Screw Jane from accounting. She can organize her own birthday!
- Crouching being instantaneous is very jarring in VR, especially around the filing cabinets.
- homerdisappearinginbushes.jpg.
- Oh yeah, this is officially the first game I ever played in VR start to finish. Yay!
- The work drops so fast, I had to take a screenshot to see what it says (until then I read that as dooooM for some reason). Maybe it would be better if is started slower and accelerated towards the player. It would also make the game a tad easier.
- Since the work to be dodged and coins to collect are random, this is actually more fun than the otherwise more polished Lost Boss.
- More stuff to collect would be nice. Coffee to increase speed is an obvious choice for instance.
- I have a feeling that this game would be a lot more fun played at work. I’ll report back on Tuesday.
- Love the boss sprite. The player character actually looks like a kind of an insufferable dork and I’m not even mad to see him crushed under the work thrown by the boss.
- The black and white pixel theme looks great on screenshots, but is ultimately quite confusing during the game.
- The vegetation background sprites are mostly to blame. Compare them to the minimalist background found in Nanowar.
- Standing too close to a respawning boss can mean an instant death. That’s no fun.
- Speaking of which, there’s no reason to ever go closer to the boss. Actually, you can kill everything just by pressing spacebar, and it doesn’t even have to be that rapid. The skulls in the last boss version are (I think) the only thing that can touch you if you stay back, but they get destroyed by the swords as they spawn and take way too long to get in range even if you don’t try to dodge them.
- Dialogs dismissed by the same keys you’re frantically mashing during gameplay - not ideal.
- I like the little explosion effect when something dies or is hurt, but they kinda break from the rest of the ar direction. I think something more pixely and without shades of gray would ultimately look better.
- This is FUN! I’d say that this game has the most enjoyable gameplay out of the whole jam.
- I like the offbeat music, which helps a bit to alleviate frustration, which is bound to be present in a game like this.
- The music doesn’t loop, though. After a while it’s just silent.
- The bombs should be a different colour from the level exit. Because… uh… no reason.
- What could use a lot of improvement is level design. The levels go way too fast from easy to cruel. The player should be given a smoother learning curve to get used to the control before the game starts trying to outright kill him. The speed boost beams pushing you against bombs are especially petty and hard to get through without being lucky even if you are beginning to understand what you’re doing.
- The levels should be shorter too, and more features would be nice.
- Overal the current version is short enough to make me want more. It’s hard to say how long would this kind of gameplay remain interesting, but I really like it so far.
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Turns out there’s a limit on user mentions in a single post, so I’ll continue here.
- Once again, I couldn’t test multiplayer, but I threw the balls around and tried to dodge them with both players. Then I used a bug that happens if the players meet in the middle to erase both balls from play and called it a win.
- That crying animation is hilarious. And the default smile of the player that’s not Duke Nukem.
- Maybe there should be a keyboard key to start a new round? Reaching for the mouse is a bit unwieldy if the rest of the input is through keyboard.
- Not sure if there’s any connection to the Boss theme, but who am I to judge?
Idle Hero Chronicles by @d954mas
- Oh, an idle game. I shouldn’t have left that for last…
- …but it turns out there isn’t much to see. I killed a couple of wolves and got some gold. Then a wolf killed me and as far as I know didn’t get any gold, which is kinda racist, but whatever.
- I saw a giant crab the other day. Horrible creatures.
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Thanks for the feedbacks, @Klear! It’s very precious, it’s more than I could dream of 
There are bugs that I know and have to be fixed, but as I was very short on time it wasn’t possible, I’m happy I released something at least playable I’ll be working on this further and there is a long way ahead
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Haha, thanks for the feedback! No idea how you managed to play it in VR, very cool! Jane has been fired.
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@sergey.lerg It was actually pretty simple compared to the hoops I have to jump through to get it working on other games. Or maybe I’ve gotten better at jumping through them by now. I’m not sure if I showed you my catastrophically broken phone when we met here in Prague? Well, it decided to die with perfect timing about a month before my birthday, so now I have a phone that’s more than capable of VR =D
I couldn’t get it working in 3D (if I understand it correctly, the shader needs access to Depth Buffer to make it truly 3D), but it was still pretty funny “being” in that office building and pushing tables around.
@Pawel No problem! I need way more practice to be able to take part in a jam like this, but wanted to give something back nontheless.
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Hahaha Awesome review, thanks for the feedback! I hope to have some time to polish it a bit, add some interesting powerups, but most importantly make it more intuitive.
For future reference (maybe should include this text in the beginning of the game):
- The main goal is to stay alive the longest.
- You die if any part of your snake is outside the screen edge.
- Your snake will grow if you eat the purple “walls”, or if you eat other snakes.
- If someone eats you, your remaining tail will turn into rock/wall. This means that you actually want to be eaten by other players to keep your snake as short as possible, since the longer your tail is the harder it is to avoid the screen edges.
Regarding the music, I loved The Neverhood! The music is actually a loop I bought from audiojungle. 
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13 shipped projects is sooooooo goooood for such a short notice.
I am plotting to letsplay all 13 games later this week. Probably will split into 2 episodes, like last time.
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I think the snake also grows from eating itself, since it’s possible to completely fill in the small space in the player selection (which is awesome, forgot to mention that!). You might want to have a look at that.
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Haha, oh yeah, right! It was a bug at first, but I liked it so it was kept!
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First one:
I dunno why the game music/sounds did not work. So I put some creepy background music instead. Tell me if it is annoying! Will cut/ship the next game tomorrow.
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So, I could write about my submission It was totally encouraged by you @Oleg_The_Evangelist - to prepare a demo of the game I’m working on from a while. It’s not completed, it’s not even playable sometimes because of bugs, I know about But I’m proud I prepared something to show for UDGJ#1. It gave my a glimpse of what people would think about a mix of puzzle with a platformer. So, the motivation to show as much features, that I would like to have in my game, as possible was very high
The story behind the creation of this game is hidden behind the story about a young father of twins, who still wants to create a game of dreams in meantime. And thus this “meantime” is very short, the production goes very, very slow. I’m not worried about it, I spend as much time as I can, creating it and it is a fun and didactic time. I learned a lot about game development, design, and Defold is in my opinion the best tool to create games - why? Its community is great and I can feel personally attached to them, feeling like I could ask anything someone who is like a colleague to me - and not a developer, closed in a corporation without a contact with its clients. Defold is simple, yet complex tool, that anyone could dive in by small steps. Simple, because with current go/components system its easy to understand. Complex, because with every day I can learn something new about it and it’s very awesome and more and more professional. For me, it’s the best tool to learn from a beginner to a developer.
But getting back to the game. There were already several iteration of the game and each was refactored or completely new. It is because I’m learning during the development. The presented state was a prototype, where I used separated modules for movement and animation, but yet the attacks and collisions were fuzzy between many related scripts. So, my submission couldn’t be treated as other entries, but anyway the week of the jam was the most fruitful for this project and the whole combat and AI systems were made from scratch.
I would recommend to encapsulate things into reusable generic modules. I do not use collections in Defold, because it’s easy to create, but hard to handle then 
It’s because of different physics world for collections, I didn’t figure out the way to create a collection for each hero GOs that could work in a collection of a level, when it comes to physics and ground collisions. So I use game objects with components or sometimes factories for other game objects that are generic and reusable for both hero and mobs (like attacks).
The focus board is encapsulated completely in GUI. I do like Defold’s GUI system a lot, take a look at the HUD in game - it’s made completely of Defold’s GUI elements, like pie, texts and boxes. Some actions were originally supported by Gooey - a helpful library by @britzl, and still there are remains of this. I do love to use Defold’s asset. They are like an example, a way to solve different problems. For example all the kinematic movement around the tilemap is handled by another Bjorn’s module - Platypus. It applies both to the hero and enemies. Last asset I am using in this project is Rendercam - a modified version with lighting support, just from the forum. It was in the game from the beginning and probaby will stay there, because of how it’s useful 
During that week I tried to implement boss behavior and design a combat that would show basic possibilities of a magic system, Therefore I was implementing on the go, adding functionalities I’ve listed in a to-do list, one by one, just where it was most convenient and easy to add. I’m happy I’ve managed to add 3 types of carriers for each of 4 element - so 12 spells for one jam! 
I had prepared fireball, so it was easy to modify it a little bit to create other projectiles. Each spell is a GO with collision object, light sprite, particlefx and a script to create a behavior and control its components. I used a prepared earlier campfire as a fire trap and then again, modified it a little bit for other elements. The trickiest was the earth’s trap - a ground block. I added there just another collision object that has the same properties as the ground in the tilemap, so enemies couldn’t jump over it, but a hero could 
At the end of the jam I added last kind of spell - buffs - effects that give the hero temporary advantages like damage or defense boost. It was also added on the go. The biggest advantage of Defold was in that time the ease of creation of particlefxs. To polish effect I added in the last days particle fxs for blood splash, dust, xp gain, buffs, and so on. Moreover, I added some basic sounds in the last day and I was surprised, I could add and play sounds with ease in Defold - this basic support was enough to add at least fundamental sound of attacks and steps. Though, I know it’s not polished I got the feedback anyway and will take care of this more in the future
So in this jam I focused on adding content instead of taking care about the clarity of my project It was a rush, but I’m very proud of it, as I discovered many bugs, features and dependencies that need to be solved/overcame/implemented to create a good and captivating game. It was a great kick for my project!
If you reached the end of this story, I appreciate it! Thanks!
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I’ll post a reply in the dev blog to keep this thread on topic.
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I feel useful now! Not @britzl-useful or @sven-useful, but there needs to be a start
Also Pixel Art Witchcrafter game video comes out today in the evening.
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Can’t wait to see it!
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Mkay, so the music is annoying. For the next episode I’ll do something about it. Like… change
Also we’ve just recorded a nice promenade around @britzl brain while he was explaining the structure of his jam game. Dunno yet if it ends up watchable. Probably will have to mix with the actual letsplay or something… Will see next week.
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Wooow 
Thanks for the video, @Oleg_The_Evangelist so much! Seems like you get stuck and couldn’t move at all, but anyway the boss is killed Unfortunately, after you pulled down the Focus board, a problem with controls occurs sometimes, so you are justified and I’m embarrassed! But it’s great to see you enjoying this and trying to figure out “what is going on here”
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