Game
JICE

1 year ago

DEMO is GONE (for now)


Some of you may have noticed that I deleted the demo from JICE’s public pages! The reason is simple - this demo was mostly a representation of the game’s idea as it was thought of in 2019. Since then, I have received a lot of feedback on how it can be improved and got a clearer understanding of what I want the game to be - gameplay- and style-wise.

A lot of other things have changed too. Team that started working on the idea of this game stopped existing - everyone moved on with their lives and don’t really have time for any gamedev side projects. Everyone - except me. I’m a kind of jack-of-all-trades, with my main specialty being game design, but having dipped my toes into a lot of other spheres, I feel pretty confident in my ability to finish this game and (hopefully) make it fun.

Coincidentally, last year I got layed off from my industry gamedev job, after which I spent some time looking for another one, while getting the feeling of sinking into a big endless pit of slimy black despair as I was going through the countless mindless job interviews that I hated more than everything else. And then I realized that I actually CAN spend some time without a stable income to dedicate my full attention to this one project that I was slowly chipping away at on the side. And so far, I don’t regret this decision. Even if JICE turns out to be a total flop, I would still have something that I created from start to finish and am proud of.

So, this brings me to the main point of this post - demo. As updating the playable demo was taking some time away from working on the full game, I decided to get rid of it for now. But this is a temporary decision - and a new bigger, better demo will be out soon enough (no concrete dates yet :P). I am still posting development updates tho, so stay tuned!

Joined Intergalactic Carbohydrate Establishment signing out.

Game Dev
9


2 comments

Loading...

Next up

Starting another level grey box. This part is a long conveyor passageway that sends goods from spaceport to other parts of the station.

Testing greyboxed level by running around and jumping on jellies.

Some more greyboxing. This part is a multi-level room where you need to carefully plan your steps or risk falling down and having to restart your progress.

New voice lines for robot toasters. More weird, more squeaky, more lore-accurate.

Started writing lines for future NPCs. One of them is a robot that likes to say inspirational quotes and take the factory job seriously. The other character is a merge of a robot and a candy planet inhabitant, which causes internal clash in personalities.

Some variations to greyboxing: started with laying down a path that a general player would follow (orange spline), then set some interactive elements (jellys) along the path, and finally - set up some obstructions.

Added energized walls and some placeholders for obstacles, so here is some more sliding around.

This week - snowballing code problems, so not much to show. Started with having to update world origin, but that meant custom logic for loading levels. Which led to player sometimes spawning outside of playable area..

Spacious arena-like room to introduce a new mechanic and give a mini objective. There will be a moving gate-mouth at the end of a conveyor that will need to be fed

Greybox continues. This is a part of the depot level that is less about processing goods and more about multi level office space.