Quicklyer

Skyrim for me, in a way. I hated this game so much at launch since it felt only slightly more interesting than Morrowind from 10 years earlier.

But recently going back and playing vanilla Skyrim (downsampled from 4k to 1080p @ 60fps) has been pretty entertaining visually and otherwise. But I've been in the mood for a silly fun slightly buggy exploration experience, so that probably helped.

Sounds like the highest end users are getting the worst of it, which sucks because you guys certainly paid/put the effort in. Hopefully they'll address that.

It is running decently enough for me on a mid-range PC (i5/gtx760). GeForce Experience settings (combo of medium/high) + a few important-to-me settings cranked way up. I'm getting a 35-40 fps consistently. Pretty close to the FPS I got with Witcher 3 on Ultra with comparable IQ.

Though my expectations might have been dampened since I played Human Revolution on this same PC and got a really really really inconsistent 60fps, where games like Dishonored (released over 1 year later) gave a fluid and stunning 60fps.

Hey the ratings are up! I had a feeling that top 3 would be the top 3 but I was wondering about the order. Congratulations you guys, and to everybody!

@mandude Hahah, well I can understand that feeling. As much as I wanted to get something in shape to submit there were 1 or 2 days where I absolutely refused to even think about working on the game.

@therealtakeshi Jeeze for your first gamejam I have to say that is quite an accomplishment. I was immediately impressed by the UI and visuals. Thanks for sharing the details and the code. I didn't know about PIXI. If I can muster up the courage and discipline to enter Ludum Dare next weekend I might try PIXI, even though it sounds like it didn't fit your needs.

Now that the rating period is over I'll post some of the nerdy-gritty details about my game and what I learned if anyone is interested.

I went completely vanilla JavaScript, not using any 3rd party engines or libraries. Not even using Canvas/SVG which is what you would generally use for browser games. I wrote it like a web app: with div & img tags moving around the page, calculating hitboxes based on the computed styles. I wanted to see how far you could take this non-ideal approach, where performance broke down, and how difficult it might be (and if I would even have a game to turn in by the end).

I ended up with 1,600+ lines of JavaScript. I wouldn't say it was strictly harder doing it this way since I could take advantage of the DOM structure, for example logically organizing the elements on the page let me hide all elements under a parent element with a single line of code -- so for example it was pretty simple switching from 'cutscene mode' to 'gameplay mode.'

But it sure had performance issues, I learned the getComputedStyle() call is actually pretty expensive since it basically requires the browser to reflow all elements on the page for every single call, and even though everything on my page is 'absolute' positioned, the call/reflow was still the largest bottleneck according to the profiler (as I call it many many times per game tick). If I were to do it over again I would definitely have a separate coordinate tracking system rather than pulling element coordinates from getComputedStyle() calls.

Also it was fun, and dumb, and next time maybe I'll do something a little more original with fewer restrictions on the programming.

Some amazing games guys. I've actually got 2 tied for my favorite and still have a few to play.

I've never done itch.io before, how do ratings work? We all submit anonymous ratings and they get tallied up at the end?

edit: Welp, after finishing those last few games I now have 4 tied for my favorite, a bunch of runners up, and just about all of them made me smile and/or laugh out loud.

For the record it's not like I've been crying, nor do I miss you at all. Nope. None of that.

I think the first-is-your-favorite and first-is-the-only-hard-one theories are both true for the majority of people. Especially people new to the series.

My first was Demon's, and after playing Dark I was like "this is even more of the same than I was expecting" (a theme continued in the games to follow), and it took me a long time to realize Dark was as good if not better than Demon's.

But at this point my favorite is whichever I haven't played recently.

Yeah, getting too excited about the word "yes" is probably a little presumptuous. But I certainly would give a random internal organ of Remedy's choosing for Alan Wake 2. The music and tone from the first was so good. If MS hasn't locked down this exclusive yet they are crazy.

The joke categories are always the best. I miss the Northies too.

• Loudest Game?
• Worst DLC?
• Least Gameplay?

Disgaea 5 quickly became one of my favorites in the series. I enjoyed the cast quite a bit, been a long time since I didn't read ahead and skip past most of the voice acting in a Disgaea game. A lot of times I would set it on autoplay so I could listen in while I tinkered around the apartment.

I guess the story did seem a little more toned down and personal compared to some past games, but I think it had a humorous enough of an edge to keep it interesting.

Those streamlined systems too, and allowing x4 battle animation speed was a friggen gamechanger for me.