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A jam submission

Fastidious Ally of LongevityView game page

When a man wants to see his relative, he will be an ally to what must exist for long.
Submitted by Hindbodes — 12 hours, 51 minutes before the deadline
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Fastidious Ally of Longevity's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
End-of-life plan#164.0004.000
Fun#293.3643.364
Jam Authenticity#464.0004.000
Overall#523.3483.348
Theme relevance#653.4553.455
Sound#812.7272.727
Graphics#1202.5452.545

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

End life plan
I hope the world never loses access to this game, even if people wouldn't mind. It is planned to always have a download link for at least two operating systems (Linux on the way), and there's meant to be a web port so people can play online if they want.

Transparency note
On Saturday, July 12th, when I found out that the Stop Killing Games game jam existed and decided to join it, it had already been in its active contest period for a few hours. Because of that, I had no chance to write code for this game in advance, unless I found myself copying and pasting code that I've already written. True to form, I did not copy and paste code that I've already written.

I happen to have a lot of base code that takes care of things like window size changing, pixelation, screenshot saving, and fullscreen mode handy on my hard drives, but I abstained from using it.

Practically all of the code in all of the .lua files that are easily accessible that I used to make this game was written within the designated jam period.

I used a framework called LOVE (or possibly "Love2D"), but aside from that, and looking up some basic function call syntax and basic module functions - such as an essential part of coding like a function that deep copies tables - it's all strictly jam period code.

I could even say I wrote too much code, I spent hours doing what some might call "reinventing the wheel". I went to extreme lengths to make simple things from the ground up like level game state partitions, save file/scene reloading, map reading, and a screenshot hotkey with file name dates. I spent a LOT of time working on what were essentially fundamental basics, and after all that I don't think I want to do it again. On that note, there will be bugs. I recognize that this game is far from perfect. I don't join game jams often and this was an impulse decision. That being said, I really like this game and I hope you will too.

I am likely going to release the source code for this game somewhere soon, and if I do, you can use and distribute the sprites, music, and sound effects as well. With credit. There's also a download for the .love file that contains all the work I did. I should release the source code for this game, because Fastidious Ally of Longevity has modding support. I have never posted code from any of my projects on a repository site before, so that could take a while. Right now I don't fully know how to do it.

People probably wouldn't agree that it's good, but personally I am proud of much of the code that I wrote in these ten days. Though I did feel pressured by time constraints near the end to start kludging big parts of it, especially with coding the cutscene. At least the code in the first four days of development didn't resemble a Rube Goldberg machine. All sprites and audio files were also made during the jam period. Most sound effects were made with an online 8-bit sound creation tool called "jfxr".

Also note that my time zone is about +12 hours from the UK to here. Days of the week that I say will not match days of the week that most people in the world would say.

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Comments

Developer

Ross Scott, I don't know if you're reading this, or if you ever will look at this game, but, hi, this game was developed with a faulty timestep for the entirety of the jam period, and runs inconsistently in the original version across multiple computers... It's much like the problem you had in the Game Dungeon episode of Revenant, part 1 at 12:59. Or the Game Dungeon Test Drive 3 review. I know how to solve these when I develop a game but with FAOL, this time, I forgot something and messed it up. A patch was developed a couple of weeks later that faithfully edits the game to fix just those timestep issues, so it runs at the right speed, and basically nothing else. If you ever look at this, I just want you to please keep that in mind.

Developer

I finished the fixed computationally-consistent version.  🤕

Submitted

Cool game, I'm sorry it didn't turn out how you like it, but it's still an impressive game :D

Submitted

Hey ! 

I love this game bro , great idea! keep up...

I will be also happy if you rate my game  : /jam/stop-killing-games-game-jam/rate/3724252

Submitted

Very fun to play, so don't worry about the delta time issues!

Submitted

Interesting submission, both in terms of the story and design. Nonetheless - It was fun to play.

Submitted

Interesting game! It reminds me a bit of the older oddworld games in the best way. Nice work!

Developer(+1)

Hey guys. Sorry to be a downer, and also sorry for causing this, but I have some very bad news about this game, for the jam version at the very least. I screwed it up.

We all know that to function, a game like this one needs a time step. I know this to be the case too, but when I took the time to add this game's time step in, I made a terrible mistake. And throughout these ten days I've been unlucky enough to miss my one solid chance to have another person run the game and test it on their own computer, which I think could have saved it.

My code for the physics update loop is very standard, except for one issue. I accidentally put a fixed 1/120 floating point value in a place that was supposed to have delta time.

After some tests, I have basically confirmed that this game will currently run differently on different computers, with anything from the speed of Podote and enemies to the scrolling of text on those electronic message boards, even though the jump height appears to remain the same. So in the future, the jam version won't run the same, and it arguably doesn't run consistently/properly on a lot of computers even now. I've also confirmed that if I were to fix the time step, I would also have to carefully edit a bunch of other values to make the rest of the game go back to how it was but consistent this time.

I feel a lot of things, but the three that come to mind are that I'm disappointed, extremely upset, and embarrassed. That mistake in the code has - in my view - cost me the entire project. I wish I caught it, I really really wish I caught that before day 4 started. I can't even release a "patch" for it right now, because I just found out today as well that I didn't even write my modding support properly.

I hate to say it, but the jam version of Fastidious Ally of Longevity sucks. And this makes me extra sad now, because today was the first time I've ever had an unfamiliar person's or persons' praise for a game I've created. I'm just crushed.

Submitted

It's okay! There will be plenty more jams in the future and I'll be here if you choose to continue this project :D

Submitted

player move very fast 

but goof game:)

Submitted

I spent a good bit of time playing this. It was the collectables lol. I enjoyed it a lot. 

Submitted

Cool game

Submitted(+1)

Just got to level 5 on your game. Pretty wacky game and I don't mean that in a bad way. I really like the atmosphere of this game. The scrolling text, the kind of social commentary. It's touching on things deeply and at surface level. My only advice is that level 5 is too hard for me. Just couldn't get past it. Great game! Also, if you have the time, let me know what you think of my game!