Me And Meta Did Another Game Jam! This Was The MechJamV, For Which We Made A Game About Repairing Mechs

Rah I forgot to post this last week. These are some of my favorite monsters that I had the pleasure of designing for the 2023 Winter Melon Jam. The theme was “charm” and we ran with the idea of making a monster parlor, where your objective is to make these creatures more charming.

Our game “Monster Parlor” was made within 72 hours by me, @puddleorganism , cobyte, and smallbuggames!

(From left to right: Squid, Rug, Hera, and the Vinegar Twins) there are 9 monsters total!

On another note, I’m superrrrr interested in the idea of making speculative biology/species out of some of these guys tbh.

Below there is the link to our game if you’d like to check it out.

https://metaphysicalmonsters.itch.io/monster-parlor

itch.io

Monster Parlor by MetaphysicalMonsters, Small Bug Games, Twelve Pens, CoByte

Make monsters beautiful

Attempted to animate a scene from Crazy Critters Attack in Gartic Phone.

We’ve redone engines to be shader based meshes. Given them much more animation and similar while also optimizing them a fair amount.

event horizon background concepts/style test

Here’s that game I mentioned finishing yesterday!

From its Itch page:

Monster Parlor is a game in which you run a beauty parlor for monsters, where you have the privilege to make them into something a bit more charming! Strike up a conversation, convince them of your ways, and earn some charms of your own.

itch.io

Monster Parlor by MetaphysicalMonsters, Small Bug Games, Twelve Pens, CoByte

Make monsters beautiful

Made in a 72 hour game jam (2023 Winter Melon Jam) by me, @cobyte @smallbuggames and dogoryx!

Bonus fanart for my own game

Hi! I make tiny indie games, mostly jam games. You can find me on itch.io

New update for Monster Parlor! Added a bunch of QoL improvements including particles, transition screens, and a new end sequence!

itch.io

Update!! - Monster Parlor by MetaphysicalMonsters, Small Bug Games, Twelve Pens, CoByte

We added a bunch of quality of life changes to make the game more fun and less annoying! Added particle effects Added day transition screens

scroll for more! ⬇️

Am I loosing because this level is poorly balanced, or am I just bad at this game?

I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".