TinderBox - Indie Arcade

The game jam is over, and after a short break we're back to work! Here's a preview of the new TinderBox menu I'm working on:

Meanwhile, Jack is working on this for the top of the cabinet:

The game jam went great - it was really fun playing games, meeting people and getting some real-life TinderBox experience. For the most part everything went really smoothly (I hope), but one or two games were down to the wire (as is the nature of game jams) and didn't quite end up working on the arcade. I think mostly that was due to not enough on-machine testing. Using Linux has been a little tricky because most people don't have access to a Linux box and have to blindly trust their builds. (Coincidentally, experimental Unity for Linux just got released so maybe that will move some people in that direction.) We will also need to upgrade our hardware soon so nobody has to scale back. But for the most part everything worked really well - thanks everyone!

You can still see everyone's games here (plus a few existing games that were adapted during the jam).

I also want to thank people for using this website! Being able to manage builds and info through ProgFrog was really helpful and gave me some important feedback on the site. The long-term goal is to host a community of makers and a crowd-funding platform here. If you're interested or have any feedback, please follow the ProgFrog blog and I'll post there as I make progress. Feel free to keep updating/adding projects here and I'll try and give you useful feedback.

And finally, Ground Kontrol has invited us to show the TinderBox at PAX Prime this weekend! This is super exciting for obvious reasons. We're trying to polish everything up a bit and hopefully get a few more fun indie games on the box really quickly. If you want to make some game updates, let me know (soon) and I'll test them out!

Hey Summer Slow Jams 3 friends, we have confirmed for Lucky Lab on NW Quimby tomorrow (Wednesday) from 5-9pm. We'll be there with the TinderBox, come down and test your games before TechFest NW, or if you are not a jammer come down and marvel as professional game magicians create games before your very eyes! The Facebook event is here, I don't have any friends on there so hopefully everyone finds out about it. I made some pretty wild promises on the Slack chat about how there will be live kangaroos and that I'd give everyone who comes a billion dollars. But will I? You'll have to come to find out!

Last night Jack stained the shelf - I haven't seen it yet but in the picture it's looking 150% more proper:

We're packing up at Centrl and I am officially psyched about everyone's games - I feel like the jam is going really well and every game has been super fun to try out. We finally have the launcher working well - you can upload games and edit info in ProgFrog, and in the menu you just press a button to download or update. Ghostly Garden, WAP and 3720 all fit really well in an arcade setting so we played those a bunch in between bug fixes. I got to try early builds of Tank N Spank and Wrecking Brawl which are looking awesome and fit the theme of Aggro-Party well, and I think there are a few more to come too.

It sounds like we're tentatively going to do another in-person meetup at Lucky Lab on Wednesday so everyone can test on the machine before TechFest, but we'll let you know when there's more info!

In the uploader you can now enter a game description and credits, so please do that when you get a chance so there's info for people at TechFest!

Hey everyone, we're at Centrl Office now! I'm still working on the game launcher but I am available whenever you want to test your game on the arcade, just come talk to me. There's now a game upload interface on this site. To use it, create a project for your game if you haven't already and in the project settings add the tag "arcadejam". After it saves there should be a TinderBox Uploader panel in your settings which is hopefully self-explanatory, but if you have trouble let me know. If you're in Unity, when you build your games for Linux make sure you set your resolution dialog to "disabled" in player settings.

Everyone's games will show up here if you want to check on progress.

PS: We got Samurai Gunn working on the arcade so we will probably be playing some of that in a bit!

For all you sticklers who expect things to happen because they are written down:

Here is the PDF version of that Handout

Also, hey, join us on twitter (if you are that kind of person) and revel in all of our collective impending picture-taking and shameless(ful?) cyclical self-promotion @FnTS_Games

It's so hot outside that our graphics card is overheating! Just kidding, it was actually overheating because there was a sticker on the GPU and the fan blades were stuck. Just one of the many problems we ran into/caused in the hours before the kickoff last night.

Thanks everyone who showed up at the Bye & Bye last night and indulged our attempt to be dramatic. The highlight for me was Yori getting Super Splataclysm running for the system in like 30 minutes:

So, the reason (besides info updates) that we are making everyone sign up for this site is because during the in-person jam at Centrl Office this weekend we want to have an interface for you to upload builds and have the system download/install them automatically. That's what I'm going to be game-jamming on in the next few days.

My current thinking is that if you create a project for your game on this site and tag it with "arcadejam" then I'll make the website detect that and give you some extra settings where you can upload your builds. That way you can also see what everyone is working on by browsing for that tag.

Other relevant news:

1. This project's About page has important links/info/dates and we'll keep that updated.
2. Please sign up for this weekend's in-person work session at Eventbrite!
3. We added some important info to the API on GitHub - please re-read the page! In particular, the "Start" buttons on there were a mistake from a previous version and don't actually exist - maybe button 5 (the white one) would be good for that. There's also a picture showing which button/player is which.

Arcade Jam Pro Tip: If you're making a 4-player game, you could avoid making a character select screen by color-coding the characters as red, yellow, green and blue and then assigning that character to the joystick with that color.

Yeah! Pretty excited to see what everyone is working on.

_{(PS - I made a few new users follow this project because I realized we forgot to tell anyone to do that yesterday. :( I'm sorry if that is annoying. If you don't want any more emails just unfollow the project or yell at me and I'll do it for you.)}

Hey all, I'm posting this from the Summer Jams kickoff. :) Here's a link to our API on GitHub. Hopefully this will make integration pretty clear and easy (especially if you're in Unity), but if you have questions feel free to ask. Please remember this is all a work in progress and we're going to be game-jamming on this stuff this week to make everything more seamless.

https://github.com/lifeformed/TinderBox

Once we have the interface ready for you to upload your games, we'll let you know here and on Facebook.