JAMs News

Hey everyone!

Well I'm back from my trip and got us caught up on new items, and I was thinking of altering the system in such a way that would accommodate sporadic trips (as I have another one coming up in a month or so anyway) so here is what I have come up with as a solution. I'll just leave them in the drop pool for a longer period of time, still cycle them out but if I fall a few days behind it would barely be noticeable to people if there were a lot of different items dropping.

Previously I was cycling them out every 5 days, I think a number as high as 30 days/items would be pretty reasonable to have as a common drop pool, any more than that would take awhile to get the newer items. And since I switched it to season 2 after fixing things and changing the distribution/timing last time, I figured it was a good time to call this season 3. It should be a lot easier for everyone to stay up to date and would give me much better flexibility to work on the actual game itself, it should work out great this way.

And my favorite bit of good news is that Steam has fixed the auto-stack feature for timed drop items!! I had them configured to do so and when I was on my trip they just started auto-stacking on their own and you will probably notice a lot of other games have their items auto-stacking recently now too. If you stack your items manually once now you won't have to do it again, but I'll still try to get item stacking functionality built into the app at some point.

Thanks for playing and lots of stuff coming down the pipeline in the coming months! :)

Hey I'm gone for a week or so on a trip so I might not be able to make a whole new animation every day, I need to focus on the trip so there may be a day or two coming up without a new daily item but it's not the end of the world, I'll be back really soon! The car I imported (which I'm picking up) is already in storage so I just need to get behind the wheel and hit the road.

I've been trying to prepare animations in advance and I'll bring a laptop, I know some of them seem a bit rushed and I can edit them later but they are turning out alright enough. They all just represent the moment in time which they were created. I have 5 or 6 more already made in advance so chances are we are good to go maintaining the 1-a-day thing but there is going to be a week of pure highway driving and short hotel stays, I could even insert placeholder items to distribute and create animations for them later, to maintain 1 new item for every day of our existence still on the odd chance the trip takes longer than expected.

I'll let you know what goes down though! I'll just not maybe be so specific in the news post about the trip itself for now, but an adventure is in the cards really soon! I was thinking maybe I could even convert videos of the scenery into items, it's lame to do that with old trip footage but if I'm right there videoing the mountains live maybe that would make appropriate more animation to fuse into the game for that day. We'll see what I can whip up!

Oh and a lot of other item games have had their pictures broken because they were using free image hosting services, you don't have to worry about JAMs' images breaking since I pay for hosting. If anyone has a game with broken images, you can contact me if you have issues finding an image host!

Lots of exciting things coming down the pipeline soon!

I'll keep you posted on the trip's progress if anything is out of the ordinary!

Cheers JAMs fam!

I made a toggle switch for loading the inventory with a different strategy --- loading one page at a time, it's much faster! You can find the toggle switch on the settings page. I'm getting rid of the resolution toggler for now (since that was only temporary as I figured out how to set up the UI recently) so this new inventory toggle switch will take it's place.

We still might need additional loading modes and some fine tuning, but you now have an option to load the inventory page in at least a faster way now. Memory can still get out of hand as you flip through the pages, but at least when you navigate back they load fast.

Hey!!

I've been tinkering away with building this inventory screen, it was pretty complicated as Unity doesn't support GIFs out of the box, and I wanted it to download the images only for the ones you own, so I don't have to keep patching in the new items every time.

This was a bit of a journey! It downloads them and brings them up from local storage if they are already downloaded, but it will load them all up every time you enter the inventory screen. I had it working where the images were loaded much faster, but the program goes into a 'not responding' state as it thinks too hard and overloads the thread, the way it is set up currently it does them one at a time slowly and just gets it done --- I like it this way since you can still navigate away once it's started to load.

Since we are decoding the gifs and playing them back, the system is basically breaking them apart into individual frames, and since we have tons of frames and if you have lots of items, your RAM usage might get incredibly high during the loading of that screen currently. This situation may not scale well as we keep adding items, so I might even make a toggle switch for different approaches of how the inventory screen loads or behaves, but for people with just a few items it's not a big deal, and when you navigate away from that page, it unloads all the memory so I think it's better that we don't have the images preloaded if it's that nuts on the memory already.

I will make pages with the details and tools of the items and I still need to do the tooltips, but lets just see how this goes so far!

Got a language toggle in settings now which will let you select 1 of 30 languages to have the tooltips presented in your language, and I changed lots of elements to use emojis (depending on tooltip for text) to make JAMs a lot more accessible internationally! I might make the panel titles change one day too, just as text instead of images but I think the tooltips should be good for now.

I also tweaked the FPS / Vsync settings and added an option to go unlimited FPS or however fast or slow you wanted to run the game, and added the option to disable drops entirely if you wanted. This is handy for me as I don't have an inventory piling up as I develop (and I'm sure not everyone wants a thousand hours of drops as they click/idle) so now that is a toggle switch in the UI.

More features coming soon! Starting to get the hang of it!