Game jam, the discovery of itch.io and some game info

Filip Walczak
Sep 27, 2020
3 min read

Game Jam

I heard about this site called itch.io many times already. From youtubers, to collegues. Somehow I didn't have a good opportunity to visit it until recently, when a Game Maker's Toolkit game jam was announced (ok, I know it was like 2/3 months ago, leave me alone) and I took part in it! As you can see, the game was a huge success, and a lack of posts on the blog was due to the enormous amount of job offers I got...

Nope, its not true, the game could have been better, but after all it was only 48 hours, it was our first game jam (thanks to Adrian, Kasia and Karo, love ya ❤) and the most important part was that we had a ton of fun and experienced something new! ...The next one will be better ;)

Builds on itch.io

Apart from the game jam stuff, I discovered that itch.io is a great place to create a site for your game and upload the game's builds. Although I didn't spend too much making the game's site look good yet, the newest builds will appear there from now on. Bye google drive!

When we get to the programming stuff, I'll show you my way of using butler - itch.io command-line tool - to upload builds to itch.io straight from the Unity Editor.

New game look

At last I've got rid of the awful "Fast Loot RPG" name. The game is about a knight which hoards loot - how would you name it better?

Looking cool, right? A few UI tweaks and a bit of post-processing improved the game's look by a lot. And by a lot I mean a lot. Just look at this and then go back to the previous posts to compare.

Also I made a very cool 2D fog using shadergraph, based on this video. It adds some mysterious, dungeon-like vibe to the levels.

NPC's

There's an npc which can increase your health or damage.

And one which will buy your items with pleasure.

In order to implement them I had to do some major changes in the code, but atleast the player now can sell his items and spend the gold on improvements.

Sounds & Music

Besides the game dev and overall programming stuff I also like to play with music and sounds. In high school I was even uploading my music to soundcloud, until I lost interest in it for a while. I always loved listening to variety of music and making my own was a lot of fun, but I just couldn't push myself to improve enough, so I could find my "style" and be happy with it. Almost everything I produced sounded like I had to force myself to make it, and even when I really loved a part of a particular song, the rest ended up sounding... just meh and it was frustrating.

Recently, when I was bored coding the game systems I had an urge to give myself a break and do something else, which could still improve the game. I try my best to make everything I can on my own - except graphics, because this is my biggest weakness and I just end up taking some free packs from the web - so I thought about making some SFX to the game.

Afterall I managed to make a main menu theme and some sounds. Every sound an enemy makes is some sort of "blrhg", "bleeh" I did with my mouth and then edited. The player's walking sound is me scratchin my nails on the mouse pad. You can hear them in the newest build ;)

Butler "automation"

I was tired of manually opening the cmd and typing in "butler push..." everytime I wanted to upload a new build, so I made this little script which allows me to do it from the Unity Editor

[MenuItem("Build Options/Upload to Itch.io")]
private static void PushBuildWithButler() {
    Process process = Process.Start(@"C:\Program Files (x86)\butler-windows-amd64\butler.exe",
        "push \"pathToZippedGameFolder\" itchioNickname/example-game:windows");
    process?.WaitForExit();
}