itch.io

Brand new today, Gold Brick Simulator is my first independent commercial game.

It’s just a simple incremental game, but I’ve put a fair bit of effort into this in a way that I think will be familiar to a lot of other developers. Rather than adding a lot of material, I’ve tried to really refine what’s there. It’s got an options menu where you can tweak the sound and graphics to your liking, and quite a set of achievements to discover.

When it comes to selling this game, I’m doing two things that I think are a little outside the box. One is that (in keeping with the theme) there are only a finite number of copies available for purchase: sales are limited to 1,000,000. The other is that for the entirety of April 2025, I’ve got my revenue sharing settings 100% in favour of itch. That is, if anybody fancies dropping $2.99 on this before the end of the month, it’ll go to the site rather than to me. I’ve posted rather a lot of free stuff here over the years, and I’d like to do something to say thanks for hosting all that before I switch back to a more reasonable split.

If you don’t fancy dropping $2.99 on this then that’s okay too. There’s an in-browser demo available over on the game page, you just won’t be able to submit high scores to the leaderboard (among other limitations).

Have you tried the downloadable version? It should be considerably more reliable. (I should possibly retire the browser one as a stopgap measure, but it’s always handy to have something that’ll run without downloading/installing.)

Wow, you sure have been following a lot of people’s work. 🙄 I’d be fine with you simply leaving an honest copy-paste message about your event, you know. It’s the disingenuous attempt to convince me you’ve taken an interest in my games specifically that guarantees I’ll never have anything to do with it.

Decided to get hold of Asset Forge at half price to take a gamble on this. (Thanks for running that birthday discount, Kenney!) It turns out that although .glb doesn’t appear among the list of model export options within Asset Forge, choosing to export as GLTF actually produced a .glb model that works very nicely in GDevelop:

My initial test models are pretty basic, but getting them into GDevelop was absolutely trivial, which is exactly what I was hoping for. I’ll most likely upgrade to the deluxe version of Asset Forge to chip in a bit more money for this. I’m not 100% sure how much 3D stuff I’ll be doing but the software is fantastic to use so far.

This is fantastic. “Redemption” is typoed as “redeption” on the map, though (if I’m remembering correctly).

ɪ’ᴍ ɪɴ.

This is really neat! I thought I’d done pretty well to beat the dragon (with a score of 196) but looking at the screenshots here I see the real challenge is to 100% the thing. Nice to have an extra goal to aim for!

This is fun - and reminds me a bit of Switch and Shoot - but I find the ship moves to a new screen way earlier than I’d like. I’ll be waiting to line up a shot with an asteroid and then boop, a wing just barely grazed the screen edge so now I’m somewhere new. The comparatively slow shot speed is a bit of a factor as well: it’s a little frustrating to enter a new screen facing the wrong direction, wait for a shot to line up, then drift elsewhere before it actually has a chance to connect. Still, it’s hugely impressive for just two hours!

I like this: it’s always good to have a short short game, and the minimalist text is very effective. It makes the abstract choices powerful in a way that I don’t think more words could manage.

Thanks for streaming the game! I’m glad you liked the opening: this was made for the Interactive Fiction Competition 2024 specifically, so I was aiming to use RPG Maker for the kind of choice-based gameplay you might normally expect in a Twine game or visual novel.

I’m not super familiar with RPG Maker - I think this was only my third complete game with it - but I actually found it pretty good for setting up those little scenes. The autosaving was the only thing I really had to write any code for: not much, just enough for it to happen entirely in the background. There are a fair few branches later on, and each save goes in a fresh slot so you can revisit any chunk you like.

Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask, but can Asset Forge export .glb (as opposed to .glTF)? I see the website says it can export “various 3D formats including OBJ, FBX, DAE (Collada), STL and glTF” which suggests there may be others not mentioned in that brief list. I’m hoping to use the models in GDevelop, and the documentation specifically calls attention to the need for .glb models with textures included.

Truly this is the Citizen Kane of interactive fiction pieces based on Boeing 737 safety manuals.

I think this would benefit from having the “enable scrollbars” option ticked: I’m finding some of the text gets cut off unless I switch to fullscreen (and I’m reluctant to push on at the moment in case I hit a passage that runs off screen even then). Good stuff so far, though!

Ah, thanks! I’ve managed to try that out now. I love the sound effect!

This feels really ambitious - I love the look of it - but the in-game text lets it down quite a bit. Partly that’s a lack of editing (spelling and apostrophes are a problem, and it just generally doesn’t get across what you’re supposed to be doing very well) but the main bugbear for me was that the font was incredibly hard to read. It feels mean to highlight that as a problem because it looks “glitchy” in a way that suggests the issues aren’t down to a deliberate design choice, but there’s a lot of text here and every page of it is a challenge to get through. That’s a shame because I also thought the evil robot overlord perspective was pretty funny.

Game-wise everything seems to work well but I was totally lost by the part-gathering minigame: it took me a while to figure out what the cards did, and even then I couldn’t tell if the numbers on each item were a price I had to cover or score I would get, or how they’d add up given that I was matching/harvesting entire groups of them at a time.

Still, this is a pretty phenomenal project for a game jam! I hope this doesn’t come across too negative - you said in the Discord that you wanted feedback more than anything so I figured I’d try to be thorough.

At the risk of causing you to crumble into dust, I’m only aware of it through a PS2 compilation of Midway arcade games. I’d love to play it on an actual cabinet someday, though!

The multiplayer is done! If you’re looking at the comment below that says “multiplayer would make it more fun,” I think they just mean that they didn’t have anybody to play with at the time. Single-player is quite a bit more reliable, though: I seriously underestimated the performance hit caused by synchronising all those robots between players.

Never thought I’d see a Joust-inspired game! I don’t think I’ve ever come across one before. The coin-collecting is a nice addition, though I found it seemed to reward simply avoiding the competition when playing two-player, though with more people I imagine it might become too hard to steer clear and then you just want the height advantage. A decent take on the “Fix It!” theme as well.

The graphics are amazing. They strike me as equal parts Bitsy, Inselkampf, and Persona. With just two players the map seems way too big - at the very least I wanted a steadier supply of trees so I could upgrade machines rather than just wander - but at the same time it was nice not immediately stepping on each other’s toes. I’m not positive this really fits the “Fix It!” theme since nothing seemed broken to begin with, but I figure it’s close enough.

Really glad to have been able to play around in this at least. Sure it’s not a finished game, but I’m super impressed by the overall look of the thing. The grainy camera and the breathing in the background are very atmospheric, as are the monsters. Genuinely creepy even as a tech demo!

I only played single-player so may not quite have got the full experience, but it was fun regardless. I was a little lost as to what affected the launch speed of my cube: just a little instruction would have been nice there. I also didn’t feel as though it was a particularly strong match for the theme, though I see how it’s relevant. A solid entry all round!

Short and sweet! I really would have liked to see more to this, but what’s there feels pretty polished. I played on my own, but given how short it is I’m not really sure what multiplayer would have added. Still nice to have the option, though!

This reminds me ever so slightly of the original Worms even though the gameplay’s completely different. I think it’s the pixel graphics and the colour scheme. In any case, it’s a fun little game! It seems pretty close to one of the templates, but I really like the way the level disintegrates. Playing on my own (which is always a nice option, though I can see how this would work in multiplayer), I actually found that constructing my way upwards made for a winning strategy so that element of the game seems to have a pretty significant effect. I don’t feel as though this exactly nails the “Fix It!” theme but it’s definitely relevant. Nice work!

Thanks!

This looks like a solid take on the jam theme, though I wasn’t able to actually fix any pipes myself (but could finish the levels regardless). Admittedly I was playing on my own. If you need two players on a pipe to fix it then that would make sense, but I feel as though I’m having to take a guess as to how to play this.

That’s hardly the worst problem to have, though: it strikes me as the sort of thing that may have more to do with how the game is explained than how it actually works. I see you say “you need two to play” so it’s probably on me for jumping into the game regardless, but it would be more helpful to know why you need two. Setting a minimum number of players to start a game might also help here, though for the jam it’s probably handy to be able to let one person at least have a go on their own. I’m certainly glad I could try it out.

In any case, you’re ten years old and you made an online multiplayer game? That’s really impressive! I hope you stick with it.

This is fun! I like that one player can focus on holding off pirates while another fixes the ship (or potentially a couple of people focus on different decks, since the enemies always start at the top). I didn’t get far enough through to be sure there aren’t other enemy types, but I would have liked to see a bit more variety earlier at least (though that might be a big ask for a jam game). The controls are pretty intuitive, though I wouldn’t have minded an in-game “J/Z to hammer!” hint. I got through my first round without ever quite working that out. (Getting interrupted by enemies makes it harder to pick up than it might be otherwise.)

I’m really glad you picked that up! I found that myself while testing but struggled to get the concept across concisely on the “how to play” screen.

This is really neat! I like the synergies between some of the vehicles - that you can follow a miner with a hauler, or a digger with pretty much anything else. It would be neat to play with a bigger group: it seems hard to justify running around as a scout with two people, but could be really handy to avoid a bigger group all wandering in search of resources.

I feel as though the biggest thing I’d like to see is more of an obstacle to harvesting the resources - maybe enemies running around or something - but that’s a big ask for a jam game. The only other thing would be a little “beep-boop” when chat messages come in (but having in-game chat in the first place is hugely impressive!).

Ah - it’s actually in the zip file I uploaded to itch.io (which is the same zip I submitted to IFComp) but itch doesn’t offer a handy method of downloading that.

There should hopefully be Linux, Windows, and Mac versions available now. I’m fairly sure that Windows and Linux will be consistent with what was submitted to IFComp - Mac might be a slightly older version since it was the lowest priority.

Have you tried hitting Escape while not in fullscreen? Sorry for all the questions - just trying to work out if this is a problem with the game itself or a problem with how it sits on the itch page. I’m almost positive I’ve backed out of the “special” menu myself when no moves are available, but it’s hard to confirm that’ll work nicely on every browser and every device.

Thanks for playing - and for the heads-up! Is there any chance you could let me know if hitting the Escape key gets you out of that situation? I recall at least one person getting stuck on settings that way, though if it completely locks up your machine and won’t even let you switch tabs then I imagine this may be a different issue.

Thanks! I considered background music (which ended up on the title screen instead) but found that the range of game noises competed with it quite a bit, so ended up going with a sort of background clock tick instead.

Rot13 because I can't work out how to add a details tag of my own: Ab. Gur whzcfpnerf pbzr jvgu gur ubhfr.

How did you do that, by the way? I've managed it on a game page before but the option to type in HTML doesn't appear in these comment text boxes.

I like the abundance of GDevelop jams. The timing doesn't always work out for me so knowing there's bound to be another one right around the corner really takes the pressure off.

I'm using Firefox in Ubuntu. Your screenshot looks like it's from a phone so maybe it's different depending on the browser/device? If anybody else runs into the same issue then that may make it easier to pin down.

Ah, sweet! That does feel a bit more forgiving (or possibly I just got better at anticipating where things would bounce since my first playthrough). I went from "bruised banana" to "banana boss!"

It's a great effort for two weeks - I hope it does well in the jam!