Jack Ham Zero Debriefing

Considering the fact that this is a game built on the foundation of failed levels from the second game that I ever made, I'd say Jack Ham Zero turned out pretty well.

HOT POTATOES:

Some good, challenging puzzles, a badass soundtrack, & that trademark sense of humor upon which the Potato Clock Games empire is built all conspire to make this game just barely worth playing. I think it's better than Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations, so I guess it's doing what a sequel is supposed to do. ATTABOY!

COLD POTATOES:

I mean, yeah, it's not actually good, but I can hardly hold that against the poor guy. If I'm forcing myself to be critical, though, I think the difficulty ramps up a little too fast, probably because the game started out as Maze of Tribulations "Brutal Mode." The early levels could stand to be a bit less. Brutal, I mean. I don't actually like the action sequences much (space shooter, sword-em-up, minecarts), they mostly just distract from the puzzling. So do things like lives, score, passwords (as opposed to auto-saved progress), limited restarts (because of limited lives), enemies all over the place that kill you if they barely touch you. I think this would have been a better game without all of those things.

CONCLUSION:

Look, people, there's going to be a third game in this series, like or not. I've got a pretty good idea now of what it's going to look like. Most of the problems identified above are easy fixes & that just leaves me to concentrate on the fun stuff: puzzles, jams & Jack Ham lore.

Jack Ham Zero Official Release

Jack Ham Zero: Caverns of the Heart is complete & available for download from the Potato Clock Games website. Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack of the Heart is available as well.

I'll leave you with the game's intro text:

"Mayday, mayday, George Washington here with an urgent message from the past. Electro-gravitational time-space history waves are undulating across the cosmos. There is only one possible source: JACK HAM. Only you can stop him. Benjamin Franklin estimates the wave will crest on December 21, 2012. Franklin is kind of a douche but he just might be right. You must stop Jack Ham before it is too late! George Washington over and out."

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #4 (Complete!)

The soundtrack &, with the exception of a few little details, the game itself, are finally complete. The Mp3 soundtrack will be available for download along with the game, I think that it turned out pretty well. Here's what it includes:

1. Title Theme From Jack Ham Zero
2. The AstroTurf of Destiny
3. Welcome to the Space Ham
4. 40's with George
5. Sesame Street Theme Song (Hooper Spider Mix)
6. In the Caverns of the Heart
7. Music for the Obligatory Minecart Level
8. Battle For Sainthood (Zero Mix)

It's like 20 minutes long. I mean, this soundtrack ain't no masterpiece but it's more than good enough for the game that it's accompanying. So the sounds are mixed & the bugs that I'm aware of are all squashed, just a little bit of housekeeping left. Right on track for that March 1st release.

Elegy for Jack Ham

So back in like 2006, when Nintendo's Wii first came out, my cousin Chrissy Dubs & I were getting wasted on vodka & lemonade at his parent's house & playing through like $200 worth of rented Wii games. One of them was a Madden football game, I don't remember anything about it except that the loading screens offered up bits of football history & player biographies, including that of some guy called Jack Ham. All of the ingredients were there: a sweet name, a powerful vodka buzz, & loading screen induced boredom. By the end of the game we had developed a rich Jack Ham mythology & by the end of the day we had started work on a book of poems entitled 'Elegy for Jack Ham'. So that's how the whole Jack Ham thing started, just in case anyone wants to make a Potato Clock Games expansion for Trivial Pursuit or something.

Anyway, I just came across a copy of 'Elegy for Jack Ham', here are a few of my favorite short ones. Yeah, they're all titled 'Elegy for jack Ham':

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #3

I ended up writing (well, arranging, I guess) two songs for the two boss battles. I'm not worried about bloating the filesize with a couple of MIDI jams & they're both kind of cop outs so don't worry, it didn't put me out anything.

The first boss battle, if I haven't mentioned this, is against Mr. Hooper of "owning the bodega in old school Sesame Street" fame. He owns the liquor store that you rob with George Washington & barfs Mr. Hooper-faced spiders at you. I reworked a MIDI version of the Sesame Street theme song that I found online to accompany this brilliant sequence. I'm happy with the song but the whole fight is still buggy as shit; I haven't really looked into the code yet to see what sort of embarrassing noob mistakes I made but that's probably the biggest non-audio job left to knock out.

For the second & final battle (against Jack Ham, of course) I threw together a MIDI version of the boss battle jam from Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations. It took like two minutes. GOOD ENOUGH. The battle sequence itself is working fine but it's more tedious than fun so I might rework it a little. Note that I'm not super concerned with the climax of the game being more tedious than fun. You must be waiting with bated breath for this one to be released.

After throwing quite a but of shit against the wall, something's finally stuck for the cavern music. It's not quite finished but I'm really happy with it so far. So I'm'a grind through some big fixin', then finish this last jam, & I think that's all there's left to do.

Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations 2015 Update

I've made some minor updates to Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations & uploaded the new definitive version to the Potato Clock Games website. Here's what's changed:

1. Picked some low-hanging fruit to reduce the filesize &, more importantly, loading time. I mean, the load time is still bullshit. I could do a lot more optimization & maybe I will someday, but this feels good enough for now.

2. Pushed through a bunch of little bug fixes, mostly involving the player getting stuck in walls & on George Washingtons due to cruddy collision detection. I didn't fix the cruddy collision detection, Ok, I just hacked out the bugs. Some of them.

3. Most importantly, & the reason I wanted to update the game in the first place, I rebalanced the end of the game. It's easier now, or, I think more accurately, it's less unfairly difficult now. There were occasional impossible-to-avoid fireballs, that kind of thing. The fireballs are a bit slower now & their hit boxes are a bit smaller so if you get hit it's your own damn fault.

Other than that it's the same game. I just wanted to give the fans a fair chance to experience the game in all its glory ahead of the release of Jack Ham Zero, which is very nearly complete! Give me like two weeks.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #2

Gonna kick this one off with a sneak peek of the Jack Ham Zero title screen & this link to download the title theme:

I just finished the minecart level music & put it into the game. The music control structure (which plays/stops the various tracks at the right times) is complete & I'm sound mixin', bug fixin' & filling in the sound effects gaps as I go.

Jack Ham Zero Origins & Futures

I'm not saying that I have any idea of what I'm doing now, but back when I made Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations I really, really had no idea what the fuck I was doing. When I finally finished the game I began working on an overambitious sort of new game plus called 'Brutal Mode.' There were more difficult versions of every level in the game plus a bunch of extra non-puzzle levels; a space shooter level, an obligatory runaway minecart level, and this ridiculous sequence where George Washington gives you a sword & you cut down police officers while he robs a liquor store. They all ended up being unplayable piles of bugs, just festering masses of earwigs crawling over the top of each other. I shelved it all & called the game complete sans Brutal Mode.

But, you know, I can't just let shit go. Plus, I mean, robbing a liquor store with George Washington, come on. So a few years later I put some work into making the levels playable (not GOOD, mind you, but playable) & then built a few more puzzle levels to put in between the new action levels & there you have it, it's most of a game. I let it sit for another couple of years before going back over it and taking care of all the tedious shit that turns a collection of levels into something that feels like a game (title screen, stupid plot, that kind of stuff). Then I got distracted again, that was probably like a year ago. & all of that took way longer than I have any way of justifying but now I'm close enough to finishing, there's just no reason not to.

At one point I had imagined the Jack Ham franchise stretching over 5 full games including a Benjamin Franklin spin-off game called Franklin's Quest: Semiconductor of Doom (I am sweet at titles & schemes, not so much at actually making games). I'm still thinking about rounding it out as a trilogy eventually; the puzzle levels are really fun to make & I have a few Jack Ham plot points that I need to get off my chest. I'm letting that simmer in the back somewhere, for now I just want to laser in & finish up Jack Ham Zero. I've been getting some more work done on the soundtrack, stay tuned for an update.

Jack Ham Zero: Soundtrack Update #1

I've finished up the title theme as well as the new version of '40's with George' & I'm really happy with both of them. The title theme is a goofy mock-metal jam, following in the footsteps of Jack Ham's Maze of Tribulations. '40's with George' is mostly just a new mix of the original version; I also made it a little bit longer & added a beepy interlude before the last chorus.

I threw together a first version of the music for the minecart levels; it's basically just a revoicing of the music for the space levels. The minecart & space levels serve similar functions in the game as weirdo action levels in between the puzzle levels, so it feels right for them to have similar music. Also, I don't want to put a whole lot of work into the minecart music; there are only 2 minecart levels, each about 1 minute long, & they're so stupid that you're actually allowed to skip the second one.

I'm thinking about making the boss jam a midi version of the title theme, which means I only have one song left to actually compose. So far so good.

Jack Ham Zero & The Return of The Zygotes

The next game I'd like to tackle is Jack Ham Zero, the riveting prequel to the second game I ever made. It's pretty much finished except for the soundtrack, & here's where that stands:

1. Title Theme: Written & recorded, just need to nail down the final mix.
2. Untitled Grass Level Jam: Complete! Er, except for the title.
3. Untitled Space Level Jam: Also complete!
4. 40s With George: This was a hidden song in the first game but I want to rework it a little.
5. Untitled Boss Jam: Does not exist yet.
6. Untitled Cave Level Jam: Does not exist yet.
7. Untitled Mine Level Jam: Does not exist yet.

Really hard to say how long this will take, maybe a couple of weeks? I expect to find some bugs & gameplay things I want to change so probably tack another couple of weeks on to that. I'll set the goal of finishing this in one month. But we'll see.

I've also got another project on my plate; Benny Lantz & I have resurrected the Zygote Intrafallopian Transfers video game. This was a project we started a quite a few years ago & was actually the reason I got into game making at all. The idea was to make a minigame for every song on our album, Sex & The Scientific Method. We only ended up making one game (Aliensexist, available at the website) before running out of steam but WE'RE BACK, BABY, making a little Castelvania-like game. I've been working on programming a respectable platforming engine while Benny's been getting his sprite on. Screenshots soon! Probably!