The FIRST Demo Disc for the 32BitJam Community is now live!
Happy New Year!
The 32BitJam Demo Disc was something people in the community had been asking for since early 2024. The conversation started way back in March of this year. It started out with DotPlus and I bouncing ideas off each other and we put together a thread in discord. A few more people joined that thread and gave some ideas and shared some cool demo discs from the past. All really good inspo. A few musicians on the discord offered to help with SFX and music. During this time I was getting ready for the summer games jam, so I couldn't work on the demo disc yet.
Fast forward to October and I started to build out some shader graphs for the background:
I pushed this stuff to github around this time too.https://github.com/DevEarley/32BitJamDemoDisc
"This version is super basic - but it works! Now I need to add more animations and SFX. If anyone wants to help with the logo or UI or anything - please let me know. I am happy to do it all myself, but I don't necessarily want to 
" - me on discord 10/4/24
A few weeks after that I was able to get a prototype looking good and posted this video to YT:
At this point I was satisfied and I had some other projects I needed to switch to. So from October to end of December, I didn't touch the project that much. Around Thanksgiving I posted this:
"Struggling with this decision... Do I make the Demo Disc a proper launcher or not. I think I already know the answer. No, I do not want to make it a launcher. Right now the app simply opens a web link to the itch.io page. I could write an app and embed unity into the app. This app could in theory do anything on your machine, including downloading, unzipping and launching software. So - I have made that app before and it was very specific for a client, closed source code written in c++. I won't be gaining any kind of experience doing so on this app. For me that is a huge driver for what I do. I want to be learning as I work on this stuff. Not getting paid after all The other issue is platform - I don't really want to exclude macos and linux users. If I made it a launcher, it would be windows only. Issue here isn't cross-platform targeting or anything technical like that. Simply we only have webgl and windows games submitted to the jams. A macos /linux version would only have a couple titles if any. For those reasons and probably more, I want to keep the Demo Disc working as it is right now. Currently, it launches the itch.io page, mutes the BG music, pauses itself and (WIP) minimizes itself."
A few days ago, with the deadline coming up, I decided to get my butt into gear and finish this project. I started by scraping the submissions page for all the data I wanted to put into the app. Then I fixed up the features I had, added some more audio and added a credits screen. I pushed an update on New Year's Eve so Rookrules could play it on stream. I wasn't able to join his stream but I did watch the VOD. It seems like he struggled with the fullscreen nature of the app. I switched to windowed mode now, so that shouldn't be a problem any more.
Today I really wanted to add some nice polish and make the games launch an informational panel in the app before sending the user to the itchio page for the game. So I created this cool - 90s inspired frame for the game-info panel and sliced it up into a 9-slice sprite inside of unity.
Once it was in unity and sliced up, I animated it to pop open with a bit of a glitchy effect. It all feels snappy enough and the SFX from astrodesert ties it all together.
In this latest update:
Added a new SKIP button to startup sequence
Added Quit button
Added Mr Union 's title track
Added "Back to Main Menu" button
Added more 2 more games
I anticipate another update in the near future once I get some more music tracks for the game info screen and the credits screen.
Cheers!
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