Usk Productions Blog

CENSORED: Now available!

Posted by Usk Productions on .

I took part in NSFW MiniJam! It was a week-long jam with the theme "forbidden". Coincidentally, this theme fit for an idea I came up with back in -- a game where you have a job censoring live TV broadcasts. I had originally back-burnered it at the time, because it seemed like it would require way too much art. But it was perfect for the theme, so I had to do it.

The whole thing came together surprisingly smoothly. I thought the hardest part would be writing code to detect whether you had successfully censored everything innapropriate, but I managed to accomplish that on the first night. By night two, I had code for drawing, moving, and deleting censor bars on screen. Then it was a matter of writing a little cutscene system, drawing a few characters, and adding all the extraneous stuff like the title screen. All in all, it was a pleasure to work on.

The game jam build of CENSORED is available now on my itch.io page. It has about 15 minutes of gameplay.

The rating period for the jam is still going. I really hope people like the game. I'm still in the process of trying out all the other entries; it's always kind of intimidating to do so.

The game jam version of CENSORED is certainly not going to be the final version. I have been hard at work on quality of life stuff, and plan to drop an update as soon as the rating period ends. So far, this update includes:

  • Better text flow on subtitles, with an algorithm to try to balance the two lines of text in each caption.
  • Much better web-player performance by moving the censorship detection code into the main thread instead of trying to multi-thread it.
  • Framerate-independant score calculation.
  • Dynamic camera movement, incuding pans, zooms, and random wobble.
  • Character wobbling, walk bouncing, and more eye movement.
  • Reduced difficulty to account for the increased motion.

I don't know if the update will have any new content. I would like to add some, but the next Strawberry Jam is starting soon and I might not have the time and energy.