I don’t remember when I started writing this, but it has been at least a year, and it’s clear I will not finish it. That said, I do want a record of its existence here, so I’m publishing it now.
To describe it in one word, ambitious. An asynchronous web-based multi-user dungeon, that looks and feels like a terminal. Everyone starts in nullspace with 1 health. Kill players and take their souls to power up the other Realms to access them.
The original welcome message on Realms
As you can see, things were running perfectly well with no errors what-so-ever. Items were implemented, characters could see actions of others using a jury-rigged event system, and there was even a dummy that could be used to create souls!
Probably my biggest achievement was in flexibility I managed. That, or the fact that I put in a way to send me messages with the report command.
As with many of my game jam entries, I was overly ambitious and failed to deliver something complete. That said, I think it was at least an enjoyable experience to briefly search around in this pseudo-terminal.
(This post has been imported from an old blog of mine.)
The One Hour Game Jam is a weekly game jam, of one hour. I participated in #64 long time ago (though I did not get anywhere), and more recently, #152. The submission period is for the entire week, so if you can’t make the official hour, you can still participate. There’s also a Discord server for it, and weekly livestreams during the official hour and playing the games after.
Breakable Objects (#152)
Long story short, this one was a big success for me. I took about 2 hours to make the game* and a couple hours over the next couple days polishing it and adding quality of life features. I made a simple asteroid-dodging game, Asteroid Dodge. Newtonian physics, the number of asteroids increases every second, and your score is based on how quickly you travel between randomly created waypoints. Everything is circles and lines, inspired by a realistic air traffic control project I had just started (see Endless ATC, a game similar to what I’m aiming for).
My biggest success and failure was the same thing: Deciding to make a version-checking library during a game jam. I knew very quickly that I was going to be rapidly iterating on the idea (even once published), and I wanted to be able to notify players. I’d done this for SCP Clicker some time ago, but that was hardcoded for it only, and I needed something for any game project going forward. It was a success because I made something I’m happy with, a failure because it took too much time away from the game itself.
I’m very glad to have managed to get my game shown on the livestream, even though it required making them wait and was the last thing shown (whoops!). I was able to watch people have their first impression and read comments from stream viewers, and thus noticed bugs and improvements to be made. Also, the original score was based on velocity alone, which made it feel like there was no goal. What I had when the jam was over was pretty crap, but I also knew exactly what to do to make it a finished (albeit small) game.
Walls (#153)
Or, as is relevant to here: Ambition Destruction. I spent the first 20 minutes thinking of an idea, ultimately deciding to make a clicker/incremental-type game about being contracted to build Trump’s “great wall”. After struggling through some GUI code and realizing I needed to make a vector map of the southern border of the US for what I was imagining, wasting another 20 minutes, I realized this idea was waaay too ambitious for the timeframe and my knowledge, and did something simpler: click to place bricks on a wall. After working on the graphics of building a brick wall for the last 20 minutes, I realized even this was too ambitious, as it required me to code something I hadn’t done before, and figure out how to do incremental upgrades (something I’ve only done very limited experimentation with so far).
Ultimately, I never submitted anything for this jam. A couple days after those two failures, I had another idea based on the player being a firewall, that slowly morphed into the player running an ISP, building out a network (how does this relate to the theme? well eventually you’d put in firewalls when there was too much traffic). I still want to finish that idea someday, but even after working on the plans for a while without coding it, I realized that I would again need to code some things I am unfamiliar with, and I believe it too ambitious to work on right now.
Lessons Learned
Some of these became much more apparent the second time around, but all of these are relevant to both weeks:
Use libraries that are simple, or that you have used recently. The second week, I struggled a lot using Pop.Box, an alpha-stage GUI library. I hadn’t worked with it in a very long time, so I ended up spending way too much time looking into the code or documentation to remember how to use it. If I had been using it more recently (or, let’s be honest here, if it was a better library), I wouldn’t have had nearly as much trouble and wasted time there. I could also say don’t use alpha-stage libraries, but as far as I am currently aware, there isn’t a good general-purpose UI library for LÖVE just yet. (To the point where I am developing my own..twice now.)
Do not create new components. By that, I mean any aspect of code that is something you are unfamiliar with. In the simplest case, this could be something like the algorithm I made for Walls to generate a brick wall from a number (how many bricks it has). That’s a very simple piece of code (once done!) but took way too much time. Likewise, you really shouldn’t go make a version-checking library during your one tiny little freaking hour for the whole project. I got away with that once, only because I was given more time and had made something very similar to it before.
Strip your idea to less than the minimum, or abandon it immediately. This lesson applies a lot more strictly here than in general, but one concept that I hear is core to game design in general is to fail faster, that is, to go as quickly as you can from an idea to realizing the idea won’t work, so that you don’t waste time on it. This is especially true when you only have an hour to go from nothing to finished. Both times I spent too long thinking about ideas, and while I managed to pull something off the first time, both times I was too ambitious initially.
* Half an hour thinking of ideas, half an hour coding it, half an hour making a version-checking library for it, half an hour setting up a page on Itch.io and building it.
(This post has been imported from an old blog of mine.)
For years I’ve been thinking about a rocket construction and flight game. Think 2D Kerbal Space Program, but with part design as well as craft design, and some SciFi aspects to it.
Just started on the project again and ran into a problem with the physics library I’m using (box2d), so for kicks I decided to calculate how many shapes I might need to try to make a planetoid have a variable surface instead of being circular.
Basically, a grandiose expansion of the concepts of KSP while simultaneously stepping backwards by making it 2-dimensional instead of within a 3D universe. I am a bit more realistic with my expectations than I previously was, so I know I’m not going to achieve it for a very long time, if ever, but it still is fun to think about or poke around with code or draw out some ideas from time to time.
I believe this may have been written shortly after I first played The Great Machine: A Fragment, based on how it is written. I would highly recommend playing that game before reading this. They are only loosely thematically related, but that game is.. to put it simply, one of the best games I’ve ever played.
An hour ago, the forest had been full of birds twittering and creatures rustling through the undergrowth. Now it was deathly silent, the only movement the wind and a small group of humans down a small path.
An hour later, they encounter a huge rusty wheel, the curved blades of it slowly moving the air. A giant fan. It slowly turns in front of them, dangerous to pass through, but moving slowly enough you could make it.
They want to go around it, as there is a weak sense of evil about it. Unfortunately, the fan is walled in, leaving them no choice than to pass through. At least the land beyond the fan was normal, a regular continuation of the forest.
As they pass through, pain greets the young adventurers, and the true nature of the land beyond is revealed. Twisted bodies of the humans that had come before line the path. Blood and gore make up the landscape. Carnage stretches to the horizon.
There is the sweet smell of cherries, disturbingly fresh, not the smell of decaying mass as it should be. Perhaps the scariest part, the half-destroyed and maimed bodies beneath, they are moving, not dead, not alive.
The adventurers now walk across the pool of bodies, but they slowly fall away from their duty, and ache to join the damned below. Their clothes are ripped off, their flesh is shredded, they join their new brothers.
This little story of doom was generated from a script I wrote that takes a list of ~240 words and randomly chooses ten, which I then turn into a coherent sentence with my twisted mind: Nathaniel’s dreaded ground filled with carnage and ether, past his fan.
