For years and years, my only desired competence with game development was to be familiar enough with the tools to jam something out over a weekend.
And after just a few months of actually learning an engine and the skills (vs the years of wishing I was doing that), I achieved my goal!
This afternoon, I (and a couple of friends) submitted for the GMTK Game Jam, with PRIMORDIAL SNOOP!
This is a game about using an ultrapowerful telescope to zoom in on distant planets, and snoop on the microbes living on their surfaces.
Match the shapes and colours of the samples in your lab to the samples on distant planets.
Give it a shot and try and beat my score of 13!
My one big regret with this project is that we mis-prioritised and backed ourselves into a corner visuals-wise, which means this final product isn't at all colour-blind friendly.
That was a combinations of not quite realising the impact of early work, or realising how final those early decisions would end up being, and a difficult timeframe thanks to real-life commitments.
With an extra few hours on the project, I could have drafted palettes for each planet that we distinct enough to be clear to everyone, or find some kind of technical solution that eliminated the needs for colour-matching at all. But that will have to come in another update.
Overall, I learned a lot in on this project and I'm really proud that we were able to get something out on time without completely wearing ourselves down.
We slept, we relaxed, we made a game!
More jams in future for sure.
I have had a fantastic summer, with friends and family from Scotland visiting with us and then spending time on Gotland (I'm a sucker for places that end in -otland, I suppose). The visits and holiday timed nicely with the lead developer on Ace needing to spend time on paying the bills. With Ace taking a rest, and my summer at a close, I took the time to team up with my good friend, Harry to make Primordial Soup (featuring some absolutely beautiful art by another good friend of mine).
It felt really good to work on a game jam as the more experienced contributor. Doing courses and tutorials is all well and good, but there's nothing like executing an idea in a tight timeframe to show yourself that, yes, some of those lessons stuck.
There's a lot I think we would have done differently, but that just means we learned something along the way.
I would love for you to check it out.