I participated in my first game jam and I want to share with you how I experienced it. This December will be for gamedev!
I always wanted to become able to make my own games, to invent new interesting mechanics and tell a story. The many aspects made me shy away from finally beginning this journey, but now I have enough. 😤 This time in my life couldn't be better: I got a job that is not tiring and does not consume much time. Also I like the symbol of major changes before the new year. Acorn Jam 3 came exactly right, because it's not too long and people do not expect a great and polished game. However, it did give me the motivation to finish something in a certain amount of time. 🎲
The jam had a theme and a twist. This time it was time and co-op. At first I was intrigued because co-op implies multiplayer, and I was not sure I could make a game using websockets in less than six days. But it wasn't really necessary: Think of arcades. 🕹️ I confess that I only worked two days, so I needed an idea that is interesting and easy to implement. A puzzle game seemed to be the right choice, and it became a card game called Doomsday Ditcher. 💥
You (and your friends) play on four continents. You must come up with a plan to save the world from a meteorite impact. To do this, each player must play exactly one card and place it somewhere in the plan. These cards have an attack value that describes how much they help, but the cards also interact with each other. Depending on their colour, they support or sabotage you. So be careful. 😁
It is not a pretty game, and certainly it could have been made more likeable, but I was demotivated by Löve. Don't get me wrong, I love this engine (pun intended). It is cute, easy to understand and you could make any 2D game you want with it. 😁 The downside is that you have to do everything programmatically. This is nice, but a graphical editor and a manager for game entities and their properties would help a lot. I can implement menus and everything, but nobody can tell me if my way is good practice. A scene graph would solve that problem.
The next step is to change to Godot. It is in the coming and I feel that it could become as popular as Unity (which is not my choice because of recent events). There is just one difficulty to overcome: I need to learn C#. GDScript is nice and everything but I don't like that blocks get identified by their indentation. I will use December to become a good enough C# developer to create a fun game and I know how. 😎 Lots of resources exist in the WWW, also whole learning platforms. The site by Exercism caught my eye. It is motivating and feels natural enough to me, to use it for daily learning. However, I want to do a lot of coding and Advent of Code starts already this Friday. A language that I know would be better suited, but hey, I really want to become acquainted to solve problems with C#. 😅
I don't want to get into tutorial hell and keep on creating games.
Take care! 🫶