Jamming

Past Sean decided that he would be equipped enough at this point to participate in a Game Jam that starts tomorrow. The Kenney Jam. Love that guy’s optimism.

I’m assuming the hardest part (other than everything) will be choosing mechanics that are simple and small enough that I can actually implement them. Or be able to implement them with a small(ish) amount of Googling. My goal for this jam is not to make Vampire Survivors, it’s just to complete a game. It doesn’t even have to be a good game, it just has to be playable. I would also like for it to have one or two mechanics I haven’t used before.

The jam officially starts tomorrow at 5am, a time at which I will be soundly asleep, and runs for 48 hours until 5am Sunday. I’m not going to approach this like I used to approach a brand-new MMO release – i.e. staying awake for 48 straight hours, eating microwaved meals in front of the computer, and consuming copious amounts of caffeine and nicotine. That was as fun as it was destructive (very).

So the jam will actually start for me when I wake up around 9am (in reality, more like 10am), and I’ll be able to work until I go to sleep (usually 1am, then lying in bed until 2:30/3 when I actually fall asleep). Taking away meals, bathroom breaks, maybe some showers, and that makes for about ~14 hours of development/day. We’ll see what we can do with that.

I don’t know what the theme of the jam is yet, just that we need to exclusively use Kenney assets. I will say that this week I heard a new album that blew my mind, Gus Dapperton’s Henge, so maybe I will try to pay some kind of homage to that. I mean, I’ll probably be listening to it the whole time I’m working anyway. Sometimes music just hits you at exactly the right place and time in your life. Hopefully Kenney has some haunting and beautiful things for me to mangle.