to turn your plans into voidless entities, aka game jam day 4see previous post
So you’re motivated, you make a Game Design Document, you create your Godot project, and write down ideas and fill the document. You go to bed, and then life just messes up a bit with you.
So suddenly, it’s 3 days later and the game has barely moved forward. At least the good point is that it’s the week-end and some time can be spared to work on it.
This day’s work has scene the creations of quick scenes on Godot to be prototypes for the menus (main menu, options menu) and creation of a small theme for the buttons. I have also been reading a lot of documentation, watched a few explanations around nodes and signals.
The current main menu of Shadowbound
It’s not much, but it’s something. I took a picture from Wikimedia commons that I liked and changed a few parameters to make it more shadowy feeling to me. I might change it, but I needed something to move forward.
Tomorrow, I hope to work on the first level and basic core loop.
According to the page of the jam (and I agree with this definition, otherwise I wouldn’t post it here):
Game Jam is a short event where you and others work together to create a small game. Most Jams have some kind of restriction on theme or style to get you thinking about games in a new way. Game Jams are a great way to test ideas, build on your skills, and meet other awesome creative people.
So the game jam’s theme is (as voted through Thor’s twitch chat) Shadows and Alchemy. Because I am not entirely sure I will be having time as I want, I have decided to enter this game jam solo, as I don’t want to block another participant.
As it is a required part of the submission, and a best practice, I made a copy of the model of Game Design Document and started on it so I can work on my ideas. It is a neat document keeping all the important information about the game, allowing to check also the advancement of the project.
The part that will be the toughest is going to be the art because, well, that’s not my strong suit.
So as the first day of the jam, I have worked on my idea and filled as much as I can the GDD document for now, which is to make a small puzzle-ish game where the player controls a character (an alchemist) to go through a level by using items to interact with the map and find the exit.
I will be using Godot1 as a game engine to make my game. For the art and sound I will see in the next few days if I make them myself or if I look at open-source art.
The aim is to try and write a small post about it every day so I can keep myself accountable. If you are participating, don’t hesitate to share about it, here in the comments, with friends, everywhere :D, it helps keep you motivated throughout the jam to have interaction with others about it.
Also my favourite jam is blackberry and strawberry jam.
During a housewarming, one plan with friends was to build together this small set. There was a lot of fun, food, and talk involved, which means we all forgot about building it.
This sets includes options to build a parrot, a fish and a dragon.
A few days later, a precise inventory of the bricks was made by the Bear. Of course, construction was going to be done carefully to ensure construction quality and optimal results.
First build was the Parrot. It used the least bricks from all the different options, and was very cute at the end.
The finished parrot and the Bear
Second build was the Fish. It had a cute way of using the transparent angled thingy (I am very good with words. Everything is a thingy that does something) to make it look like the fish is making some bubbles in the water.
The fish and the Bear
I decided to keep the best one for last. The dragon used all the bricks (minus the few extra ones always present in a Lego set and looks very very cute. I really enjoyed building it.
The Red Dragon and the Bear
As usual with Lego builds, I had fun, and I am very thankful for the gift from my friends. The evening was great, and I have a nice little dragon as souvenir.
AKA: sitting around a table with friends, eating snacks and sharing stories together
For decades, the Bear has spent countless hours writing, playing, imagining stories, and more importantly playing those stories.
The basic idea is easy to understand, each player has a role, and they play it (I’m rebranding as Captain Obvious). To me, it’s at the crossroads between improv theater and boardgames, with a pinch of “let’s pretend” games we used to play as kids.
And from that basic idea spawns a multitude of possibilities, that are more or less popular, have more or less rules, and sometimes even switch the basic paradigm, with some games having all the players play the same character, but a different personality1, some games having a referee (also called Game Master/GM, or Dungeon Master/DM, or Storyteller, …) and others having no referees with the players sharing everything. And that’s just about the game’s structure.
You can also have completely different atmospheres and genres. Games go from playing as ordinary people facing unfathomable horrors and trying to avoid terrible fates (or just avoid insanity)2 to the classic fantasy party trying to save the world3, but also science-fiction games with space opera vibes4, or post-apocalyptic games5 and many other options. My examples are not necessarily all games I’ve played, but I’ve tried to give somewhat of a range. Wikipedia tries to make a list of them, but there is many indie games out there that can be found on various sites.
In those games, you get to live through a story and orient its outcomes through your actions. If you’re the GM, you’re going to witness your players break your carefully planned steps, but also finding very logical explanations to things you just put there because “it felt nice there”. If you’re a player, it’s going to be split between creating characters and enjoying their experiences, making plans when facing complex situations, and learning that no plan survives first contact with the enemy when everything goes awry, but you still manage to go through.
Events in games bring joy through playing them, and when something particularly funny, extraordinary, or lucky happens, it turns into great stories that will be told and retold by bards (or your group of friends). Some silly decisions creating surprising results will inspire you forever.
All of this and the sharing of food and good time around a table are the main reasons why I really enjoy tabletop role playing games, and why I will most likely be sharing stories, ideas, maybe scenarios of games on this blog. Plus throughout all those years, I have acquired some trivia about various topics because I was looking for information to make it feel more real in the game, or sound plausible. I have also learned to answer with a “yes, and…” to disruptive player actions that derailed the scenarios I had envisioned, which has made me more adaptable. I got used to speaking in front of people, and impersonating characters has allowed me to explore various things and ideas.
If you’ve never played a tabletop role playing game, you should definitely try it. If you have, don’t hesitate to share your favourite games, or even better, do share your favourite stories from games. I love anecdotes, like Sir Bearington.
The easy example being Dungeons and Dragons, but there is a very wide range of games that have a fantasy aspect and a lot of them bring variety and change to a very used genre. ↩︎
Or how Bear rambles about week days and drives readers insane, maybe…
A regular work week for Bear
Bear trying to fight off writer’s block.
In theory, for someone working an office job with regular business hours, a work week could be seen like this:
Monday, as either the “what’s my job again?” day, or the “oh no, everything is breaking everywhere again!” day, since one such person would be coming back from a hopefully nice weekend back into work. Being so far from the weekend (in fact, the furthest of the week) can make it very dreary sometimes. But mostly it can offer a new perspective on past work issues, as one would have been able to disconnect and recharge one’s batteries.
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday as sort of ‘in the thick of it’ days, where it’s work this, and work that, and when’s the weekend, and so on.
Friday, also known as FriYAY1, because the weekend is just around the corner, and one anticipates exciting activities, or even just peace from neverending requests. And also, it is the day where it can be perfectly reasonable to delay certain actions to next week because of their possible impacts that could not be mitigated over the weekend.
And yet, despite this sort of common week feel (for the Bear, YMMV, of course) we get sometimes hit by a second Monday. You had a Monday that was of the exhausting variety, with plenty of things to deal with, you try to unwind and spend a nice evening. The next morning has you checking your phone for a possible Groundhog Day 2 or something because it’s Monday all over again, disguised as a Tuesday.
Bear after reading an incantation to solve the second Monday issue
For those who have been cursed3 for real, this experience can repeat itself throughout the entire week, leaving one feeling both crushed and stretched thinner than Bilbo after holding the Ring for so long.
There is sadly no easy cure for this. The Bear does not recommend trying out spells randomly, as the cure may become a bigger problem. It could especially becoming the type of problem that stares back at you in the void, without it being your lovely black kitty. Of course the difference between your cat and a summoned horror lies in the number of eyes you can count in the dark. We advise not to count them, just in case…
The best course of action is the same as most illnesses:
Be kind to yourself,
Breathe,
Drink water,
Change your socks,
Throw work related problems at colleagues, with a decently crafted excuse (even better if you have a good reason to do so, such as “this is your area of expertise”, “I need your opinion on this”, etc…)
Keep up the hope because, as you all know:
The sun will eventually set on a new week!
Of course, this is all very much my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt, as I don’t think you should trust blindly a Bear over the Internet. You can always share your own views on time perception through the comments!
For doing something terrible in any life, or angering a witch, a Great Ancient, stepping on a Lego brick, not petting a cat, saying bears are not nice, how could I know the real reason? This is beyond my skillset.↩︎
How you got there is a good question, but I hope the time you spend around here will be at least enjoyable for you.
The Bear riding towards a glorious future (maybe)
What you have stumbled upon, is my attempt at getting a new routine of writing more because I used to write a lot and gradually stopped, even though the itch of writing is still always there. I often get distracted or carried away by dozens of ideas, or worse by an inability to decide what to write on.
Most of the posts might just stay on private because I don’t feel like it would be very interesting for anybody to just listen to a random person rambling over the internet, but making them online brings a sort of accountability to the writing process.
To briefly introduce myself, I am Freyja, I like bears, Lego bricks, writing, reading, space, and a lot of other things.
Thanks for your time and have a great time on this side of the Internet!
