Tag: pirate software game jam

Life always finds a way…

to turn your plans into voidless entities, aka game jam day 4 see 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.

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What does a game jam taste like?

Also known as Pirate Software – Game Jam 15 day 1

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.

by Pirate Software

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.

  1. https://godotengine.org/, it’s a free and open-source engine that has neat capacities. ↩︎
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