The Iron Throne

OK, first: Unless you have personally gone from what amounts to a torture device, to a brand new (albeit second-hand) office chair which is actually comfortable to sit in, you can’t imagine the bliss I’m experiencing right now. I’ve had that “gaming chair” for about 10 years now, and it must’ve counted as an OHSA violation from the get-go.

Fair to say, despite being awake at 6am, I’m in a good mood.

Now, to the topic at hand: In about 2 hours, a game jam will begin, called The Game Wisdom Game Jam Volume 4 - I’ve been looking forward to joining this one, as it’s run by a (relatively) small-time YouTuber, who’s managed to cultivate a good little community. The only major problem I can foresee is that the past themes have been… less than ideal - either too specific, or not open enough to work with.

It’ll be good for me to finish a game, after spending so much time wrapping up Egg Trainer for sale - I think we might finally be getting close there, but without a solid end date, it’s hard to say.

A jam - even a 9 day one like this one - gives me a solid goal to work towards. I’ll be spending most of my free time this weekend on the jam, and I’ll still have Pupper and Egg Trainer to tinker on if I get bogged down here.

I’ll probably append this post later today with more thoughts on the theme, and how I could approach it - I know it’s going to be using Godot, but I may need to grab a decent spriting tool as well. As for music… yes?

BTW, since I’m on a raspberry pi, the resulting game will almost certainly be web-based, so downloading a binary won’t be required.

8am

Just spent about an hour trying to get aseprite to build from source, no dice. Thankfully, a friend pointed me to this thing, so I guess I’ll be using that for this jam. It’s quite cathartic deleting code that didn’t work lol.

And the jam theme is drum roll….

​In honor of me finally finishing my book on RTS design and spending the last two months playing nothing but games managing lots of little guys running around and not following orders. The theme for this game jam is: ​ ​​Managing Mismanagement​

“Managing Mismanagement”?

OK, this is workable.

For game jams, the first hour or so (assuming 48 hour time limits) should usually be spent brainstorming. We’ve got more time for this one, so I’m gonna start thinking up ideas - some kind of brainstorm, based around the idea of wrangling up a bunch of automata, perhaps?

11:15am

I have a terrible sleeping pattern - I’m lucky to have about 6 hours a night. As a side effect, I tend to doze off during the day, especially on weekends. Well, at least I’ve got an interesting idea now.

Lets say you have a “conveyer belt” on the side of the screen, that reveals up to three “cards” at a time (the card imagery is just an aesthetic). You can click on a building card, then on the game map to place that building, or you could click on the human card, then click on a building, the build a unit there.

At any time, you only have a couple of options, and you need to wait for more to be revealed by the “conveyer belt” - this would pace you out, and potentially prevent you from burning through content, or breaking the expected build speed - basically, clicks per minute are no longer a factor, and you now have more strategic thinking to do - do you hold onto this one unit card, in the hopes that a better building card appears later?

Here’s the link for the git repo, on my private gitea - no promises for the quality or content, but at least it’s there. I tend to push at the end of each session, and sessions are only a couple hours at a time these days.

So yeah… looks like I’m making an RTS!

3:30pm

And I’ve done nothing but sleep today - the exhaustion of the week has caught up to me again. That’s ok, this is a 9-day jam, I’ll try again tomorrow.

I’m glad that I at least have an idea, based on the theme.