“So what have you been doing since the brewery closed?”
I’ve been reading a lot and going to the climbing gym and hanging out with my kid, which are all things I was doing before the brewery closed. I have some time before I decide what I want to do next in terms of “putting on pants and going somewhere in order to get paid” so I’ve been experimenting with a lot of stuff. Merlin and I made some synths:
Astute readers will also notice that we moved into a new house.
Kristina and I took a two day linocut workshop one weekend as a date:
Adapted from an illustration in the DCC RPG rulebook. Also we never returned to pick up our prints because it was during the crazy snowstorm.
I thought about writing a novel but in an early brainstorming session I typed “I do not want to write a book I want to make video games.”
When I was a kiddo first trying to make video games you basically started with an Integrated Development Environment (think Microsoft Word but exclusively for programming, also typos might cause your computer to crash on compile) and the available resource base was mostly books from the library, which I loved at the time but I found it hard to get through even the basics of making a game loop.
Fortunately 20+ years have passed since then and the whole ecosystem has changed. There are ample online resources, from youtube channels to forums to discord servers, and there are many engines available for game development. The two biggest are Unity and Unreal, which are both very powerful and extremely full-featured (and as a consequence have steep learning curves). I have done a bit of work in Unity (a major gamedev engine) and didn’t care for it, fortunately someone from the Webster U game design program hipped me to Godot so I decided to try that out instead.
I did a couple twenty hours of tutorials(specifically, this guy’s game dev course, which I extremely recommend) and then joined a game jam, which ended on Sunday.
For those unfamiliar, a game jam is basically a design sprint for game designers–you are given a theme and a set of constraints (the biggest being the time limit) and then your job is to make a game (or as much of one as you can manage) before the time runs out.
The Godot development community is full of indie/hobby developers and there is a robust game jam scene. Godot Wild Jam runs every month with members voting on the themes and submitters rating everyone’s games.
This month’s theme was “Controlled Chaos.” Each jam comes with several optional “wildcard” challenges, this month’s here:
I chose to go with just “show, don’t tell” which made the second challenge kinda pointless since there wasn’t any text in the game. I debated doing the second one instead and having the teacher run through random, absurd facts about the artwork but it seemed like writing all the facts would have taken up precious time and also maybe get old for the player.
My first idea was going to be a prototype for a mini-game in another project I am working on, where you are a sandwich artist attempting to make sandwiches at a fast food restaurant while too high to function. I was going to use simple shapes for everything and made some pretty decent looking sandwich toppings out of squares, triangles, ovals etc.
But then I had a brainwave–Merlin’s pre-school class went on a field trip two weeks ago. What could possibly be more chaotic than that?
So I ditched the first prototype (which only took about an hour and a half, Godot is great for prototyping) and decided to make a game about a preschool going on a fieldtrip to an art museum. After nine days of increasingly long hours it was done!
Here it is:
I had it set up to play in the blog post but it auto cues the music and that’s pretty annoying, something I will fix in the next jam.
Most of the code was easy, except when I got towards the end of the jam and started putting in very long hours. My code got increasingly slapdash and the time-cost of adding new features went way up as it would require re-writing the bad code (or, paradoxically, writing even worse, more convoluted code) to implement them.
I didn’t have the time or skills to do the 2D assets at the scope I wanted for the game so I bought some licensable images. I did the UI stuff and all the buttons and screens and drew a few custom things. I used a character generator for the sprites. I will probably focus more on doing the art next jam and making a game that is very static/small in scope so that I can practice those skills.
The sound design stuff was fun, I remixed the midi files of several songs from Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (thematic!) and I got some very delighted laughter out of Kristina when i demoed them for her.
If people are interested I’ll write a follow-up post mortem on design decisions, what worked, what didn’t and how fun it is to put trap beats on classical music (very, very fun). I also recommend checking out some of the 200+ submissions to the jam, they are all free to play and most won’t take up much of your time.
I hope you are all well and happy and focusing on the present moment. Not the world-historical/geo-political “now” but the spring breeze batting the curtains around “NOW”. I have some other projects I want to write about now that my head is out of the trenches and I hope this brings you some joy.