This will be my second jam. A few of my teammates from the last time are coming back along with some first-timers.

Last time

We kinda decided last-minute we were going to participate (I forgot it was coming up). I had been toying around with TIC-80 as a widescreen alternative to PICO-8 and we decided that's what we would use even though I was still getting the hang of the differences and no one else on the team had spent any time with fantasy consoles (or gamedev at all for the most part) until the jam. In hindsight we should've stuck to what I already knew and could teach efficiently, so this time we're going back to PICO-8. In addition I wish we had: * Had ideas for all the possible themes planned out ahead of time. (good-bye first hour!) * Gotten everyone's software and tools set up earlier (good-bye first day!) * Had genre-agnostic starter code ready to go. We didn't have a main menu > game > game over screen loop until the last day, and just barely made the cutoff with a single level because we didn't have time to implement switching between all the ones we'd made. * Taken advantage of dofile. We lost a lot of time to merge conflicts in our one giant cart. * Just used Lua instead of Javascript. We thought it would be easier since everyone knew the language but that mostly just led to deliberation about the best way to do things and weird issues between what's supported in the browser and what's supported in TIC-80.

Despite all that we are very proud of what we managed to accomplish:

Jam Page

This time

We have some teammates who are new to coding, don't code at all, or don't really play games and we're super excited about that. It should lead to some interesting discussion and creativity that those of us with a firm idea of how games are supposed to work otherwise wouldn't get. We also: * Planned out mostly all of the possible theme ideas in advance. * Are meeting up early to get everyone set up before the theme is unveiled. * Have a full game loop in our starter cart ready for hacking. * Have split our cart into sub-carts thanks to PICO-8's new-ish #include functionality. * Can't use anything but Lua because PICO-8.

6 hours to go...