I've had plenty of gamejams go to ruin by bouncing against technical issues I should have seen coming. So these days if I'm using an unfamiliar development kit (basically anything other than Unity) I try to do some prep work so that my time during the jam is focused on the game itself, and not learning the platform.

As I've decided to make a SNES game for the jam, I've been spending my evenings this week learning how to build games for the SNES and building myself a fairly basic framework so I can hit the ground running.

I'm working with the PVSnesLib SNES SDK, and oh boy am I glad I decided to do prep work. There's a lot to learn here. My goal was just to get a background image, control an animated sprite and draw text on screen. Theoretically it's straight forward and thankfully PVSnesLib includes lots of examples. However there's a lot of weird eccentricities to working on the SNES that have thrown a lot of obstacles in my way.

Thankfully it's starting to come together and as you can see from the GIF above, I've got some placeholder assets in place and I have my character moving around the screen on real SNES hardware. I'm going to look at music and sound effects tomorrow night to make sure I have a good pipeline for them and then I should be ready for the jam.