Going to bed so late yesterday was probably not the best; I didn't make as much progress today as I had hoped. I've lost track of the amount of times I've decided "screw it, [feature X] can wait until everything else at least exists, I don't have enough time left to spend on it!" Even though it probably wasn't more than 10 overall, on top of the original "mvp" plan not being completed, today's jam work has been a resounding meh. There are still 2 parts of the UI that haven't been implemented at all:

• I don't expect for the news ticker/feed to take too much engineering work, it's basically going to be a read-only twitter feed (similar to what is done in Cities Skylines). However it will be the greatest source of flavor for the game, as well as something to occupy the player whilst they wait for the (in-game) days to go by. Ideally it would function as a source of "market info" for the player, but doing that convincingly might take too much time - either in the implementation or just simply building up a large enough corpus of template messages to draw from at runtime.

• Inversely, I expect the torrent browser to be much more finicky in the implementation side of things to get anything working close to what it needs to be, and to be simpler to generate the corpus for. Given the university student theme I'm going with lore-wise, it's easy to come up with plausible names for files that people in this setting would be interested in.

The most frustrating about this is that these 2 systems are where the game is really supposed to "start being fun". The player would get to feel clever spotting that people will need x textbook before the end of the week, or y song on the monday following its weekend release, stocking up on written copies of those files whilst cheekily bumping up their price as the exam date loomed nearer.

So I'm 2 days in, have 1 day left, and had originally planned on spending the last day solely writing tons of tweets and file names to flesh out the content. Maybe, if there was a solid afternoon and evening left over, play around with each file having its own parameterized demand curve that could then be plugged into the tweet generation and market demand logic. At this point I'll be glad to have both of them resembling anything functional by the time the jam is over...

Anyways, once those 2 are in a working state using static datasets, I'll see how much time I have left to make them interact with the passing of time, and find interesting playoffs between all of the systems.

When I take a step back, and more notably when I remember this is the first time I've made it this far in a game jam period in terms of having made a quantifiable game, I don't feel too bad in the end. It's cool to be part of the event, and it's a great check of how much I've learned since the last time I tried participating in a jam.

Shoutout to cloudconvert (dot) com for their free (up to 25 per day) image format conversion, allowing me to quickly make the following gif from a mac os "native" screen recording (aka a QuickTime Movie file):