Hey, everyone, Orin here.

I’ve been making games professionally for approaching a decade but this will be my first real game jam. I suspect I have at best a 50/50 chance of finishing something–I’m not used to working on such a compressed schedule!

I’ve been working on a simple little framework to save me from doing too much boring infrastructure work during the 48 hours. Per the rules, here’s the source (which I expect to continue working on right up until the start of the jam): bitbucket.org/otresnjak/em-engine.

My goals for setting it up were:

• Use only technology I’m very familiar with. That means C++/DirectX/FMOD, even if it will limit my reach compared to using Flash or HTML5.
• Use primarily tested code adapted from other hobby projects of mine wherever possible; I want to make sure I’m using reasonably well-tested code so I don’t end up wasting time debugging my library instead of making my game.
• Focus on being able to get something onscreen with minimum work. There’s a simple resource manager (inspired by XNA’s ContentManager) that makes most loading as simple as resource::get<type*>( filename).
• Use 2D only. I’m a render programmer in real life so the temptation to try to do something with 3D is significant, but if I go down that rabbit hole I doubt I have a chance of completing something under the time limit. Plus, it’ll be fun to go old-school and play with sprites.

Aside from my own code, I’ll probably be using Photoshop and my tablet to make some terrible programmer art and some combination of Ableton, Audition, bfxr, and a microphone for audio.

Can’t wait to get started!