For @parsefal and me, this is our second game jam. Our first experience clearly highlighted my weak spot — visual content.

Back then, we were making a platformer. I took on the graphics because I already had some experience with graphic editors, but I had never drawn tiles or character animation before. The result was beginner-level graphics, and the game looked, to put it mildly, unimpressive.

Another problem was scale. It’s impossible to make many levels in three days, and that seriously hurts the cohesion of the storyline.

This time we decided to lean into our strengths and make the whole game procedural. Parcefal has the perfect hobby: he’s constantly writing music, and putting together a dozen tracks over three days is a welcome break from programming for him. Working with music is convenient here, too — tweak the arrangement a little, and it sounds like a new track.

As for me, after last time, when the endless “export — check in game” cycle had me quietly hating Photoshop, I happily retreated into generation and shaders. Shaders and programming interest me more than pixel art, and they haven’t been done to death quite as much.

It turned out to be an ideal combination. Some things worked out better than we expected, others didn’t go according to plan.

→ ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/packetracer/

In the next part, I’ll tell you how we handled level generation and matched the track length to the music.