Taking off of work to start on Friday and go for the compo. Very excited as this is something I've wanted to do for years, but work always got in the way. Best of luck everyone!

Either gonna be using unreal engine + blender + gimp fore something in VR

or Pico8 for something 2D

and there's absolutely no inbetween there. ha

little bird harvesting twigs and trash for its nest

gonna try and maybe get some bird animations + a tutorial screen done before the end, but progress is being made

Pretty happy with how this one turned out all things considered. did not have time for music or sfx but wanted to submit it to compo anyway for the sake of calling it "done".

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/nesting

Retrospective:

The speed of sprite and sfx creation in Pico8 was great for the jam. The pico8 font is incredibly hard to look at for long periods of time, in the future I'd like to hook an external ide to the pico8 just to be able to use a more readable font. I found code organization difficult as well because of this. I by no means whatsoever stretched the limits of what Pico8 can do, nor reached anywhere near the token max, which allowed me to iterate very quickly on some quite janky code. Saturday night I nearly gave up as the game wasn't feeling fun and I was itching to return to other projects, but I spent some time adjusting my level designs to take better advantage of my flappy-bird style character controller and started to enjoy game again, so decided to finish after all.

I can't wait to play everyone's games!

It's been delightful to read everyone's comments, and I'm stunned that I've already hit nearly 60 ratings! If you haven't already, why not spend some time flying around as a little bird with a little backpack? If you have Pico-8 you can search Splore for Nesting 1.0 or grab the cart here!

Otherwise, Play Nesting Here and please do leave your feedback! :smile:

I'm thrilled to see that Nesting received a total of 107.75 ratings, and really I can't thank enough everyone who tried the game and left feedback. This was my first ever jam and to see the positive reception is absolutely heartwarming.

This was also my first serious attempt at a Pico8 game, and while looking at the code editor in Pico8 for a long time starts to feel like staring at CRT static, the sprite, map, and audio editors were an absolute joy to work with and the only way I was able to complete what I did with Nesting within 48 hours. I wanted to create just enough to get a full feel of the mechanics. So two tutorial levels, one more dangerous level, and then one "flight playground" sort of level before arriving at the end screen area. Seeing everyone's screenshots of how many twigs they'd collected next to their next was so much fun.

I saw quite a few people mention how the sprite and footsteps changed once you collected 10 twigs, but did anyone collect 20 at one time in the final level to see the extremely-overburdened sprites? :smile: It's extremely funny to me to watch the little bird struggle to fly with that many twigs, but it's also extremely difficult to press the flap button with perfect timing to gain any height. Fun fact: Many people commented about the bird sprites and footstep sound effects that change as the little bird becomes overburdened. Those bits of polish were all authored and implemented within the last hour of the Jam, I'm really glad I had the time in the end because they added so much charm :sweat_smile:

Can't wait for the next Ludem Dare, and thank you again everyone who's played and rated!