I intended GAME USER EXPERIENCE MANAGER SIMULATOR to showcase my writing, and then ended up spending most of my first 36 hours on JavaScript and CSS...oops. I am actually really proud that I managed to bend Twine into this nearly unrecognizable console interface. Also, none of the screenshots show off that I manually implemented tweening to draw a fake mouse that moves around the screen, which took wayyyy too many hours but by the time I realized what I was losing...sunk cost. Still, it became a core gameplay loop and I'm pretty proud of it!

Hi! I know there's an exception for fixing bugs after the compo ends, but I realize I didn't put my name or a link to my work literally anywhere inside my game and I'd kinda like to have it there while people are playing. Is it a rules violation to add that after the fact? Totally understand it might be but if anyone has a better idea of this that'd be so helpful.

Sometimes you look back at the code you wrote when you had a total of 48 hours...and get a laugh. If it's not not-a-number, it's probably an integer! Also apparently I was referring to GUEMS, aka GAME USER EXPERIENCE MANAGER SIMULATOR, as if it were a sentient being that does things????? Jam-brain.

I love inventing new genres in my code. My hope was this would be only one sort of game users (not the player, of course) could play in GAME USER EXPERIENCE MANAGER SIMULATOR but sadly I didn't have time to implement any other pastiches :'(

First of all, I'm absolutely honored to have ranked 15th in the Innovation category of the compo :)

Second, does anyone know how many games were submitted to the Compo, Jam, etc.? Or even better, how many games were rated by category?

Right now, the closest I can tell is my best (15th) vs. my worst (472nd) but I have feeling based on prior LD numbers, there are far more games than that! Also, on that topic: I find the difference between my best (Innovation, 15th) and my second-worst (Fun, 249th)...very funny. That's what I get for making a satirical game about how shitty the gig economy is lol.

love to add a DUDE_OK variable to store whether it's ok to call the player/protagonist "dude"

we've got the main menu + aesthetic down for "HACK THE PLANET" and we're so happy with it!

Heather and I are putting some polish on the HACK THE PLANET interface and while they write the net crawl, I am getting to work on character writing, including the all important

``` _ _ _ _ _ _ _
/ _/ / _ \ / _ \ / / / / / |/ /
/ / / / / / / // / / / / / / /|/ /
/ / / // / / _, _/ / // / / / / /
// _/ // || __/ // //

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / / / _/ / _/ / | / / / | /_ / / / / / / _ \ / _/ / / _ \ / / / / _ / |/ / / /| | / / / / / / / // / / _/ _ \ / / _/ / / // / / /| / / _ | / / / // / / _, _/ / / / / // // _/ // |/ // ||// _/ // || /_/ /_/ ```

main menu:

and ft. jamslam, my favorite script kiddie:

...i wrote an algorithm for centering a number inside a given length using whitespace padding (see the "LIFETIME" column in the second screenshot) in a language...

that has no "for", "while", or the ability to retrieve the length of a string

handwrote an example of the (recursive) algoritjm then reverse engineered it from that

obviously it cant do perfect centering for odd-length strings in even length spaces and vice versa, but it does closest approximation, in a (narrative scripting) language (ink) where, let me repeat, there are no for loops, while loops, or the ability to retrieve the length of a string

so i was forced to do things like...

write a ruby script that generates escaped ink string literals for displaying the loading bar text: to output:

or, for our ASCII art, use regexes to escape the art into completely gibberish like this:

however, the results were pretty sick...

Heather and I's planning whiteboard looked so insane by the end lol. Most of the unchecked items got completed in the end, we just stopped checking them off as it came down to the wire. We got a wild amount done for 2 people in 3 days. Still very proud of it. Also very funny that "win state" got left until nearly the end.