I love game jamming, but for some reason I’ve never managed to join a Ludum Dare. Maybe I won’t succeed this time either– I’m commonly overly ambitious *and* pretty lazy.

And indecisive! Even if I could think of a game idea, I wouldn’t be able to choose environment to implement it in. I’m an iOS developer, but people wouldn’t be able to try my game if it’s ObjC/Swift. Could maybe do Mac, but it’s a boring platform. I can’t stand JavaScript, so web is out. I almost defenestrated my laptop at the last game jam because of Unity. Unreal’s too resource intensive for my laptop. Gah!

The idea of being able to see the innards of the game *inside* the game is very intriguing. Perhaps dumping all the buffers and variables in the game into a level can create some kind of procedural level? Or what if the game is a visual-programming-chart with the game’s own game logic?

Hey, I got started!! That was unexpected. I decided to recreate one of my favorite games from my childhood. Way-back childhood, I don’t even remember the name of the game! It was an old Mac shareware game. Side-on perspective, where you built your own mine, with conveyor belts and excavators and escalators, and you were supposed to mine diamonds and get them out of the mine.

I decided to use SpriteKit, Swift and Mac as framework, language and platform respectively. I just happen to know those specific environments pretty well. I’ve only been working on it for a couple of hours, but doing this with an actual physics engine is fun progress (300 lines of swift):

I won’t have time to make anything serious out of this, but it does actually feel possible that I could make this into something that resembles a game tomorrow. Plan of attack:

* make it so you can progress through levels
* add tiles for: ground/dirt, dirt that falls?, resource tiles you can build extractors on, rock that can’t be removed
* make a tool for digging out dirt
* make it so resources that touch dirt disappear
* import levels from tiled or something
* escalators
* make levels clearable

Since there’s a lot going on in my life right now I didn’t commit to LD very seriously, but joined for fun in hopes to have a few hours to spare this weekend. Still, I thought I’d have *something* to submit, since I had chosen a really small scope; but alas :/ From my previous checklist, I did manage to add TileD level file importing, a tilemap, tool for digging, a few tile types, and that resources die if they touch the environment. Game still needs escalators and a goal. Sound, graphics and menu would be a bonus 😛 Performance is *terrible* though…

Also renamed the game to “OverMiner”. The goal of the game is to mine resources, and transport the minerals to the exit. The code is rather so-so, but if you’re curious about how to do game development with Swift and SpriteKit on Mac and/or iOS, I’ve published the code on GitHub. It’s about 500 lines.

Would be fun to port this to iPad. Maybe with an online community level editor it could be pretty popular?

Here’s a gif of my progress after day 2:

i love the feeling of this weird thing we're building

allmosstt done

The maniacs at Suffra have set up a multi-cam setup here at Knackeriet, and we're streaming the whole process from concepting to building to desperation to victory.

Watch us here!! twitch.tv / nevynjpg

Two characters with a sprite each are able to move across the screen. There isn't even input yet. We've been coding on this our first ever NES and first ever assembly project for over 12 hours straight. And we're happy with the result! Coding for NES is so much fun, it's a dream come true :D

there's something magical about accidentally corrupting your NES's RAM by not adhering to timing rules and being presented with glorious, beautiful abstract art.

maybe we should just abandon our original art direction and go for this instead :D

Game loop is fully in place just minutes before the deadline. From knowing basically no 6502 assembly, to building an entire working game together. It's a magical feeling <3

It's been such a journey. Yesterday I literally spent three hours figuring out how to subtract numbers. (an 8-bit signed integer from a 16-bit unsigned integer). That's a single character in a regular programming language. Here, it's 8 LINES, and you can barely google it.

How is it that no matter how well or poorly an LD goes, the full game loop isn't ever in place until mere minutes before the deadline?

Well, I'm mighty proud of what we managed to build this weekend regardless 🥰