I did it! This was my first game jam and I'm really pleased with the results. I made a game called Eject Tape, which aspired to be an action-packed top-down platformer but ended up as more of a wistful maze wanderer. You play as a little robot who doesn't have enough space to hold his memories. He writes them out on tapes so he can revisit them later. In the game, each tape reveals a maze with a key at the end. The goal is to retrieve all three keys and progress to the end of the map.

I'm pretty happy where the game ended up in terms of theme. It's a bit abstract. I've spent probably the last three or four hours of polish trying to make it as clear as possible. Honestly, I'm still not sure if the concept makes any sense, but I'm happy for something a little surreal either way.

In terms of development: something interesting I noticed while coding was how effective ugly, repetitive code can be for getting things done quickly. Normally I spend way too long making things elegant and over-complicated. This thing is a mess, but it's done in two days, where my other games are years in the making. That alone was a big learning experience.

This was also my first time using Godot for a big project. I've always taken the build-your-own-engine route (which is why I never finished anything) I guess because I'm kind of intimidated by big engines. There's a pretty steep learning curve. But after this, I'm sold. Even though I was outside of my comfort zone, I got way more done than I would have working from scratch.

Speaking of engines, I still don't understand this one fully. I couldn't figure out how to connect the player pressing the spacebar to the object they were standing in front of. So instead, I wrote a function that checks every single interactive object and picks the one that has a visible text box. That's the one the player is standing in front of. I'm surprised it worked it all and at this point I'm afraid to touch it. It'll be nice to clean things up after this is all over.

All in all, I'm hooked. I had a great time and will definitely be doing this as often as possible.

It's been a few years since my last dare, and I'm very excited to get back to it. I have a lot of perpetually-ongoing projects so it's great to have the push to finish and publish something quickly.

I'll be using: - Godot for development - Atom for notes and design - Aseprite for pixel art - Bitwig Studio for music and sound effects

Good luck!

I took the musical interpretation of the theme and made Beatbox Gardener, a game about music-making potted plants!

Each plant controls one track of a continuously-repeating loop. When you drag and drop a plant from the store to the jam zone, it plays its audio and animates in time with the music. Plants in the jam zone accumulate points that can be used in the store to unlock more plants. There are nine plants and nine tracks in all.

This was both fun and stressful as always. I'm proud of what I made and hope you get a chance to play it! I'd like to write a more in-depth post mortem later on, but right now I need some rest.