long time viewer, first time participant. no expectations aside from no sleep and bad food.

I'm building with Pico-8. I was super tempted by TIC-80, but Pico-8 serves as an implicit forcing function for fast deliverables because of its extremely limited environment. for a longer timeline I'd probably roll with TIC-80, but for Ludum all it'd do is give me enough rope to hang myself with.

trying a design experiment. will be building a small docset as I participate. trying some ideas about agile dev which focus entirely on the ideate->create->evaluate loop and forego the rest of the usual formal process. I'll write a doc, then build a proto, then play it, and then build the next doc based on observations from the playthrough. no idea what it'll prove but it made me go hmm so I'm going with it.

good times comin.

Day's work? complete. Workout? finished. Dinner? on the plate. Desktop and browser? clear of distractions. Toolset? locked, loaded and shortcutted. Mind? a complete blank.

Let's do this.

Wait. How did I find myself coding a faux text adventure engine in PICO-8 as a part of this whole thing anyway?

It makes sense, I swear it does, but... yeah. didn't see this coming. At all. Huh. Neat.

Anyway. 15m break. Stretching legs, making tea. Writing up some quick docs to capture the ideas. Hope everyone's having a blast!

Current soundtrack: DX/HR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyG6YMLEWus

Found myself going super nihilistic with this theme, and the whole human/machine thing is giving me lots of inspiration. May just keep it on repeat. I mean, I like it anyway, so why not right?

Current task: Just finished my vision statement. A bit late, but that's cool; the 8pm estimate was probably overly aggressive anyway. I know what my gameplay summary is, what my primary elements are for each game mode, what my secondary gameplay elements look like, and even what the story is (yeah, there's a story, who knew?).

Current tea: Twining's Breakfast, loose leaf, with raw honey and oatmilk.

https://www.amazon.com/Twinings-English-Breakfast-Loose-Ounce/dp/B009G3TTFE

Yeah yeah yeah I have a dairy allergy and oatmilk rocks.

Next up: I have a bit less than 2hrs of consciousness left, so instead of bashing down code I'm going to play with assets. I know what my game does now, so may as well play with pixel art and chiptunes. I'll post some (bad) art before I crash.

sure looks like one, though, doesn't it?

this, a vision statement, and some sprites for later gameplay done. feels like a good start. signing off for tonight.

have a good time everyone - catch you tomorrow!

because one game mode wasn't enough. stealth/puzzle levels. be the little mostly powerless robot dude flipping switches, evading and trapping enemies, and accessing terminals to hack your way through to the next part of the game.