I'm still new to a lot of programming and mostly I wanted to use this event to sharpen those programming skills, as well as writing and game design. Those are basically the only things I'm good at, I can't draw and while my taste in music is excellent, it doesn't mean I know how to make it.

Well, I've got my Rock N' Roll, my idea which was planned more around plants but I think I can rework to the theme, and the usual amount of panic.

...Seriously, like half my plans were based on plants and crime for "Connections" and "Tunnels". The idea for inevitable was from a friend and I'm gonna damn well thank him when I see him next cause I have no ideas beyond this.

I've spent my evening making a pile of leaves and stairs that feel like they're gonna be odd in gameplay.

All I can say is this game would go best with Corpseacopia's theme from Atomicrops.

...actually y'know what? The self-deprecation wasn't necessary. I was thinking the game would go at run n' gun speeds but the system I have (Manually pressing a button to move up stairs) might be better for the aesthetic.

Well, I'v certainly gotten more done than I expected I could. I've got a basic enemy type (who still don't kill but will run after the player), some basic effects, sounds, and art suited perfectly for my cheapskate and softwarephobic lifestyle, and even a title screen!

...Hey did I ever mention I am bad at art? I don't think I've ingrained that into your heads hard enough. (name is temp but it basically gets the point across)

Anyways, I've got some food, a Payday 2 anarchist build, and a need for a break before I burn out.

I am working in Godot, an engine I've only recently learned about, and I will admit I am going about making stairs in the most ass backwards way possible.

It has taken 6 signals, multiple functions, hours AND a nap for me to finally get the player character to move through floors and up stairs. Spawning shite? I did that in minutes. Making a character move across the screen? Tearing my hair out.

AND there's no animations for moving up stairs they're just sliding up the background.

"Born to dream, forced to journal". I guess the game dev equivalent would be "Born to dream, forced to program.".

After getting stuck on a lot of nitty gritty details trying to get...stairs to work, I don't know if I'm going to get anything to market. I've certainly learned things about Godot from this, and that was all I was trying to do. I think with a team I would've gotten further but as a solo dev it got way too frustrating to think that what others have made looks like it's cut from a movie while I look slightly better than scratch. Mainly animation players, I've heard they're grand and probably could've made a lot of problems simpler, but that requires art and I can't animate for my life. Probably gonna post the trainwreck on the itch I made once I get it close enough to working properly and then drop it.

So last time, my first jam...well I went with a game idea I concocted beforehand that barely bent around the theme. Plus it just didn't feel fun to play. Or code, for that matter. But, I've got 6 extra months on my engine of choice under my belt (Godot), and an itch to make a project by myself that I can keep simple on launch. Still haven't...made any, full games...from Godot. But I had a lot more engine tinkering since then. Something that will keep me from programming for most of the damn thing.

I'll cut to the chase. I'm a writer, game designer, and programmer. What I am certainly not is an Artist, nor a music maker. I'll certainly get by without either, but I don't know any software and don't own any hardware that would make either thing easier (at least, without costing money). If anyone has some good places to grab this stuff or wants to work with me on the upcoming Game Jam, I'd be more than happy.

Oh, right. I should mention I'm a 2D Godot dev. Slipped my mind.

I've got some fun ideas for Connections, 10 Seconds, Split, Ascend. God almighty I have no gameplay ideas for Ascend but dear lord I want Ascend. Got a project together, and I'm gonna make a run for snacks tomorrow, though I just got spacers in my mouth. They're the precursors to braces. They're pain incarnate.

While everyone else has been saying the theme sucks, I've actually got a half-good idea for it. It just needs refinement since it was added to a pile of other ideas that we're mostly half-thought out to save on time in case it wasn't the theme. Granted, it wasn't one of those "slobber in anticipation over getting to make the game" ideas, but it wasn't Side Effects. Thank god it wasn't Side Effects.

So I just got here to look at what themes were available and thought of an idea for Limited Visibility as a poker game where you didn't know your own cards or what cards were in the middle.

Then I went to play Sea of Thieves with my friend and while playing, she mentioned how bad she was with Row Boats. Row Boats can only be driven with oars and while boating you get turned around and can't really look at where you're driving. So I proceeded to help her by calling out when she needed to push which oar and we eventually made it all the way towards the ship.

I don't have any concrete ideas but given how little I understand light nodes in Godot I think this form of "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes" visibility is what I'll go with.

It's not much. But it helps to start a game jam by stroking my ever fragile ego.

Oh also I'm in. I will make damnably sure that I raise my jams participated in to jams actually completed ratio to a number that is not 0.

I have an idea for a game that I haven't really finished especially now that my old work is on an old version of Godot.

But the idea of the Health Bar was that you were an actor in a stage play and your health bar was not just your health but how popular your character is in the play. The audience would throw you boons the more favored your character is, and when you ran out of audience approval the character dies. I don't have any current plans to finish that idea but I want you all to know that I've been cooking that game idea for a year at this point so the theme being Delivery is giving you all mercy.

Knowing nothing about how to record videos, let me explain some code with a screenshot

What I've done with a Godot Tilemap is nothing short of witchcraft and it doesn't use Custom Data Layers because I don't want to test my luck and sanity. The game world will take all the tiles in the game world and add them to a grid dictionary, which each key has a cell data class holding my important info. Each Tile, depending on which tile it is, has a receive and transfer direction, which each object checks to see if this tile's transfer direction and the next tile's receiving direction are the same. If they are, a tweening of the object as smooth as hot butter occurs to make it look like the object is being moved across the conveyor belt.

It may not be much in comparison to the work some of y'all have put in but this is half the work for me. I could probably close out the mechanics sooner rather than later if I pace myself. The main gimmicks are rotating conveyor belts at intersections and flipping a switch that reverses all conveyor belt directions in order to drop objects into goals. Not the most interesting game in text but it's simple and it's arcadey and all the Tilemap sorcery was the bulk of the work.

Well I wasn't really expecting myself to make much, but considering I was more productive in one day than I've been for 3-4 months I've got to say I'm pleasantly surprised. Especially since I spent the morning of the first real work day thinking about just how incapable I was for the job of making a Ludum Dare game on my own. But then I remembered how proud my Therapist would be if she saw that I made a game after 3-4 months of feeling like the only thing I owned was the indent in the couch and a My Singing Monsters Account, which by the way my Gold Island is going well

I have just woken up and it is already past 11 when the Compo ends at 9pm my time. But at least I had some pretty cool dreams about an all you can eat buffet of soup, cookies, and cake alongside one about training an electric snake to attack Brock Samson. I mean, I still woke up 3 hours later than I did yesterday but still. Nice dreams.

It's coming to the end of the Compo and I'm not really finished, which I'm not really surprised by. It's more like that feeling when you wake up and look at your work and realize it looks very placeholder and shit. Now, as someone who is drawing this entirely in piskel with a mouse, I've got to say I'm impressed with some of my own work, and if I maintained a work load like this for a week or so I'd probably feel a lot better, but now my fuel is kind of running out. Not like my previous jams where I just immediately hate thinking about continuing work because of burnout, but I wouldn't be surprised if I submitted for Extra. Which, quite frankly, this is my first real game so the fact I could probably finish it in a few hours and a clear head astounds me.

Congrats to all of you looney tunes who finished for the Compo deadline, hopefully some day I'll join you guys.

I was extremely excited to finish my game on the first two days but now my enthusiasm has definitely gone down after days of not working on it. However, this jam, more than the previous jams, taught me a lot about the process of making games and staying invested in it, and because of those lessons I got closer than most other projects I've had in actually making a game. I'd like to share a bit of the wisdom I've gleaned, whether the game I have actually gets finished.

1. Have a clear idea of what you want in the game before working on it. Try drafting up a level for the game to get an idea of what mechanics you'll need to make. In my game, which involves conveyor belts moving objects on them, I had spent a long time without a level designed and thought that all I would need was straight and elbow conveyor belt tiles. Come actually designing a level, and I realized that those two tile types limited me too much and I needed to add more to make a half-decent level. Another thing I realized was how the big gimmick of the game was being able to rotate tiles on the belt, which were originally only going to be elbow tiles. However, again, by designing a level, I realized that only being able to rotate specific tiles like that was way too limiting. I shifted to a gold tile system where conveyor belts above a gold tile could be rotated. Knowing these things before going in would've cleaned up a lot of the process or at least given me more confidence to just make that level possible to create.

2. Set up a to do list and break down tasks. A lot of the work going into developing the game is going to feel overwhelming to your 3 day deadline if you only envision it in terms of finished product. To put it in a way that I was inspired to say by someone from the Godot discord who had an unfortunately realistic view on the matter, most people want to Make a game, but no one wants to or knows how to Develop a game. Find what parts of your game need to be worked on first and work your way up from there. As well, being able to cut down on tasks sizes will increase the amount of tasks you finish, and being able to cross out multiple items on your Trello board is going to feel sweet instead of slogging through a couple of broad tasks.

3. Once you have an idea, and a full day to work on it, focus as much as you can on making the game playable in as short of time as possible. All of the Day 1 excitement is going to wear off by the time you wake up in the morning, so having the most confident product you can have will help immensely. I can attest to this after spending my first day getting closest to a playable prototype, but then I made the mistake of working on other aspects and leaving the main game and main game maintenance tasks for later. Trust me, being able to say "I have a fully playable game, I just need to make the art/music/proper UI" is going to feel a lot better than "I can't really play the game but at least there's a boppin' beat in the background.".

4. Try to be making effort in any way you can. This may somewhat contradict point 3 but it's still a productive way to get around blocks. Whether that be a code block, art block, or music, if you've still got that productive bent in you then try working on something else instead of beating your head into a wall when you can't figure out why x doesn't do y or how to draw z. You'll be making enough progress to keep up your momentum and come back to whatever problem you've had with fresher eyes. Plus, as always, having some non-placeholder art or a couple of sound effects are going to be a lot easier on the eyes and ears as you stare at your computer for hours at a time.

5. Finally, take some breaks when you can. Rome wasn't built in a day...okay bad example, Rome wasn't built by a single guy in a day. Whether your form of a break is to go get lunch for yourself, play a couple of missions in a game you like, or just take a walk, it helps to stop yourself from getting burnt out completely or feeling stuck on problems that you just can't get around. The worst feeling to have would be pure exhaustion at the thought of going back to work on a project, and pushing uninterrupted 8 hour work days is how you're going to get there. At the end of the day, this is a friendly competition where the most anyone gets is internet clout. Draining yourself for a couple of reddit gold and not even finishing the project because of x or y problem is painful to deal with, so maintaining your stamina is just as important as getting a product out there.

If you put me in a court of law and asked me why I may not finish my game, I'm going to say Not Guilty by reason of College Finals and game releases. Darkest Dungeon 2 just released, Splatoon 3 had a splatfest, and I needed to study for the Economics final after spending weeks in that class barely paying attention and scrolling through Disco Elysium dialogues. I don't even have a working title for the game, so I can't even say what the game's gonna be called (if you got a suggestion then hey dont let me stop you from giving it to me). What I'm glad for, though, is that regardless of what comes of the project, it taught me these things for the next Jam, or even the first Full game I intend to make in general. Hopefully I didn't just spend the last 5000 characters of this blog post blowing hot air out of my ass, and that some other dev might read this and learn how to avoid these motivational pitfalls before they stumble into them. Given the fact I started the jam doubting myself to the extremes and thinking that there was no way in hell I would be able to make the game because it was Godot 4 and there was all these new tools and blah blah blah, the fact I came so close anyways really helps with my mental health and confidence in my abilities.