Well I guess this is it, as I saw on “a few” other posts, I AM IN! 😀

It’s my first time attempting a Game Jam with the express goal of shipping something, so I’ll give it my all.

With very little coding proficiency and ABSOLUTELY no art skill (I’m a business/marketing guy for an indie studio), it was all starting pretty bad…

But hey, since I love reading and telling stories, I realized I should probably try writing one.

Tools: Twine, A LOT of research.

I wasn’t greatly inspired by the theme so it took me 3 hours to decide what I was going to go for. Finally got the idea, so COMPO here I am!

So, my original plan was looking somewhat like this:

• 9AM – 12PM: Find an idea to fit this theme
• 12PM – 5PM: Research (my game idea was following a news cycle so I had a lot of news curation to do)
• 5PM – 12AM: Build the basic decision tree and start implementing it in Twine
• 12AM – 2AM: Set up variables and special macros in Twine
• 2AM – 8:30AM: Sleep, breakfast
• 8:30AM – 4AM: Writing, polish, format, debug, submit

How it actually went down is:

• 9AM – 12PM: Find an idea! YAY~
• 12PM – 5PM: Research! Still on track
• 5PM – 9PM: Realize I don’t know anything about Twine. Watch a bunch of tutorials, try some basic stuff.
• 9PM – 10Pm: Start writing content, to feel like I’ve achieved something.
• 10PM – 8AM: Despair. Go Home. Sleep on this.
• 8AM – 10AM: Watch some more tutorials, realize my scope was way to big to start with
• 10AM – Now: Redefine scope. Start from scratch.

So now I’ve got a WAY smaller game idea. I should have trimmed it down from the beginning, following a lot of advice from my fellow GameDevs at Ludum Dare Beijing.

I’ not sure I’ll have enough time to finish this. And I don’t want to make it a JAM (mostly because it defeats all the goals I set for this weekend -shipping something in 48 hours). However I learnt an important lesson:

Participating in a Ludum Dare is not “just” acommitment for a weekend. You need to prepare! Whatever the results of this one, I will go all in for LD33, so I’ll plan a warm-up weekend to familiarize myself in advance with the ins-and-outs of the tools I’ll use.

Anyway, it’s not over yet. I’ve got my new project open, my basic branching tree started. Gotta get to it.

Well it looks like I might be able to actually ship something.

It won’t have any custom CSS. Won’t be very long either.

But I’m seeing myself finish this!

I’m still not completely profficient with Twine (or with writing stories in English, if that matters…), but if I can submit this one I’ll be proud enough

Go Go Go everyone, the end is near!

I can’t believe it took me so long to build this…

I’ve played a little with what Harlowe is allowing us to do, mostly by following this tutorial serie from VegetarianZombie.

So I figured out how to add dynamic links and inline pictures, how to display stuff based on variables defined at the beginning of the story, etc. As you can imagine this led to a lot of UGLY and MESSY code…

If I have time left before the COMPO submission deadline, I’ll think a little about priorizing:

• CSS Styling
• Making a title screen
• Cleaning all that shit (and probably breaking everything in the process)

In the meantime, with 9 hours to go, I’m allowing myself a little break. So after this blogging time, I’ll probably take a short 15 to 30 minutes nap