Adventure Jam started again! \o/

I participate once in 2019 but somehow didn't manage last year, even though I would have had the time. Something like that feels super bad to me, so I aim to do it differently this year. So goal #1 is to write a dev log, one entry per day, no matter what. There will be days where I simply don't have time to work on the game at all, so the progress reports will be rather short. All in all I estimate that I will have at most eight days during which I will be able to put in significant amounts of work, so roundabout a week. I certainly won't stress myself out over it, goal #2 is to have a playable game at the end of the jam.

So what game will I make? I have no idea. But I do have a plan.

What do you do if you don't have an idea? Well, you guessed it, you make a sequel, Darts 2 (working title).

What do you do if you don't have an idea for what will happen in the sequel? You start with writing an engine.

My 2019 Adventure Jam entry was called Darts https://gamejolt.com/games/darts/418699. I actually had a proper post-mortem written for last jam, but unfortunately only in my head.

The game was made using an engine called GB Studio https://www.gbstudio.dev/. It allows you to create Game Boy compatible games easily, which is great. On the other hand it was really restrictive in what type of game you can make and awkward to program for.

The plan is to write an engine similar to GB Studio using the Löve framework. It should allow me to make a similar game to Darts and allow me to re-use the sprites. I do not aim for compatibility with the Game Boy or GB Studio, nor do I plan to replicate all the features. On the other hand, with Lua as a general purpose programming language, I will have a lot of freedoms that I didn't have with GB Studio. While working around the various limitations of GB Studio was fun in a way the block programming was just a pain to work with.

If all goes well I will be able to break out the engine or parts of it into standalone modules that I can reuse down the line. That is goal #3.

As for the actual game, I don't know what it will be about. I simply hope that inspiration will find me along the way.

Thanks for reading, happy jamming!

Philipp