I know that it’s been a while since Spitball Sessions had any updates, and I apologize to any readers.  It’s been a strange and busy summer, and I have done very little coding.

I should start by announcing that the podcast will not be continuing.  I’ll go into a longer update about that later.  For now though, I’m just going to say that I am finally back to write, and finally back to coding again as well.

Today I started off a game for the JamCraft2 Game Jam:

Plans

The theme of the jam is “combinations”, and I think I have a pretty good idea what to do with it.  I plan to make a math-based roguelike.  The goal is to make it simple enough for small children to play, because the goal is to have something that will also help them to learn addition and subtraction.

Therefore, the game will hopefully be slightly easier than the average roguelike.

I don’t want to cover everything about it yet, but that’s going to be the basic premise.

Lessons Learned

I’ve thought a lot about what I did wrong during the last game jam (where I made Sim-You-Later), and I came to three major conclusions:

1. I tried to do too many things I’d never done before.  Since I still don’t have a ton of experience, it’s really easy to do that by mistake.
2. I coded things from the beginning of the game to the end, rather than coding the harder parts first and then attaching things like menus to them.
3. I was self-conscious about my code, and tried to make it look nicer.  In so-doing I wound up breaking several things, which probably would have been fine had I just left my code where it was.

So, to rectify that, this time I’m working from a “recipe” of sorts – I’m going to build a math-based roguelike.  There’s already an excellent tutorial series at http://rogueliketutorials.com/  which I can follow along for a lot of the boilerplate stuff.

Progress:

At the end of the first day, I have a player and the map generation is close to how I want it.  I’m still playing around with it to see if I can get something I like a little more, but I have a map that WORKS, so for now I’m going to move on.

My goal is to get the basics of the game done by the 9th.  Then I can get some people to test it on the 10th, and I’ll have 3 days to do things like debug and tinker with map & AI to make sure it’s what I want.  I still may not be able to get it perfect.  (I am, after all, still new to this), but I’d rather have a finish project than perfection in half of an unfinished game.