my first game jam: 48 hours, 1 stray cat, 0 sleep, 31 ratings ~
Tanvi Hegde@tanvi_makes_games
Contents
okay so i did my first game jam!! 🐈 a small one on itch, 48 hours, theme was "one more lap", about 400 entries.
my idea: a stray cat in a temple town has to walk around the temple 108 times before the gates close, like a pradakshina, but every lap something changes. a monkey steals your snack, the flower seller moves her basket, it starts raining. you only have to survive one more lap. and then one more.
what went right
- i scoped it to ONE map. i had planned 5. ayyo, past me was so naive
- i made the music in BeepBox in about 2 hours. a 16 bar loop on a temple bell sound and somehow nobody got tired of it
- the lap counter is a big number painted on the temple wall that changes every lap. people loved it. it was 10 lines of code
what went wrong
- hour 40: the web build was a black screen on itch. turns out godot 4 web exports with threads need special headers (cross-origin isolation, the SharedArrayBuffer stuff), and itch has a checkbox for it that i didn't know about. panic. then i found that newer godot 4 versions let you switch off thread support in the web export preset, and then it just runs on normal hosting. if you jam in godot 4: test your web export on day one, not at hour 40 like me
- cats walked through walls for the whole first day because i forgot to set the collision layers. very spiritual. not intended
- slept 3 hours in total. do not recommend
results
- 31 ratings
- 87th overall out of ~400, 12th in "fun"
- favourite comment: "i did 108 laps. why did i do 108 laps. 10/10"
honestly the most fun i've had since quitting my design job. the temple cat is going into my real game as an easter egg ~ next jam: swalpa more time on the sprites, less time panicking
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Comments
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Sign in to commentOlivier Gagnon@ogagnon
Bravo for the first jam ! 12th in fun is the category that matters. And "test the web export on day one" should be printed on every jam page, I lost 4 hours to the same black screen 😅
佐藤はるか Haruka@nekomata_games
cat solidarity 🐈⬛🐈 the 108 laps idea is so beautiful. "why did i do 108 laps" is the best review a game can get
Dhruv Thakkar@dhruv_ships
Tanvi proud of you! 31 ratings in the first jam, bhai bhai. Next jam make the cat file GST invoices, I will be your first customer 😂
Jake Morrison@jakemakesgames
the lap counter painted on the temple wall is such a good idea mate. diegetic UI in 10 lines. heaps good
Mehmet Aydoğan@malloc_mehmet
Cute. But this is not engineering, this is arts and crafts with collision boxes.
Tanvi Hegde@tanvi_makes_games
ayyo. state machines, collision layers, a frame budget on a web build that has to run on school chromebooks... ok uncle 🐈
Bartek Wójcik@bartek_gamedev
No, Mehmet, ship a game that holds 16ms per frame on a cheap laptop and then we talk about arts and crafts
Mehmet Aydoğan@malloc_mehmet
16ms is eternity. My controllers answer an interrupt in 50 microseconds. Olmaz böyle şey
Bartek Wójcik@bartek_gamedev
and your controller does not need to make a 12 year old laugh. different job, both engineering