This is a reflection about my participation to the game jam GAME-A-WEEK #10 San Japan which ended August 28th 2023.
My idea was about mixing chess and runner game : a black knight is going forward, trying to escape the control zones of the white pieces appearing on his way.
I've never finished coding a chess engine but I'm a long time lurker of the Computer Chess Club forum ; this has paid off on this jam because I was able to implement from scratch the movement and control zones of all the chess pieces without much difficulty.
I'm also proud to have implemented without any help a branchless min function (it works only on positive integers though).
On a preceding game jam, I made by necessity a backend completly separated from the game engine. This time, I've done it by choice and it was very effective for several reasons ; a big one is the gain in testability. I was able to simulate random gameplay in tests which has been a great way to find and fix bugs.
The discovery of the HaxeFlixel game framework was a very pleasant surprise (weird that I miss it when I recently reviewed the game framework landscape). The documentation and tooling is excellent and it seems to be very mature and a big success for an open source project.
I'm becoming familiar with the Haxe language and I'm convinced that I will continue to use it. Its syntaxic features are pretty good and its transpilation capabilities are very useful to me.
I wasn't able to release a game before the end of the jam. I was missing 1 day of work, maybe even more.
At the beginning of the jam, I had some difficulties to find a game idea with a scope small enough to do it in one week. I've also taken some time before renouncing to use UE5 as a game engine.
My productivity hasn't become better, I had some good coding sessions but I'm still very unsatisfied about my work capacity.
Even with my past experiences, there was lost time because I was completly ignorant about the tools to manage texture packs/sprite sheets.
I've confirmed the importance to test as I code. Writing too much code without testing can cost much time.
I was working without any planning and only a small design document ; after reflection, I think I should make for myself some simple templates for :
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It sounds like you were taking quite a bit this week! My suggestion is for Game-A-Week is to start simple and go up from there. Because of the strict deadlines, it will force you to handle other aspects of game dev like polish and deployment which is generally neglected for games with longer dev cycles.
Once you have a pipeline in place for deploying builds, it becomes a lot easier to focus on execution for ideas since the boring technical stuff has been resolved.
I hope you stick with Game-A-Week! There's always a lot to learn and it sounds like you got quality experience on this attempt.
Thanks for your comments. I'll probably not entirely follow the Game-A-Week methodology because I'm a wannabe indie gamedev and I'd like to work soon on a commercial project ! But I think this is a fantastic thing to do for anyone who wants to become serious about game development. One similar alternative is to participate frequently to game jams.