I've never dev blogged any of my games or jams in progress. I've been nervous about doing that for various reasons, but I'll give it a go with this project.

This is my first time coding for Adventuron - I came across a tweet about this gamejam from @lexoloffle (zep - the Pico-8 creator) a few weeks ago, and remembered about this gamejam a few days ago. I had previously seen adventuron.io in passing earlier in the year, and had always meant to come back to it.

 I decided to join and start 2 days ago. It's been a while since I've done a gamejam, so this seemed perfect - especially as the last time I tried to write a text adventure was when I was 10, on an RM Nimbus machine at school. 

I've decided with doing a dystopian, cyberpunk themed xmas game - what with the release of Cyberpunk 2077, and also cyberpunk (small c) is just cool in general. As it's a jam, and I've entered halfway through the jam, I'm going to focus on a very small scenario - but as dense as I can make it.

 I'm hoping to have at least 2-3 solutions to each challenge in the game - in trying to keep up with the style of play that games like Deus Ex, Prey, Watchdogs Legion et al all follow. I'm approaching this with the mindset that there will be advantages and disadvantages to the different solutions (maybe taking an easy solution earlier on, costs you a resource that makes another challenge later on harder without it).

I also want to take a more simplistic, maybe modern, approach to a text adventure; I don't want the game to be a reading comprehension test. Instead I am going to happily highlight, indicate and point out all the things you can interact with - and even suggest actions to be taken. I want fun not frustration to be the overall takeaway! But as this is my first text adventure, and I have limited time, it's a broad goal.

For graphics, I am using the awesome PyxelEdit, using a Pico-8 palette - as I am quite familiar with it (and want to be even moreso). I'm potentially looking at trying out some chibi/anime/Famicon-esq sprite art style - to fit with the limited resolution, but also thematically with the 80's style approach to cyberpunk, where it's a mishmash of American and Japanese culture.

I'm finding the Cookbook on the adventuron.io site quite useful, although it feels like there isn't quite a 1:1 parity between the cookbook and the reference guide. The sample games are helping too. While I am multi-language coder, predominantly Javascript at this point, I'm having to fight the urge to treat the code like JSON! But I am using camelCase, because anything else is just too foreign for me!

So far I've been having fun experimenting and discovering some of the more funky bits of tech available, that you wouldn't think would be in a text adventure (well, not at least when I played them in the late 80's/early 90's).

Hello, and welcome! For me, this is my first game jam ever, and I just started using Adventuron about two months ago. So this will be my first public release. :D
Feel free to ask us questions!

Hi,

I saw your tweet about this on Twitter about an hour ago, then found the post here.

Looks to be a fun challenge for you.

No obligation, but if you find any errors in the documentation that have slowed you down or sent you on the wrong path entirely, let me know, and I'll try to correct. The documentation, especially the cookbook, is kind of written in a very fast "forum post" style, that I just copy and paste into that document rather than it being intricately planned out - or even grammar checked. I do try to edit the document from time to time when I notice errors myself, but I'm pretty busy so I imagine I'm absolutely certain there are many errors still in there, hopefully not in the code snippets though.

I do like the style of highlighting interesting words. I think modern players, for better or for worse,  are hardwired to quickly scan text rather than read every word  and it's clear to me that the 21st century brain (on average) is different to the 20th century brain (on average) seems.  We can process so much more information now but at the cost of attention span (on average). Our brains become good at the skills that we need for the era we live in.

Anyway - thanks for the post, and I look forward to seeing what you will do with the concept. Try to not go crazy with the scope is my advice. 12 days remain.

Good luck!

Chris