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Jonathan Giroux (Koltes)
Creator of
Recent community posts
If you have no ideas, no pressure, maybe a later week will be more inspiring. Ultimately the goal is not simply to make a game, but to fulfill a personal need. What is your own challenge? Do you feel lacking some skills? Do you want to express something?
You could try something out of your definition of what a game should look like. Have you already tried to break a feature to see how it turns out? To go tangible with alternative controllers?
Usually I release a WebGL build, but in this case it doesn't load, I'll investigate today.
I also wanted to put everything on GitHub since I see no value of keeping secret a prototype made in one hour compared to the benefit people would have to explore the code. Well, maybe this benefit is small as well since it is prototypic code...
Interesting for the speed up, in which way?
It all depends of the challenge you want for yourself. I set these jams as a pretext to explore the skills and methods which I felt were lacking to me. So should you use them too. If you're interested in making a whole game as fast as possible, then you would include the asset creation in the time span. If you only care about programming quickly, then only count the programming time. And, if you care about asset creation, then make the assets, and stop there, or maybe less frustrating, find someone else to integrate them into a game.
You also decide whether you have to be strict regarding the time limit. Personally I have always exceeded a bit.
You are allowed to have a large interpretation of an egg cup too. What do you feel when you hear "egg cup"? What can you do if all you have is an egg cup? What if it is the only object that makes you remember about a past friendship? What if egg cups are conspiring to kill all eggs? What if egg cups can contain something else too?
I'm sure you'll find something to tell. Don't stress about it.
At the end, you decide what challenge you want to take up. If you're programmer, you may want to consider only the programming time. Personally I expect to shorten the whole process, i.e. from finding the idea to releasing the packages on itch.io, because I want to become more efficient in all of that. Moreover I expect to do that every week, and time adds up quickly, but I don't want to waste a lot of time making these games, that's the reason behind the one hour rule. But for now I always exceeded.
Well the basic idea is that it must not take long to make the game. That's because if you make a game per week, it could add up to a lot of time... So the guideline is to stay within one hour per game. You can split it over several days, for instance fifteen minutes per day. Honestly I always exceed, I usually do it in three hours.