I exclusively develop text-based games with ASCII/ANSI graphics, and I'm usually a hater of Game Jams, but this one caught my attention. The reason I make ASCII games is to force myself to make something minimal and not rely on all of the tropes the video game industry has fallen into. This Game Jam takes all of that to the next level by forcing us to focus more on Game Play than Graphics.
So, since each ASCII character is already 8x8 pixels, the dimension of my project can only be 8x8 characters.
I tried making a room-based game. I went and made all of the art first, but no matter how hard I tried I could not think of a way to make a fun game out of it. I just ended up with a tiny apartment complete with TV, Toilet, Fish Tank, Bed, Stove, Sinks, and Fridge. Here's a screenshot.
I'd been making a run-and-jump game starring a horse the previous week and then I saw this Game Jam. I'll finish the Horse one eventually, but I shifted my focus to the jam. The horse was already 8x8 characters so I had to shrink it down. I ended up with a Capybara. I coded 6 hours straight until 5 in the morning, spent another 6 hours on it the next couple of days and ended up with this (excuse the size, I had to add the border for Twitter)..
It's called Capybara Capriole. I made a massive level for the main game, which I'm still trying to beat. Once you get bored with that though, there's a built-in level builder! I love the level builder because it only uses a single line of text.
I need to clean it up a little more, but it should be up by tomorrow (Saturday) night. I'm very excited to see what the rest of you come up with and what you'll all think of my title (and hopefully some of you will create and share your own level). This has been super super fun, and I'm happy the jam fell on my 3-day weekend.
