Gamejam

As hinted at to be my plan in my post about my first proper gamedev experience back in April, I recently took part in my first ever gamejam, Go Godot Jam 4, and during that built a game called “Pew Pew Pew: Danger Zone!”. The jam required all submissions to be built in Godot Engine, which was one of the reasons I chose it - I just recently got my feet wet in game development with Godot 4 and wanted to get some more practice in. Since my partner was otherwise committed, I entered as a solo dev. ...

For my 40th birthday a few weeks ago, I got a pretty amazing gift from my partner: a coupon for a personal 4-day Gamejam/Gamedev experience, just the two of us. I’ve been a gamer pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a coder pretty much my whole life, but I never so far managed to combine these things. Apart from copying some Star Trek game code in BASIC from a book in my teens, the probably quite common tinkering around with the parameters in gorilla.bas, and a Snake clone in GLUT in preparation for a 3d graphics course in university, I never so far got into game development. It has been something high on my bucket list however, and I’ve been fascinated by the concept of gamejams like Ludum Dare, GMTK Jam etc., where you build a game matching a provided topic within a set time limit (usually between two to ten days) and within a set of rules (e.g. do you need to do everything yourself, including graphics and music, or are you allowed to use certain existing assets, do you need to use a specific game engine etc). Add to that the fact that these days I’m way more into playing indie games than the AAA stuff from the big players1, a love for learning new stuff and the release of the latest major version 4 of the fully open source Godot Engine that has made me curious for a while now, and you might see why this really WAS an absolutely amazing gift by my partner. ...