…and hopefully I’ll get back to my slightly longer midweek run tomorrow.
Today has mostly been a quiet day of catching up with all the admin I neglected during the last week of the jam, with a bonus technical difficulty in trying to get all my WhatsApp chats off my old phone and onto my new one. I rarely use WhatsApp but I like to have an archive. Anyway, it’s all sorted now.
Looking forward to playing some more game jam entries tonight!
A picture from over the weekend – I’ve not been on the Metro since before lockdown, but it was nice to see the rainbows on the signs as I walked past the station.
Today’s earworm playlist:
ACE+ – ‘Mechonis Field’ Alison Moyet – ‘Is This Love?’
…as I didn’t feel that well when I woke up. I had planned to do my delayed weekend long run today, but I think I’ll be trying to make up the mileage later in the week instead.
As such, I got my day job work out of the way first today, and then went for my short run in the afternoon. Since then, I’ve been catching up with admin, and am looking forward to playing some jam entry games tonight.
I’m still feeling a bit physically poorly and mentally fried, but I think that’s just because I’ve been so busy over the last few days and weeks. This week is just going to involve some quiet catching up with admin and housework, and a lot of playing of videogames rather than making them.
I’m still really pleased to have released my most recent game last night. You can play it here!
As a result, I’ve not got much planned for tomorrow!
An updated graphic for my first jam game, The Cave of Hoarding. To celebrate the sequel coming out, I made some quick replacements for the shonky old original graphics. This pile of treasure sums up my feelings when I submit a game at the end of a jam!
Today’s earworm playlist:
Mott The Hoople – ‘All The Young Dudes’ Idina Menzel – ‘Into The Unknown’
I released my newest text adventure game last night (and submitted it to the Adventuron game jam, making it four Adventuron jams in a row for which I have managed to cobble together a game!). I’ve put a lot of work into this one over the last month, so I’m really pleased that it’s all finished and out there in the world at last.
Adventuron version.
The main reason that this game required quite a bit of extra work was that I accepted the optional jam challenge of porting the Adventuron game to Spectrum +3 and Spectrum Next using DAAD Ready (I talked about this process at length in the video I linked to in my Barry Basic post the other day). The DAAD conversion process works really well, but there are a few things that come up slightly differently in the Spectrum port and so they needed to be tweaked and refined to make sure that they worked in the same way across the versions. There’s still a bit of improvement that could be made to the ported versions, but I’m happy enough with them for now.
Spectrum Next version.
I also made two sets of graphics – one for the Adventuron and Spectrum Next versions, and one Spectrum-compatible set for the Spectrum +3 version. The Spectrum-compatible graphics were a lot of fun to make, but I’m going to need a lot more practice in that style before I do another +3 port! The Adventuron/Next graphics, meanwhile, are probably my favourites that I’ve made yet – I used the hept32 palette suggested in the jam rules, rather than just picking random colours like I usually do, and I think it’s made everything look a lot nicer and more pulled-together.
Spectrum +3 version.
For the actual game and story, I tried to keep everything fairly short and simple, as I knew there wouldn’t be much memory space when porting to Spectrum +3 (as it happened, I did have to sacrifice one graphical change in a location on the +3 version because the original amount of graphics was too much for the conversion!). I decided on my setting (a single five-room building) for this reason, but I ended up making a short prequel* to the game I originally planned out, as the first game plan was getting a bit too big.**
* It’s also a sequel to my first game from last year, The Cave of Hoarding. It’s complicated. ** This always happens. The only time I actually made the game that I originally planned (Hallowe’en: Night of the Misty Manor), it ended up being 10,000 lines of code and required a lot of all-nighters in the week leading up to the jam deadline. At least it means I’ve got a lot of semi-finished games that I can work on in my own time!
After making a fairly contained game (albeit with a lot of interesting complications), I am quite keen to do a project with a big, sprawling map again. However, I am going to take a few days (at least) off from game creation – apart from anything else, I want to play all the other jam entries now!
…before the longer weekend plods. The weather is meant to be miserable this weekend so the Sunday long run may get shunted to Monday if I really can’t face it. We’ll see.
I’ll be polishing off my Adventuron jam game for a little longer than expected this weekend, as the jam deadline has been extended. Nice to have the breathing room! I spent most of today implementing the changes I identified as necessary during Geth’s playtest last night, as well as a few tweaks that I’d been listing over the last week or so. Tomorrow will mainly be focused on creating my Itch page/promotion stuff and making everything look nice, then on Sunday I’ll be able to run through the different versions of the game a few more times just to be sure!
I really enjoy this process, but I am looking forward to kicking back and playing the other games from Monday onwards. I’ll be posting the usual running vlog updates over the weekend, but there may also be some game-related posts if I have time.
My surrounding game decoration has a bit of a rainbow theme this time round.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Carbon Leaf – ‘What About Everything?’ All Saints – ‘Pure Shores’ The Cure – ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ Mesh – ‘Automation Baby’
…and then straight back into my game for more polishing off. Today was all about experimenting with external sound effects!… which didn’t work, and so I recreated them with the beeps that come as part of Adventuron instead. The beeps probably sound better and more consistent than the effects I made with my wide-ranging elderly instrument collection and limited musical skill, but hopefully I’ll be able to work out how to incorporate my own sound one of these days!
I also had Geth playtest the game this evening. This process always throws up a few issues that I need to work on, so that will be the first job for tomorrow.
Hopefully – fingers crossed! – when I update again tomorrow, the game will be all but finished. Jam deadline is Saturday afternoon!
One of my ultimately-unsuccessful sound effects was recorded on my clunky old Concertmate keyboard from 1994. I still love all the terrible voice settings you can use for the keyboard!
Today’s earworm playlist:
FM-84 – ‘Bend And Break’ Zara Larsson – ‘Lush Life’
The box is also painted in this nice blue and green colour scheme in the above Street View image, which must be fairly recent. But wait…
If you try to move closer to the phone box, you get this older image, which shows how the box looked when it was still red!
While the classic red colour is iconic, I do like the look of interestingly-repainted phone boxes – it indicates that they’re being looked after, if nothing else!
One last phone box picture from Cornwall next week.
I went out for my four-mile midweek run this morning…
…and it was a bit of a struggle to force myself out of the door! I need to do nine miles on Sunday, and I’m already slightly dreading it… it’s just one of those weeks where I’m lacking a bit of running motivation. One day at a time, like everything else.
My game is really getting into the final stages now. I got the second set of graphics implemented today (they were a lot more straightforward than the first set!) and have started to sort out the final non-8-bit touches for the Adventuron version of the game, as well as the eventual presentation aspects such as the Itch page design. Hoping to run it past my first playtester (i.e. Geth) tomorrow evening!
The laptop stack did not pull its weight as planned today – laptop number one turned out to be about six Linux versions out of date and needs a complete reinstall, while laptop number two needs a day or so to recharge its battery. Laptop number three is tiny and struggles to do anything complicated, so I don’t think it could manage more than a small test game in an Adventuron editor (if that), and laptop number four is still on Windows 7, so I wouldn’t want to connect it to the web (it’s another one that needs overhauling with Linux). Hopefully number two will be ready to go tomorrow! I need to remember to plug them all in for a recharge every so often…
Just a short run again tomorrow, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a productive game creation day 🙂
Something different today – this graphic is from a mini side project that I’ll hopefully be able to update you about tomorrow.
