Entering Mini Jame Gam #38

2025-01-10

I am going to enter the Mini Jame Gam #38 this weekend making a game with Rust and Bevy. I will also stream the whole development process on Twitch, hooray! 🥳

Why am I doing this?

It has been a while since I dabbled in game development, but it has always been a passion of mine. Making games was also how I got into programming as a teenager in the first place. I took it a little more seriously after finishing my studies and spend some time fashioning myself as an indie game developer – the articles about functional reactive programming on this blog document my endeavours into being utterly and hopelessly side-tracked.

After that short phase in 2014/15, my career has been dominated by enterprise software development which has kept me busy for years. And honestly, I miss programming for fun and entertainment quite a bit.

Alas, since I recently became a freelancer again, I am using the newly won time & energy to get back into game development. A game jam seems like a great way to get started!

Dependending on how this goes, I might continue doing more of it. First and foremost, I want to focus on submitting a game to the jam that is reasonably fun to play. Actually finishing has been my weak point in the past, so this will be a challenge on its own.

I have no concrete idea what game I am going to end up making. So I am eagerly awaiting the theme and special object of the jam to be revealed when the event starts.

There are certainly a few mechanics I want to explore: for example, procedural generated narratives. Games like Faster Than Light, Wildermyth or Rimworld are really good at this, so I am likely going to draw some inspiration from them. There are a lot of pen & paper RPGs with interesting ideas on how to generate a story using dice – I am thinking about Thousand Year Old Vampire, for example.

Also I can make some pixel art, so I will likely use that skill or, failing that, use assets.

Something else that has been sorely missing from my previous gamedev adventures was audio 🙈 – be that, sound effects, background musics or dialog, I never actually added audio anywhere. So that should change. I definitely need to use 3rd party assets for this: learning about making music or foley art is far outside the realm of possibility for a 3-day jam.

I had a lot of fun messing with OBS Studio to set up my streaming profile and got some experienced advice from my sibling who is a veteran Tomb Raider streamer. (Check out their channel!)

Here is me being "surprised" by them raiding my channel for a test:

I am looking forward to this jam and would love to see a few viewers drop by throughout the weekend and say hi and chat about game development. 😊