Day 1: My First Game Jam!

On the evening of July 20th, I set my alarm for 8am. This is because I want to participate in My First Game Jam summer 2023, for some reason.

The theme was announced at 8am sharp in my time zone. Whilst entirely optional, the theme they agreed upon to inspire jammers was 'cycles'.

I wanted to brainstorm a little before attempting something anywhere near coding, so I browsed some story prompts, opened up OneNote and attempted to map out a story arc, as well as defining characters and locations, and additionally writing up a reference section to link to any resources and credit any assets.

I had decided to use Twine as my engine of choice. The last time My First Game Jam was hosted, I had planned to learn and use Unity but unfortunately bit off more than I could chew, which resulted in me not submitting a game at all and shamefully lurking in the discord's #general channel.

At first I was intimidated but as my answer to the @daily question in the discord, my second goal was to "actually read the documentation" of my chosen engine, which unsurprisingly was very helpful. I managed to whip up a prototype for the entirety of the prologue for this small game whilst learning to use conditional variables.

My first goal though was to "actually submit something this time" which, with the way things had been going today, seemed like it could be genuinely plausible. But upon reading deeper into the topic of variables, I suddenly thought: "I could make the game I initially wanted to make in unity, but was too chicken to attempt."

So I dug out the old school notebook and pens and got to work.

I found my handscribbled gameloop I had made for the previous jam, and went about inputting this loop into Twine. I ended up with a simple game with a beginning that reset all your scores, an end that displayed your scores once you completed the game and, if you played your cards right, could be played infinitely.

In looking up different types of variable rules for this game prototype, I found you could balance player choices with luck probabilities. Using these types of variables would give more unique outcomes, which in turn could mean more replayability for the game. I had a brief discussion with my fiance about weighted probabilities, but this is definitely an area that could do with some more research (and at this time of night, I'll probably read up on it tomorrow!).

So in summary:

- Berni woke up

- The theme was announced

- She answered the @daily question

- Berni brainstormed an extremely simple game

- She then read the documentation for Twine and SugarCube

- Berni was like fuck dis I can make ma game BIGGER and b e t t e r...

- She decided her two goals tomorrow would be:

1. implement CSS into her game

2. expand sections of text that could be randomised