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Day 2:  of the DEAD!

Well, the best laid plans of mice and mole-men.  Got some backgrounds and coding done, and several ideas on how to do the digging mechanic before sickness set in.  (You know those handy-wipes at the cart corral in stores?  Use them no matter how brief a trip you take)  On the bright side it's gotten me started on making this game, and lit a fire for game dev I haven't felt in ages... but I really did want to get at least a proto up and running.

So what does this mean?  The jam may be over but the game lives on.  As soon as I am no longer coughing up lungs, I will resume work at a more reasonable pace.  Big thanks to those who've looked in on this project!

I can trace the fall of my career in game design to one event... it's what solidified my hate of programming and set me down the path of art.  25 years ago my backpack was stolen.  Now it was bad enough it had 2 books for class I had to replace, and a few hundred bucks in art supplies (my beloved Prismacolor pencils... T_T ) ... but it also had my games.  Specifically page after page of code, game ideas, prototypes, and a few actually finished games.

Now when it came to art, I always found it easy to reimagine and reproduce... and I set my brain to work on that.  Programming games though, especially back then, was a pain I wasn't keen on repeating.  

So suddenly all these years later I started having dreams.  Not dreams of code... but dreams of what those games could have been.  It's those dreams, and the work of my game dev friends, that has finally gotten me to this point... signing up for a game jam with just a few days to get something playable going.

Day 1: 

Dug up old art and notes.  Decided to revive an old prototype that was a "reverse Dig Dug"... where a subterranean monster had to defend against human invaders.  The original used a mechanic similar to Qix where the character would tunnel under enemies, and kill them if the tunnel was successful.  Eventually I'd like to improve on this with upgrades, powers, etc.

Questions, comments, and criticism always welcome.

Thanks. It sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is. Fun fact... archaic 80-90's programming languages age as well as moldy bread. (That could also be 20 years of not using said knowledge) I've actually got a folder of game ideas I've jotted down since I quit programming, so at the very least I'm not starting 100% fresh.

Hello there! In ancient times I made games... and by ancient I mean I coded games in Basic, Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Assembler... on these strange artifacts called Apple IIe, Atari 800, etc. It was, quite literally, like taking one's brain out and rubbing it against a rock expecting some sort of result with little to no insight outside the odd snippet of code posted in these things called "mah-guh-zeeens". (Seriously, you'd think books right, but game programming was this ultimate taboo secret back then. Like programmers were worried SHARING ideas would put them out of a job) I wrote tank games, maze runners, choose your own adventure text games, and even what could be considered a proto-visual novel on Mac.

Thankfully my programming teacher told me, "You'll never make games." Why thankfully? Because at the time I was torn between my love of programming and my love of art. So I became an artist. A bit funny really, as had I continued in programming back then I probably would have ended up writing dull programs for businesses and slowly turned into a robot. (No, not the fun transforming kind either)

So here I am all these years later... I draw, I paint, I sculpt, I make puppets... and now I want to get back into making games. Since I've never been good at doing only ONE thing at a time I also do a lot of Let's Plays on my Youtube Channel. I'll definitely be featuring games from here, as I think there's a lot of talented game designers here that need more exposure.