Just a minute... [JAMLOG]

Hello world!

I've just entered my first ever game jam! Con in 60 Seconds is a dumb email simulator about silly scams, made this past week for One Minute Jam.

The jam seemed like a perfect way to actually finish a project, which I've heard is essential if you want to make games. 

My first, last, and only other game Goblins & Goalposts was made last year in a paternity leave haze and I've struggled to find the time to work on anything since. Thus, a small-scale jam with a generous timeframe fit the bill nicely.

You might notice that Con in 60 Seconds contains almost no artwork, and truthfully doesn't have much actual gameplay either. It's essentially a glorified game of mad libs set in a fictional computer OS. You just click buttons and then a bad algorithm writes an email. But that's kinda the point! 

With this project I purposefully limited the scope so I could get to grips with Godot, a game engine I've wanted to try out for a while – and I loved it! It's so lightweight and speedy, and GDScript was easy to write even as a rookie coder. Relationship ended with Unity.

Speaking of rookie code, this thing is one huge bowl of spaghetti. It's like 800 lines of code for what a pro could probably achieve in 80. But it works, so who cares?

As with my last game, the real joy of this one was the random character code. Here are some names the Fake ID generator spat out:

• Apollo Tourniquet
• Waluigi Spamfilter
• Forbes Realman
• Bill Gates
• Doctor Peanus

Creating a fake operating system was fun too, although with more time I'd love to have gone deeper into making the windows more interactive with layered web browser elements. In fact, I've got loads of ideas for feature that didn't make it into the game for lack of time or talent. 

A CPU counter that overloads when you have too much going on at once. Spelling errors and mistranslations that need to be fixed. A Clippy-esque help character that constantly gets in the way. More glitch effects when the virus hits. A responsive layout that doesn't explode if you tweak the display dimensions. A thousand more potential lines of text for the emails. Etc etc.

I'm also noticing that for the second time in a row I've made a purely UI-driven simulation game inspired by retro computing. Maybe that's my niche?

Anyway, enough rambling. Is this what devlogs are supposed to be like? Drop me a comment if you actually read this far!

rolfebox out.