Totally on a whim, I decided to enter* a game jam this weekend — Ludum Dare, where there are a variety of rules and different levels of entry depending on how intense you are, but which at its core seems to be about making an entire game (assets, code, ideation, etc.) over a single weekend.
I really liked this idea, because I’ve stalled a bit on developing my game over the past week or so and had been lightly considering turning my attention to making a couple of minigames to eventually implement inside it; partly for variety’s sake, and partly because I still haven’t actually learned much about the part of game dev where you ‘do mechanics’ and ‘try to make the game fun.’ I liked the idea of getting out of my own way and just seeing how far I could get with what I already know.
The answer is: this far! Which is like, not very, but it is technically an entire game and it was extremely fun to make. I probably spent about 12 hours on it from start to finish (which I am led to believe is a pretty paltry investment for one of these jams but also I am solo, new, and didn’t really plan to do it in the first place.) The idea here is that this will be a small minigame you can play if you interact with the fish tank in the rightmost classroom, and the idea came to me from the Ludum Dare prompt — “harvest.” I’ve been trying to think of ways to basically hide items for players to find around the little world of my game, and I like the idea of the fish as these sort of silent but watchful forces mysteriously harvesting people’s possessions in order to hold them hostage for food. Kind of a stretch thematically, but I’m pretty full up on farm sims at the moment (s/o to my partner, who’s been ripping through Stardew Valley over the past few weeks) and wanted to do something that wasn’t like, my protagonist weeding a pumpkin patch. So far this is very squarely a city game, and I like it that way!
* I didn’t like…..tell anyone or pay any fees or formally do anything, other than telling you now.