Jam update

Hey!

I hope everyone had a great week.
On my side, it was kind of a weird one 😕

I was hyped by the Odin 7 Day Jam. The theme was “Pathways”, and I immediately thought about a branching narrative game, where you interact with the story by choosing which path to follow.
I went straight to work, and everything was cruising!

It all went down on Monday, when my chair broke. I can still sit on it, but I can’t lock the tilt so I’m always falling down the front.
I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to fix it, but no luck. I also looked at the prices online, but my god, have they gone up.
In the end, I didn’t work a lot on my game.

On Tuesday, I tried to build the web version to test it, but it wouldn’t compile: emscripten and the library I used for font rendering were both redeclaring foreign libc functions.
It took me a long time to figure out what the issue was, and the only solution I could think of was to rewrite I/O functions I was using.
I decided to do it the next day.

The so-called “next day” had something else in store for me though: my laptop broke!
I spent almost the entire day dealing with tech support, packing the laptop and sending it to customer service and reinstalling an old machine I had.

So, on Thursday, I decided to drop the text rendering, and thus the branching narrative game idea altogether.
I pushed the go-live button, and started on a new game idea, much simpler, which I mostly had implemented by the end of the day.
I really enjoyed streaming again, and I’m kinda looking forward to the end of my freelance contract, at the end of March, so I can be live more often.

I won’t forget the text rendering issue, though—I’ll fix my template after the jam. I think I’ll also grab most of my “core” systems and put them in the template for the next game.

In the end, it was a pretty positive week, even if I could do without all the annoyances—and having to buy a new chair.

See you next time!