I’m pretty excited for this to happen. I think I’ll enjoy programming in the language and believe it will be very productive to use. Not to mention all the useful game-related libraries the Jai Team has built.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

– Mountain Interval, 1916

I’ll be blogging about my experience, and I think I’ll do some streaming as well.  I haven’t made any solid decisions at this point and this was intentional.  I’m a bit burned out from my day job and I need some time to rest and rejuvenate.  I don’t want to make any decisions until those stressors have passed because the context of these new decisions is completely different than the mental space of having an energy consuming day job at a large corporation.

I can share that the decision that’s been most on my mind lately is, “What technology to use?”  If you look at my gamejam history you’ll see I’ve tried a lot of different technologies but never settled into any one in particular.

I wish Jai, Jonathan Blow’s C-style language, was released because I’d probably just jump into that and see what it was like. I quit using C/C++ back in 1999 because I hated how insane things were getting with std, macro hell, DCOM, COM/+, Apartments, BSTR and the whole UTF-guess-the-number game etc.  Jai seems to be a solution to all that craziness and even adds some really powerful features like compile-time execution. My gut instinct is it will fit my natural workflow and how I think about problems.

I’ve been using Unity for the last 5 year professionally and so that seems like a natural choice, but I’ve never had a gamejam go well with Unity.  I think this is because of just how complex Unity has grown.  It works well for medium to large teams, but as a solo indie, I worry that complexity undermines workflow and productivity.  It also doesn’t respect Data-Oriented Design and often hides data from you.  And even though they are “cross-platform” you still run into native compiling features that aren’t supported like android’s multi-dex to get around the 64K method count limit. I love what Unity has done for the industry by opening game development to way more people but they often fall into the trap of fixing the easy problems, not the hard ones.  I’m also worried that complexity is ramping up instead of down now that the film industry has become a target.

I’m sure I’ll expand on all of this later.  Thanks for listening!

The art below was made by Francis Andrew Acupan a few years later.

I’ve spent a lot of my spare time in November learning Game Maker 2 by trying to build a Tower Defense game. So, when the theme was announced I immediately thought, that sounds like a Tower Defense game!  So, that’s what I made.  You play as a mage who’s been imprisoned in a maze built as a prison for criminals with magic abilities.   There are monsters patrolling the halls and you can cast a spell that creates a Totem (tower) that can shoot fireballs.  It’s pretty basic, but I think it works pretty well.  I think it’ll be very hard to beat.

Game Maker preformed great!  It was one of the most productive gamejams I’ve done.  Game Maker did get on my nerves in a few places but overall I was impressed how quickly I could get ideas working.  I can see using it more going forward.  But, I must admit a part of me still wants to dump it and just write something from scratch, typical programmer.

The game itself is pretty interesting and I can see a lot of ways to make it better.  It’s basically a Roguelike mashed with Tower Defense.  So, making the maze procedurally generated is the clear next step.   I’ll see how the reception goes, if is does a tiny bit okay, then I’ll probably make a post-compo version and expand on the ideas.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-prison-maze-of-ozxu

I attended Unity’s Conference, Unite, in Austin this year. There are a lot of interesting improvements coming down the pipeline but nothing ground shaking. I think the biggest announcement was for artists: direct integration with Autodesk’s Maya and Max. Other things I’m looking forward to are:

• the integration of TextMesh Pro
• the new Asset Bundle system
• the new Entity framework
• the 2D Tile system

The main focus of the show seemed to be film, but I think most Unity users are not that excited about those features. It’s a completely different audience, and one Unity is still trying to capture. The interview with Neill Blomkamp, the writer and director of Distrik 9, during the keynote was exciting and important feeling but at the end I felt underwhelmed by the interview. It didn’t come across as a strong endorsement of Unity specifically. It felt more like rough vision centered on how real time movie making might be important to up and coming indie film makers. The short film also was kind of confusing to me because the story didn’t fit with what I remember from the original Adam movie. The original short implied that their crimes didn’t matter, hence the screens on the chest going blank, but Blomkamp’s follow up seemed to emphasize their crimes but didn’t give you a strong sense of how the characters felts about the crimes, good or bad.

While the Unity party was high caliber and fun as always, I didn’t really meet a lot of new people. I’m not sure if that was because of the large size or because I just know so many people now that they absorbed most of my time and energy. But, it was great to see some folks I hadn’t seen in a while and catch up.