I'm currently on holiday and the "visit everyone, do all the things" phase is over. Now, I was just going to laze around and grow some mold until I have to go back to work, but my game dev friends just had to go and remind me that LD was happening this weekend during a break at board game night.

I originally created this account four years ago or so to participate in the Jam with one of said friends, but the whole thing fell through because of scheduling (being an adult sucks so fucking much, but who am I telling that). Originally, however, I participated for the first time what I am now realizing was

12 fucking years

ago!

Honestly, LD is the reason I actually went ahead and made my first real game instead of just durdeling around (that's M:tG lingo for aimlessly fucking around, btw).

In a sense, it's the reason I studied Games Engineering, though I can't really work very well in the industry because of my sleep disorder; I just need a job with a looooot more flexibility than you can get in the industry to accommodate that disability.

So there I sat with my game dev friends, talking about the games they have been working on, when the LD came up, and I realized that, though I had participated in two and a half local game jams since the pandemic (programming with a fever sucks so bad), I hadn't participated in LD since before the pandemic.

So, here I am, tossing my hat in the ring, going for the full nostalgia: Just me, a programming language I haven't touched in a few months, and a library where I'm going to have to look up every single damn thing because I don't remember. I'm going to evaluate my options over the next 24 hours, but my fallback will be zig and SDL.

It would probably be smarter to pick one of my main languages, but that would probably mean fucking Javascript/Typescript, and after spending two entire weeks before my holiday upgrading packages, swapping out no longer updated dependencies, and configuring three different package managers across all of our JS/TS projects, I am currently acutely aware of how much the entire ecosystem fucking sucks; I would quite frankly rather throw myself into a vat of acid than set up a new TS project just to use a library I'm not familiar with in a garbage language with a garbage ecosystem.

I might use that Javascript based music live coding thingamajig I've seen a bunch recently, though. That way, I might actually get some actual music instead of random bleeps and bloops that sound like they were randomly fuzzed until they could barely be recognized as music.

Might use Godot if my idea goes in a direction that requires 3D, because I don't trust myself to remember enough OpenGL from 5 years ago to get off the ground right away. Maybe something to work on for the October LD. I honestly enjoy the "writing your own engine" part too much to not do it at least once this year. It used be almost a speedrunning thing, those game dev friends' eyes almost fell out the first time they had me on the team for a game jam during university.

Gonna get some preliminary brainstorming on what to do with the possible themes done first thing tomorrow, but I usually do nothing more than the vaguest of ideas before the official theme is revealed. Anything else feels like cheating.

I've rambled enough, though. Gotta go to sleep, I can feel the crash coming :stuckouttonguewinkingeye:

Good luck to everyone, especially those who are first timers.