A hurried history of EI

I didn't even know this jam existed until lunchtime on Thursday afternoon. I was scrolling through different jams while I ate and happened upon it. This sounded like the jam for me. I talked to my mom about it (because I'm building her house at the moment) to see if she would allow me to take off 3 days of work to participate. Second-guessing myself, I said almost as I was asking for time off "well, I should probably just let this go. That's a lot of time off this project." And her reply was "well, if it gets you a job in gaming, maybe you should." That sealed it for me.

I searched out the theme (which was quite hard to find) and sighed. I had no idea what I was going to do with "one-time-use." I decided I could workshop the idea while I wrote some music. I opened FL Studio and got to work. I wrote a terrible song for the title menu. But still, no theme ideas. I had an idea which is the maze spinning, pinball style game I created and thought that it sounded really exciting. I started to work in Godot to realize my vision. I've only worked in this dev environment for 2 weeks and my first jam using it was mostly looking up a tutorial and copying what I saw but this time, I was able to create a little more fluidly. I had the starting mechanics done by that evening: A spinning maze with a ball that fell through it to be manipulated by the player. I was really excited I had this much of the prototype done in one day and was feeling hopeful of getting it completed.

The next day was about spicing things up with sounds and visuals. There's one thing I absolutely hate about Godot is that it's hierarchical structure is not user friendly AT ALL. I spent most of the day pulling my hair out to get SFX to play and things to rotate that should rotate and vice versa. I alternated between that frustration and getting a background inserted for a nice visual. I knew if I wanted to port it to webGL I wouldn't be able to have bloom effects and figured this was a good way to incorporate it into a static image. Late that night, after hearing the first three seconds of that terrible song I wrote for the intro, I decided it had to go. I opened FL again and 3 hours later I shipped off a copy to my bestie. I worked on it another couple of hours that night, adjusting the structure and note sequences and was really happy with the results.

Saturday, my final day of working on this project, partly due to my frustration with Godot and partly because I knew I needed time to make sure I could get my build submitted and there were no issues with it. I created a final level and a new enemy along with two new backgrounds and went to work on general house cleaning. Deleting commented code (so many comments) that I had to use to get the project running and so on. I tried to put together a webGL version which wouldn't play in the browser (again) and decided on an executable.

Submission day. My best friend called me and said he couldn't run the project and I feverishly started moving files around to see what was breaking it because it was running fine for me but I'd never run it outside of my project folder. I had it down to my asset folders and a couple of config files in about 30 minutes and uploaded them as a zip this time. He said it was running fine now and was really enjoying the project which also reminded him of his favorite toy someone gave him at work which is a metal BB in a small plastic maze. 

Throughout this process, I realized, you CAN dev a game if have the past programming experience in a few days even if you've only worked in your current environment for a couple of weeks. I also learned that I will NEVER develop in Godot again. Unity from here on out baby. My hope is that within a couple of weeks I can just create instead of learning over and over, I'll have the confidence to just put down the code and spill my idea out onto the screen.

Thank you to those who've played and enjoyed and commented and followed from this project. It means the world to me.