I Released a Game for smilejam

You can tell the gap in blogging is due to me being unable to finish posts rather than not starting them. Something something “make bad art,” don’t worry about this being out-of-date even as its posted.

Small tools have been popping up on feeds lately. Stuff like strudel.cc and flickgame. And while it’s cool to mess around with them for a while - seriously let yourself engage in creative play if you haven’t lately - it’s a completely different feeling to make something from start to finish. Meanwhile, I’ve been itching to do more game dev projects. I haven’t intentionally finished one of those in… a long while. Game jams are a captivating idea, but I struggle to reach out for collaborators and making even a jam-sized game can have so many obstacles that I scare myself out of it rather quickly. Luckily, for both of these ideas, I saw a couple people submit flickgame entries into a little event called smilejam. The whole deal with the jam is to make something in a very short timeframe, so I took the plunge and tried actually making something in flickgame for the first time.

The loose theme of first memories was harder to work with than I first thought. The idea I was drawn to was an amalgamation of some interactions with an ex of mine, the memories being related to self-discovery, including my aromanticity. Besides the fact that this path would mean putting a lot of myself out in the open, it was just hard to script for a flickgame project. There’s only so much exposition you can fit in under 20 slides, especially when you’re drawing it by hand. So I settled for another idea: some of my first memories with Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Not my first gaming memory at all, but it’s one with a loose narrative that gave me a solid sense of direction for a project I wanted to finish that morning.

Now, about that time limit. I stuck to it, the whole thing took about 2 hours. But even with that short span… I had a visit from everyone’s best pal: Scope Creep. I included a little secret screen that you could reach if you were just a tad clever. And I thought it’d be so cute of me to have two points where you can visit that screen. I was being so smart by having both instances lead to same screen and when you exit that screen you- oh you return to the first chance to see it because that’s how clicking that part of the screen works in flickgame. So my two quick and dirty options to make this work were to either make the secret screen clearly communicate both ways to exit it without encouraging people to skip ahead if they find it the first time, or copy and paste. … I went with the latter.

The fun part of your first itch upload being a jam entry is you get to learn how several things work at once, and it feels like any mistakes you make will be very visible. Well, I’m here to tell you no one noticed (or let me know) about my clumsy way of trying to get the page set up and properly linked to the jam. So let this part be a reminder that the majority of an audience will not notice mistakes you make so you really don’t have to worry about them. You know what people do care about? That there is another thing included in a list of things they want to check out. Yes yes, it all comes back to the ‘Holy shit, two cakes’ meme. But that meme is true. The most common negative response, if you can call it that, is ambivalence. Don’t let hypothetical judgement stop you from hitting the last button on your project.

Yes that last sentence was written partially because of how long it took to get this post done. But that’s not important now, what is important is that I actually have a publicly available game you can play whenever you want: “A Smashing Night”