This template might also be useful: https://github.com/bitbrain/godot-gamejam - e.g. i read through the savegame stuff before implementing it in my own game.

I saw another template the other day… and my last/next project “dino” is available as well, though it’s pretty crazy in there right now: https://github.com/russmatney/dino - i hope to whip this one into shape by june 1st!

I’m going to try to use both zig and gerbil. Usually i use clojure, so might fallback to that as well. I started doing puzzles from 2015 this week, and that’s been fun so far

Types and unit tests are bloat that increase the maintenance cost of whatever code they are involved in. Most types force premature design/optimization. Most unit tests lock up some specific implementation (increasing cost of inevitable refactors) rather than prevent actual bugs.

Nil-punning in clojure has spoiled me rotten, and now every other language is annoyingly verbose and pedantic.

Just to share a perspective from erlang/elixir: pattern matching to filter for only happy-path inputs and the principle of “letting it fail” (when the inputs don’t match the expected shape) works really well in some paradigms (in this case, the actor model + OTP, erlang’s 9 9s of uptime, etc). In that kind of architecture you can really only care about the happy path, because the rest is malformed and can be thrown away without issue.

A fun one!

Interesting, syncing history across machines is pretty cool. While writing this I went looking for my yabai logs helper as an example, but of course, it's on my other machine, haha

Security (sharing secrets from that history) comes to mind, so I feel compelled to mention that adding a space before a command is a pattern for preventing it from being stored in history, though I think I had to opt-in to that in my zsh config: setopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE

for sure, here we go with day 2! hoping to get something working quickly today so there's time for polish and level design... tho i'd be happy even to just get some mechanics shipped

Yeah, it's definitely a battle. A mistake i'm struggling to shake is trying to hold too tightly to the theme. I'm trying lately to come up with something that I want to make independent of the theme, and then letting the theme influence it somewhat, rather than trying to forge some theme-centric idea out of nothing.

I'm loving being able to break the docs (script tab) out of the editor!

oh yeah! Getting godot 4.1 all squared away today, excited to dive in tomorrow

I'm always pumped leading up to jams, then distraught when the theme is announced and my doubts set in.... ready to battle through it again!

I can’t finish anything without an external deadline. Otherwise i just keep refactoring and tweaking forever.

Game jams, a self-imposed deadline, promising other folks a demo on a certain day…

Sometimes i pick something as a reward, like playing some game (lately, TOTK) only after having delivered a new feature for whatever game idea.

Another thing that helps is setting smaller goals - a basic first version as 1.0, then small features to bump to 1.1, 1.2, etc. Bigger features can go in later versions! Don’t turn yourself off trying to do it all at once.

I think game dev is prototyping lots of ideas - then at some point you look back and decide one of them is worth a more serious time investment. In the mean time, keep prototyping!

Dang, this is very cool - would love to know more about how to build up to a look like this!