Half and half-half

Wednesday was the beginning of the jam. And amazingly? I'm feeling really good about it. My buddy is handling the code portion while I'm tackling the art. I feel like we have pretty even hands in the game, which is good. I do have to look into some simple music program at some point though. There's a large number of small pieces that I'm doing which is unfortunately my comfort zone. I'm talking 32x32. I mentioned the proportions not being quite to my liking with the mockup, which I feel is partially because I have a hard time picturing them when working on smaller areas of larger canvases. This will be something I work on throughout development because there is a very particular way I want TT to look, so even if I have to iterate on it over and over again I'll make sure it's perfect. All of this is to say, even in the first few days of this jam, I've been doing a lot of introspection. And ironically enough, I can't help but feel that me and my buddy have gotten more done in these few days than the last few months with our other projects; it's wild. A complete 180. 

Enough of the jam for now though. I learned about streams in node.js this week. They are the key to taking information from files and using it in other areas. Also probably the most straightforward method for creating save files. I also learned about buffers, which I'm thinking will be great for things like "asset" size. It has a nice gradient of 256 different selections, which I'm thinking is going to be ideal for the limits of the game. 

I think it should be said since I haven't outright mentioned it at this point, like some other roguelikes I've seen talked about, I'm planning on working on this game for many years to come. There's a lot of content I plan on piling into it, which is normally called feature creep, but I simply refuse to subscribe to that train of thought for this project because of other simplistically styled games. Many roguelikes that use ascii graphics are intensely complex, which is a quality I want this game to have. Games like Dwarf Fortress with it's simulated water physics or ADOM with its hundreds of edge cases for unique interactions with items and creatures. It absolutely baffles me these games blow triple A titles out of the water with their attention to detail outside of polygon count and makes me wonder where everything went wrong. I once again state that my goal is to create a game that goes into this fine level of detail while also having an in depth and accurate depiction of the player's character; something I feel has never truly been done correctly. 

That's all for this week. Go do something awesome.

Links to stuff

itch.io's coming up and ongoing jams:

https://itch.io/jams

Things to remember:

Find something to be passionate about

Be a little weird sometimes

trust your team