Had an awesome time developing a game for Jern-Jam #3 - the game jam of IrishJohnGames from twitch!  A shout out to his game Rise of Piracy.  If ya like pirates (let's face it, who doesn't?) - head on over and wishlist it like a good seadog.

I wasn't sure I was even going to enter his jam, as it ran for two weeks, and I didn't think I could spare that time.  Time seems to go nowhere when I'm working on my game, as it is!  In the end I said 'ah to hell with it!' a few days into the jam, and decided to jump on board.

I'm so glad I did ... I've joined game jams a couple of times before, but never pushed through and submitted.  Maybe it's because of the community that surrounds IrishJohnGames that I did this time, not that I worked with anyone else as such, but just feeling a bit more of a connection than with a random jam, made me really want to finish.

It was hard as feck pumping out a game in under 2 weeks.  I really wanted to go heavy on atmosphere, and I think I nailed that side of things.  The gameplay side of things suffered quite a bit.  Fortunately it's fun just running around a Japanese country town in a thunderstorm, with a giant alien beast stomping around, and UFO's overhead, and firing endless flaming arrows at them all.

Really, I was amazed at how fast I can actually work on games when there is a firm deadline, and I don't sit around getting hung up on how hard some little task is gonna be.  I just dove headfirst into tasks, did them with a rough-and-ready approach, and learned a ton. If anyone reading this has been thinking about joining a game jam, but is on the fence because of time concerns, I hope I've said enough to nudge you over the line, join it!

I used countless youtube tutorials the last few days, even though I have quite a bit of knowledge and skills on the various aspects of dev these days. There is always more to learn, and there are some very productive people out there uploading lots of game dev expertise to youtube .

In fact it's re-energized me to get back into uploading game dev vids to my channel.   I'm gonna make short, maybe 30 sec - 1 min vids - straight to the point, no video intro at the start, maybe not even saying hi - getting straight to the point in a clear and concise way. When I was making vids before, I was using Unity, whereas now it's Unreal and blueprints.  Gonna be fun!

That's about it for now guys.

Cheers!

Ninja