After The Game Jam

After the game jam

I wanted to relax and play some playdate games, sleep and regenerate. But that's not what happened.

But let's rewind a bit, the YellowSquare Game Jam was a good fit for me because I could jam for a month. It's not a typcial length for a game jam, but great for me. I am father I can't be away on a game jam for three days in row.

Also not typical: no theme! I've probably wouldn't have stuck to a theme very closely, as I had a specific idea a wanted to work on. You know, Maki Maker! :)
That's why the format of the Yellow Square game jam was intriguing to me, because I would have time to work on a project over a month. So I've squeezed daily hours during commuting or in the evening staying up late. So coding for my day job and jamming around it and more often than not jammed until past 12 AM at night and my kids would wake up again at 6 AM.

Jamming

It was a strange experience, it was more relaxed, but still intense over the longer time. Because I've spent most of my spare-time on Maki Maker. Towards the end of the month, on some evenings I could observe myself losing my trail of thought multiple times  and my brain just wouldn't work. I've never really had that, usually I could motivate or focus myself with music or with a specific goal, but when being exhausted, it just doesn't work.

End of October 2023

At the end of the game jame, I've created Maki Maker a prototype for the playdate. The visuals and game mechanics took a while to create, so the game design isn't finished yet. I learned a lot and wanted to use the momentum after the game jam to continue Maki Maker, polish and finalize the game design.

It felt great, having created something new. New at least for me. A game about cooking, creating sushi, using the crank to cut ingredients, roll the sushi and cut the makis. Over the last months, I gathered so many ideas for playdate games, but simply don't have enough time to even develop them into prototypes.

Remember, Remember November

Then November hit, usually during this time of the year, I'm generally in a bad mood. This year it was different, in about the middle of the month. I tweeted (aka. posted on X) an idea about a playdate advent calendar which would feature a different game on discount every day. Initially, my thought was: "Hey Panic, wouldn't it be cool if Catalog had a playdate advent?". Then Xania chimed in and basically said, "it's probably not happening from Panic, let's do it ourselves!"

So we discussed and shaped out the concept for the playdate advent website. So the sucker that I am for playdate & web development, dove right into this project. I basically started another Game Jam, this time: Playdate Advent Jam! This time with a hard deadline of 1st December, and it was already around the 15th November.

Advent Jamming

I basically returned to the routine I had during the game jam. Working during commuting to my day job, work there, get home and continue jamming. I was aware that the deadline would be a close call and I asked around in the playdate discords for help with the web development. But I didn't know the different discords that good yet, I only could get in touch with a few game devs, which weren't able to help with web development when using specifically vue.js.

What did I do? Talk to my wife, explain to her that I have an important thing going on, that I'd like her support and plan how we could do it? Nope! Not me, I'm just dove back into full coding mode. I couldn't find others to help with coding, so I thought it's on me if the playdate advent calendar 2023 is going to happen or not!

That really was a strain on me and my family. During the jam in October, I've had evenings when my eye would close in front of the computer and my bran would stop working because I was so tired. I was quickly back to that level of overworked and this time it was more complex, I also had to get other game developers involved, so they could provide their playdate games to be part of the advent calendar!
Luckily, Xania and PizzaFuelDev helped out with the communication with the game developers, social media, conception and other details. I couldn't have done without you two, thank you very much!

Deadline is approaching

I knew it would be hard to hit the deadline and that it would be stressful. I don't really get why I wouldn't talk to my family about it. Most probably fear of rejection. Once I've realised that I would have to do the coding myself, I should have talked to my wife and see if I could get some support from my family and friends. Yeah... still a lot of things to learn for me of being a father / software engineer / game developer all together!

Nevertheless, the playdate advent is live! Of course, I'm thrilled that we have made it! And so many playdate game developers participated and provided the gifts and presents for calendar, which is the most important thing! In the end, it was 25 playdate presents to unwrap!

Happy 2024!
Dom

PS: this is a shorted post, the full article will appear in issue 2 of the Playdate Magazine: https://xanialasagna.storenvy.com/