It was the time for another js13k jam. Busy jamming season for sure, the latter half of the year is so packed with jams I'd be interested in attending. This year GMTK jam was overlapping js13k (only a weekend though) so I opted out of joining it. On hindsight, would of have plenty of time left for js13k even if "wasting" one weeked. But it was the first weekend and I was excited about the new idea.

So the theme was announced, triskaidekaphobia, the fear of number 13. I had like an hour or two of my day job still left to go at the point the theme was announced so I spent the rest of it thinking of some ideas. Quite quickly my mind went into dice, especially throwing three dice at once. Didn't run the numbers but puzzled out that them summing to 13 would be common enough so it poses a nice "risk" element for a game.

By the time I got off from work and ready to get cracking, the idea had formed to basically the basic idea of the game as it is now. The dice are also your HP and they live as cargo in your ship. And the amount of cargo is the number of dice you roll to do damage. I also quickly changed the damage dice to only roll D6 / 2 - 1 (ie. 0-2) so the combat flows better and isn't over in a single shot. At the end of the first day it was already starting to take form.

Second day was mainly focused on visuals. Plotted down some color and added better animations. Also implemented the combat mechanics and looting a piece after winning. So basically the base game loop was done at that point.

Then it was time to add the events happening between the combat encounters to make it less repetitive and smooth out the pacing. At this point I also made (the first draft) of the music and added in some nice ZzFX bleeps and bloops. For music I used SoundBox again. I started off trying out ZzFXM for music too but the lack of individual patterns per instrument (ie. not a 1D sequence) brought me back to SoundBox.

I'm pretty sure at that point I was already getting at least near the size limit of 13 kilobytes by just minifying and gzipping the game. But thanks to Roadroller, there was still around 4 extra kilobytes to squeeze in some extra stuff.

At the end of the first weekend, the game was feature-wise and visually almost exactly like the final product. Really like the water animation that I got going on here. It's always such a wonder what you can do with just a few (offset) sine waves. Overall while doing animations Math.sin(time) and Math.abs(Math.sin(time)) were my biggest friends.

I think only visual changes after that point was the addition of clouds and changing the character face to look more forward instead of that straight stare at the camera. Of course there was also a lot of bug fixes still incoming and had to fight tooth and nail for every byte to squeeze all those in. And of course there was still the hardest thing in game development to tackle, coming up with a name for it.

So after the first week I still had some ideas left in the tank for how to make the game better. It still needed more variety to keep the runs fresh in my opinion. So I kept working on it for an "enhanced edition" which I ended up releasing at the same time as the original jam version. And every time I found some bugs there, I had to struggle to squeeze a fix for them in the jam branch too. Basically the three weeks of enhanced edition dev work also served as a nice buffer of QA before my itchy trigger finger pulled the release button.

The enhanced edition ie. the directors cut, has a lot more stuff added to make the gameplay more replayable, varied and interesting. I already made a post about some of the things it adds and plan on adding even more to it.

I quite recently got myself a Steam Deck and playing it really started to put some ideas into my head of whether I should start putting my games on Steam too (and by extension, on Deck).

So who knows... 🤷‍♀️ Well, looks like it will indeed happen.