The problem when you rush something is that afterwards you need to go back and fix it.
These two weeks I’ve been documenting my new library Sugarcoat, and making an example game with it, and fixing it along the way! And then I went to Nordic Game Jam in Copenhagen to give my talk about helpful limitations in game development, and make a small thing for the jam!
Sugarcoat is now fully documented and useable!
I still have a few functions I want to add, starting with reading pixels from surfaces, but there definitely is already more than enough to make a complete game.
The documentation is fragmented into the different subsystems, and uses Github’s markdown implementation to make it extra-navigable. Each and every function has a short description, with what it does and what it returns whenever it does return something.
This took the better part of a week, but then I could go and make the example game! Which is what you see on the gif above, and you can play it over there!
It’s not really a game in the end… There is no lose or win state, just the apple and the snake, and you control the apple. But it’s a good example for the library, so I prefer to keep it at that. Especially since I do intend to make the actual game version, with a better Castle integration (the example had to work with Love2D) and with online multiplayer!
But this was the first real test of Sugarcoat and… some parts of it turned out to be quite broken. Mostly, the input subsystem and some sprite functions, both of which I had only barely tested. So I took some time to fix it all! As far as I can tell though, now everything should be fully working!
Once again, you can find Sugarcoat here, its documentation hub here, and the demo/example here!
And then I went to Denmark for Nordic Game Jam!
Victor Selnæs Breum, the organizer of the event, had seen my talk at Indiecade Europe last year and had come to me to ask if I was interested in speaking at Nordic Game Jam, and of course I was!! And so I did my talk about Helpful Limitations again, with two extra slides about game jams!
The talk overall is about how limitations in game design, graphics design and code (small API for example), can help you strengthen the core and personality of your game, while also helping you build a comfortable, familiar development environment.
And it went super well! A few people told me afterwards that they really liked it and some even asked about Sugar, which was mentioned in the talk. I’m really happy about that!
I spent most of the rest of the event hanging out with the other speakers and the sponsors, since I’ve learned this is generally an excellent occasion for networking and having fun.
But I also made a tiny thing for the jam! The theme was “that again” and one of the other talks at the event mentioned how powerful symmetry can be in UI, and so I got inspired to make Symmetry, a symmetric generative Pico-8 screensaver!
I actually wanted to make it into an interactive soundscape generator, but I really didn’t get enough time to go that far with it. Instead I limited myself to a nice graphical demo. I’m pretty happy with it!
You can play it online here, and you can download it there!
That’s pretty much it for those two weeks though! I came back home from Denmark Sunday night at 3am, so most of Monday was spent resting up. Now I’m going to be working on this Multiplayer not-Snake game!
As usual I want to thank my Patreon supporters for simply being the best! I’ll never stop being thankful for your continued support!Here are the names of the 3$+ supporters:
★Joseph White, ★Spaceling, rotatetranslate, Anne Le Clech, bbsamurai, HJS, slono, Austin East, Jefff, Meru, Bitzawolf, Paul Nguyen, Dan Lewis, Dan Rees-Jones, Reza Esmaili, Andreas Bretteville, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Flo Devaux, Cole Smith, Thomas Wright, HERVAN, berkfrei, Tim and Alexandra Swast, Jearl, Johnathan Roatch, Raphael Gaschignard, Eiyeron, Sam Loeschen, Andrew Reitano, amy, yunowadidis-musik, Max Cahill, hushcoil, Gruber, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, Andrew Reist, vaporstack, Jakub Wasilewski
Have a great week everyone!
Take care!
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