Jam Party

I keep hearing a lot of good things about Unity, but as I really don't have the resources necessary to develop 3D games and feel that using a full-blown 3D engine for creating 2D content to be the equivalent of using a chainsaw to slice bacon that I pretty much dismissed it. Now that the 4.3 release has 2D support, I am thinking that I might give it a try. The problem is that I really don't have the time to do that this week as the tiny amount of spare time I have will be put towards creating a game for the GameJolt jam. The following weekend is the second Charity Jam which, depending on the theme, I will probably want to participate in. I highly doubt that a few evenings during the week will be long enough to learn even the 2D portion of Unity, so I probably will not be doing anything with Unity until the December Ludum Dare event.

I missed the November Mini-Ludum Dare so when I went to combohub.org I spotted the GameJolt contest#10. I had never heard of it before so figured I would take a look. The theme of the challenge is Party, and when I think of parties I think of a group of adventurers going on a quest so have gone with the overly ambitious plan of creating a party-based RPG. The problem with longer duration jams is that it is far too easy to overreach. I have created a fairly simple RPG core for this game with the plans of using this core for the bases of a NES RPG.

I am fairly confident that I will have a playable game by the end of this weekend, the question is how polished the game will be. Sadly, I suspect the answer to this will not be the one I want. Still, I am quite impressed at how such a simple RPG engine can be as flexible as this one is turning out to be. In all honesty, I highly doubt I will be able to utilize all the potential for this game even if things go as smooth as I hope. If I am lucky, the Charity Game Jam 2 might have a theme that lets me use my RPG engine though I fear that CGJ2 will have "fighting game" theme and creating a game like Dust in a week is even too ambitious for me.

I am thinking, though have not decided for sure yet, of creating the NES RPG in this blog. Essentially, creating a series of articles about creating a home-brew NES game that covers the creation of this game. I really do want to create a NES RPG and this would give me the excuse to at least continue to slowly create such a beast.