Yikes, has it really been two months since my last post here? I knew it had been a while, but I didn’t realize it had been quite that long. Well, let me at least not let March go by without a post.
So, let’s see… the majority of the most recent posts on my blog have been about game jams, and when I last posted, there were two upcoming game jams I’d intended to participate in: the Ct.js game jam, and Mini Jam 73. Well, actually, the latter was upcoming; the former had already started at the time of my last post—it overlapped a bit with Mini Jam 72, which I did participate in. But I thought even if I got a late start, I could still make an entry in the time I had left.
I didn’t. And, as it turned out, I didn’t enter Mini Jam 73 either. In fact, I haven’t entered another Mini Jam since.
Why not? Well, the fact is that much of the time I’d been spending on game jams and Unity tutorials was time I really ought to have been spending on work—as in, the work I’m being paid to do, namely preparing for classes and catching up with grading. I was way behind on my work, and I couldn’t put it off any longer.
To be sure, there were a few other factors that played a role. When the required limitation for the Ct.js jam was announced, it was one that I personally found rather unappealing. (“Graphic assets must be made from poorly cropped stock images and memes”.) And the Mini Jam 73 limitation was a bit of a turnoff to me for a different reason. That limitation was that an entry could “only display 5 colors on [the] screen at once”—and that explicitly meant 5 RGB/Hex values, so slightly different shades of the same hue would count as different colors. Ordinarily, that might be fun; it could even be an interesting artistic challenge. But, well, much of the reason that I’d been doing the Mini Jams was to get more comfortable in Unity, and a 3D Unity game—at least involving the usual shaders—would necessarily involve a lot more than five different colors due to lighting and shadows, even if every object in the game had the same monochrome texture. So to make an entry for Mini Jam 73, I’d have to either learn how to do cel shading in Unity, or learn how to do 2D games in Unity, or, well, use some other game creation system.
Mind you, that’s not to say I wasn’t sorely tempted to enter despite those limitations. But honestly, I just had too much to do. Even if the games hadn’t included those discouraging limitations, I probably still would have ultimately decided I just couldn’t afford the time to enter. And, conversely, if I’d had enough free time, I probably would have entered despite the limitations. I could certainly have put something together with ct.js using some “poorly cropped stock images and memes”; despite my misgivings, it might even have been fun. And as for Mini Jam 73, well, even if I didn’t have anything else to do I almost certainly wouldn’t have had time to learn 2D game creation or cel shading in Unity in time for the jam, but I’d also been meaning to get comfortable with making HTML5 games in JavaScript, and that I probably could have done.
In fact, even though I didn’t end up entering the jam, just considering entering a JavaScript game brought that goal back to mind enough that I decided I might as well get to work on that in whatever time I could scrape together. One thing I’d been wanting to make for a long time anyway was a JavaScript online RPG editor; why not start now?
Well, I quickly found there was a lot more that I didn’t know about JavaScript than I’d realized; there were a lot more differences between JavaScript and C++ than I’d assumed. Still, I’m learning JavaScript, and I’ll have something to show for my RPG maker, uh, eventually.
In the meantime, it’s also occurred to me that if I’m going to make games, I ought to make some time to play games, to know what’s out there and get ideas. I haven’t been doing that lately. I own a lot of computer games I’ve never played. For that matter, there are a lot of games I did play, but never finished. In high school, I spent a lot of time playing Ultima IV (which had just come out at the time—yes, I’m old); I got all the way to the final dungeon and then… never bothered finishing. The same thing happened with a lot of other games, frankly; I started playing a lot of games, and finished relatively few. So I restarted one (then-)shareware game I liked that I’d started playing in college and never finished, an RPG called Exile: Escape from the Pit.
Of course, two things quickly occurred to me: First of all, well, if I was going to keep up with the gaming scene, I ought to be playing some newer games. (And I did buy some new games on GOG.COM that… I’ll maybe eventually get around to playing.) And second, that I was now losing at least as much time to Exile as I had been losing before to game jams, and was still falling behind with my work. So, after a month or so of playing way too much Exile, I finally summoned my willpower and took a break from it.
And then proceeded to waste time on even older games.
And then once I finally managed to tear myself away from those, I got briefly sucked into some games that… weren’t quite so old as Exile, but still old.
So, yeah… I haven’t been updating this blog or participating in game jams because I had too much work to catch up on, but then I ended up spending too much time playing games and still not getting my work done.
Although as it turns out I’ve gotten a little exposure to current games through work. See, during this time of distance learning, the local schools are having “advisory periods” devoted to social and emotional learning and to just giving the students a bit of a break and a sort of an anchor. And after hearing that some other teachers had been having weekly game days in their advisory periods, I decided to do the same, asking the students what (free) games they’d like to play. And so through that, I’ve now had some experience with Among Us, and skribbl.io, and Minecraft—there’s an educational version of Minecraft that’s free to students and teachers in participating districts, so that’s what we’ve been using.
As it turns out, in each of my advisory periods a student insisted on showing me how to get to the End (in Creative Mode, anyway), and what happens when you defeat the Ender Dragon. (The second time I didn’t let on that another student had already shown it to me in the other period.) Also, in one of my advisory periods, a student asked me to switch the game from Creative Mode to Survival Mode, whereupon I was immediately killed by her pet wolf. (She said she didn’t know that would happen, and I believe her.)
But anyway, I do want to get back to game jams, and to more practice with Unity. Mini Jam 77 starts tomorrow, but as much as I’d like to make an entry, realistically I still have too much I need to get done over the next few days… but hopefully I’ll get caught up in time to participate in Mini Jam 78 in a couple of weeks. If nothing else, I’ll definitely have time over the summer when school’s out… but I don’t want to wait that long. I’m already afraid it’s been long enough that my Unity skills (such as they were) will be rusty… although there’s another Create With Code Live course starting in May, and I think maybe I ought to join that; even though I’ve done a Create With Code Live course before, I could probably use the refresher (plus, maybe it’ll include a discount on Unity certification again, since I failed to take advantage of that the last time).
Speaking of Unity, I took a Unity for Educators course, and I’m going to see if I can talk my school administration into letting me teach a Unity class next year—there are Unity classes being taught at other schools in the district, so it’s not unprecedented. We’ll see how it goes, but it could be fun if it ends up happening…
Anyway, I’m still way behind on work, and still have a lot to do, so I’ll end this for now. But I’ll try not to let quite so much time go without a post again. I don’t know what my next post will be about—a game jam I participate in, a Unity Learn or other game creation tutorial I take, or progress I make with my JavaScript RPG maker—but I know there’ll be one soon. Now… I’ve got a bunch of practice exams to write.
