The first month of the year is gone and I’ve made a game! The January 2016 entry of 1GAM, namely “Writer’s Block”, is now completed (kind of)!

January 2016 has been a great start for this year! During the last months of last year I started a personal journey to fight my inner demons. I don’t want to bore you with some self-improvement/productivity bullshit -it is not the place for that- so I will not. You just have to know that after 6 months of trying and failing this January is the month in which all the good habits really start to stick.

The “One Game A Month” challenge was the perfect way to test myself and doing one of the activities I love most. As usual, we will start from the beginning.

Hi everyone! I’m here to tell you the story of my last game jam: the Bacon Game Jam 09. It was a long time since my last game jam (and my game-dev stuff in general). I was a bit distracted by other part of my life and, in general, I wasn’t in the best mood. Because of this, I’m very happy to partecipate to  this jam, also if the final result is not completely satisfying.

Anyway, let’s start!

First of all, some time ago I stated that I would like to start writing more. Unfortunately, a combination of personal issues, flu and other psychological breaks did not allow me to respect this promise. But I’ll be back soon. I swear.

Second, it is now time to talk about the game we developed for the Global Game Jam 2015 (and obviously valid as a January entry for my One Game A Month challenge!) I’m very happy with this game also if it is not a real “game” because (little spoiler) it is an online game who require a big amount of users to be interesting. I’ll never have so many users connected at the same time, so it is useless in practice. The good thing is that it was a big technical challenge and to be able to complete everything in less than 30 hours was really exciting. But first things first.

As I said in a previous post, in these days me and my colleague at Noctua were working in the SpeccyJam 2014. The goal of the jam/competition is to make a game with the same look and feel of an original ZX Spectrum game. This introduces a lot of interesting limitations. First, it constrains our resolution to  256 × 192 (that is, however, a really big improvement respect to the LowRezJam :D), second it forces us to use only 15 colors. But most important of all, the non-strict limitation, is to simulate the color clash effect of the original Spectrum on modern engines. This was the most hard constraint that forced us to explore 2D shaders and a lot of simulated low-level algorithms on top of a modern engine like Unity 3D.