Untitled Digging Game (TriJam #267)

Hello, and welcome back to the latest episode of How (not) to TriJam with your host: me.

I spent the last weekend of April in decision fatigue land. I wanted make a short jam game, so I did the usual thing on Saturday: I went through the currently running jams on Itch.io looking for ones with interesting themes / restrictions and started ideation. By afternoon I was sure that I wasn't going to start actual development, so I figured maybe collecting some assets will help me get started on Sunday.

It didn't. I couldn't decide on what to make and ended up watching 2NerdyNerds on Twitch instead (which is my absolute favourite gamedev stream by the way, check them out!). A fun time, but I really wasn't happy about "skipping gamedev practice".

On Monday I woke up around 6 AM and immediately decided I'm going to fix things. I quickly went through my morning routine, made a todo list and cycled to the office with the intention of making a "last minute" entry for TriJam, since the deadline is always on Monday at 11 AM. A little after 8 AM I started streaming and did this:

The main lesson learned: don't try to innovate if you only have 3 hours to make a game from scratch 😄. Mixing tile-based movement with physics (with no previous relevant experience) was way too ambitious, so by the time I got most features working I only had a few minutes to do level design, which is suboptimal to say the least.

Still, I can call it a prototype I guess, so ka-ching, I'm incrementing the game counter for my 2024 challenge with Untitled Digging Game. It's buggy, it's super short, but I learned new things while making it and hopefully I'm getting better at streaming in English too.

I highly recommend TriJam to any fellow game developers, it's a hoot, it's on every weekend and the 3-hour limit is more of a recommendation anyway - unless you are literally starting 3 hours before the deadline like I did this time 😁.