Posted April 23, 2020 by ergodicbreak
As the voting for this Spring's Lisp game jam comes to an end I wanted to reflect a little on the jam, my favorite games, my game's development process, and just my thoughts in general.
A couple of weeks ago I wasn't planning to enter (or even knew about) the jam. But given the current state of the world I had a lot more free time on my hands than usual, and the one person I follow on the Fediverse posted about the upcoming jam
the biannual #lisp game jam is coming up in about a week: https://itch.io/jam/spring-lisp-game-jam-2020
I've always had a lot of fun participating; if you've never done a jam before this is a good one to start with since it runs for ten days and doesn't require crunch or staying up all night like people do with the 2-day ones.
Now this sounded perfect for me because (a) it gave me plenty of time to work on something and (b) I had plenty of time to work on something. Clearly this was a win-win. This wouldn't be my first game jam, since that Ludum Dare 11 (11? holy cow) years ago I've dabbled with different languages and tools, worked on a few games and played with a few Lisps. But as a hobby programmer I had never really finished a game, and I hadn't programmed for a year or two much at all, so I was kind of excited to crack into it again and see what would happen.
Before I talk about my game I want to highlight my favorite games of this jam. There were over twenty entries and I managed to play all of them, though not without some (to be expected for a jam) technical issues. In no particularorder:
This piece is only one scene, but that's not too uncommon for jams. However I thought the dev had a deft touch here with the visuals and the way they got the mood and emotion across. I hope they get to work on something more substantial.
I really liked the combination of physics-y controls and schematic visuals in this game. It also had a nice degree of polish, and of course a great title.