Greetings to everyone. I have been a solo developer for a couple of years and this is my very first jam. I love procedurally generated content and I have been working with it since my very first game.
I would appreciate if someone could clarify a couple of points to me. Sorry if the questions are trivial but I'd like to be very sure to not make any stupid mistake.
1. I have a precise, simple and stupid, idea in mind for this jam; an idea that revolves on routines, graphics and sounds I already implemented in previous games. Is it fair if I recycle (almost entirely *cough*) routines for procedural generation, or for character movement, or for inventory management, or for bullet movement/exploding/special effects such as chaining, forking, dealing critical strikes, from previous games?
The game itself is completely new; the core mechanics revolves around a couple of ideas (Zelda 1-style rooms + potions -LOTS of them- as the only collectable and consumable items available) that I have never used (ok I already used potions; who doesn't! But this time, I am talking about like a hundred of potions or more, and in my game there will be only those: not weapons, armors, rings amulets etc); but again, graphics and sounds will be strongly tributary to my previous games, as well as algorithms for movement, projectiles, managament, and procedural generation. If I understood correctly this is acceptable, right? I hope so.
Speaking of game content. To define the project, I have created a spreadsheet with the potions I intend to make. I made this is to make up my mind, I mean, I consider this as part of "planning" phase... but ahem, I also tought, at this point, to make a direct use of the spreadsheet in the game as well, i.e. to import it as a Resource and pick data from it, just to save me the time of re-writing everything from scratch. (I have already used spreadsheets for game data that can be organized in such a way in 3 of my previous games, I find them very useful). Is doing so cheating the rules? Hopefully not...
2. How do *exactly* partecipate to the jam?
I signed up. Fine. Then, I have to start coding when the jam starts, ok... but WHERE? I use the Godot Engine. On my PC. Do I have to post the code as I progress, to show that I am coding only during the jam? And if so, where do I post it? Or there is something I am missing? And at the end of the story, how do I actually SUBMIT the project? Do I have to put it in my itch.io page? But even if I do so, how YOU will know that it is "my project for the jam" and not "some random project"? HOW exactly I am supposed to inform the organizers with something like: "hi there, here's my finished project, get this zip file, enjoy"? I didn't get this point.
Sorry again for the very stupid questions, I hope you won't get mad at me. Best wishes to you all!