That was fun, definitely had some trouble solving a few of the riddles, and there are still a few I'm stuck on. The photos are very nice as well :) Radically different from the "norm" as far as games go, which I really like to see. What did you use to make your game if you don't mind me asking?
Viewing post in Life is Full of Inspiration jam comments
Thanks for the comment! Yeah, honestly, I missed the part of the announcement where Tim said we could make a game inspired by something, so I just made a game about inspiration itself, which pretty much ruled out any of my previous ideas for action games.
As for the underlying technology, I did not use any game engine. I like to say I wrote the game from scratch because it sounds hardcore, but in reality, Java provides a ton of built-in features that make it easy. I used something called JavaFX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaFX), which is actually a standard feature of the JRE, so it requires no external dependencies. It's intended to be a replacement for the old Swing/AWT GUI frameworks in Java, but is really so much more than that. It supports audio, video, images, hardware acceleration, 3D, animation, special effects, CSS styling, and all kinds of other things that go way beyond the traditional enterprise GUI application. In some ways, it's actually comparable to a very basic game library. If you've ever used SDL or SFML, it can do a lot of the same things as those. All the grids, buttons, sliders, etc., are all standard JavaFX features. And there's a Scene Builder GUI application that lets you drag and drop components to build up a UI, so that you don't have to do it all in code. It's really quite nice. Unfortunately, it falls into some of the same traps as pretty much everything in Java in general, such as having a high learning curve because the interactions between all the components are somewhat of a dark art. But with enough practice, it's a very capable framework.
One of my favorite demos of JavaFX is this NASA mission control software that they use to find stable orbits around celestial bodies (skip to 52:30 if the link doesn't automatically do that):