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I’m glad someone got that reference! There are a lot of historical references hidden away but they are almost all pretty subtle. Each system is named after a real-world port that had some trade significance during the period of the Opium Wars, mostly by taking a very literal transliteration of the name of a real city. But I think for the most part the references are much too well-hidden.

I’ve thought a bit about this, and I think it’s reasonable that entries demonstrating something wild like a completely new lisp implementation should probably get some bonus points for that; filing it under “creativity” is maybe not quite fair.

In a past jam, we had a 4th category for “Language use - how well was Lisp incorporated into the design” and I think that was added in order to address the same thing you mention: (this was before I was involved in running the jam)

https://itch.io/jam/lisp-game-jam-2019/results/language-use-how-well-was-lisp-incorporated-into-the-design

Unfortunately it was not very well-received; people felt that it was unclear how to interpret and rate based on that criteria. I do think that if we used “Technical Merit” instead that it would be clearer than “Language use”. But it is rather difficult to gauge this by playing the game; would this mean that you need to read the source before you can rate the game?

I don’t know; I’m not against it altogether, but I’m interested in hearing what the rest of the community thinks.

Makes sense; thanks!

In retrospect: I have an unhealthy aversion to text in my games. A bit more verbosity over the hints in the bottom right for the first few tutorial levels would’ve went a long way.

It doesn’t have to be in the game either; like you could put the explanation in the itch description too. The nice thing is the itch description isn’t locked during the jam period; I have added a few hints to my game’s description even once the submission period ended.

Well, from my perspective the annoyance would be the same whether it’s clicking “no” on the approval or just doing a normal disqualification the way it currently goes.

The real question is whether the approval step would serve as a disincentive for the spammers so that they wouldn’t even bother submitting in the first place. Hard to say without trying it.

What if there was a rate limit instead? Allowing submitting to three jams within the period of a week would stop the spam but still allow participation in extremely long jams.

Cute lil blobby fellows; I like the feel of it.

I felt like there was definitely supposed to be a specific order you’re meant to do things in, but I could have used more feedback indicating the difference between picking the right way and the wrong way. Is it bad to get cards that show up in the upper area?

A+++ title tho

Wow, I remember playing v1 way back in 2018; a blast from the past! That was also my first jam ever. But since it has been so long. I had to go back to the instructions of version 1 to refresh my memory of how to play.

Not bad! I liked the language icon graphicse

Getting this when I try to run it: ./glob: cannot execute: required file not found

I’m on Debian stable; x86_64.

I really liked the hand-drawn art style; it gave a charming feel to the game.

More games with dog protagonists imo.

WAF!

Great example of a very simple idea with a surprising amount of depth to it! Great puzzles that really made me think.

Sometimes it’s a fine line between a game and a toy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an entry like this before!

Did not expect the Nicole From Toronto fan fiction! Nice.

I wish there was more focus on exploration over trading goods

There is more to the game than just making money, but we didn’t get enough time to add enough hints to push you in the right direction. Hopefully that can be added after the jam.

The gameplay is surprisingly complex yet cohesive for such a short jam.

Thanks! That is probably because it is heavily inspired by the first game I ever made, which I worked on for four years: https://technomancy.itch.io/bussard =D

I’d love to hear both of y’all’s thoughts on tic80 vs pico8 for development

I also am not much of a fan of pico8, for a few different reasons, but the main one is that the font gives me a headache! The other big advantages of tic80 are that you can use an external editor, and that it supports Fennel instead of just Lua. The developer is also really accommodating and helpful to people who want to help contribute. I’d recommend giving it a try some time!

In past game jams I’ve run, we’ve often gotten one or two entries from a spammer who does not read the jam rules and simply submits their game to every single open jam. I don’t know what changed this time around, but we’ve already had seven spam entries, and the jam isn’t even over yet.

Every time I go and look at such a spam game, it’s a dead giveaway because the entire right side of the screen is covered with the list of all the jams that they submitted to; for example on https://leenrdo.itch.io/knowledge-challenge-trivia-hunt

I know there are legitimate cases where you may want to submit a game to more than one jam, so limiting it to one jam per game is probably too aggressive, but if there were a cap of maybe 5 or 8 maximum jams you could submit a single game to, it would probably help cut down on the spam submissions.

Thanks!

How about sharing some screenshots of your work in progress?

Here’s one from our game:

Guess it depends which parts of Defold are closed-source. Is it the authoring environment, or is it part of the runtime dependencies? That is to say, can you use Defold to make a game whose executable is released under an OSI-approved license with all the rights that license grants, or not?

I don’t think it would be appropriate to make an exception to the rules for this.

The rule is not that the engine has to be open source “in an acceptable state”; just that it’s open source. You can worry about polishing it later.

Typically when I don’t rate a game, it’s usually because it’s hard to get running on my machine; like if it requires installing a specific version of a compiler that isn’t in apt-get, or if it needs a newer version of OpenGL than my machine supports. The jam description specifically recommends web builds because then it’s easier to get people to run and rate your game. But in practice, sometimes games with web builds still don’t get that many people to rate them.

In previous years we’ve had a rating period of only 3 days; that usually felt like it was difficult to try to play and rate all the games in that time. That’s why we expanded the rating period this time around. I personally felt like it was much better; I didn’t feel rushed. But as you note, overall it didn’t make that much of a difference, so I suspect the actual problem is probably not lack of time? I don’t know.

Thanks for your submission.

The jam rules indicate that art must be attributed to the original creator. Did you create the cover image? If you cannot credit artist (for instance if it came from a generative algorithm) it is not allowed by the jam. Since it looks like it is just the cover image and not part of the game, it does not necessarily disqualify the whole game, but the cover image would need to be replaced.

Thanks.

I can email a late submission link; let me know where to send it.

That should be fine, you’ll be judged by other jammers based on what you submitted during the deadline but adding the source late shouldn’t result in disqualification.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense on its own, but here’s a shot of what we’ve got going on:

If you have any specific questions about Fennel, feel free to ask here or in #fennel or #lispgames on libera. We also have https://fennel-lang.org/from-clojure for people coming from a Clojure background.

TIC-80 is very easy to do browser-export with but it can feel limiting if you have a specific game you want to make that needs more colors or pixel resolution. Love2d is quite good; it’s a little more work to get it running in the browser but still possible, and its constraints are less severe. But you need a lot more 3rd-party stuff like art/map/music editing programs outside love2d.

Cool! If you want another take on the topic, I wrote a post here about a simple raycaster in 43 lines using TIC-80: https://technomancy.us/193

This landed on the main branch but it’s not in a release yet, so you’ll get it if you build from source; you don’t need my PR any more.

Hello jammerinos!

I know we often get a good number of submissions that use TIC-80, which is a retro-styled “fantasy console” for building games with harsh technical constraints around resolution and limited sprite sheet size. It makes it easy to export games to play in the browser, and anyone who plays your game can “peek behind the curtain” to see the code and art and even make changes to it live without recompiling.

TIC-80 supports Fennel out of the box, but the current release has an issue where the stack traces reflect line numbers in the compiled output rather than the original source code lines.

I have a fix for that bug here: https://github.com/nesbox/TIC-80/pull/2705

So if you plan to use TIC-80 for the jam, I highly recommend building from that branch, or from main once it gets merged, since it really makes a big difference having the line numbers when debugging.

I couldn’t get it to advance the frames; when I press space it just scrolled to the bottom of the buffer. The arrow keys moved the point, but that was all. Does this require a specific version of Emacs? (I’m on 28.8)

Looks like there are some incompatibilities with Emacs 28 fyi: Symbol’s function definition is void: take

I tried on 28.2; I was able to workaround the lack of file-name-parent-directory (you can replace it with file-name-directory which works just as well; however it also calls the defvar-keymap function which is not present in 28, and it’s less clear how to work around that.

Made me think of this

That’s realism!

I should elect my tech before the Jam starts and figure out packaging and distribution first.

This is really good advice. If you choose a lisp that doesn’t have a good out-of-the-box distribution story, it will eat up a lot of your precious jam time unless you get that solved ahead of time! The jam rules mention this already, but perhaps it could be emphasized more.

While I don’t love Appimage for general-purpose application distribution, it’s actually a pretty good fit for games, especially if they’re single-player.

I worked with my son this time who is 9 this time around.

Also really good advice! I’ve been collaborating with my kids for the past 6 years on this (they were about that age when we started!) and it’s become something of a tradition to play thru all the entries together and talk about what we like and don’t like. Kids are great at finding bugs and noticing when things don’t make sense.

Yes the cover image is generated by ChatGPT (spit!) but so what?

This will probably not be allowed next time. It’s important to credit the original creator of whatever code or art you incorporate into your game, and these tools make that impossible.

Not bad for having changed languages halfway thru the jam.

My favorite thing about this is how you can get a good ways in before you realize that missing the ball doesn’t make you lose.

Anyone who found it too difficult on their first playthru: you can press backspace to activate easy mode where the workers have a higher tolerance for fatigue, hunger, etc.