Blog Post Title #1

06-September-2023

Bloop!Jump is my first attempt into gamedev! It is a simple platformer where the goal is simple: Get to the top! I tried to make it a little bit difficult so...sorry if it was too much. (Or sorry if it was not at all lol!) But I decided to blog this game as a story for future self! And for you too, reader.

There are a ton, seriously, absolutely A TON of tutorials on how to make games and how to use engines out there. I actually bought a course in Udemy once and did some games in unity during the course, but after I finished, I felt like I learned absolutely nothing. I would come back to unity and everything would look alien to me! That made me abandon it for a while. The pandemic didn't help and some stuff happening at home made me forget about it. To be fair...following tutorials step by step is a thing that never worked for me, at least not when I wanted to learn something that I wanted to apply by myself later.

Fast forward, I'm in Japan doing a Master's in CS (something that I always wanted, maybe I can talk about this in another post!) and specially motivated to do stuff I always wanted to do! Like learn how to gamedev, how to write interesting stories for games, study in-depth graph theory...and so I started to play a bit with Pico8. My adviser told me about it. It looked like a fun engine to play and learn. It wasn't that difficult and I saw lots of fun stuff made with it. So I practiced a bit in Tiny Code Christmas. It was pretty fun! :D

Fast forward more months! I was going through some rough times with anxiety on having to write an phD proposal and doing my master's research. I was checking mastodon during a procrastination session and noticed LOWRESJAM Perfect! It was, honestly, the thing that put my mind at ease a little bit! I was doing my stuff and working on the game alternatively. It was some real good cleansing thing to me. And...I had fun!

I totally had 193956398493 ideas to put in this game. I would talk to my wife about the puzzles and story and meanings I wanted to put into the game... only then to remind myself that I should just get something ready. Something done. It was my first game after all. It didn't need to perfect. Hell! It didn't need to be good! It just needed to be.

All that considered, I did it! I got a lot of feedback from people in the jam and lots of evaluations! I was just happy that people took their time to play this simple thingy. I got top #101 overall. My first though was... "damn! so close to top100! " But then I just laughed it out. I had fun doing it, fixing it and actually playing it. I still have plans to update it with one or more levels and add some stuff I got feedback on. You can check the game on my itch: Bloop!Jump!

Welp! Too long for an intro post, but I kinda wanted to separate this one from the "devlog-like" thing I wanted to do later. So yea, next post I intent to talk about the ideas, the challenges the game presented to me and how I solved them!

See you in the next one! :D (Yes, the title was intentional!)