SBIG Game Jam 2024 Part I - Before the storm

It has been awhile since I have written any new content to publish. Over the last almost year, I have been bouncing back and forth between different thing. However, over the last 6 months, I've spent most of my free programming time playing around with Swift and Apple's Metal framework. Hopefully I will get a chance here soon to dive into that some.

Fast forward to today. As mentioned, I've been playing around with game development. Starting today, I am doing my first game jam. If your unfamiliar with what that is, it is a competition where you implement a game within a set time period. That is at least the simple explanation, mile high view. However, I have a little twist on this. My son, who is 8, has been asking me to make a game with him. So I decided that we would try to do that during this game jam.

Today starts the 'So Bad It's Good' game jam. The rules are simple.

• Try to make something fun
• It can be original or based off an existing IP
• Use whatever you like, however many people
• Games must be made during the jam period

So, here is the plan of attack.

It is up to my son to design the high level parts of the game. This is the story line, game mechanics, rough idea of the assets, all of that. I will help some with narrowing his focus. I will take care of the programming and essentially everything that needs to be done on the computer. From there, we've got 8 days to slap something together that it hopefully fun.

For tech stack. I started working on my own library in Swift that uses Metal called 'Flatland.' However, due to some other side projects, I wasn't able to get it where I feel confident enough to live in it for 8 days. So over the last couple of day, I have pivoted on my tooling. My plan is to use a small project called AdaEngine to implement the game. The benefit is, AdaEngine appears to be architected in a way I was shooting for for Flatland. But also, it'll give me an idea of what kind of interfaces and such that I want to eventually bring into Flatland. So the tech stack is simple. Swift and Apple Metal using AdaEngine, targeting macOS.

My plan is to try to document my process and progress over the course of the game jam.