Raylib 5k Game Jam

When I heard that the Raylib community would be running a game jam I knew I had to participate. I've toyed with Raylib before and made a few small demo games but never got around to finishing anything. I think the jam gave me enough incentive to take it all the way this time.

It didn't get off to a good start. I didn't do any preliminary work before the jam started other than forking the template project and looking at the code. I didn't even start after the jam officially began, I had a severe case of game designer's block. I couldn't think of a concept that would use the theme "that was close". It wasn't until about 4 days into the jam that I thought of something and started programming.

I hadn't written much in C for a year or two so I was a bit rusty at first but I did my best to copy the programming style of the template project and I think that was one of the main reasons I was able to submit a working game. I had realized that you could use .c files as essentially the equivalent of classes with their own private and public variables and methods but years of exposure to object oriented programming had held me back from doing that and resulted in me over-using structs in other projects. Embracing static variables and making judicious use of extern freed me to focus on the game logic rather than agonizing over initializing and passing structs around. I still used structs for self-contained entities where it made sense but I didn't try to force an OO style as I had in the past.

The game I submitted is very much a prototype, I didn't have time to do any serious game play tuning and I spent almost no time on polishing, graphics, sound, juice, etc. I even committed the cardinal sin of having the player use the up and down arrows on the keyboard in a game that currently has to be played embedded in a website (duh, I know but I haven't released anything on itch.io before). It's interesting to note that submitting the game on time in an unfinished state is actually very motivating to work on it further. I know that other people have played it and commented on it and that makes me want to improve it so that people will continue to interact with it.

Here's hoping I continue to stick with it.