Howdy Jammers and Judges!

Although I was going to make a submission, my poor time management skills got the better of me and I don't think I'll be able to complete a game in time. However, while I'm here I wanted to share my experience as well as show off some of the assets I made for the game! 

It was going to be a point-and-click adventure game called "Saturday Morning Surfers", where you help a lil cartoon duck guy go through various TV channels to get back to the one he belongs on. During this week, I spent time working in Adventure Game Studio, which is a fairly simplistic engine that I just didn't have enough coding knowledge to get through.

Because I really enjoy the idea I came up with, I plan on releasing some kind of demo or proof of concept for it at some point! Just likely not during the jam window. 

Below are the sprites I made for the game. But before I head out,  I wanted to say thank you PotaJoe for bringing this back! I had a fun time even if I didn't quite finish up, and I'm really glad for the experience. I plan on playing through and rating a good chunk of the submissions because I want to see the creative things you all came up with! Happy Jamming, good luck to everyone! See you next year!!

Awesome art style dude. As someone who is an artist first and a code person waaaaaaaaaaaay last it always hurts to not make it, i feel ur pain 

Yeah it's tough to not be able to make deadlines, but you definitely at least learned things to take away from it! Often it's what you feel like you failed at that teaches you the most.

I can't do art and primarily am a programmer, and I think your best bet for a game jam is to make sure you find an engine you like working with ahead of time that doesn't pigeon-hole you into a game type, so you can be flexible for the jam theme but also not have to learn it all in the very short jam window. I spend a lot of my time just thinking like "Man I like this game, I wanna try making my own version" and practice in engines like Godot.

For me with programming, it's a lot about building your mental toolbox and learning how to break down concepts into the logical flow so you can do that in your game. What I found that helps me the most is practicing taking whole ideas and then thinking about what do I need to make it all work and writing it out in order. You'll only ever execute one line of code at a time, no matter what, so if you think of your game projects in broad strokes like:

• Get input
• Update game 
  • Update player
    • Change from idle to walking, move around, etc
  • Update enemies
    • Perform AI logic
  • Update GUI
    • Check the player info and update what to draw later
• Draw game
  • Draw player
  • Draw enemies
  • Draw GUI

You can then just focus on small portions at a time and even inform what to google in a more focused way or decide what order things need to happen in to get the final effects you want. Hopefully this helps you or anyone else reading this! I'm by no means an expert, but this is my method and it helps me stay more focused especially when my ADD acts up in a project and i get bored and jump around working on different components lol.

Lol same as ShampooBandit, I spent all my time waffling between game styles, ended up building out a 2d and 3d engine from scratch with nothing in it, and wasting a ton of time on [bad] art assets that I barely took advantage of.

I think next year I'll team up with someone like Beanie (OP) so that we can use our skills to the fullest without having to spend time doing the things we're bad at.

3 person teams really seem to be the way to do it, I'll just have to set up a team github to sync up!