This WAS gonna be an article about how I designed and programmed this game for the Historically Accurate Game Jam 5(link below), but I didn’t finish it. So this article is about that instead. Why didn’t I finish? For a few significant reasons.
The first reason why I didn’t finish the game is because it took me too long to figure out what game I was gonna make. The way the HAGJ has worked lately is that about a week before it starts we vote on one of two themes. The hard part is that we won’t know which theme won until the day it starts. And the game jam generally runs about eight days, from Friday to the second Saturday.
For HAGJ 4 the last two themes to vote on were mythology and something else. I had a good feeling that mythology would get chose, so I had the game idea all ironed out the same day. I made a game about Sisyphus pushing the boulder up a hill. It was a time trial, press-a-button-really-fast sort of thing. Quick and easy. The game probably took me three days to make.
Sisyphus Up The Hill Link: https://bmdnerd.itch.io/sisyphus-up-the-hill
But back to why I didn’t finish this time. The final two themes for the HAGJ 5 were witchcraft and “Your Country’s History”. I thought witchcraft was going to win so I had an idea to make a platformer of some sort but I didn’t think far beyond that. But witchcraft did not win.
I’m from the USA but American history has never interested me. And I’m black so I like it even less. The first game idea that popped into my head was a game where you played a runaway slave. After pondering that for about an hour it dawned on me that that was a bad idea. So after couple more days of deliberation I landed on a Paul Revere game about running and hiding from soldiers while warning folks. The game jam started Friday at 6pm, I didn’t nail down this idea until Sunday.
So that was the first reason. Reason two was that I couldn’t figure out the game mechanics. Could you attack soldiers? How? Will this be an endless runner? Can you throw apples? Will you ride a horse? Can I properly draw a horse? The answer to that last one is no. I didn’t nail down the game mechanics until Wednesday.
The third reason is that I had less time. Why you ask? Well due to religious reasons from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday I don’t do any programming among other things. So when this game jam started on Friday I didn’t know what the theme was until Saturday night. So by the time I finally nailed down the game mechanics on Wednesday I barely had time to finish, due to work on Friday and sunset hitting immediately after. So Thursday night in the midst of me attempting to code the running animation I stopped trying.
Why didn’t I try extra hard to finish? Because I would have been so extremely annoyed if barely missed the deadline. And I didn’t want to push myself hard just to not make it in the end. I don’t blame the game jam’s time limit; I just took too long to get things written in stone. So this WAS going to be an article about how I made a “cool” game about Paul Revere running on the ground and not riding a horse, but in the end I didn’t make a game at all.
Historically Accurate Game Jam 5 Link: https://itch.io/jam/historically-accurate-5
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