---
layout: default
title: "pico 8"
---


# gamejam

## status and collective shout 

i entered a gamejam called ["litle guy game jam"](https://itch.io/jam/little-guy-game-jam) at what seems to be possibly the worst time :D 
as i'm writing this itch.io caved to a conservative/christian/"feminist" group pressuring them into removing a bunch of nsfw content, which gives me some confliction about this gamejam, since it's hosted on there.
the group is called collective shout

but i'm mainly doing this for my friends (kinda :p). it's fun to see how others experience games, and making games. their idea's etc. it's very entertaining to see them grow and learn. One of my friends has actually made great progress, i was really impressed. Though they might not see it that way.


## pico8
anyway, i picked pico 8 and added some of the projects i've made so far, and some of the ones friends made and i tinkered with to my github. It's actually been really entertaining to figure out within the limitations. it reminds me of this i think it's called "smile basic" 3ds game. where you could code stuff in basic. i really liked tinkering around with that and it's limitations. 

it's surprising how good and at the same time bad i am now. i know theoretically so many things, and how they should work, but the implementations are such a struggle every time. i also pushed myself a bit too hard i think with my laptop kbd, had a bunch of handcramps yesterday. 

for now i'm really happy with the results though. cool idea and i'm overall happy that i'm doing it 

## ideas

we've had a bunch of idea's so far and i might catalog some of them.

### majora's mask + animal crossing

thats how my sister described the idea. basically my original thought was this jam has a 2 day voting period, so how about a game that takes place in that 2 day period. combining some of the fears around the fleeting time like you have in majora's mask.

i thought of a character that starts knowing they only have to live until the end of the game jam and then depending on how they spend their time it affects the ending.

i had a bunch of thoughts, like maybe going very 4th wall break with it, like the character knows it's a character in a game jam. 

or going very sad with it, giving the character a family that they can choose to spend time with, choose to tell them (which might sour the last days but can give them closure), choose to spend time alone instead,...

eventually i ran into the idea that i'm terrible at writing. at least i'm not as good as i'd like to be. i think i have good idea's, but executing them story wise is always pretty terrible 

### surprise 

a friend had the idea of a map that changes through time, like a water level rising and falling. that friend actually worked that idea out! I think it's called "trywater" in the project files on gh. really impressive i thougt. this friend had no experience with making a game before and it looked so good!

### yarr

another friend had the idea of having a boat that continuously fills with water and having to drain it constantly. i worked that out with a very simple version of a river temporarily blocking your access. but it looked, felt, and played like shit :D if i was better i'm sure i could do the idea justice, but alas. still for the first thing i made, i feel like it's allright :)

### sims

someone else had this idea of taking care of a kid. depending on what you do the kid will grow up a certain way. again tons of writing involved in that one. which i am really bad at. but i did get the time stuff to work (kindof). i reworked the idea into more of a horror game, in fact i'm still working on it right now.

the idea is that you are taking care of a creature that will eat you if you don't feed it in time. so far i've been able to make the creature grow over time (which will determine its speed) and i've also implemented screens like in zelda. today i'm working on pathfinding, which i've implemented a very simple distance based version that fails to move past a wall if it's directly facing the player. so gotta work on improving it some more :D and switching to dijkstra
