The big trip is right around the corner for me. In a little over a week, I’ll leave and be out of the states for 6 months - 3 months in Japan and 3 months in Thailand (most likely). After that, the current plan is to return back to the states for a month and a half before starting another leg of the journey (too far to really plan so its extremely tentative). I’m excited, but a little anxious - which I think is natural given the uncertainty of what lies ahead and trying something new that I’ve never done before. But that’s never stopped me before!

In August, the goals were

The first project has morphed into something much larger, something that will likely take several months to get done, but be much more valuable for building experience and ideally something we can list for a price. The second, for the GMTK Game Jam, was successfully completed and submitted after four of us pushed through some long nights! We only had 96 hours to create the game from scratch, and while there are plenty things the team would have liked to clean up and add, the fact that we implemented some complicated systems and got the project submitted is a win.

In terms of physical/health goals, there was a solid week where I got pretty sick, something that is always unexpected and puts a damper on any plans. Feeling better now and just going to focus on small, consistent steps forward. I did finally run for the first time since February and injuring my knee. It was a short one but I had no pain or problems with it afterward - signs of progress that I like to see. Generally speaking, I feel so much better physically than I did 6 months ago. Although I haven’t been working to the levels I’d like, the small steps are having a beneficial effect.

Next month is all about building consistency. I’ll be in the same place for 3 months so I’ll have the opportunity to build some routines and focus on getting some work done. However, I expect there will be some level of culture shock and figuring out how things work so we are going to keep the goals pretty minimal. There is another game jam competition I will be participating in, but my role in this one will mainly be teaching and some art assets. Other than that, I’ll be spending some time build tools and templates for systems to accelerate the process with future projects.

In terms of physical goals, I anticipate I’ll be walking a whole lot more, so I expect to see those step numbers jump up. I’m considering looking for a gym once I’m out there, but I have a bodyweight routine I’ve experimented with in case I have difficulties with that.

Not much progress was made on the project that was started in the Pirate Software Game Jam. The list of items to take care of keeps expanding - not because the scope is increasing, but because my increasing awareness of the steps necessary to complete certain tasks/components. Slowly, but surely, I’ve been making my way through a list of videos, covering the different aspects that will needed to make this project happen.

The accomplishment this month was starting and successfully finishing the GMTK Game Jam! 4 of us (plus some assists from two others) sat down for 96 hours to build a project from scratch and get it uploaded for submission to a competition. Through strange sleep schedules and long working sessions, we were able to complete and submit our game called “KittyUp.”

The theme for the competition was “Built to Scale.” It seemed like the immediate interpretation was about scale and size of things, but we decided to go with a different approach. I the game, you control a cat with a tentacle that throws you around. Your objective is to use items to build a tower that will help you scale as high as you possibly can. The items shrink and disappear, so there is pressure to work fast. We didn’t worry too much about the “randomness” of how these concepts fit together and instead saw that these ideas would give us a few interesting coding challenges to work through.

This project definitely came with its set of challenges - many of those being completely new concepts for me to learn and implement rapidly.

The physics system was by far the most difficult thing I worked on. It took almost a full day to figure out the cat’s movement since its driven by two physics objects (the cat itself and the tentacle) and the relationship between how those move is… complicated. And then it took another day reworking all that to ensure that it worked properly with all the objects in the world. One of my personal priorities in developing a game is good game feel. This generally describes how it feels to play a game, like controls feeling crisp and responsive. And to get this game to feel right, it took a lot of coding, recoding, and recoding again - all trial and error to get it to feel right. There are still some changes I would make and I could spend an entire week just working on this, but I’m happy with how it turned out - and many lessons learned here will help me when working with future physics systems.

The week following the game jam competition gave the chance for all who submitted to rate and vote on other people’s games. The website usually gives people a random assortment of games to encourage rating of all submissions. The results are now out and I’m very happy with how we performed. Overall we placed 2847th out of 7630 entries. Not exactly a placement that earns a standing ovation but still something we should be happy with given this is our first submission to a competition. The breakdown of the ratings and scores (out of 5) are in the picture below for those who are curious.

If you want to play the game, you can play it in any web browser here. Fair warning… its not an easy game and the controls were inspired by a game meant to cause frustration.

This next month is a little tough to plan for since I have no idea what to expect. I’ll be in another country learning to live in a place I’ve never been, culture I’m only familiar with through media, and surrounded by people who primarily don’t speak English. I’ve got the bare minimum of what I need already figured out (place to stay and work, place to get groceries) and there are people out there who I can reach out to for some assistance if needed - but its all very new and uncertain. Because of this, the primary goal is to familiarize myself. I want to figure out my schedules and routines and learn as much as I can about this new lifestyle.

For specific goals and plans though, there is another game jam competition that I’ll be participating in. It starts September 8th and last for one week - however, my role will primarily be teaching for this event. The other guys I typically work with would like to come up to speed on a few aspects of dev and so I’ll be working with them to familiarize each with the different components necessary to make a game. Bringing everyone up to speed will give us the opportunity to contribute more equally on future projects and accelerate the timeline a bit more.

Additionally, to help accelerate future projects, I’ll also be spending time this month building tools and setting up templates that can be used for future game projects. When we start a new project, instead of having to develop the same systems that are generally the same across all projects, these templates and tools will give me and the team a jump start so we can spend more time on the more complicated problems.

For my physical health goals, the main focus is to continue slowly building up the running to not put too much pressure on my knee. I also plan to look for a gym - something I’m completely unfamiliar with outside of the states. There are people living the digital nomad lifestyle who continue to workout at a gym, so I know its possible, but I’m not sure what it takes to sign up for one or what sort of costs to expect (or if its even the right thing for me). All things to be experimented with in this first month!!

That covers everything for August and what I’m looking forward to in September. I expect I’ll have a lot more photos in next month’s newsletter. Thanks again to everyone for the support. See you on the 1st of October.

-Zack