"Just one more thing..."

This was a surprisingly chill run. First things first, I’ve re-read a postmortem for the previous jam. It basically said “time is short, don’t get distracted, have a plan”.

This is the first jam for my fourth(!) engine. I’ve been practicing, but things are different for actually jamming with it. I tried to get my tile framework ready and stop hanging spheres in a vacuum, but alas.

I considered (briefly) doing a game on floating point numerical instability, had a sensible chuckle, then discarded the idea.

Next up on my list was unimplemented n-body racing mode for my old game, with items and stuff. With a few strokes I’ve unloaded everything there was to begin.

Before I had a chance at getting to that I’ve found I don’t quite have a starter project for the engine, oops. So the next 7 hours went into frankenmerging engine demos and examples into one relatively clean project.

By the end of day one I’ve found myself in violation of the postmortem commandments. At least I was working on the code that would remain in the game, not just thrown out.

Day 2 greeted me with the memory corruption bugs… which were solved promptly by consulting out git history for the previous project which had similar symptoms.

The simulation core is ready, but the game feel is a bit off. The planned thing ought to be somewhat more thoughtful and tactical, but I had suspected I wouldn’t be able to implement all the details in time. And the game could be dull without them.

• Collectible items were crossed out.
• Small amount of checkpoints swapped for a wild ride across hundreds of bodies.
• Ship controls tuned to be more powerful, at the same time the bodies became more heavy.

A few more engine fixes, open source library fixes, game fixes and the game is playable.

With a few hours remaining for the day (and the compo), I’ve plugged in the scoreboards library I’ve prepared a few days before.

Taking a day off was the great idea. I had to sit through only a single work call, duh.

A final day went into boosting the experience.

I remembered how sound does improves a game and went trawling https://freesound.org/.

An already powerful ship got even more powerful with addition of rechargeable boosters. And so did the bodies. A rather sedate ride turned into a trick play with multiple styles.

But there was one little thing in the original n-body flying game - particle effects - and just one hour remaining before the submission deadline.

Without getting too fancy I just shoveled them sparkles into the same wireframe rendering collection and the engine got picked them right away :triumph:

First play day was rough, but I fixed almost everything we’ve found during the second one.

I doubt there would be much post-jam activity, but the project looks like I can have some compute pipeline practice on it :thinking:

Bonus content: n-body gravity force visualization with color-coded directions