Been really out of it lately, hence the lack of posts. Not much in the way of pet projects of deep thoughts to post about.

However, I’m attending another one of those Game Jam things this weekend, and I’m hoping that will sort of jolt me back into normalcy. (That, or I’ll just get even more loopy because Marie is on vacation, I’ll be around a lot of people I don’t know too well, and I’ll descend into one of those forgetting-who-I-am episodes. We’ll see… )

For those of you who don’t know, a Game Jam is where you’re given a specific theme to work on, and have a couple days to crank out a game that fits the theme.

The jam doesn’t start for a few hours, so here are some disconnected tips for myself going into this. It isn’t so much unlike the mental prep work I used to do before TypeCons, I suppose.

Keep my other pet projects at a trickle during the jam.

I fully intend to use some of the weekend doing non-game jam coding and illustration and design and whatnot. Besides my already burning desire to get this stuff moving again, it wil probably help whatever I’m doing for the jam, to take frequent breaks.

Speaking of which:

Pick an approach to the theme that will help me sort out issues with my existing stuff.

If I find myself writing something at the jam that’s about cool mechanics for their own sake or has too-realistic physics simulations, I’m doing something wrong. Ideally, I’ll be able to pick an approach that has a little bit of story, a little bit of that commenting-on-the-the-real-world-through-the-lens-of-abstract-mechanics I want in my other stuff.

Check in with other jammers.

I could easily just hole up and work on my own stuff, and I want to make sure I don’t do that. Unlike my last game jam, I won’t be part of a team, but this is still, in many ways, a social event after all.

Sleep.

Not something I normally have trouble with. 😉 But if I do hit a point where I’m so super excited about what I’m working on that I feel the need to stay up late working, I have to remember that I wrote this: staying up late never, ever helps in the long run.

Alternate skill sets.

I’d like to try forcing myself to stick to a rigid rotation of coding, playtesting, illustration, and music composition — say, a half hour each session — throughout the weekend and see how that goes. My gut feeling is that if I can do that, it will help greatly with my productivity.