I’m participating in Pirate Software Game Jam 15. It’s my first game jam. It’s also the first time I’ve spent more than a day creating a game in at least 10, probably more like 14 years.

I’m using Godot as the engine. It’s quite nice. I feel like I’m easily 3 or 4 times as productive with Godot than I would be if I tried to write the whole thing with a game library, which is how I did my first and only completed game (more on this later). That’s ironic because I’m not really productive with Godot yet; I did the tutorial last winter and jumped into the jam without doing anything to prepare at all. I’m still doing OK given how much time I’ve been able to spend on the jam.

The main thing that I find annoying about Godot is that I don’t have a good sense of which things in the API are actually the right ones to use. For instance, there’s an Area2D, a CharacterBody2D, and a KinematicBody2D, that people usually recommend to do the same things. It’s not immediately obvious from the official documentation which you should use unless you want to read the entire API reference, which defeats the purpose of the API reference in the first place. The whole point of a reference is to refer to it, not memorize it cover to cover.

The other thing I find slightly annoying is that most tutorials one finds on the web to do specific things are for Godot 3.x, and I’m using 4.2.2. Also, a lot of tutorials are YouTube videos instead of written content. I prefer to learn through reading, because I can read faster than the video, and because I can refer back to the most relevant parts of the content quickly if I need to later. That’s a pain to do with a video, especially if the video is an amateur production (which most of them are).

I’m aiming to place in the top 20% of the jam. I suspect that 80% of participants will not even submit a working build, so this is an extremely modest goal. I think I’ll release the game on here as well. Expect that sometime after next Wednesday.