I Made a Game for a Game Jam, Here’s What I Learned

Recently I made a game and entered it into the Github Game Off 2019. The premise of the game is that there are a series of cows that run around following rules. The aim in the earlier levels is to get all of the cows into a green area. The aim in later levels is to use the cows to create and program a basic computer.

With these kinds of game jams, there is a restrictive time limit involved. In this case, 30 days. On day 0, you receive a theme in which to base your game upon: the theme was “Leaps And Bounds”. Generally there is not enough time to create a large, polished game given the limitations, and in my case, the game was largely unfinished. There was definitely enough gameplay for a few hours, but I had hopes for a bit more. Well, anyway, here’s how it went.

Brainstorming

For the first day or two, I tried to come up with ideas on how my game was going to work. I wanted to make a puzzle game of some description, and hopefully something that I would have fun playing as well. As the puzzle maker, it’s almost a given that you know the solution, but there are some problems which you can give yourself a blank palette, describe what you want, and then fill in the gaps. This gives the player (and me) a wide artistic license to solve the problems in their own way.

I had an idea for a tile based automation based on Befunge where the stack was part of the main memory. A basic language would need an instruction pointer and a stack pointer. In a…