Scarbyte

If you didn't see my blog post from 2 weeks ago, I created a website where users can upload their experimental games. Each month there is a theme and users must create a game that demonstrates a completely new type of gameplay that matches the theme.

The Submissions

January's theme was "GRID", we had a total of 4 submissions (which I think is pretty good for the first ever jam, especially considering this jam was only 2 weeks instead of a month).
Here are the submissions!

Knightventure (made by Chartuch)

The first submission was a really cool puzzle game called "Knightventure". In this game you have movement like the knight from chess and you must solve puzzles using your limited movement. Despite not all the puzzles being fully implemented, this game was super polished and the puzzles were actually very well designed!
You can download the game here.

Gupta (made by scarbyte)

The second submission was the game that I submitted. Like the last submission, it is also chess themed. This game is a roguelike with chess based movement. You can combine different segments of your chess piece to alter your movement pattern. Looking back, I probably could've designed this game better because the UI is very confusing and cryptic.
You can download the game here.

To Reach The Light (made by dawn)

The third submission was a neat little puzzle game involving pushing boxes. The twist is you have you control multiple characters and boxes of the same color will move together. This leads to some great and challenging puzzles.
You can download the game here.

Creoterra (made by errormine)

The last submission was Creoterra. This is a sandbox terraforming game. The world will grow on its own as you play (grass will spread, bees will pollinate flowers, etc). Also, bonus points for the game being on a hexagonal grid!
You can play the game here.

February's Theme is "Ingredients"!

Ingredients can come in many forms... what ingredients will you use to cook up the perfect game?

Join the experimental game jams discord server!

Experimental Game Jams is about discovering completely new types of gameplay. Each month there is a new theme and users must create their game to match that theme. The rules are that each game must be made by 1 person and within 1 month, and the game must demonstrate a completely new type of gameplay never seen before.

I created this website as a spiritual successor to the now defunct Experimental Gameplay Project. This website will hopefully motivate myself and others to experiment and create new forms of gameplay never seen before. I've always had a problem with focusing on story, art style, environment, etc first without even thinking about gameplay. Hopefully this new project will force myself to prioritize gameplay.

The first jam is GRID!

Some of the greatest games were built on a grid based system. Games such as rogue and Tetris have created entire genres and new forms of gameplay. Grid based games even originate from ancient times, look at Chess/Chaturanga for example, which was created sometime around 600 AD. Also, creating a grid based game does not confine you to 2 dimensions, look at Minecraft for example, which is essentially a 3D grid based game. Old school 3D dungeon crawlers also have their maps generated on a grid. Now the question is, can you create a completely new form of gameplay based around a grid of some sorts?

Feel free to make an account even if you dont plan to participate in the jams, you can always leave comments and feedback on other peoples games. Also please note that there are currently no games on the site yet as it has only just released.

https://experimentaljams.com/
You can also join our discord server!

I haven't released any screenshots of my upcoming game Cocktail Exotica in a while so I've decided to show a small teaser image of one of the locations in the game.

This is going to be the shop in the game. After the end of each night working in the bar you can choose to visit the shop to buy items for yourself or for your bar with your earned money. I won't reveal too much but these "items" will either be purely cosmetic or will have a certain functionality. Since it is now summer I will hopefully have much more time to work on this game, so you should be seeing more updates in the future. As always if you have any feedback or comments feel free to send me an email (scarbox@proton.me).

NOTE: Things in this image are subject to change

You may of noticed that once again, the site looks completely different now. My previous site wasn't very good. The design aspect of it was alright, but the code was a complete mess and the website was pretty wonky looking on mobile.Take a look at these two code snippets (old site on the left, new on the right):

Both these snippets of code are for the navigation system of the site. The previous site had a more complex navigation system that conveyed a lot more info than the new one, however the code is still terrible. Look at how many <div> tags there are nested inside of each other! Now compare this to the new design which uses only one <div> tag (in the entire document!), and is much more readable and manageable. This new design is also easier to adapt for mobile devices since the layout will stay exactly the same no matter what device you're on. There's also some cool new spinning gears (very important). Another thing I did was optimize the size of the webpage, the old website's homepage was a whopping 8 megabytes, now it is only around 200 kilobytes.

I'm starting to get tired of making crappy ascii games written in C that run in the terminal so I've decided to start developing a serious game in the Godot Engine. The game is called Cocktail Exotica and in the game you play as a bartender and serve drinks. I've just started working on the game so it's currently very unfinished but I thought it would be nice to make a blog post to show what I'm working on. Here are some screenshots of the game (all the assets/art is created by me):

Godot has a very easy to use pathfinding node, so it was very straightforward to set up pathfinding for the NPCs. Currently, the NPCs are just placeholder for now, but I do plan on them looking stylized and strange, rather than humanoid.

Why Use Godot?

Some of you may be wondering why I'm using the Godot Engine to make a 3D game. I'll list my reasons below:

• Godot's 3D Engine is very capable, the physics aren't the greatest, but I'm not really using any physics in my game.
• Godot is free and open source , so I don't have to pay any royalties/fees, unlike with Unity and Unreal. This means no mandatory "Made with xyz" splash screen as well. Since Godot is open source I also know exactly what is (or is not) being bundled in with my game, this is a fact that people often ignore, but shouldn't.
• Godot is very easy to use and the documentation is very good.
• GDScript is an easy language to learn and use. Also, if I need to I can use C++ or even C# as the language.
• Godot 4.0 is in the works which will make the 3D engine even better. The physics engine is also getting overhauled as well.

For a while now, I've wanted to expand upon my programming skills. I wanted to learn a compiled, low level language. I've never been a big fan of languages like Python or Java, which are pretty slow and require you to install an interpeter (or the JVM for Java) to run programs written in these languages. I feel like these languages are like training wheels that I've never taken off. Modern software is starting to become pretty bloated and slow, and these high level lanuages that attempt to simplify programming aren't helping. In languages like Java, you're at the mercy of the garbage collector and JVM. For things like game development (which is what I want to get into), it's very important to have the power to manually manage memory and optimize your game so that it can run on a large range of hardware. I do understand that a lot of jobs use these languages, but I still feel like learning a lower level language will help broaden my understanding of programming.

After looking into a few low level languages like Rust and C++, I've decided to just start with good ol' C. Even though C is quite old, I still feel like it's relevant. C's syntax serves as the basis of a lot of modern programming languages and I'll also be able to quickly start learning C++ afterwards, if I feel the need to. I would also like to know the exact differences between C and C++ rather than just "C++ is just C but with objects". Anyways, learning C will hopefully teach me:

• how to approach problems without thinking about objects as the solution
• memory management and optimizing programs
• good programming practices
• a better understanding about how programs work and how they interact with the hardware

Hopefully I'll soon start experimenting with writing programs in C. I'll post some programs that I deem worthy if I write any, if not you'll probably end up seeing a blog post titled "Why I've stopped learning C" instead.

To Start off the new year I decided to redesign my site once again. I liked my previous design, but I felt like it was a bit dull and lacked color. The entire website also felt a bit empty and barren (mostly due to my lack of complete projects). Hopefully in the new year of 2022 I'll actually be able to show some cool content on my site. In the meantime, enjoy the pretty colors. I hope everyone that's reading this has a great 2022!