Last week I made a little jam game for Minijam 150, the theme was magic and the limitation was 'light is the way.' A pretty abstract limitation for sure ahahaha. We got 1st place!
My goal was to play with my toolkit and make something small and complete, from start to finish. Across the projects I've worked on I have pretty good libraries for handling stuff like NPCs, conversations, interactable elements etc. that I wanted to play with.
Scoping out an RPG in 3 days is fun! We started with an outline for the story, magical girl beats up aliens. Combat system came next, that's the gameplay part of the game. You get 3 moves, that cover different areas and solve different problems, which makes the fights into super basic flow charts the player can solve.
With 3 moves, we knew we wanted 3 combats and a boss, let's you make a super easy level up system where you upgrade a move after each fight, then fight the boss with your skills. Exploration is rewarded with little health upgrades that give combats a larger margin of error, a neat little package!
The game also gave me a great space to work with my new lighting tools and experiment with some practical uses of the color lookup table. On the html build of a love2d project, canvases get compressed and lose color accuracy. But with a color lookup table, I can use a shader to cheat in the proper colors, pretty cool!
My favorite part was modding in a secret boss after the jam though, spending a couple laid back days post-jam playing with the legos I made! A harder more complex boss than you should probably put in a jam game, but I had fun ahahaha