#1HGJ Entry – Bouncing Boxes
timbeaudet
A quick entry for the OneHourGameJam entry: Bouncing Boxes.
Working on a game in an hour is a great way to learn the weaknesses about your development pipeline, be it in coding, art or audio.  The result is almost always a project that will get thrown away, seriously it took 60 minutes to make, but the experience is certain to teach you something and sharpen game development skills.
While hanging out on in the #LudumDare irc channel of afternet.org an interesting topic came up, a challenge if you will, make a game in one hour.  TurtleBrains is still a very fresh framework and the rough edges are still being shaped but even after 10 years of professional game development I pondered, is that even possible.  Obviously the quality will be low, and the game minimalist, but 60 minutes of development…
A few of us attempted it, some using GameMaker, others using their own development tools and me using C++ with TurtleBrains.  C++ is notorious for being slow during development.  For years I’ve considered it just lacking a solid framework to build with, and am hoping to provide that with TurtleBrains, maybe the language is the barrier, but a solid framework should help.  In any event, it took me 17 minutes to get a blank project to a black screen.  With forty-three (43) minutes remaining I decided to go with a game where you control a square and several other squares fly across the screen.  Goal: Don’t contact another square.
I created an entity for the flying squares, the gameplay scene and got the mouse moving the player square with others randomly moving at their set velocities.  Time was up.  No collision, no win, no loss, no sound, no graphics – beyond the colored square.  And that was an hour.  As expected the results were less than spectacular but the room for learning continues.  There wasn’t much time wasted, probably 2.5 hours including the pre-jam and post-jam irc discussions.  I was happy with my results given 17 minutes to get to black screen.
But that has to change…