Coding Blocks - What is a Developer Game Jam?

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

We learn all the necessary details to get into the world of developer game jams, while Michael triggers all parents, Allen's moment of silence is oddly loud, and Joe hones his inner Steve Jobs.

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 146. Subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes. Well, not Stitcher anymore, but maybe Spotify still. You know, hey, I tell you what, just find it, and if you can leave a star or a thumbs up or a plus or a review, whatever they allow, we'll take it. All right, and codingblocks.net, check it out. You can find show notes, example

discussion, and a lot more. And you can send your feedback questions and rants to comments at codingblocks.net. You can follow us on Twitter at codingblocks or head to www.codingblocks.net and you can find all our social links there on the top of the page. And with that, I am the guy who

says the irritating www's. I'm Alan Underwood. I'm Joe Zach. And I'm Michael Outlaw. This episode is sponsored by Educative.io. Learn in-demand tech skills without scrubbing through videos, whether you're just beginning your developer career, preparing for an interview,

or just looking to grow your skill set. And X Matters, keep your digital services up and running from IT to DevOps to emergency notifications. Everyone needs speed, automation, and reliability when things go wrong. And Datadog, a unified monitoring and analytics platform built for developers, IT operations teams, and businesses in the cloud age. All right, and today we're talking about game jams, which is something I think we're all kind of no on right now, or like no, no, no, right, in terms of we've never done one of them before.

I would agree with that assessment. I thought the yes, yes, no was in reference to like if you knew about it. Right. Yeah. I know nothing about it. Yeah. So I think we're yes, no, no. Okay.

All right. Well, there you have it. Let's move on to the news. All right. So as always, we like to say thanks to those who have taken the time to leave us a review. And on iTunes, Outlaw wanted me to stumble over these today. So it looks like we have Abhishek in 12, Shake Poster Batoran, Herkamer's Dad, and Bamer's 22. So thank you all for leaving those reviews. And I think it was Bamer's 22 that brought up the, the great way that the dub,

dub, dub is said. So, well, but he also said that nobody actually types it though. But I want to point out though, that while you're, you're fine to not type it and it's fine for websites to default and automatically redirect you, it still is important.

Anyone who has done any kind of SEO work will tell you there's a big difference in Google's mind in regards to www.codingblocks.net versus codingblocks.net. Yep. Yep. Each one has theircks.net. Yep. Yep. Each one has their own page ranks. So yeah. That's why we kept it consistent. Alright. And hey, got to throw out there too.

We're going to be talking about Game Jams today, but we're also going to be running one in January. So we're looking at 2021. We're done with 2020. We're looking towards the future So we're looking at 2021. We're done with 2020. We're looking towards the future. And we're looking at basically January 21st to the 24th running a game jam, which we're going to tell you all about this episode. So that's going to be super exciting and super awesome. And as kind of part of rolling that out and getting some information out of the website,

we set up a new page that you can go to right now at codingbox.net slash events that has a scheduled event so things like uh like the virtual happy hours which i haven't been great at publicizing and things like the game jam uh things like live streams uh if we're going to be at a conference or something or giving a talk somewhere then this would be the place to go to so it's got like a calendar uh it might even have a feed up there so you can add it to your calendar i'm not a calendar. It might even have a feed up there, so you can add it to your calendar. I'm not sure about that. If not, I'll get it up there at some point.

But anyway, codingbox.events. Wait, codingbox.net. Oh, and one last thing. I've got to tell you, too. Another way to keep in touch and find out about this stuff, of course, we can follow Twitter and social links, blah, blah, blah. But also the mailing list is super great for that stuff. We run contests there and we'll also be posting information about the upcoming game jam.

And you can get on that mailing list just by going to codingblocks.net over there on the right side. It'll be a thing to put in your name and your email. And, you know, we don't spam or anything, so that should be good. Another thing that I just forgot about, because we always forget about it. If you want some swag or some, some stickers, some, you know, whatever, go to codingblocks.net slash swag. And, and the instructions are there on what you need to do or reach out to us on Twitter or something like we definitely like giving it away, but we always forget to mention it. So,

so yeah, definitely check that out. There's a reason why we're not in marketing. Like this is why we sit behind a desk at a computer. Instead of like, you know, being out there, like trying to get a brand thing going and right.

You know, like, do I use the dub, dub, dub? I don't know. Right. Um, so a little bit of news here.

And this is I just got this email the other day and it was kind of shocking. And it's probably worth anybody else knowing because I'd imagine that a lot of us use the service. So Google Photos in June of 2021 is going to start counting photos against your space quota. So if you're a user of Google services, I think you get 15 gigabytes free. I don't even remember what the number is. 15 gig is the free tier. Okay. So 15 gig is the free tier. And what they're saying is everything up until June of 2021 won't count against your quota.

But on June 2021, all photos that are taken that get put up in Google photo storage will start counting against your quota. But on June 2021, all photos that are taken that get put up in Google Photos storage will start counting against your quota. And it's because I forget how many trillions of photos they said they had. Like, it's ridiculous. And when you consider that probably of every 10 photos, there's two of them that are complete trash that you take that you just never go delete. So it was really interesting. So I've got a link to their storage changes that they put up in their blog.

Probably worth going and checking out if you are a user of that service. Well, I guess this is like really just an indication that they're helpful hints to like, hey, you want to delete these, right? I guess those didn't work, right? Do you know what I'm talking about? They were like, have, they would suggest the photos like, Hey, you probably don't care about this document that you took a picture of.

Right. You've, we can, we can delete this. People are like, no, that's free. Why not?

Yeah, exactly. But I wonder like, uh, I guess this is only cause this is only applicable to the, uh, the free pictures that they had. Right. Or, or is it any, cause like to the, uh, the free pictures that they had. Right.

Or, or is it any, cause like there was, um, when they, when they first started that, that photo service that you could, if you used their like optimized version,

their photo quality, then, then it was like unlimited number of photos that you, and that's what they're getting rid of. Because if you wanted to go with like the raw or the original version of the photo, then you already had to, that was already counting against you. So it's, it's that free tier, um, of the unlimited where they would like choose how to optimize it, that that's what's getting, being gotten rid of. Yeah. Let's be real. What they did is they gathered all the images they needed to make

their ML amazing. And they're done with that now. So now they're like, thanks for all the free images. Now you guys are going to pay for storage. Yeah. Well, I mean, it is interesting, though. I mean, they do have just a couple bytes dedicated to these photos. Uh, cause they have, they said that they have more than 4 trillion photos stored in Google photos. And every week,

every week now they get 28 billion with a B, but billion new photos and videos uploaded. And you guys wonder why the polar ice caps are melting. It's photo storage. Yeah, right. That's right. Hey, we also, a little bit of inside baseball here. Somehow, some miracle, we cracked the top 15 of the technology category in Apple.

That was kind of brief. Never long. It fell back down pretty Apple. I was kind of brief. Never long. Fell back down pretty quickly. But that was pretty amazing. This is a bunch of NPR shows and Gimlet shows and Radiolab shows and WNYC. Like a bunch of shows I listen to. It's like, oh, wow. Yeah.

It's really cool. Top 15 in that category is crazy. That was truly exciting. For two days, I think we were there, right? Yeah. Yeah, I'll take it. Only two days? Well, okay. Now I'm sad. It's probably there again. I mean, whatever. Right. Right. for two days i think we were there right yeah yeah i'll take it only in two days well okay now i'm sad it's probably there again i mean whatever right right all right so uh on uh on with the show

so uh today we're talking about game jams and uh the name's a little weird um you know we've talked about the word jam before and how it can be often tied to things that are a little bit strange but in this case it's referring to basically like a musical jam you know where We've talked about the word jam before and how it can be often tied to things that are a little bit strange. But in this case, it's referring to basically like a musical jam, you know, where like people get together and they just kind of make some noise. They freestyle, they collaborate. And that's actually where the name comes from. So the idea was kind of initially just to get people together who have different perspectives, different ideas, getting like a kind of a theme or challenge and see what they make. And so that's what they did.

And the first one that anyone, you know, kind of the first official version that I could find on the internet happened in 2002, which is not that long ago. It's been a minute. It's been a minute, but we're not looking at like 1960 or something so i thought that was pretty interesting and then uh ludum dare which is uh one of the the big challenges the big game jams that we'll be talking about here quite a bit got started basically the next month after and has been running ever since so uh 18 years, Ludum Dare. Great job.

And at the heart, we're basically talking about a timed challenge to create and publish video games. So you might sign up to compete in a 48-hour game jam and get started, make a game, throw it up on the Internet, and maybe there's some sort of voting process. Maybe there's some judges. There's a variety of things that can kind of go down. And the end of it, you theoretically have some sort of game published. Now, I want to clarify upfront. There's a bunch of different kinds. We're going to be talking about some of the major players

and the major competitions and styles and rules and stuff. But a lot of them, there's not a – they don't expect you to work 48 hours straight, right? A lot of times it's – most of these competitions, they totally expect people to work on them for a short amount of times. Sometimes you might have a seven-day contest and people might just work two hours a night for that week in order to kind of publish. Wait, just a total of two hours? Say what? Just a total of two hours or two hours every night you're saying? Yeah, two hours every night. I got to know like how much is this going to interfere with my Overwatch time is what I'm trying to get a good feel for.

Well, you'll have to decide that. And I think one thing that's pretty obvious like right off the gate is is there's some people that could take a week off life and do this. And that's great for them. And there's some people that are going to have a hard time finding even an hour or two a day. And the output of those, it's going to vary pretty wildly. But the big driving force, the kind of spirit behind all of this is to just say it's okay. It's not about trying to come out with this polished, amazing, you know, it's not a competition. It kind of is. But the goal here is really just to get something published and just be creative and have fun and collaborate.

So it doesn't really matter. Okay, so tell me this because you set aside the 21st through the 24th of January is what I saw, and that looked like a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yep. What is your plan with this? Like how many – are we basically taking eight-hour days in doing this? Is that what the goal is or what? Whatever you want. So it's four calendar days.

It'll be – what's that? 96 hours uh the contest will be running which means basically we'll say we'll say go at uh midnight at uh whatever time zone we decide on and and uh all the the games must be submitted by the end deadline and then there'll be some sort of like kind of judging phase and that's it okay all right and are we going to uh compete in as well? So there's several different ways to do the judging. I've got a section coming up here at the end where we can kind of, I fear we kind of talk about our preferences and maybe talk through that a little bit. I thought that'd be kind of fun.

Okay. We've got options though. All right, cool. I will let you continue. What did the publishing, like define that though? Like are you talking about like published to an app store or just to the web? Generally, it's just to the web uh so sometimes there's uh you know like kind of sponsored game jabs or something that might have like uh you know additional rules for publication like maybe you know maybe amazon's trying to get uh more games in their marketplace or something and so maybe they'll do something like that for the most part though it's generally just about that kind of

free open spirit where you got to get the games uh up online but like immediately right off the bat i'm sure as a programmer you're thinking like well what if it's uh windows what if i write it for ios what if it's a web game like how are people going to play this how are people going to you know get to experience these things on platforms like some of those things require installs some of those don't like it's uh kind of a jungle and i those don't. It's kind of a jungle. And I think overall it's kind of hard to navigate that. And so this is one of those things like if I hadn't heard about GameJazz from so many different people, I would immediately dismiss it as just too complicated.

It'll never work. And luckily for the world, I'm just totally dead wrong. And we'll see some – I've got some numbers here coming up that I think might knock your socks off. Except that I set it up and so now you're probably going to be disappointed. What if your socks were already off? Right? I haven't worn socks since March. That's what I was going to say. We're in a pandemic.

Nobody would wear socks anymore. Yeah. A couple of quick things I want to point out before we get into the meat here. There's apparently an international Game Jam conference. I've got a link here too. It's actually really super big. Look at the pictures. I can't believe that so many people are involved with these sorts of things.

I feel like this has been off my radar for radar for so long. And I'm just like really surprised that I missed such a big deal. And now if you go to this website, indie game jams.com, does it, does it mean anything right now though? If it five Oh threes, right?

Oh, uh, well it shouldn't. If you Google, Google search for indie game jams.com, it's't. If you Google search for IndieGameJams.com. It's just the link that was there, though, Outlaw. If you just go to the main site, it works better. Oops.

Sorry about that. I love it. The loading animation is a Pac-Man. Yeah. Well, they need that loading animation because... Yeah, they could. Do you see how many Game jams are running just this week it's ridiculous wow i am not going to count that i don't know if it's possible to count that high it's impossible i think you need google photos to count that high yeah so we're going to go

through some of the kind of like the bigger kind more major ones, but I want to just kind of come out the gate saying there are a ton of different game jams for a ton of different reasons on a ton of different sites. If you go to IndieGameJams.com, of course we'll have a link in the show notes, you can find a game jam to join any day, any hour, any time you want. All different flavors. I don't know, there's maybe even 100 going on this week that are just on the side alone. What if we said it

this way? Like, if game development is your jam, then there's probably going to be plenty of resources for you in this episode that you'll be able to walk away with all kinds of helpful information. Yep, absolutely. And every that uh you'll be a walkway with all kinds of helpful information yeah absolutely and every

single one that i've looked at so far has been like i would even say beginner focus like they want people to just come in and make a game if this is the first time you've ever tried programming if this is the first time you've ever tried to make a game uh then that's like totally encouraged so i'm sure that you'll find game jams that have like pro developers that kind of pop in there and do really polished awesome things and that's great for them but you're also going to see 14 year olds who you know just have a circle bopping around the screen and that's fine too that's great how about a dos batch game jam make a game using only dosOSBatch for Windows.

No worries. Yep. That's awesome. Some of these go on for a month. Some of these go on for a single day. Here's one that's just Friday Night Jam. So, yeah, pretty cool. So, that's a great way to find your next game jam,

and that is tied in with this international conference also which i had a broken link for but is also super cool looking back when we went to conferences and things yeah so i know i'm doing a lot of talking here but i promise we'll get into it but i do want to kind of hit on the most popular game jam so if you've ever heard of a game jam before it's a bit on your radar it's probably going to be one of these and the top one uh you probably hear about is ludum dare which is the thing i mentioned at the top of the show uh ludum dare got its start very early on uh in the game jam scene and ludum dare actually looked this up so it stands for to give something a name basically in latin so they just needed a name for this thing

that they were trying to do which is uh put on games and just a online event and in this case ludum dare.com happens every april and every october basically spans a weekend and people will talk about ludum dare pretty much all year round. They'll be talking, they'll be thinking about ideas. Ludum Dare does this cool thing where they start with a big batch of theme ideas. And as the weeks get, as time gets closer and closer to the actual event starting, you'll look at a big theme, a big list of themes, and maybe it'll be like computers or technology or community or friendship or green animals or whatever. And so your mind will start thinking about maybe games that you can make the kind of, what you call it, focus on those ideas. And then, you know, the next week comes up and 20 items drop off the list.

And next week comes in, 10 more items drop off the list. And then finally, the day before the contest begins, the real theme is announced. And people go and make games around that theme. And that's really cool because it gets you thinking about kind of – it gives you something to kind of focus on. It gives you a cool way to see how other people kind of thought about that theme. But it also keeps people from like totally making a game ahead of time right so you're not flailing around and you don't have five months to build it before everybody else gets a chance to get in there yeah i like it can can i ask a dumb question though of course um what i do best uh

are there like are there any games that i might have heard of that have come out of a game jam like a flappy bird for something like or something so there's uh there's like niche games and there's certainly certain categories like roguelikes where a lot of games come out of game jams that uh people who are in those scenes if you will uh are going to be familiar with but here are the top ones and i I've got a list here of the 10 kind of popular ones, but here are the ones that I've actually heard of. Surgeon Simulator. Have you seen this? No.

So this game in particular, it kind of seemed to spark off a whole genre of games, and this is one of those ones where you've got the two hands on your screen, and you'll be trying to commit to commit do a surgery and uh let's say you grab a hammer but the fit is really uh wonky physics so these crazy things will happen all the time so you'll grow to grab the drill and you'll knock over the skeleton in the corner and you'll go to drill you know whatever procedure you're doing and accidentally hit the person's foot and like just chaos ensues. It's pretty funny

to call it a simulator. I guess it's similar to what would happen if I really tried to do surgery on someone. You kind of got to see it to believe it, but it's just total mayhem where you're trying to bandage the person up and the bandage stuck to their eyebrow.

Whatever, just crazy stuff happens. It's kind of aages the person up and oh, the bandage stuck to their eyebrow and you know, whatever, just crazy stuff happens. So it's kind of a comedic game. Super Hot is another one that's popular and kind of niche circles. I don't know, Alan, looks like you've seen that one before. I own that one. If you have a VR headset, you absolutely must get that game.

It is a blast to play. So what's it like? So Super Hot is your, at least in the virtual world, I think they also have a non-VR version of it, but you're basically a person that you enter a room and there's people trying to come kill you, right? And there will be tools in the room that you can pick up and use. So it might be a gun. It might be a Chinese throwing star. It might be a knife.

It might be something. It could just be a bottle. But as you do an action, like if you pull the trigger to shoot, then everything speeds up for a few seconds. And so the people that are attacking you might shoot, and it's almost like, you know, the Matrix, that cool effect that first was popular in the Matrix where the guy did the- The bullet time effect?

Yeah. It's that same type thing. So if you do something like go to punch somebody, everything speeds up and somebody might shoot and you'll see the bullet trail coming at you. And so you can sort of like duck to get out of the way of it. It'll go past you and then you can come back and try and do something else. So you're constantly trying to react and do this. And it's just a very polygon world.

It's very much like if you remember Virtua Racing back in the Sega days. Yeah, yeah. It's that polygon feel, but it's so interactive and it's so fluid that you truly get worked up and it's fun. You'll get your blood flowing doing it. That's awesome that it came out on one of these game jams. Seriously, I think it's like $10, maybe $15 when you buy it.

Totally worth every penny of it. You get your money's worth because even if you beat it, it's one of those games that you can go back and just play and play and play because it's just fun. The graphics on it are not serious at all. Like when you said it's a polygon kind of thing, like you're not kidding. Like there's just, you know, whatever shapes it takes to like make a human-ish form. Some squares, some triangles, some rectangles.

Yeah, it's all triangles. It's all polygon based. But it's really just, and again, this is like one of those things, and I could see how it could grow out of a game jam, only because you don't have a million or a $50 million budget to try and make some photorealistic people coming at you, right? Like this is just about the game. It's really just about the game of for everything you do, their ability speeds up for an amount

of time, right? So it's like this whole push and pull balance of stuff. It's really fun. Okay, and I just looked it looks like they've surpassed selling 2 million games, and that was from a year ago. So I imagine it's only gone

up since then. That's awesome. And that was the result of Game Jam. You can kind of imagine too where like someone probably had the idea. It's like, well, what if I did the Matrix thing? Let me see if I could do that in a weekend. And they came up with a prototype in the end of it. They were happy with the prototypes.

People seemed to really like it. And so they went on and made a good bit of money from it. That's awesome. Yep. So Snake Pass is another one. That was one of the Switch titles that came out really early and did well on Switch. I never played

it though. Man, that one looks super polished. It does. That one looks really nice. Gods We'll Be Watching is this is more kind of my last, but it's kind of like a narrative pixel art game, which just kind of looks a little retro, but it's just neat.

It's been really popular. And then there's my favorite here, which is Goat Simulator. Have y'all ever seen Goat Simulator? I have not played it. That thing is super popular. It pops up for me on recommended purchases all the time. Yeah.

People love it. They've been playing it for years. And you can just imagine where someone took this game. It's one of those physics simulators where they basically took a goat and they threw it into a world and had it do crazy stuff. That's it. You know what's awesome? If you go to their

website, goat-simulator.com at the very bottom of the page, they have a disclaimer on the page. Goat Simulator is a small, broken, and stupid game. It was made in a couple of weeks, so don't expect a game in the size

and scope of GTA with goats. Wow. As a matter of fact, you're better off not expecting anything at all. That's amazing. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say that first one, the Surgeon Simulator, it reminded me of, like, looking at it,

it made me think of, like, Who's Your Daddy? Do you remember that game? Yeah, the octopus, right? No, the game where, like, one person plays as the baby and another person plays as the dad. It's like a head-to-head game. Oh, yeah, yeah. And the baby is trying to do something to die and the dad is trying to keep the baby alive. So the baby would try to climb into the oven or stick a fork in the light socket.

But the graphics aren't like, you know, they're, they're, they're not that crazy. They're nothing like, you know, super,

super impressive. Uh, you know, but they're good. They get the job done. And that's what, uh, the surgeon simulator reminded me of looking at it.

Made me think, like, I wonder if that's where, uh, if who's your daddy came out of a game jam. It might. I just looked up Bug Stacks, a game coming out for the PlayStation 5 that apparently came out of an internal company game jam.

Oh, and that's by the same company that made Octodad, which is the game I was thinking you were talking about. So I haven't found a total number of sales for Ghost Simulator, but I did find an estimate of their daily installs. So they're saying that Go Simulator gets 1,300 daily installs. So even with the price of it

being $299 now, which it was much higher, they're estimating about $4,000 daily revenue. Wow. Daily. That's impressive. Not too shabby, huh? That's impressive. For something that was created in probably a few days. The initial stab. Yeah, pretty cool. We're doing it wrong.

Why are we making podcasts for the last eight years? For real. And so if you just Google a Game Jam games, you'll find a bunch more, but those are just the ones that I had kind of recognized, so I kind of grabbed them. So we talked about Ludum Dare, and they do it twice a year.

Global Game Jams is apparently the biggest, at least that's in their marketing speak. But it's actually got a big emphasis on physical presence. So what they do is it's basically a big event that happens at a certain time all around the world, and they get people to basically run these events in different areas so there's one new york city one in cairo one in uh you know the philippines whatever i'm sure there's more than one in all of those places but uh let's see here i got some stats uh in january of last year they had 934 locations across the world 118 countries and, and they created, in those locations, 9,601 games

in a weekend. And that's coming up. Yeah, and I couldn't find any numbers on how many people there were, but this is an event that really focuses on teamwork, so I imagine it's going to be, you know, 10,000 times something for a total number of people that were involved in this, which is really

cool. Now, here's one that's near and dear to my heart it's seven day roguelike s7 drl i just love roguelike games and uh so yeah i had to include this one it's not as nearly as big as some of the others i've got some numbers uh which we'll get to when we kind of talk about the rules because each one of these has different emphasis and different rules so I just kind of wanted to throw that one out there. But I did like that just right on the front page they have a big emphasis on not being a fast coder but that proving that you can release a finished playable game.

Now you did a roguelike game a couple years back right did you was it related to uh 7d rl uh only in the sense that i wish i did seven day roguelike like i've always um i've played lots of the seven day roguelikes that come out uh you know usually every year i've been slacking on it lately last couple years but i've always been aware of it and the cool things that people do. And so, it's definitely a bit on my horizon. But yeah, I really like the emphasis on doing something

finished there. So, I thought that's kind of a cool way of doing it. So, it's more about getting something done and published than it is about polish. So, itch.io. Now, this is the one that I've kind of got my eye on the most itch.io if you're not familiar it's basically i'm saying like a marketplace for kind of indie games and i say marketplace but a lot of it's just free games like people put up their games other people come in play it give feedback if you want to make a little game, maybe try to sell it, maybe not.

This is a great place to just go and do it. And they also run Game Jams, and they provide a platform for you to run Game Jams for free. So remember that big calendar that we saw? I would bet money that most of these links, if you clicked them, would link to itch.io game jams. So I was thinking that is a good platform for us to host our game jam. And so I went and I actually set up a test one, made a private, super good Dave, by the way.

He's the one who got me turned on to all of this. He is my inspiration. He's the wind beneath my wings. Big shout out to the bet meddler of the show. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Super good. I created a super good game jam

and tried submitting a game just to kind of see what it was like. Because I had a lot of questions around platforms and playing and judging and all that stuff. And so I got a much better sense around that. There's one game in particular, or one, sorry, one jam that playing and judging and all that stuff. And so I got a much better sense around that. And, uh,

there's one game in particular or one, uh, sorry, one jam that, uh, I found on itch.io. This is the biggest one I've seen so far, but,

18,000 entrance. That is a lot. Yep. And, uh, itch.io, uh, at the time, uh, I got the, got i pulled the stat they've had a hundred and almost basically 110 000 games that have been created specifically from game jams hosted on itch.io

and you think like you know most of those like some blood sweat and tears are going to any coding project right so there's some blood sweat and tears are going to any coding project. So there's some blood, sweat, and tears going into the site. Let me ask you something. When they're setting up these games, do you think they focus first on building their DevOps pipeline to deploy this thing? Or do they focus on the unit test first? Oh, absolutely. CICD first, and then tests, and of course security above all all right okay yeah this is a departure be good at this

oh man so uh here's i put it together a couple reasons why i thought a person would want to do a game jam and uh you know based on the readings it basically seems like a lot of them emphasize being new people uh including virtual spaces uh and we'll talk a little bit more about how the rules often go but usually when it comes to kind of time to kind of finish the game and like do a do like a judging process a lot of times uh the way it works is that the people who have submitted finished games get to vote on other people's games and that's uh the kind of a common way of voting things up wait say that again if it's uh the people who submit games are the only people who can vote on them and there's all sorts of variations sometimes there's

like a judge panel sometimes there's like a round of like public voting and then it gets weaned down to smaller and then it goes on to you know so on and so forth but I just think it's really cool that by having the people who submit the games be able to be the ones also judge it it really encourages everyone to kind of play everyone else's games so if you submit one of these

games and your game will get played because they're encouraging people to go out there and do that voting as well so in addition to making a game your game actually gets played and you get feedback and you get to meet those people and in the when you do a game jam a year later on the same platform maybe you'll see that person again you'll see the game they made this year and remember the one they made last year and so it's got a great way of building community which is something, of course, we're interested in. I like it. So, you said you are definitely

looking at itch.io as the platform will probably use. Yeah, it's a couple checkboxes and a submit button to get going. And so, I like low barrier of entry. It's totally free. So, it just kind of makes sense to me.

Excellent. Obviously, if you're doing a game jam, so it just kind of makes sense to me excellent obviously if you're doing a game jam especially if you're like writing your first game or you know you're not not a game developer you're going to be learning a lot there's a lot of different things with physics and just the way you write these kind of programs is different there tends to be

like a game loop an infinite loop most developers I know don't ever try. There's no intentional infinite loops in the code, but that's something that's super common in games, which is kind of a different way of things. It reminds me of just doing Windows app development, right? If you were doing desktop app development,

then there was a main loop as well, a main event loop. Yeah. You can make a game out of Windows components. It would be kind of fun. I'm sure somebody has. Well, I mean, I remember back in school we had to. You didn't do that in any of your classes as an assignment? A game?

Yeah. Actually, back in high school, maybe. I think I did like a DOS game. But no, I don't think anything in school, in graduate level stuff, none of that was ever. I don't think I ever did any games. Yeah. I had one class that was an elective, though, and it was just kind of and one little challenge was to make a GUI game. Cool.

What if you love it? I don't remember what it was about. I just remember we had one where we had to do something with a Bumblebee game. Huh. Oh, that's cool. Fizzbuzz? Yeah, Fizzbuzz. On the love it thing, yeah, I mean, this could be interesting.

I've always been curious. I've never tried it, never actually sat down and said, you know what? I'm going to make a little something. Yeah. And if you kind of demystify a little bit, maybe the next time you go to learn whatever language you want to learn next

or whatever framework or something, then maybe instead of doing a to do list, you'll do a little, a simple platformer or, you know, Tetris or a puzzle game or something, which is, you know, Tetris or a puzzle game or something, which is, you know,

fun. Cool. Great for GitHub blogs, Twitch. If you're wanting to get more content out, this is a great way to stream about something or have some sort of thing you can output because games are so visual. It tends to represent really well in these sort of areas.

So if you want to have something cool to show off on your LinkedIn or your profile or whatever, then what's cooler looking in the game so do i need go ahead do i need to have like my unity 3d skills down pat like i need to be super polished before i start this or absolutely not just have if you do want to javas JavaScript or Python and be done. There are fantastic options for all of those. Got a list of game engines coming up. Unity is such a fantastic choice, though. It's crazy.

And from what I can tell, a lot of people will start with a tutorial from Unity. There's tons of them. There's tons of official ones, even. You can go and just kind of start there, start working through a little bit. At some point, you kind of branch off and do your own thing and there you go.

You learned Unity and you made a game. Are we planning on Twitching anything? I guess I'm asking a bunch of specifics about what you've got in your head for coming up in January. Is this going to be like a community type thing where we hop on

Twitch and we have a bunch of other people on there? YouTube? What are you thinking? Yeah, I was definitely thinking about trying to make a game. I was going to try and take some time off work and just go in for it. Gung-ho. I assume I would be ineligible for winning or whatever. I don't care about that. I just want to do it

to be fun. I would Twitch it. I would also love just to play through other people's games on twitch too you know assuming you know we'd have to talk about and think about it you know make sure people are okay with that but i just think it would be cool to like see my game being played by someone else and just see the things that they run into that i didn't think about kind of like you know user feedback testing live qa yeah but this being hosted on itch.io like anybody who was on that platform could sign up to compete in this game jam yeah and that's another thing that was kind of interesting to me too is like part of me was like you know we could like go nuts and buy a bunch of advertising

and like just try to make the biggest awesome most ball in game jam that ever was or we could just talk about on the show and the mailing list in Slack. Keep it small and keep it more kind of, you know, essential to the people we know and love, right? Yeah, I think that's the right way. There goes our marketing skills one more time. We start small in the next year.

So we could be doing one of these every day. I mean, this is just the first of many. Yeah, because some of these people might go on just the first of many. Yeah. Because some of these people might go on to make millions of dollars. That's a great way to maybe get a new career path if you end up finding something like a super hot that really takes off. And then making, what did I say, $2 million. It sells for like $20.

So $400 million. So check this out. Outlaw. I think you might remember this. I don't know if you were there, Joe. But years ago, this has been years ago, we had gone to a meetup. I don't remember what the meetup was about, but there was an Android developer there. I can't remember his name, but do you remember? He creates crossword puzzle games.

And he had entered in something. I don't know that it was a game to him but it was something similar but there was basically a hey create a game and submit your game and whoever wins wins i don't remember if it was 20 or 50 000 it was a chunk of money and he won with his first crossword puzzle game and so he started was like okay well that's what i'm going to do i'm going to start creating games and I'm going to publish them on Android. And then I think he started, that's what it was. I think it was a Xamarin meetup because he was looking to cross platform his game.

Yeah. I'm trying to find his name now. It was a Peter something. Yeah. And I'll, I'll find it. But yeah, you're right. It was, it was, we met him at a Xamarin meetup, and that was how he... Roger Peters is his name. That's it. And you could find him at SmartyP. And he had created a game that I think was called Match and Go? No, Word Search Light, I think was the name of it.

Oh, no. He had both of those. He had two games. I forget which think was the name of it. Oh, no. No, he had both of those. He had two games. I forget which one was the first. I think Word Search Light, I think, was the first one or something like that. But, yeah, you're right. He got started because he competed in a game competition, won $50,000 for it, and that started the whole thing for him. Yep.

So when Joe says that, hey, you could make millions of dollars, no, you totally could potentially make a living. I mean, super hot. You could look at it and tell that it didn't start out with amazing things. And they haven't absolutely taken it to the next level. And people love it because it's just a fun thing. So this could be a nice little start to something that you didn't even know you'd be into. You know, um,

so the gaming industry is, uh, $200 billion a year, which is getting, this is, uh, this is a couple of years old, but that's about double Hollywood.

So that's double the movie. Crazy. Yep. Those people you've never heard of that are living their entire lives, making games you've never heard of. And you said 200 billion. Yeah. With a B.

Buh. A lot of Instagrams. I'll include a link, uh, you know, for the curious about where we did talk about, um, when we met Roger Peters and,

and now that it goes back so far, like we didn't even include the number, the episode numbers in the show notes. But it was like early on because this is like from 14, all your database are belong to us. Which seems like a fitting title for this episode to talk about you know to refer for this episode to reference that one since it is game related oh that's right yes i did just see it too i just happened to see uh in this article i was getting some numbers on uh in this article they're projecting so who knows what came true or not. But by 2020, esports are expected to have more than 70 million viewers for finals for big competitions, which is more than the NBA, which is crazy to me. Wow.

Yeah. This industry is still growing. It is fun to go to the gaming competitions. I mean, if you've never been, like it is – you can see like it's definitely on its way up. I mean there have been some gaming competitions that I've gone to and there's like full-on like stadium seating around the game area. And there will be like an announcer's booth and it's, you know, fully decked out with cameras and everything, just like it would be like if you were at an NBA or whatever, you know, and, and there's the stage you can watch the people play, but then there's like giant, giant screens to, uh, you know, watch, watch all the action as well

as like, you know, uh, I've even seen stadium seating where it was like there were smaller monitors closer, you know, throughout the seating area so that, you know, in case if those, even though they are gigantic, if it was still too far away for you, you know, there was something closer to you that you could see. Yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome. This episode is sponsored by Educative.io. Educative.io offers hands-on courses with live developer environments, all within a browser-based environment, so no setup is required.

With Educative.io, you can learn faster using their text-based courses instead of videos. Focus on the parts you're interested in and skim through the parts you're not. So as I mentioned a few times, I've been learning Python and I've been working through the path for Python data analysis and visualizations. And it looks like I'm 17% through the path, which is amazing to me that it's so big just for this specific path. There's been a lot of what they call playgrounds, which is where you can run the code and also change it and then run again and uh my favorite thing is actually the assessments now i take it back assessments are cool don't get me wrong uh little quizzes to make sure you can do things like uh get the right code my favorite thing is the ability to basically scroll the scroll bar to to move fast or go back to the sessions that you need to which has been

really great for me as like kind of a language switcher here to be able to scroll past things about learning Python that I already had a good grasp on, like creating variables and whatnot and stop and spend more time on the things that I need more help with, like the things that are specifically cool and interesting and unique about Python as language.

So for me, I've basically been learning Python with this and it's just been fantastic. So I can spend the time on the things that I care about and can kind of gloss over quickly the things that I already know. Yeah, so the one that I've had my eye on is the Practical Guide to Kubernetes. So it doesn't have to just be programming related. It could be environmental, kind of setting up systems type of stuff that you could learn in their, uh, you know, platform and with their platform as well. So, uh, again, you know, as we said, skip through the parts that you, you want to learn, learn how to like, uh, run your Kubernetes

cluster locally or, uh, install kubectl or minikube, you know, you, you're like, Oh, Hey, I already know kubectl. I just want to skip ahead to, you know, you're like, oh, hey, I already know KubeCuddle. I just want to skip ahead to, you know, get in a little bit more detail past that. Then fine, you can. And, you know, we've talked in the past about they have their best-selling series of grokking the interview prep series, right? And there's, you know, Joe's favorite that he went through in the past called grokking the System Design Interview and the Grokking the Coding Interview. Well, they've now added on to that with Grokking the Machine Learning Interview

that actually focuses on system design side of machine learning by helping you design real machine learning systems such as an ad prediction system. And it's the only course like this on the internet. Yeah. So go ahead and visit educative.io slash coding blocks to get an additional 10% off an Educative Unlimited annual subscription. But hurry, because they don't run deals on these very often. Again, that's educative.io slash coding blocks to start your subscription today. All right, so now I want to talk a little bit about a couple specific game jams,

specifically because I kind of wanted to highlight the differences between them and the way they do things and why they do them that way, so we can kind of think a little bit about what we want to do. So I mentioned Ludum Dare. They're kind of the the big dog in the space uh you know kind of sort of they're at least most associated with the name and they just most recently had one in october which is uh number 47 which is quite a lot of game jams they had 6 000 uh like almost 7 000 signups which uh they have divided categories so you can do solos or you can do compos, which are basically teams. And so there was actually 9,000 individuals. And of course,

some people about 3000 didn't end up submitting a game, didn't finish, but they got 3206 submitted games out of it. And you can go browse all of them and play any of them right now. Thousands of games. That's pretty cool. Yep. And you can go play just the winners or the top 10 or the top 20 or whatever you want.

It's all free. If you're a game developer or you're interested in becoming one or just want to see some cool creative ideas, then, I mean, the world is your oyster. There are more games than you could ever look at. And that's pretty awesome, especially when some of them end up kind of really taking off and becoming big, bold new concepts. I mentioned the Surgery Simulator, which kind of spawned off a whole generation of games where you're like a construction person trying to hit a nail. And, oh, you're hitting your arm, you know, whatever. You guys have to look at that it sounds like the way you describe it though sounds like if you uh asked me to use the unity engine for the first time and i would have all the physics wrong right

why am i going right yeah uh there's uh there's one level I just got to tell you where you're in a bumpy ambulance trying to do a surgery. Maybe a little dark. I don't know. But I think you're trying to do some sort of heart surgery. And, you know, so like maybe you go to grab the scissors and you accidentally grab the hammer or, you know, whatever. You get over a bump. You accidentally hit them with the scissors and you crack the ribs and the heart flies out. Just kind of like level of ridiculousness that can happen.

That's excellent. I made that scenario up so that, I don't know if you can actually knock the heart out, but that's the kind of stuff that happens. It will be available in the next release. Yeah, there you go. It's a great idea. Dave should pay me for that.

So for Ludendare, it's 72 hours. They call it a weekend, but it basically starts on Friday. You can do it alone or team. They have separate rules for teams. Basically, just a little bit more strict. Now, Ludum Dare does like for you to do your games from scratch, including the art, music. They like the games to be open source.

So basically, when they're asking people to kind of vote on them, or they have, I don't know if they do judges or not, they basically ask you to kind of rank those a little bit higher if someone did the work themselves. You're going to see a lot of derivative works. You're going to see a lot of Marios if you look at big game games because people reuse art and then sometimes they'll change the color or something. But you can oftentimes tell where the inspirations'll change the color or something. You can oftentimes tell where

the inspirations or where the assets came from. You can also tell if someone does something what they call programmer art where someone's obviously a coder who tried to get some art in there and they actively encourage programmer art in these times of competitions.

I was just thinking everything on my art would be like you'd say, well, that's a square. Yeah, I was just thinking like everything on my art would be like, you'd say well that's a square and I'd be like no, no, no, that's a person. Exactly. And that person is going to walk through, but no, that's just a square movement. No, trust me, that's the person. Yeah, a long time ago, maybe a year

or two ago, Tor and the Slack, I don't know if you ever met them, but they did a game jam with the team, and it was a super cool idea where there were these lasers kind of firing through a cave, and you could go and position these crystals to redirect

the lasers. So you could kind of move a crystal and position it at an angle, and it would bounce the laser off and kind of achieve some sort of objective, like opening a door or something. I forget now, but it was super cool. And it just always stuck with me.

Cause, uh, of course, you know, like you do it once you're like, okay, that's neat. I can move these crystals and I can rotate the angle in order to shoot other

things like enemies or myself. Uh, but like, what if I made this crystal point at this other crystal point is other crystals. And so the next thing that you got, this is laser, just like zigzag it all over the whole level.

It was just super fun. So that was really cool. And I'd never seen anything like that in a game before. And never since. I think there's so many possibilities out there that you can just still find ones that no one's ever done before. Super cool.

Now, there does have a specific uh specific rules on derivative works and like things that they like specifically don't want you to do like reusing assets straight up or making them so obvious but they do say that basically uh major modifications are okay as long as it doesn't look too much like the the source but that's kind of things that like we want to think about when we're creating the rules for the game we can have special rules about whether or not we allow purchased assets or illegal assets to count or to you know disqualify essentially so something to consider and itch.io bless them because they basically give you default rules So you can just kind of go with what they have. You can kind of override and enter your own custom text for anything that you

want to do. But for the most part, if you just kind of stick with the rules, like you're going to be all right. So regarding the derivative works, then like we could allow it and we could have like Mrs. Pack outlaw. You could have Mr.

Pack outlaw. I have mr pack outlaw i don't know if you know you probably don't you probably can't see where i'm going with this but hear me out oh man that's awesome uh so in particular so ludic dare um they i actually found the things that they rate people on. So it's a 1 to 5 rating on innovation, fun, theme, graphics, audio, humor, mood, and just the overall score. So they ask kind of a lot of questions. I mean, it's 1 to 5, so it's not too quick. But at the end of that, they're able to kind of average those items together and come up with a single score. And also you can go and say,

hey, for April of 2020, let me go see the most innovative games. So if you're trying to find some new cool mechanic or some new inspiration for a game, you can go look at the most innovative or the most fun or the most funniest games going

back for the last 47 of these things. So you can borrow these ideas to help you stitch together what you want to create. Yeah. And great artists, right? And also, they're looking at ways to give credit for good reviews. So if you're a person who reviews

games well, and I think they have places where you can give specific feedback, then they want to have that kind of factor somehow into maybe your game score give you some sort of like gamification there i don't know if it's a tiny game but it's interesting wow i'm looking at this one there's actually like because i because i was kind of poking around on the the ludum dare just to see some of the games and i saw what you're talking about where like you know the results of how they would rank them you know overall fun innovation and and i didn't realize like oh yeah like you just said you like you could go and look oh just

let me see the most innovative one so the most innovative one i guess for the last game jam or i don't know if this is of all time i don't assume it's of all time but uh the phone tree of despair and to play it you actually call a phone number whoa that's cool like that's unlike any game i've uh but yeah like you're you're it's phone tree of despair is a game where you navigate a phone tree while trying to avoid getting stuck on a hold loop. Wow. That's cool. And yeah, I talked about games being visual.

But some of the coolest games I've heard about coming out of Loot & Jare. There's one I heard of many years ago where there was nothing to see and you would just have to navigate by sound uh and um yeah it's just really cool and so you imagine there's a lot of interesting stuff you can do just the sound and if you kind of impose that limitation on yourself or some other limitation that you could actually make some really cool experiences that obviously you're never going to see that in a triple-A game, at least not 50, 60 hours of that kind of game loop. Maybe. But that kind of stuff, like phone loops and things like that, those kind of things are just rampant, cool ideas that don't really fit very well in other categories. Man, some of these graphics, too, are like,

considering how short the time is, they're a lot better than I would have put together. So you'll find teams maybe where they'll have one artist, one sound designer, one coder, and they'll just all go split their separate ways to do the thing. They knew the game themes kind of ahead of time. They were thinking about it. Maybe they had some ideas going in, and they just just all go split their separate ways to do the thing. They knew the game themes kind of ahead of time. They were thinking about it. Maybe they had some ideas going in, and they just go for it.

Man, I need one Kubernetes guy, one Jenkins guy. Yeah, that's one thing. Did you see this a couple of weeks ago on Hacker News where someone made a game where you would play kind of a – you'd like shoot basically your pods in your Kubernetes cluster so you could like kind of shoot a pod until it would explode and it would actually kill it in Kubernetes and so

it was like a way of like testing your Kubernetes cluster but also shooting things. That's pretty awesome. That's hilarious. Yeah. That was neat. I'm in. Yeah. You'll see a lot of education games too, like even games like How to Type or even one of those little games where you're like a math blaster type stuff or like little things like that when you were a kid. That kind of stuff just fits really well for games like this.

It's like, hey, let me spend the next two days making a game that teaches kids how to do long division or something like that. That's awesome. That is. making a game that teaches kids how to do long division or something like that that's awesome that is uh i don't know if you've heard sir but they don't teach long division anymore it's all about partial quotients yeah i've seen you draw the lines i know i just hit a trigger word on like every parent that listens that has had a kid go through common Core, they're like, oh my god, Outlaw. Yeah, new math. Yeah, new math, exactly. Yeah. So Global Game Jam, I actually kind of talked about them already. Basically, they're the ones that do things in physical locations.

They're looking for hosts. As far as I can tell, it's not been rescheduled for 2021. Sounds like they're all systems going. They did it 2020, and it looks like they're going to try and do it again. And if you're interested in running a game jam in your area, then go to global game jam.com and, or sorry, dot org global game jam.org.

And you can go to slash running a jam and you can, you can do it. You can sign up and they've got some rules there. They kind of, they want you to basically run public events. They don't want you to just say like, Hey, me and my friends are going to jam over here.

If you run a meetup or you're involved in a meetup and know some people that are, you have a space to do it. It might be great to say, like, hey, my SQL Saturday group is going to be doing a – we're going to be working on part of the Global Game Jam here on Saturday. So come on down to the office, hook up your laptop, and spend the next 48 hours eating pizza and making a game. Well, this is awkward. You also have a sequel Saturday group? Who doesn't? I think they're everywhere, aren't they? I know Orlando has them.

Yeah. Yeah. So 7 Day, like I already mentioned, they're kind of one of my favorites. They recently swapped over to using itch.io's website. And so because of that it's really easy to like go click on the 2020 jam and see uh what's been uh you know submitted for that one i don't think there's a date yet for this year but some of these are really cool i'll tell you one of my um favorite ones uh was uh it was actually a host of the roguelike podcast roguelike

radio who did this game where um i probably going to butcher the description here. But basically, you played a character who walked around a little grid. And the longer you walked around, the more likely this ghost would come to kind of haunt you. And so your goal was basically to try to go around and kind of fight the monsters and collect the loot so that you'd be strong enough to face off this ghost but it had this really cool theme where the ghost i was the ghost kind of represented like anxiety or depression and although the little monsters you would fight would be like just little insecurities and uh little things that kind of make you feel bad and the the items that you would collect to fight these things were the things that would make you feel good.

So it was kind of like this cool take on mental health. And it was all basically ASCII art. So you were this little atzible walking around trying to fend off depression, which was kind of inevitably coming for you. And you just had to try to kind of buck up the strength to face it. That's cool. It was just a cool idea.

And so I explored a really cool theme and idea with literally text. And so the last one had 209 entries. So it's smaller. It's seven days. But I've seen several of these games go on to Steam or just other kind of notoriety. And a lot of these I've seen Twitchers and whatnot. So, you know, I'm more involved in kind of iniety. And a lot of these, I've seen Twitchers and whatnot. So, you know,

I'm more involved in kind of in the scene. So now they in particular do recommend planning your game ahead of time. So even on the podcast, I remember they would kind of talk about their ideas for the, for the next year. And I think you mentioned this earlier that basically they really want you to, I think I said that they don't want you to uh i think i said that they don't want to polish but they did this one does in particular really want a polished game that's easy for people to pick up

and understand and i think with roguelikes in particular they tend to have like a lot of like pixel graphics and so if you you know it's kind of hard to get someone up to speed and explain the rules of the game if all you've got are like little at symbols and, you know, letters running around. So I think they really want a big emphasis on that. Uh, and they're very permissive third party libraries and mods and, uh,

all sorts of stuff. And so the one I talked about, like the one where you're kind of like fighting off the ghost, uh, that was actually a mod of another game. So the person was able to just kind of focus on their rules and use an existing game engine to kind of get past that, the boring stuff, if you will. Cool. you will cool huh and do you mark it done your game is done or incomplete

and when you say the boring stuff you're saying like all the stuff that i would get bogged down into like okay how do i draw again right exactly so uh the face doesn't look like a normal face there's some definite commonalities. You're probably going to have a maze. It's going to be turn-based. You're going to have maps. There's these things that are just in every roguelike game. And if you are doing your 20th seven-day roguelike challenge in a row,

maybe you don't want to program that again. And they said, you know what? Screw it. It's fine. We don't expect everyone to go out there and re-implement A-Star. Use whatever packages you want. use whatever tools you want we're more focused on you delivering a polished experience and hopefully you know having a good time so it's not io is uh kind of i would say like it looks like they're the centerpiece for running game james nowadays it's like most people are running their game james on itch.io and for those parts the rules are roughly laid out based

on ludinger but you can add your own criteria for scoring you can override sections for rules you have a couple nice check boxes and they just give you a bunch of places just put text in so if you don't want whatever text they have or whatever rules, like fine, just pop in your own. It's really flexible and an easy way. So it's not like a million radio buttons, just text areas if you want them. They also had some cool stuff.

So I did go ahead and create one of these just to see kind of what that looked like. And some of the cooler options that they did actually have spelled out were the ability to have ranked jams uh which is the uh where people could vote on submission so we could have a public jam where anyone in the world can go and vote so everyone can go on facebook and say hey vote for my game or maybe only the people who actually submitted a game can do that maybe you have a panel of judges that all have like special accounts and say these are the judges and they get to pick and maybe there's no ranking at

all whatever you want to do they have options for doing things like hiding the results so people don't see if there's like one clear leader taking off and you know kind of skewing the results things like that same with uh submissions so that was all really cool and then I found this and I had not heard of this before so I kind of saved this one for like the last specific bit here have you ever heard of GMTK great minds think no

yeah I still don't know like I even looked at it and I saw game makers toolkit ah there you go okay what is that it sounds like some sort of like i don't know product uh oh it's a youtube channel wow okay and uh yeah it's literally a video game analysis series created by Mark Brown, who's a video game journalist. And yeah, it just talks about making games.

So I didn't expect that. They've got a Patreon. They're literally, it's just content about making games. They're on Tumblr, etc. Well, I've never heard of it before. But in the last Game Jam they ran they had 5377 submissions so that's a completed game submitted they got 143 000 ratings for those games so let me just do a little bit of math here carry the one yeah divide by pi so roughly 28 people uh played each game which is pretty nuts and pretty cool i think

uh no i did i was able to find their theme last year which was out of control so you might be able to think of like a couple cool ways of spinning that and yeah i've seen a couple sites where you could do do things like kind of spin a dice to come up with themes. So maybe say like roll a dice, but like, okay, the theme is out of control.

Roll the dice again. I'll say it must be black and white. Roll the dice again. Like it's a racing game. So now you've got to make a racing game. It's black and white has something to do with out of control. Yeah. And you know, however much time you have something to do with out of control. Yeah, and you know, however much time you have to do it over

the time period. And now there are rules in particular that say it must run in Windows or it must run in a browser. It always seemed to me like running in a browser is a pretty huge advantage for getting people to play your games. But, you know,

it's, I never would have imagined that so many people would download and install games, which are just kind of arbitrary code, but people do it all the time. Yeah. I was going to say that kind of scares me. Yeah. Yeah. Scares me too. But I'll set up a virtual box. Anyone that has ever spent any time looking at anything security related or listening to anything security related. And then here's Joe Zack advocating for like downloading and installing just random code. Yeah.

It seems crazy to me. So that's something to consider for our game jam. Like we could say your game has to be open source buildable from GitHub. Buildable from source. And so we may say, hey, people don't get to submit games, they submit links to GitHub. That's one way to deal with it. We'll have to look into it.

I'm not sure. Because even then, there's bad code on GitHub. Oh, yeah. For sure. I'm like, hey, Joe, have you been paying attention lately? For sure. Yeah, so that's super scary to me. But people are doing it somehow. Buy like another machine, air gap it, and then that's the one that you would run these games on.

Yeah. So I wonder, like, somebody has to have written that article, like, Game Jam, protect yourself. I don't know. So, yeah, again, we're not in marketing. So, you know, that's probably why we're talking about security concerns. And also, at the same time, trying to encourage you to join our Game Jam. Yeah, so, I don't know. I keep finding games about, like, protecting and weird stuff that have to do

with game jams. I like the browser based better. Yeah. But then you could always do web as a web assembly, right? And then you're running C code in there anyway. So are you that much safer? I'm guessing.

Yeah. You're sandboxed to the browser. Then I'm sure there's no hacks for that. Well, I mean, okay. Yeah, sure. but you have that risk on every website you go to true true true yeah yeah that's true fine i'll build another machine just for the browser too that's right so in this case uh they did say uh most code had to be written

during the jam and it was a code focused jam but whatever art and assets you have rights to go for it so if you just want to go to the unity marketplace buy a bunch of 3d spiders or whatever and go for it most code most code so you could write some of it ahead of time you can write some of it ahead of time yeah and so i'm glad that you brought that up because that is the kind of things that I keep getting hung up on thinking and I would say that this basically never worked because I think like

well I'm just going to write the game ahead of time and then come in there and like you know paint on it and call it done and you could understand how people will do that I'm sure if you have 5,000 submissions at least one of them is going to come in with either a tutorial or a modded game or a game that they've already written and drop it in there.

And you just got to kind of hope that the voting washes that out. Right. Because they're missing the spirit of the contest at that point. And that's why it's something I haven't been able to find any game jams, at least no big ones, that offered big prizes. And I think that's probably part of the reason. Because I thought initially, too, it's like, oh, we should do some really awesome, amazing prizes. We should give away a car to the winner.

Or, I don't know, we should give away MacBook Pros. Yeah, hundreds of them. The top 100 entries. But then the thing is, having those kind of prizes, it kind of encourages people to really want to win rather than wanting to do it for the funsies. Right. So, yeah. So I've been kind of wrestling with that, but it's something to think about. And you could also imagine, too, like, so if you say, you know, we don't want people bringing in the full done code game.

Well, what if you wrote a little game engine of your own? Is it fair that someone else could use a third party game engine or library for something, but you can't write, you can't use the package that you wrote or you can't use the framework that you set up and that you use for fun. Like that seems weird, doesn't it?

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's hard to lock down some of that stuff because really what you're going for is creativity, fun, all that kind of stuff. So leverage the tools that you have access to, right?

It really does make the most sense. So maybe we make a rule that says the game has to be open source. You don't have to publish your assets, but the game has to be open source. And so if we go there and see that it's all copied from somewhere or something, then you're not going to get as favorable judging, probably. So I should run it through an obfuscator. Yeah, exactly. I like how you think. Yeah.

You'll probably win. Man named Outlaw does outlawish things. Yeah. So for our first thing, I thought it kind of made sense to just log it down to the people that submitted games just seems easier that way but I did think GMTK a great way to find new people for the next year's game jam is to just make the judging public and then

what they did is they had a series of judges who would go and judge the games so sorry I think I said this wrong so basically they had public judging and then from there they took the top 100 games that people voted up and then they had a series of judges go and And then from there, they took the top hundred games that people voted up. And then they had a series of judges go and do a second pass,

come up with the top 20. And then the person who runs the YouTube channel went and played all 20 of those probably on YouTube and found a, I think he did a little spiel on them and, uh, then ended up picking the winners. It was super cool. Cool. Yeah.

And there, the things they emphasize were fun, originality and presentation. And, uh, one thing I did want to hit on too, that I saw on the fault on, uh,

I think it was default on it started out, but definitely for GMTK is they had a couple of legal rules that basically said that, uh, anything that you make during the jam is your property and anything you submit may end up in a YouTube video without your express permission. So that was really good. So just because you submit the game,

we don't have any rights. We like coding box can go and sell your game. Like that would be crazy, but it's nice to spell that out. And you still have a hundred percent rights to it. It's your baby. But I like the idea that you're kind of consenting implicitly to let us feature in a video or something like that. Yeah.

So like if you, if you did that judging, like what you said, where the judge plays the top 20, maybe on YouTube, then yeah. Yeah. Got it.

Yeah. What's like if one of those people DMCA, the person said, you know, you're showing my content probably would never happen, but yeah, it's kind of cool. Well, because I mean, it wouldn't make sense because if, if you did do a YouTube video, you'd be like, Hey, check out what so-and-so made. And it's, it's almost like free publicity for them, but, but it is nice to have it called out.

I'd imagine there's different rules for teams though, too, right? Like who, who owns it in that regard, you know know because you don't want to have a fight if somebody makes super hot and right all of a sudden it's uh yeah where's my money exactly you might say that that would be super bad that would be i think so i think you could say that yeah right that's awesome and then uh so i got a couple links here one was the stay safe jam which was you know it's kind Jam, which looks like a COVID-oriented theme about safety. And then GMTK. If you just look at these, it's just hundreds of super cool games.

I keep saying super a lot, but you know what? It is super. Thanks for asking. Also, huge thanks to Super Good Day for inspiring all of us. Don't forget. That's right. We're on theme. And I just love the art. I want to play all of these.

So, yeah. So, we'll have links to those again. So, all very exciting. See, this is – okay. Go look at that last link that you sent. Yes. The stay safe jams. And find Lisa Helps Shopping. link that you sent the yes the stay safe jams and and find lisa helps shopping and just just like the thumbnail for it alone is all you got to look at and that's the kind of art that i would be

submitting in my lisa lisa helps shopping don't click on anything because like when i clicked on it i didn't, I didn't see anything. It looks amazing. She's picking up toilet paper. That's awesome. You can see the guy and his daughter who made the game. There's a little

picture of them there. That's cool. That's awesome. Oh, wait. Where did you see that? I just bounced over it. The one I like, just based on picture, most was called Support Group. A visual novel. Students responding to code, but the person's like wrapped up in a blanket with their laptop just doing their thing. But then I saw my true favorite, which is a game called With Seven Cats.

Which it looks like they're basically a person and seven cats in this little tiny room cave thing. And the person is trying to take care of these cats, like feeding them and scooping their poop and whatnot. Uh, while also trying to just navigate around this small space with seven cats. That stresses me out. Even thinking about it.

Yeah, I can relate to this. So it was awesome. This episode is sponsored by X Matters. X Matters helps enterprises prevent, manage and resolve technology incidents. X Matters industry leading digital service availability platform

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From IT to DevOps to emergency notifications, everyone needs speed, automation, and reliability when things go wrong. So keep your digital services up and running today with X Matters. Learn more at xmatters.com. All right. So it's that time of the show where we ask if you have a free moment, it's getting close to the holidays. You'll probably have lots of free moments

where you want to sneak away from all your loved ones. So if you get a chance and you find yourself in front of a computer or on your phone and bored, you know, leave us a review. If you want to know how you can give back, just a computer or on your phone and bored, you know, leave us a review.

If you, if you want to know how you can give back, just put a smile on her face. You can go to codingblocks.net slash review and leave it. And, and again, we, we love reading them. It truly does make our day. So thank you for all who've done it. And thank you if you're considering doing it. And with that, we head into dad jokes.

I was trying to come up with a better name for it off the top of my head and I failed. Okay, so real quick from SuperGoodDave. Hey! Might have heard that name once or twice.

Why do programmers prefer dark mode? I don't know. Because light attracts bugs. Oh man. Oh, that's good, man. You just did the jeopardy.

Oh man. That makes me's good. Man, you just did the Jeopardy. Oh, man. That makes me so sad. Like, seriously. I didn't even think about that. Moment of silence for that guy. Golly. 35 years of Alex Trebek. How are we going to have a moment of silence?

How are we going to have a moment of silence? Keep talking. It hurts, man. I don't even like thinking about it. All right. Sorry. Moving on. Okay, then. But also, I do have one other joke that's similar that I thought I would share that's pretty good. While we're talking about light, how many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

None. None? programmers does it take to change a light bulb none man i like that i like both answers uh none is the correct answer they prefer dark mode oh okay all right so So honestly, though, it's time for Survey Says. All right. So a few episodes back, we asked, when a new mobile OS update comes out on iOS or Android, do you update as fast as possible? Can't get the bits fast enough. Or wait for a stable release. Or never update. All right. Now, you're asking, oh, who's he going to say goes first this time? Well, you know what? Tutco on Slack gave me the most awesome way to remember this. So he suggested,

Hey, uh, since you can never remember who goes first, why don't you just set it up so that on the even episodes, one person goes first. And on the odd person, odd number episodes, the other person goes first. And I was like,

oh my gosh, why have we never thought about this? This is a genius idea. Thank you. You're amazing. So here's the thing. A is the first letter of the alphabet, which is an odd number. And J is the 10th letter of the alphabet, which is an even number. So, Joe, you're always going to go first on the even numbers. And, Alan, you're always going to go first on the odds. Oh, genius. That's a lot of thinking. So, this is episode 146. Now, if you have carried the two and you forgot and you remember to divide by pi, you would know that it's, whose turn is it?

It's Joe's turn. All right. All right. So Joe, who do you think, and I'm sorry, what do you, who do you think should go first?

No. What do you think the answer is? 100% ever update. Never update 100%. Okay. That's with confidence. That's, that's good. I'm going to go in a hundred percent. Okay. That's with confidence. That's a, that's good.

I'm going to go in a different direction. I'm going to say update as fast as possible and I'll go with 40%, 40% update as fast as possible. And you know what? This is kind of timely because we're, we're recording this and big sir just recently came out and I don't know, like when, when big sir came out, did you go like, oh, let me go update the Mac? Or were you like, oh, I'll just wait?

If it prompted me, I hit update. You didn't go looking for it then is what you're saying. I didn't go looking for it, no. So when that Windows V2004 came out, you didn't go looking for that one either? I did go looking for that one. Oh, oh, oh. Okay, so if it's Windows, you go looking for it. If it's Apple, you're like, eh.

Windows had Linux love in it, right? So that was a big thing. Mac already had Linux love in it, so I didn't care. Okay, okay. Well, this is going to come as a shock being that uh jay-z went with a hundred percent oh i thought it's my one for uh never update and but no no you know we really gotta get you into a math class. I mean, the odds of it being 100% on any one of them, unless there's only one choice, maybe that's what I'll do for you in the future, Joe.

And then it'll be 50%. Yeah, 50%. You probably would do something like that. Yeah, 50%. You probably would do something like that. Yeah, no. The answer, the winner is update as fast as possible at 70% of the time. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay.

Which I felt good about because anytime there's an iOS update, I'm running around. I'm updating everything, telling every family member, like, hey, update the devices. Or if there's a Mac update, I'm like, okay, let me update. I do it for security purposes mostly and features secondarily. I don't even know half the new features that were included on any particular update, but it's more about security like i yeah if it's a if it's a big major release then it's probably in for me it's more about the features than it is the secure security when it's the minor point releases then it's definitely the security because like on the major releases i mean they're that's never a security based update so it's featured. So like the Big Sur update,

that's nothing to do with wanting security updates. All right. Well, here for this episode, very related to it, we ask nothing, because I'm going to tell you another joke.

Ha, tricked you. All right. So how about this one for you? This is a thinker. You ready? Because I don't like computer science jokes. Not one bit. Okay.

That's awful. I like it. I like it. Yeah, they're not going to get any better. So, I mean, they're dad jokes. They're not supposed to. All right. So, for this episode, we ask, what kind of game do you want to make?

Your choices are puzzle, because I want my players to suffer as I have suffered making this game. You should also lose a piece of it just to make it more interesting. First person shooter. What else is there?

Or roguelike, because procedural generation is kind of like a game for the programmer, or RPG. It's kind of like writing fan fiction, and that's awesome. Isn't it? I just wanted to make you say that. There's nothing wrong with it, but I wanted a lot to say it.

Or platformer, like Mario, not the shoes. Which, by the way, shouldn't that be called just a side-scroller? Yeah, I guess so. They always called them platform games, though. But that's because that was the game for the platform, though, right? Like Sonic the Hedgehog or whatever. So, yeah, I think side-scroller is probably a better one. Okay. right? Like Sonic the Hedgehog or whatever. So yeah, I think side-scroller is probably a better one.

Or racing, because mama, I want to go fast. I knew you'd have one. So inside of baseball here, I actually wrote these and I tried to write them like what Outlaw would say. And for racing, I just couldn't think of one, but I knew Outlaw would have something from Talladega Nights.

I want to go fast. Dear baby Jesus. Seven pound, eight ounce baby Jesus. Or lastly, turn-based strategy. Because all your base are belong to me. Alright.

So, you know, one more, because we were talking about updating, you know, your OS and everything. And that reminded me because, you know, there was that whole thing about why Windows skipped. You know, they had version 7 and they had 8 and then they skipped 9, right? And we know why, right? I'm waiting for it. 7, 8, 9? Yeah, there you go.

I mean, not really, but that's the funny answer, right? So why didn't 4 ask out 5? I don't know. He was 2 squared. Oh. That's a good one. This episode is sponsored, Datadog provides end-to-end visibility into the health and performance of modern applications. Datadog's distributed tracing and APM generates detailed flame graphs from real requests, enabling you to visualize how requests propagate throughout your infrastructure. See which services are causing errors or

contributing to overall latency so you can troubleshoot faster and identify opportunities for performance optimization. And, you know, I mean, we've talked about Datadog a lot and they have over 400 plus built-in integrations. And I can't stress just how awesome the number of integrations they have because it's like, okay, let's just pick something here. Let's try to go through the A's, for example. Like Akamai, for example. I'm just going to randomly pick some out. Like Akamai is in here.

Name an AWS service. Let me skip the AWS services. There's just too many. That that's probably like a hundred right there. Uh, there's Ansible, there's Apache, there's Aqua, there's Auth0. Then you get into all the Azures. Okay. Let me scroll for a bit more. We finally, um, passed some Azures. You're thinking about it from like, Oh, Hey, I just want to focus on it from a developer point of view. I don't even want to don't, don't even want to think about it from like, oh, hey, I just want to focus on it from a developer point of view. I don't even want to think about it from like a services point of view, but just develop, let's just say developer focused. Okay. How about we got Bitbucket, CircleCI. We have Chef.

We have, what else we have here? Cloudflare. Again, I'm trying to think of it from, you know, things that developers are going to care about just from a developer. CouchDB, Druid is in here. Alan loves Druid. Kubernetes, it's our favorite. Flink, Git, GitHub, GitLab. Then we go through all the Google services. I mean, I can't, JFrog, Jenkins, Jira, there's so many. You need to go check it out for yourself. You can go check out all of the integrations that Datadog has. You can go to datadoghq.com and you can find other integrations.

You need to try it yourself today by starting a free 14-day trial. Go in there, do so, and you will receive a Datadog t-shirt after installing the agent. Visit datadoghq.com slash codingblocks to see how to enhance the visibility into your stack with Datadog. Again, that's datadoghq.com slash codingblocks. All right. So we talked through the major kind of game jams. I told you what game jams were.

How about we talk about how you can actually get your game jam on here. So, you know, we mentioned already in the game jams.com is your go-to website to find a game jam that is happening right now. You can find one probably that started five minutes ago on the site because there's so many of them. So just go and sign up for one.

And also, we'll be doing one in January. So, hey, you got some time off around the holidays, why not pick up a game engine and start mucking around a little bit and see if there's something you want to do because we're looking at doing the 21st to the 24th of January. And it's going to be fun. I mean, are there some libraries, though, that you have available to, like, help kickstart?

Like, if you've never written, like, you had already done, like, a roguelike game before, right? Did you start that from absolute scratch or did you have some JS libraries? Because it was web-based, right? So I'm assuming you had some JS libraries. I've done a couple. Ever since I've been? So I'm assuming you had some JS libraries. I've done a couple. Ever since I've been alive, I've been trying to make video games. Mostly poorly. Sorry, always poorly. But yeah, there is, in fact, there is a fantastic library for JavaScript, free, open source, called rot, R-Ot dot j-s i forget what it stands for probably roguelike open toolkit or something it'll generate maps for you it'll take care of movements

uh it has like really nice patterns for uh setting up like monsters and just the common kind of things you can do and it has a support for even uh visualization so you can have like tiles rather than just asking and uh so i did a couple things with that just for fun but actually i would say if you're trying to decide what tools to go with first i think you kind of decide like whether you want to just pick a tool that you want to learn because you don't learn the tool or the ecosystem or if you want to use what you know and if you want to pick a tool that's really popular i mean unity 3d is your choice it compiles to native it compiles to phones it compiles to web just by default unless you go out of your way to break that it's going to do that and all the tutorials are going to be

done in such a way that you can do that so you can literally say unity 3d tutorial and get started today learning unity 3d they've got tutorials for roguelikes and first-person shooters and third-person shooters and racing games and every game under the sun. And they're all, like, insanely good. And just to go a little bit further in this, Unity 3D is C Sharp, right? Yeah. Absolutely. So there's some love there, which is really good stuff. Unity 3D, I've never really looked into it that much.

Is this something to where you kind of need to determine the type of game you want to make first before you choose which one you want to go? So, for instance, if you wanted to do a rogue game, would you use Unity 3D or would you use one of the tool sets out there that's already kind of built around the rogue stuff? So I would honestly say if you just want to make a game and you care more about the output than how you're doing it, then I would just do Unity 3D. It's such a major player.

There's so much information out there on YouTube and tutorials and the marketplace makes things really easy. They have a marketplace with free assets. So if you don't want to spend any money, you can just go there and find tons of 3D spiders or whatever levels or music or sounds. And so it's just such a great way

to get started. But then again, if you really want to use your favorite language, say you love Rust, you can also just search Rust game engine. I guarantee you'll find at least three of them because programmers like making game engines apparently okay cool um another heads up even though i've never written a game i have uh you guys have heard of humble like humble bundles yeah for games they a lot of times will come up with things where it's like hey you can buy game

assets right now for 15 bucks right and it And it'll give you 1,000 images and whatever else. So just something to be aware of. If you are actually interested in doing this and want to make them, you know, go – is it just Humble.com? I don't even remember anymore. I thought it was Humble Bundle. HumbleBundle.com. Yeah.

Yeah, if you go to Humble.com, it'll take you to HumbleBundle.com. Yeah. Yeah. If you go to Humble.com, it'll take you to Humblebundle.com. Oh, cool. So, yeah, a lot of times they will have, like right now, they even have a thing on here, Java programming and more from O'Reilly. They'll have assets and stuff you can do. So, no, that's really interesting. So, you're saying Unity 3D. Cool.

What else we got here? Yeah, so that's my personal recommendation. If you have no other dog in that fight, just go through Unity 3D. It's C-sharp. It's great to use the tutorials and documentation. It's fantastic. Other big players in the ecosystem are Unreal, of course. And you'll see that's super popular in the AAA realm.

But it is free for, I think it's free until you make $100,000 in revenue or something. And I'm sure they've got some paid fancy features too that you can kind of make use of. But for the most part, if you're just doing an indie game, Unreal is a great option. I think it is C++ only, I believe. So that's quite a hill to mount if you're not used to C++ only, I believe. So, you know, that's quite a hill to mount if you're not used to C++. So I kind of feel like C Sharp is one of those languages that it's easier to learn

for anyone who's programmed in any other language. So if you've programmed in JavaScript, you're going to be able to pick up C Sharp pretty easily. C++, there's going to be some things you've got to learn. You're dealing with addressing, and unless you're programming in native languages, you're going to be learning the tool and the language at the same time. Godot is another one. I believe it's native, but I keep seeing this one pop up. It's got a big emphasis on 2D games in addition to 3D.

It looks really nice. It looks like people are doing some really cool professional stuff in it. And let me see. I'm not 100% sure that it's exclusively native, but I believe that it is. Yeah, C++. But the results look quite nice. Now, I would say it's so Unity 3D.

I don't know if they even go by the name of 3D anymore. I probably should check that. But you can do 2D games just as easily. You just drop a D. Yeah, they don't even call it 3D anymore. It's literally just Unity. Okay. Yeah, that's why I asked the question. Alright, cool. Game Maker is kind of like a

it's more targeted towards non-programmers. There's a lot of things you can do with like drag and drop, but it's actually a lot of fun. I have a copy. There's also RPG Maker. So if you want to make an RPG, then a traditional, maybe a JRPG, Super Nintendo-style RPG game, RPG Maker has you set. You basically do a new game, and you've got the RPG there. And it's just up to you to enter the story, the battle systems, the monsters,

the items, like all that kind of stuff. You can really just focus on your game because this is a genre that is so well defined and they have very specific tools for it, which is amazing. And there's a lot of games on Steam that make a lot of money and do really well that are made with RPG Maker

and artists. So go commission some art and go make some good money. App Game Kit. I forget what this was. I just kept seeing it come up when people would ask about doing game jams. It says it's ideal for beginners, hobbyists, and indie developers. Okay, that looks nice.

There was one other I heard about. I guess I didn't put it on here i can't remember what it's called but uh it's a really small tiny game engine the app game kit looks interesting too it's a it handles most platforms iphones ipads linux html5 raspberry pies mac os windows and android okay very cool that's good and uh yeah so pretty much like i looked for kotlin the other day and there were several choices for me and so i went with like forge it's like forge with a k for kotlin uh pi game is what i've been doing with uh python if you want to do something kind of more native and c-sharp just like mono game and i mean literally

any language that you are working with and you enjoy doing, uh, JavaScript has several big surprise there. Uh, Pixies are really popular one there and, uh, let you do in a browser. I'm sure there's like five made a node that are really popular and well

documented. So, uh, that's all really good. And of course, some popular tools, you got to mention the assets, things like,

uh, the music and the art sound effects things like that even um there's really cool tools and plugins and libraries for doing things like conversation trees like in a video game where you're talking to a character and you could say this or that and you want to kind of spell that out in a declarative way um a star algorithms for pathfinding things like that i mean programmers love making this stuff and so if you can think of some system or some something uh that you want to have in your game like you should give a shot at looking for a algorithm or package that already does what you want so you don't have to kind of reinvent that

wheel and waste your time there unless you want to and now for was it the mea culpa does that mean what i think it means nope that's not what i thought it meant the coup de grace uh but anyway the coolest part of the show oh let's talk about the coding blocks game jam coming up in january let me tell you first off it took every ounce of my being to not call this jamuary every time i've talked about tonight what's the problem there sir i know i was just trying not to because it just felt a little too punny even for me you know to say that the cooking blocks game jam january contest or some such

i i don't know why we wouldn't still go with that i like it okay it's official game jam january january don't don't even don't even say game jam jan. It's just Game Jamuary. Game Jamuary. Yeah, I think it says it all. The dates that I picked do overlap with the Global Game Jam. It's a little awkward. For them? Okay, that's the one that has the emphasis on in-person. And we aren't in-person very often these days.

No. So, of course, we'll have a code of conduct. We already have a code of conduct up on the website for all our social kind of things. But, you know, it's all pretty much common sense, I think. But, of course, we'll have one for the game. For voting, what do you think about the different kinds of voting strategies that we talked about? I'm fine with any of them, honestly. I mean, I would be more, I guess I'd be more open to whatever the community wants to do. But, I mean, public seems like it's good because you get opinions of people that love to do this stuff, love to play it.

Submissions, yeah, I got no real opinion on it. So I kind of felt like if we were going to have prizes, particularly good prizes, then I kind of felt like having judges, like a panel of judges, was more important. And public, I thought was fine. If we said no voting at all, I thought that wasn't great because I kind of like the idea of having a way, like if someone does some really spectacular something, and if you go see 20 games, you're probably not going to play all of them, right? Right. But I wanted a way to kind of highlight the standouts, you know? spectacular something and if you go see 20 games you're probably gonna play all right right but i want uh i wanted a way to kind of highlight the standouts you know yeah i definitely like the voting yeah okay so we're looking at basically publicer i was torn between like i liked the idea of that if you submitted then you could play one or you know play the games and then uh

um weigh in on you know you know give your your vote and then, um, weigh in on, you know, you know, give your, your vote, but also kind of like the public too. Cause then, you know, like, what if you don't want to, or know how to or feel too intimidated to create a game? Like, Oh, you don't get to play them and vote on it. You know, like that kind of, that kind of sucks. But I do like that other tier where you said that, uh, you know,

based off of the decisions that other people have made, that there would still be like a panel of judges would then get that final selection, you know, to go from there. So I don't know. I kind of liked the combination of it all. Yeah.

I like that. Yeah. It is kind of sweet. Like, like let's say you're the kind of person that doesn't want to go hassle your friends and family to go vote for you. And, like, I don't like the idea that we kind of, like, force you to do that. But maybe having some sort of, like, public tier and also the panel is good. So, I don't know.

We can figure it out. So, hey, leave a comment if you have an idea because we are really trying to figure this out. Also, oh, my gosh, I should have mentioned this. The Coding Box Slack, which you can join right now for free. Right now. Go to codingsbox.net slash slack and get in there. There's a GameDev1B channel. It's literally called Game-Dev-1B, where people talk about this stuff. Perfect.

So we'll be talking about the Game Jam. We have been talking about the Game Jam in there already. We'll discuss this a little bit there. And if you talking about the game jam in there already. So, um, yeah, we'll, we'll discuss this a little bit there. And if you have any, uh, ideas,

leave them in the comments, please. Uh, also, uh, so theme, I, I kind of felt like,

uh, Dave mentioned this, that Ludum dares where they kind of like narrow the theme down. Uh, it's a little bit more overhead, you know, it takes some work to do that, but it's,

I was so cool to kind of like start with a bigger number and then kind of weaning it down, just to kind of like start with a bigger number and then kind of weaning it down just to kind of build that anticipation. I like it only because it gives people a box to play in, right? Yeah. If you leave it too open, then a lot of people struggle trying to even get started. Yeah. So, can we say the idea for the theme now? Not right now.

Yeah, I think we come up with like a big list and figure it out either we figure out kind of behind the scenes or we throw i don't know but i think we i don't think we should have a theme because just like you said something there's something about constraints that set you free if you tell me like hey joe go write a game i'm like okay well i guess i'll make mario or a roguelike but if you tell me like make a theme about the color or make a game uh dealing with the color orange and all of a sudden i'm like oh what about the kool-aid man or what about the desert deserts are orange that'd be cool how do you think about cheetos what was that i said now you got me thinking about cheetos yeah like walk walk away like your fingers and hands are just like caked in

cheetos dust. Oh my gosh. You can't touch anything. It's like two big hands and all you do is just collect all the dust on them. Leave handprints everywhere. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited. Or, you know, you could do like a spinoff of Who's Your Daddy?

And the baby has like Cheeto hands and the dad's trying to like keep everything clean so that he doesn't get in trouble with the missus yeah that sounds awesome man uh yeah i'm i'm loving these cheeto ideas so definitely have to have a theme there for that uh so the rules i think this is the kind of the hardest part because uh you know we got some decisions to make about basically uh libraries assets and how much pre-planning we really want to encourage i'm actually open to people using libraries and assets like yeah it doesn't bother me yeah it doesn't bother me at all like i don't want anybody just copy and paste a game like that's lame, but that's, that's,

it's like you said, that's sort of outside the spirit of it. Right. Yeah. You know, if, if you can use a library to get your game engine rolling and you can use the assets to make it look good without having to put in,

you know, hours and days where the work just try and make something look halfway polished. I'm fine with that. Yeah. I like that too. To me, it's really fun to work with assets you like too. So if you go find some graphics that you like,

it's just more fun to look at that than whatever I would draw. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. Yeah. I like that too. Okay. What about a live platform?

So this is somewhere where we could say browser only. Oh, man. Yeah. That would definitely limit the choices on engines. But I don't have a problem saying that. I like the idea of protecting people. I would hate to say like, hey, people, go join our game jam. Go play all these games.

And somebody puts a key logger or something. Right. So kind of the opinion that I have here applies to some of these other ones too, like the rules and the theme of the voting was like if there's already in the game dev wannabe channel, developers have already competed in some of these things or have participated in some of them. I kind of feel like their opinions are going to weigh heavier

than anything that I'm going to say, right? Because I haven't been involved in these game jams in the past, so I'm only thinking about it from purely a security point of view to where I'm like, I don't know that I want to run random code on any machine. So you start up a VM. It's fine. Yeah, probably.

I mean, have you ever in your life heard of anybody escaping a VM? That never happens. It never happens at all. I mean, at least the one positive, it being the coding blocks community. But since it's going to be hosted out on itch.io, right, then just any random person could be on it. So we might not necessarily know. It might not be a community member that we know that would be competing in it. So again, that's what puts me back into my security mode.

I kind of picture the Fry meme, the one I'm talking about, where he's like, wait a minute. That's just me. I should mention, too, they have unlisted events. So if you wanted to make a game jam and not have it be public, I think they even have invitation only. And they even have like a mailing list that's kind of built in. So just by signing up for the mailing list or signing up for the contest

to get on like a special list, right? I don't even think it shows the organizers the mailing list, but you can like send out announcements and stuff, and it's a way for them to kind of sign up but also protect their email addresses, which is really cool. Yeah. I don't know how far we want to lock it down, but I'm going to agree. If there's people that have already done it, then cool.

We can definitely lean on their better guidance for it. But I don't know. I mean, I think I'd almost default to a browser in this type of world. Unless there was something, like I wouldn't even be opposed to something like Linux if it was something where you could boot from a USB into a Linux and just run it on that, right? Like, I don't know. There's so many different ways we could go about this, but.

Yeah, kind of like the idea on one hand, it's like, well, what if you want to learn Python? Then this is a cool way to like learn Python through Pygame and do something neat. On the other hand, I feel like, well, so what if you really know Unity really well? you can't you can do web so what if you say like you know pi game really really well and it's frustrating to you that the only way you can join this is if you have to use some javascript framework right javascript like then that

sucks but at the same time like hey maybe you'll learn something new maybe you'll like it yeah i don't know maybe maybe we'll just wait and get some feedback and see what people say here yeah yeah or we just let alan install all the games have to be installed on his machine there you go how long is all the installs that's right all right so uh last one i got here is uh prizes should we do prizes what kind of prize is the community yeah i don't know it's like so what do you guys think we were thinking about doing macbook pros for all entries all submissions so i don't know is that enough uh how about a coding blocks hat for the winner yeah we could we could definitely do that uh so yeah i would definitely not have any worries

about people scumming for a hat, you know, like a... Right. But if the prize was $1,000, then I think we're going to get some people signing up from the internet from, you know, whatever. Yeah, that's the problem. Like, that makes me not crazy about it. No, I mean, I'd definitely be down with some swag

and maybe a book or something. I don't know, something like that, right? Okay. I like that. Take notes and yeah, book or something. I don't know. Something like that. Right. Okay. I like that. Take notes and yeah, leave those comments. So cool. Okay,

cool. Um, so, Oh, uh, one last thing I wanted to do here. I almost forgot. Hey,

you can Steve jobless, Steve jobs us with like one more thing. I was going to put you on the spot. So, uh, this will be like a little idea here so i thought it'd be fun to just imagine if you will that the three of us are competing separately at a game jam and you have 48 hours to do this you can bring your own assets so you don't have to worry about art. And let's see. Outlaw, your theme is stars.

What kind of game would you make in 48 hours about stars? Oh, you're straight up putting us on the spot. I didn't realize it was going to be like this. I don't realize it was going to be like this. I don't know. I would just make like a game where the stars are tumbling from the top of the screen and you had to like arrange them. They would be on all different shapes or – no, not shapes. They would be the same shape because there's a star. But different size stars and you would try to like squeeze them in it, like get get as many as you can into the screen i don't know right i'll play that game i'm not good at this all right alan the number between one three sorry i should have done this

for you outlaw two uh so your theme is renovate renovate no he has to pick stars you got stars so renovate I'm going to have bricks that I'm going to try and gather and squeeze in I think renovate oh man it would be

you had enough renovation huh yeah I was going to say man you get the tile jeez no I think it would probably be something similar to the Yeah, I was going to say, man, like I almost got my thumb off the other day. Geez. No, I think it would probably be something similar to the surgery thing, right? Like you have a bunch of tools. You go to town on a wall, right?

Something like that. You got to put a shelf up and all of a sudden you knock a hole in the wall or whatever. Like, you know, it'd be something fun. Yeah, it sounds very real. It's not far not far off all right and uh outlaw give me a number between one and three this will be for me oh i was gonna i was gonna pick one instead uh oh yeah yeah you got the site i put the link there yeah yeah uh so your theme is venus venus okay so we've got uh the planet but we also got the you know the god so i think i would make a game about uh about love and what you would do as an agent of venus is you would fly around as a little naked baby and shoot people and uh the people would uh fall in love so this

is a game of cupid not venus all right fair but they're they're related does anyone else like as he was describing this you know you got like the love boat theme going through your mind you know know? The love boat. Yeah, a little sheriff. So yeah, you'd fire two arrows and you'd, I don't know. They'd fall in love. It's not a very good game. I'm not good at this. But you know, if I just got like shooting an arrow and like

you know, the person lights up or something, that would be a win for me. If you could tell it was a person, that would be a win for me. you could tell it was a person that would be a win for me did you see uh lisa helps shopping right yeah that was pretty awesome yeah that that would be uh like if i made the art that good it would be a win yeah now how fun would that be like why can't i spend eight hours a day looking at that kind of stuff yeah because. Because Kubernetes is so much more fun, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Can I write my game in YAML? I'm convinced you can do anything in YAML. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, YAML ain't another markup language, so. That's right.

All right. All right. Well, we'll have plenty of links in the resources we like section for this episode. So, again, if game development is your jam, this one is for you. And with that, we head into Alan's favorite portion of the show. It's the tip of the week. Hi, it looks like I'm still talking here. So I've been streaming some Python and Pygame stuff lately.

And Ian Miser, also known as Letras Cthulhu on the Slack and member of the PyAtlanta meetup group, it's quite involved there i believe um does some streaming stuff there as well uh put together an article uh gathering resources for how to learn python and this was just published uh july so a couple months ago so this is a new list with a bunch of great links to resources and reddits and discords and books and free code code camp like 300 hour python courses all for free so uh it's just a ton of resources uh that are all really cool and all really current and you gotta go check it out man i know you've been getting into it do you does python just strike you as javascript like it's it's straight up feels like that to me when i'm coding it yeah there's some stuff like it does it's uh maybe because it's got kind of older roots or whatever like uh there's some things that frustrate me where like um functions won't be attached to the object like

i want to do like array dot length not len of array and right that and so some of the more modern javascript stuff just seems more consistent to me which i never thought i'd say about javascript but that es6 has just made it such a pleasure and so some things like that and some of them like the naming conventions and the capitalization and it seems like some people just kind of have their own ways of doing things that are just like very inconsistent between like libraries even in the same library sometimes it'll be like all lowercase no spaces oh this one uses uh underscore is this one uses camel casing and that it just drives me nuts to see all of that in one file. But I mean,

what I can do is super powerful and it's, it's been kind of disgusting what I can do with dictionaries and lists. I mean, these things should never work. Like it's like, Oh, you want to pop a variable in here as a key or you want to use the object as a key or you want to like whatever.

It's like, yeah, yeah, fine. It just works. Yeah. You just plug it in. It's all good. I will tell you one of the things that. It's like, yeah, yeah, fine. It just works. Yeah, you just plug it in. It's all good.

I will tell you one of the things that I found with Python that just today I needed to substring a string, like get characters something to something. Their way of doing it is so beautiful compared to everybody else. It's like array notation. String, open square brackets, then your start position, colon, end position. That's it. It's so simple.

There's no substring or method or anything like that. It's just really intuitive. But like you said, like the len on an array, like, really? Why is it there a dot linked on the end of it? What is this? So, yeah, it's inconsistent, but still, it just feels very, it's a loosey-goosey language, so it reminds me a

lot of JavaScript. But the fact that white space matters would make me think that it's not. Yeah. That was like, when you asked the question, immediately it was like, what? No, no. Why would you even say such a silly question?

It's like the associative rays and all that kind of stuff. It's very much the same as JavaScript, right? And the duck typing and all that kind of stuff, it's sort of similar type. Yeah, the spacing is definitely different. The spacing drives me a little bit crazy in Python.

It's bit me. I'll copy and paste something from one function to another or something, and VS Code will help me out by tabbing or untabbing or something, and something will drop out of a loop or drop into a loop without me realizing it, and that stinks. Yeah. Copy and paste has killed me in Python, no

doubt. So I guess my tips of the week. The first one, I looked to see if I'd done this in the past. I don't think I have. Oh, he's so subtle with that. My tips of the week. The first one, I looked to see if I'd done this in the past. I like how he's so subtle with that, my tips of the week. Yeah, my tips, yes. So the first one, I looked to see if I'd done this before. I haven't, and it's surprising because this one's excellent. So Visual Studio Code, we all love it.

There is an extension for it called Status Bar JSON Path Extension. And what this does, it's so frustrating if you have a huge json file and you're down in the middle of it somewhere scroll down 200 lines you're trying to see what is the path for this particular property i'm looking at like the way i used to do is i'd go up and collapse sections until i could get it to where it was something i could see this one makes it to where you just click on the line that you're interested in and open the status bar. It'll actually show you the path to where you are in that JSON object. Love it. It's super helpful. But this is showing it in the bottom.

I think this one... If you click on it, it's showing it in the bottom bottom and that's why I was questioning because I was like hey wait a minute I thought it already did that at the top I don't have code on here though but in the screenshot they're showing it in the bottom so I don't think it used to do it in the top but I think in the newer releases

it does so maybe this isn't as useful anymore I don't know I'll have to check that out oh okay um that's interesting because i didn't notice it in the top two all right so seeing as how that one may not be that useful anymore i've got another tip and this one is from micro g and the as always he's got some great stuff this This one, we had mentioned Chaos Engineering or, you know, like Chaos Monkey from Netflix and that kind of stuff when we were going through the DevOps handbook. Or, no. Yeah, we were talking about Chaos Monkey as part of the DevOps handbook.

Okay, okay. Yeah, I thought we had. So he found this thing that is, it's a GitHub page and there are hundreds of links on here to just all kinds of resources, everything from books to culture to game days, tools, all kinds of stuff. So,

um, if you're into that, if you're interested in testing out your distributed systems and that kind of stuff, this is a great resource. So thanks again, Mike RG for, for sending that our way. Okay. Now, um, before I give you my tip of the week, how about I first, um, inundate you with bad jokes again.

Okay. Okay. Now you've been warned. I lost my job at an orange juice factory. They said I couldn't concentrate. One last one. These are from Super Good Dave as well. I also quit my job at the fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park near the place. Very nice.

All right. So for my tip of the week, I'm taking a different spin on the typical tip of the week that we would have. Because I have been put in a situation where I've been eyeballing portable laptops. So mostly 13-inch laptops have come up. So I am going to share the ones that I've had my eye on. So one of the first ones, this one, I think it was released sometime in the summer. This is the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition that you can get with, as the way I'm looking at it, Ubuntu installed on it, which that's the way I would go.

It's $1,049 is the starting price on that right now. And, uh, you can, you know, upgrade it. So, you know, you're only going to get at that configuration, you're going to get an I five, which I think would be good enough if we're talking about an ultra portable, you know, a laptop. Um, but you're only going to get eight gigs of Ram, which might be a deal breaker and a 256 gig, uh, MVME SSD. Now here's the thing.

You can upgrade this to a maximum of 16 gigs of Ram and you're going to want to do that. You're going to want to make that decision at the time you purchase. Soldered. Yes. Unfortunately, that seems to be the way they're going. Now, the SSD is user replaceable, but the memory is not. And this is only true for the 13-inch Dell XPSs. If you wanted to get like the 15s and up then uh i believe those you can replace the memory on on those but yeah i don't know why they decided to solder it in on the smaller one

maybe it was just like a form factor decision that they're like hey we we barely have enough room to squeeze this thing in there so uh you know we can't also make it easy to get to that's pretty yeah but yeah oh super pretty i mean like keyboard layout is exactly what you know how i'm we can't also make it easy to get to. That's pretty. Yeah. But yeah. Oh, super pretty. I mean like keyboard layout is exactly what, you know how I'm picky about my keyboard layouts on the, on the laptops.

So, uh, if you've never seen these, uh, the Dell XPS is these, the top of the, you know, the top of the keyboard surface,

like where your palms would sit, that whole piece is just a piece of carbon fiber. And, uh, you know, so, so it looks really nice. And obviously I'm sure they went with that with the carbon fiber for lightweight plus strength. And, uh, I think it works honestly. Um, you know, so, so there's the Dell. Now here comes a little bit of a twist on it. So there is a Razer laptop that I've had my eye on for a bit, the Razer Blade Stealth 13. And this one, okay, so here's the deal on this one. Here's honestly what I like about it is the fact that it's on clearance right now. So I'm,

I'm giving you a best buy link because they have it $500 off. Wow. And if you walk into your local best buy mine, had it even cheaper. They had like another, I don't know, 50, 40 bucks off 40 or 50 bucks off of it.

Um, so normally this laptop is $1,800 and right now Best Buy is selling it for $1,300. And that's with an i7, 16 gigs of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti and a 512 gig SSD. So think of all those stats. I just told you in a 13 inch laptop. I mean, we're, we're talking crazy specs, 120 Hertz,

uh, screen, full RGB, uh, keyboard, just nutso, right? More ports.

Yeah. Yeah. Tons of ports on it. I don't even remember all the ports on the Dell versus this one. Here's the downside though about this laptop is that those crazy specs that I just gave you, it's going to chew through a battery. So you're not going to get a lot of, a lot of battery life out of that one. I, I would expect that the Dell XPS based on other Dell XPSs would be way up there in terms of battery performance. Uh, I don't remember off the top of my head where the Dell landed, but, uh, the sad thing is, is this Dell, I'm sorry, this razor, if you, if you were interested in it, like it would be a good,

from everything that I've read about it, like it's a good laptop, you know, good hardware, especially if you're going to be plugged in the majority of the time, your ability to run it not plugged in, you know, is going to be limited. You're not, you're going to want to like try to not use that GTX card as much as possible when you're out. Plus, from a performance point of view, technically the beauty of the performance of this is the video card because Razer actually made a conscious decision to lower the performance of the CPU

as a way of trying to keep it cooler and, you know, to add to the battery life. Hey, so a heads up on this battery life. There's a review where somebody says here, they just posted it three weeks ago. They said they've had it for a week when they reviewed it, the battery life, they were getting 10 to 11 hours playing YouTube videos. That's pretty good, man. Yeah. If you're going to sit in front of YouTube all day long and that's all you plan to do, maybe that's okay. But here's the thing, is that like other reviews, most of the reviews that I've read, people, the average on it was a few hours. Most people, like I've read a truckload of reviews on it because trust me, like I walked away from the deal because I was like, well, I guess I just can't, right.

You know? And that was the thing because for, for, for the use cases that I was looking at, I will, you know, it wasn't going to be plugged in often. And so it mattered. So the battery life was the most important thing. So, so I include it because again, like, you know, if you're going to be at home majority of the time, then, you know, it might not matter, but, uh, you know, yeah. So, so there's that, but here's the catch though. Here's the one that I'm more excited about or the most excited about. And Razer is coming out with a new one that is going to be released at the end of this month. The Razer book 13, and this is their first, uh, entry into the productivity line of hardware, because if you've ever heard of Razer,

it's always about gaming, right? Gaming mice, gaming keyboards, whatever, right? And even that other laptop that I mentioned was labeled as a gaming laptop. But these are their productivity models. So it's still early to see like what is going to happen, um, you know, performance wise, but they look promising. So, uh, you know, the, the base model for this is going to be $1,200. Uh, so 60 Hertz screen instead of, uh, the 120 Hertz on the, on the blade stealth. Uh, and this is on that blade stealth. You can get up to a 4k touchscreen, but on,

uh, this book 13, you're getting a 10 ADP screen, um, for a 13 inch. That's all you need. Honestly, I agree.

Uh, but you're going. Honestly, I agree. But you're going to get an i5. You're going to get 8 gigs of RAM, 256-gig of, you know, shiny, glitzy kind of specs that the blade had. But again, if you're going after mobility and, you know, not being connected to power often, then, you know, this one looks more appealing to me than the, the blade. Um, yeah, the blade, sorry. So, you know, the XPS 13 or the, the book 13 are my two favorites. The XPS came with a Ubuntu. I presume there'd be no reason you know you couldn't put something else on it but you can like if you if you when you're on the dell configurator page you could pick windows if you wanted it and in fact uh sadly like they kind of like try to push you into that that way like oh hey you know you're not you don't have windows on this thing do you want it yeah uh i'd much rather buy it second hand and

uh install it and not have whatever weirdo dell stuff puts on it yeah exactly yeah well plus i would just stick with the ubuntu on it and like why bother right um i mean it's not like i don't have enough windows in my life you know why do i need another um but but yeah so so those are the ones i like now and the downside is on all of those is that um you know soldered in memory is is the way to go so you're gonna have to like pick which which you want now here's the bad thing and and this is where like that that razor book 13 uh you know is less is lower on my list, uh, compared to that Dell, because if you Razor's frustrating compared to like other companies, like you can't, you can't like say, Hey, I want to buy, you know, like a, like a, a MacBook pro. And I want to start with the base

model MacBook pro, but I would like more storage or I would like more memory or whatever. Right. You can't, you can't. Razor's like, here's the three configurations we offer period done. Right. And so that, that 1200,

uh, you know, price tag, you can't be like, Oh, Hey, I'll, here's a, let me throw another a hundred bucks at you and upgraded to 16 gigs of Ram or

something like that. Nope. You want the 16 gig model you're going to pay 1600 for that model to go up to that so that's that's the unfortunate thing about the about the razor and why i really like that one. Very nice. Yeah, all nice. So, yeah.

So, if you happen to also be interested in some, you know, small, portable, powerful kind of computers, there you go. That's what I have my eye on. I'll take the Dell. I've had such bad luck with Dells but I'll still take it yeah I don't know alright well so you know stay tuned there will be more information

coming up for the coding blocks game January and you know we'll have links to the events calendar that Jay Z mentioned earlier. And with that, subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, you know, wherever you like to find your podcast. And be sure to leave us a review.

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