# discmaster game jam

_published Mon May  5 17:54:37 UTC 2025_

In a previous post I described how certain ideas, situations, and stimuli can cause my brain to act like it's just seen a rattlesnake before my conscious self is even aware of what's happening. For reasons inexplicable, the idea of sitting down and doing any amount of video game development has caused such fear responses. I was able to get through a class on Unity and ended up enjoying it rather a lot; I've also done several tutorials in a few game engines. They go fine. Whenever I tried to make something from scratch, though: panic city.

Due to being a volunteer with the lovely MADE video game museum[0] I was asked by the events coordinator at Internet Archive to see if there was interest in collaborating around the DiscMaster Jam[1]. I am very eager to see my employer and the MADE work together more so I connected some folks. The result was an in-person jam day cosponsored by the MADE and IA.

I had a convenient excuse for not doing the jam: I work full time. I just did not have the brainspace to do a game jam after work. I intended to sit during the in-person jam day on Saturday and work on something for the town. I couldn't not think about DiscMaster, though, as I chatted with the people around me. I'll just poke around, maybe, I thought.

I ended up imagining a very dumb, simple game where you launch something at various assets and win them as prizes: a silly ring toss game. I sketched it out in my notebook, pulled up a Godot tutorial (that I've done over and over) for reference, and went with it.

My wife and a friend ended up hanging out with me at the MADE and they, too, found DiscMaster irresistible. We refined the little idea into a distant parody of pokemon and worked together on asset hunting and tweaking.

The absolute stupidest thing I did, which I mention for others out there insecure about game making, was to recall how in my game development class we learned how to implement a scrolling tiled background to simulate horizontal movement of something in the foreground. I labored over replicating that for way too long. Once I got it working well enough, I wondered: ok, now how to keep the CD-ROM (our stand-in for a pokeball) from flying off screen?

It pains me to write these words.

I had no need to fake movement: I was using the physics system to actually throw rigid bodies around. The background needed to tile, yes, but it had to tile as a camera moved around 2D space. Very embarrassing. I then struggled to get the camera to work and not lose track of the flying CD-ROM. Another embarrassment, as the solution was to just always have the camera's position locked on the CD-ROM itself. One line of code (`camera.global_position = disc.global_position`) instead of the mishmash I'd been throwing at the problem.

I was pretty intent on shipping after overcoming these hurdles. I worked all day Sunday and all evening Monday to get my dumb little guy ready for the deadline. And, warts and all, Disc Masterz[2] exists.

I had a great time. I want to jam again. A lot of the stuff I struggled with this time around I can breeze through next time, leaving energy for figuring stuff out like, uh, how to properly configure resolution and canvas sizes. And menus. And text that scales properly.

I'm _really_ thankful for the Godot Engine[3]. After the game development class I took a few years ago I realized that I just did not enjoy working in Unity. I found Unreal intimidating and struggled to find good tutorials. I happened to catch a talk by the Godot lead developer in SF around the time Godot 4 was out and was sold, utterly, on the vision and roadmap. I even got sold on GDscript.

If you haven't tried it, I can't recommend it enough. Wonderful documentation, a fast and friendly UI (that only crashed once in three days of heavy use as opposed to every few hours like Unity), great linux support. And it's free. And it's open source. It's truly a gem. I want only for vim keybindings in the in-engine text editor `^_^()`

Please do go check out the jam submissions[4]. There is a lot of amazing work in there. And, of course, go wander around in DiscMaster[5]!


h[0]: MADE video game museum	https://themade.org
h[1]: DiscMaster Jam	https://itch.io/jam/discmaster-jam
h[2]: Disc Masterz	https://vilmibm.itch.io/disc-masterz
h[3]: Godot Engine	https://godotengine.org/
h[4]: jam submissions	https://itch.io/jam/discmaster-jam/entries
h[5]: DiscMaster	https://discmaster.textfiles.com/