I remember my first game jam vividly. It was Pyweek 4 and I decided "to hell with it, I'm going to code a game from scratch (or as much scratch as I could) and release it". It was an intense week of coding and design for most of the week. But when it was all said and done I had a finished game that I'm still proud of, warts and all.

That game is Busy Busy Bugs, which still works under modern Python.

I did a second one for PyWeek 5 that was more ambitious. It was Twisted Twister and it wore me out. I never got sound in there, and the game engine needs help. But it was still an accomplishment.

Unfortunately I haven't done many game jams since. I know how much I get sucked into them. It's an awful lot of work with a hard deadline.

That said, I've decided to join the RPGenesis game jam because it's the kick in the ass that I've needed for a long time.

I've had several games floating around in my head now and it's high time that one of them (the one that I've been noodling on for a long time) gets the release it deserves.

What I like about this game jam is that it gives you an outline of how to participate. The gist is to get all of the material that you'll need for game jam done first (layout, artwork, fonts, etc.). Then the week of August 14th to the 20th is your writing time. 5,000 words, due by the end of the week.

That doesn't seem like much, but when it's fused with mechanics and what-not that can be daunting.

It's the first time I'll be trying this. I'm sure I'll make mistakes along the way, but hopefully I'll have a finished game to show for it. At the very least I'll have figured out some other nuts that I can crack by learning more about layout.

Wish me luck!

(hat tip to Paul Czege for sharing this link and sharing his experiences).