I took part in Global Game Jam 2025, and all I got was this lousy picture. Jokes aside, it was a total blast. Being my first jam, everything about the process was new to me, and boy, was it a real rollercoaster.
I'd love to yap about it in detail, but honestly I don't really know what to talk about, so here's a big lesson I learned from the experience.

Programming is my comfort zone when working on game projects, so to challenge myself I was designated to be the artist of our project. I wasn't particularly stressed out about handling this on my own, since I felt that I had enough little tricks to elevate my 'nasty programmer art'. As the project came along and everything got horrific, my little corner of art, while stable and not really causing me any hangups, made me very aware of how stressed not being in the programming seat made me feel. When there's a couple hours left before submission and all you can do is twiddle your thumbs and pray for someone else to finish up their coding for the project to work, it becomes a challenge to contain the stress and still be productive.

Trust your fellow man: My team was very talented, I had seen what they had done before and knew they could pull off the project. Even then, it took me a bit of strength to be able to not helicopter over everyone to make sure things were coming along. Even though I was informally tasked as the 'Project Lead', I knew that I wouldn't be helping my teammates by hovering over their work simply to calm my own stresses. This is something I hadn't really faced before, but now after seeing how the whole thing came together, I can proudly accept that taking a step back and trusting people is possibly the most useful skill for being a project lead.

I think being in the role of project lead makes it really easy for stressful moments to blossom into "it's me and MY team", and in a medium as collaborative as gamedev, you cannot strap yourself to your work that way. Your project will always be a blend of different people's ideas and personalities, so to effectively create a good project, you MUST trust your team's abilities, and allow their work to define your project.

As for the actual game we made.. It's still fairly broken but once we fix up some bugs, I'll slap a link for it here.

Shoutout to Lucas and Canyon by the way. Couldn't have done it without yall.

1/13/2025

At last I have returned from my fantastic voyage. Here are some cool photos. More updates soon, but for now I'm workin on fixing up this website to be more than just a blog slapped on the main page, AND hopefully I'll get started on some projects I've been wanting to show off soon.

12/22/2024

Christmas time is really damn weird. Ever since my fever cleared up from last week, it feels like everyone is in that dopey sentimental feeling that the end of the year always seems to bring. I guess I also have that knot in my throat, but I assume it has more to do with my upcoming travels than that ol' christmas movie Charlie Brown nonsense.

I think this is the first time in a couple of years that I reach December and genuinely feel like things are 'lookin up' for the next year. I guess finally getting my hands dirty with gamedev stuff really has given a positive spin on what previously felt like goofin around on my computer. I'm glad that for my upcoming trip I won't be stressing over coming back home.

Oh yeah, I keep mentioning the trip. I'm going to Colombia to relax with family for a while, so expect this website to be dead as hell until sometime in January when I'm back in business.

Happy Holidays.

12/11/2024

I have one hell of a fever right now, so forgive if the following ramble is stupid.

Now that the semester has been wrapping up, I've had some time to sit down and go over the script of ThirtyTwo and fill up some gaps. Before you yell at me, I'm NOT rewriting anything, I'm simply just going in and filling in gaps that I left in worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is kind of funny, because it's one of those things that is essential yet inconsequential to a story. Nowadays with the advent of community-led interest into the worlds and lore of videogames (look at FromSoft), people place an enormous importance of the quality of the worldbuilding, but they often forget that the actual reason worldbuilding is so fascinating is because of the story in front of it all. Story will always carry the weight of a narrative, no matter how elaborate or compelling the world of the story is. Having said this, effective worldbuilding is all about detailing INTERESTING aspects, not every aspect of the world. (We don't need to know how the blasters in Star-Wars work).

When it comes to magical realism and science fiction however, although not ALL details need to be elaborately explained, you still have to keep a serious regard for the real world. The respect that you have for the rules of the material world (physics, world politics, the way stuff works in da real world) is ultimately what determines if you're making Interstellar or Indepednece Day. And that's where ThirtyTwo comes in.

When approaching the wild science ficiton elements of ThirtyTwo, I've always wanted to strike the balence of something like Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park has always rocked in its world building because the 'magical' element of dinosaurs coming to life is so elegantly answered with the mosquito. The moment they show that awesome little animation of the DNA guy explaining how DNA of dinosaurs is found inside of mosquitos, the story no longer feels like dopey fantasy but rather something genuinely plausible. Even though it is not a complete answer, and obviously still has gaps in its logic, the fact that Michael Crichton really considered the ways in which bioengineering would allow for dinosaurs to come to life goes a LONG way in the seriousness that people apply to the world of the story.

So, now that I'm actually having to go back and explain some of the more elaborate science fiction elements of ThirtyTwo, I've been taking extra time to really research the history of Computer Science to try and find my own semi-plausible way of explaining the wild shit in my story. I still havent quite found my 'Mosquito' yet, but this approach to making sure my worldbuilding is satisfying has been a really informative experience overall on how to approach science fiction. If there is a takeaway from this ramble, it's the fact that research REALLY matters in creative writing. It is something insanely easy to neglect when you want to just dive into the story you've been playing out in your head, but it makes a BIG difference in the way that people will engage with your story.

Now, back to bed.

12/6/2024

I am the official BVC Dr.Mario champion. This display of power will be my first post on this new website. I hope this brings good omens from here on out.

In other news, as you can very much see I finally switched up this site to be less empty and un-inpsired compared to before. I think the previous iteration of this site was practically an empty portfolio layout, and I think the pressure of wanting to only show high-quality stuff on there made it difficult to actually keep it updated. My intentions with this new site are simple: a dump where I can throw rambles, devlogs, and whatever I want. Maybe as time passes I'll organize it a little better, but I think I like the current layout I have set out here.

As for those curious about how this wretched website was made, I slapped together a couple of css themes from eggramen's site. Please dont inspect the css sheet this page runs on because its HILARIOUSLY hideous.

Aside from all that, I'm currently in the process of porting ThirtyTwo's engine into Godot. I've been considering giving it a silly multi-purpose name like "Exploration Engine" or something like that, but I will keep this blog updated as that whole thing unfolds.