Entering Spring Lisp Game Jam 2021

Published: 2021-04-29

From the Spring Lisp Game Jam 2021 site:

Lisp Game Jam is a bi-annual game jam taking place for a full 10 days. After the jam has finished, 3 days are given to everyone to try out the game submissions and vote for their favorites.

My goal coming into this Game Jam was to finish a playable game. No matter how burnout I felt at the end, I was quite happy to finish the game using just my own free time. The game is quite enjoyable and fun (to me) in many aspects. I submitted my game after 8 days of jamming. You can play my game, Spirited, here on my itch.io page, or in the iframe below. If you just want to see the source code, it’s GPL-licensed on my Github.

The game was written in Fennel on TIC-80.

Some lessons were learned:

1. My Clojure experiences didn’t really matter.
2. Making the tile set is a skill worth learning.
3. Lua’s Coroutines is a great tool for game programming that I need to learn more for my next game jam.

Some unexpected were found:

1. I had a lot more fun than I expected making the game’s soundtrack and SFX.
2. I enjoyed a lot doing world building, story telling, and designing dialogues.
3. There are a lot more stories I want to tell in the world of Spirited.

Some links were mentioned in this article:

• The source code on Github
• Spirited on itch.io
• Spring Lisp Game Jam 2021
• Fennel Lisp
• TIC-80 fantasy console