If you gamejam, do you repurpose your old UI elements, plugins etc. and make only logic for specific game or all is made from scratch?
generally I’m looking to make some playable demos as Portal Ranger seem as very simple but I’m still lacking knowledge to make it playable fun game.
I saw some Maacks, DragonForge templates which are fairly well made, but then it’s like figure out how to make it work along other autoloads, components.
Is it better use template for quick jam or go completely from scratch with such simplistic UI as Start, Pause, Exit ?
Typically I do not carry over code, I find Godot has plenty of great tools built in to cover the basics like rendering and physics.
I know plenty of people do use templates to get started, I think this is more helpful with code events like “Advent of Code” where every daily task will involve opening files and parsing ascii characters, usually in some CSV format. I find games to always be unique though, I can’t imagine gameplay code being the same from one game to another.
That’s certainly the question, does this plugin give me enough benefits to outweight the fact that it’s someone else’s code I’m now working in? Godot should be assessed like this too, do you find it useful or are the forced paradigms getting in the way? I was a very opinionated teenager working in C++ with SDL, I would so rarely touch a game engine, I preferred to do things my way and still made 2D and 3D games. I find Godot agrees with how I like to build games, so I do use it for projects now too. But I steer clear of plugins that don’t bring much to the table; I think the only one I do use for Godot is drawing terrain tools like Terrain3D.
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I never reuse any code or graphics for jams. The main incentive of doing a jam for me is to produce something I’ve never done or seen before. I see jams primarily as opportunities to explore the unknown. Reuse is kinda antithetical to this - it just drags you into re-making what already exists.
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I have always wondered if people do that, have a bare bones project ready before the jam and think “I will just twist it to fit” when the jam theme is announced. Cheating in effect.
I think jams usually outline if you are allowed to use existing modules, assets and code bits etc, or if everything has to be done from scratch or not. So if people cheat, I don’t really know what you can do about that. Not much incentive but people cheat at anything!
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