I've never dev blogged any of my games or jams in progress. I've been nervous about doing that for various reasons, but I'll give it a go with this project.

This is my first time coding for Adventuron - I came across a tweet about this gamejam from @lexoloffle (zep - the Pico-8 creator) a few weeks ago, and remembered about this gamejam a few days ago. I had previously seen adventuron.io in passing earlier in the year, and had always meant to come back to it.

 I decided to join and start 2 days ago. It's been a while since I've done a gamejam, so this seemed perfect - especially as the last time I tried to write a text adventure was when I was 10, on an RM Nimbus machine at school. 

I've decided with doing a dystopian, cyberpunk themed xmas game - what with the release of Cyberpunk 2077, and also cyberpunk (small c) is just cool in general. As it's a jam, and I've entered halfway through the jam, I'm going to focus on a very small scenario - but as dense as I can make it.

 I'm hoping to have at least 2-3 solutions to each challenge in the game - in trying to keep up with the style of play that games like Deus Ex, Prey, Watchdogs Legion et al all follow. I'm approaching this with the mindset that there will be advantages and disadvantages to the different solutions (maybe taking an easy solution earlier on, costs you a resource that makes another challenge later on harder without it).

I also want to take a more simplistic, maybe modern, approach to a text adventure; I don't want the game to be a reading comprehension test. Instead I am going to happily highlight, indicate and point out all the things you can interact with - and even suggest actions to be taken. I want fun not frustration to be the overall takeaway! But as this is my first text adventure, and I have limited time, it's a broad goal.

For graphics, I am using the awesome PyxelEdit, using a Pico-8 palette - as I am quite familiar with it (and want to be even moreso). I'm potentially looking at trying out some chibi/anime/Famicon-esq sprite art style - to fit with the limited resolution, but also thematically with the 80's style approach to cyberpunk, where it's a mishmash of American and Japanese culture.

I'm finding the Cookbook on the adventuron.io site quite useful, although it feels like there isn't quite a 1:1 parity between the cookbook and the reference guide. The sample games are helping too. While I am multi-language coder, predominantly Javascript at this point, I'm having to fight the urge to treat the code like JSON! But I am using camelCase, because anything else is just too foreign for me!

So far I've been having fun experimenting and discovering some of the more funky bits of tech available, that you wouldn't think would be in a text adventure (well, not at least when I played them in the late 80's/early 90's).