GameJam Tycoon

How long can you last in your game jamming career.

Survive weekly crunch of making mini games for the marketing department of a company going bankrupt. You might just be their last hope to keep something going.

How long can you delay their inevitable end. How long can you pursue your hobby as a career.

Technical Details

You manage three variables : Your mental health, your savings that’s running out coz some weeks you don’t get paid, and your reputation when bad games lead to poor fanbase. As long as you delay their inevitable depletion, you carry on as the gamejam tycoon.

And much more ... will write after some rest

After some time resting, testing, playing other games and some feedback, here are some notes I made:

• My old code editor acted up and repeated a few brackets at the end of the file, you might notice the brackets at one page and wonder "what sorcery is this?", lesson: just use vim.
• Random function is amazing, but a simulated randomness is more realistic, getting the same paragraph by coincidences in math will prove to be very not-fun.
• Not having a lot of javascript overhead is much more fun to build with, and much more smooth to play, my last ludum dare game felt much more smoother due to its 4kb size (also the gameplay was too competitive, that too). The neomorphic buttons should have been a bit more circular and bigger, screen margin should have been bigger.
• Sound effects with button clicks, my buggy implementation of it almost made the game unplayable and so it had to be removed, a simple play .ogg file on button click would have been much simpler than using webAudio api.
• The art I designed was supposed to be a mix between 3d and ascii - something that didn't end up looking very nice within the 48 hours.
• I had plans to then animate the art using some css tomfoolery: moving noise and occasional glitches.
• Factors like losing hair strands don't seem of much impact when judged from a pure quantitative perspective, in simple terms: a visual metaphor would have been a nice addition to the game.
• Rising through the ranks in your company should be a necessary theme given the tycoon genre, yet you will only have your focus on sustainance (a bit too realistic, unfair for a game).
• And ofcourse, funnier situations, incrementally increasing variables to keep track of, showing the impact of your choices on the variables, having more impact on the quality of the games you make, features such as these would have made the game, in my opinion, ready perfectly.

Well a full version can be made for the ludum dare extras. I'd love to learn your suggestions. A total framework changes is not out of the question.