My two cents about past, present and future

I must have joined and left the single choice jam a few times, for a very simple reason: I felt like I didn't have anything truly interesting to share. I'm still experimenting with tools beyond Choice Script—I didn’t get what I expected with Godot, learned quite a bit about Renpy, and gathered more knowledge about alternative design philosophy, specifically for board games with tokens and accessories for multiple simultaneous plays.

Throughout these comings and goings, I drafted several concepts and then discarded them because I felt they’d fit better in something that isn’t about a single decision. So, as I sometimes do when the weekend approaches, I sat down to play what had been submitted. And this game, Acceptance - Prototype, sparked an idea in my mind. Specifically, the devlog about the story offers a very unique perspective on how and why things are the way they are. I recommend playing it and then reading what was written; some things click together like a puzzle, perhaps why it was written that way.

In a way, Carpe Diem is a response game and probably the only one of its kind that I’ll make because it revolves around a conversation, and that’s not something I like to do in indirect discourse, due to methodological reasons. Often, we don’t have a choice; our choice is just a pile of elements that connect in an inorganic way to things we don’t talk about, decisions we didn’t make, lives we don’t know, and yet we’re still directly impacted by them in a long and cryptic manner.

I probably won’t use Tyranobuild in the future, but I felt that for these short projects, it’s a good tool. Bad for porting? Yes. Is Renpy much better? Yes. But these jams, for me, are about experimentation. It's a very limited tool, although accessible at the same time. Some commands are counter-intuitive, some commands (like variables) that shouldn't require code need to be set in a script to be fully functional. Other things like dialogs, presentation and effects are very broad to do and customize. Very strange. In the future I'll do a second test and prepare something that can actually get everything I want from the platform.