For everyone who doesn’t know me yet (most of you, anyways): I’m Nelson Lopez! A Nerdy 16-year-old teenager from Chile! (yes, it’s a country, and yes, it’s shaped like a chilli)

I think that my biggest problem with the development of this game was AMBITION, I tried to implement way too much when i should have been focusing on what i have should done in high school, and i’m not really good at focusing at all, so it just really really really crushed every plans i had and everything i wanted to implement! if you check in the source code, i actually even wrote a damn compiler and interpreter for a programming language specifically designed for scripting scenes ONLY, only because i thought i’d need it for what i wanted to do, and in reality, i just needed to make a good game, not some sort of… nintendo-esque crazy rpg adventure that lasted 8 hours of gameplay which is developed in under 10 days which are also filled with other random tasky nonsense.

Well, the purpose of this post wasnt really to just showcase how much of a lost cause i am but rather part of my creative process as i built this incredibly complicated landscape of pixels and weirdly slanted levels!

I actually started developing the engine for this in Zig using Sokol as a base before the jam even started, but then ended up in some absolute chaos with how the data was organized, then i decided to entirely redo the entire engine as an entity + event + scene handler on top of Löve, those are some of my original sketches for the engine:

I also composed some sort of… test song…?

After deciding to rewrite it all in Lua, The jam had finally started and i had about 10 days to get a workable game, i brainstormed a little and decided to follow a single design decision blindly: Reuse as most as possible, simplify the way it plays but dont make it easy. Alongside that, I started writing a song for sokamoka which never really evolved into what i wanted from it, but i still have it stored somewhere in the game’s files:

I thought this song wasnt enough, so i experimented with a slower and clearer beat:

Then almost giving up, i just grabbed my dad’s guitar and started strumming some random ““chords”” and a surprisingly pleasant result came out of it, specially with the reverb and delay effects on it. It ended being the only song actually shown in the game:

And then I just decided to experiment a little as i felt the strumming i did wasnt very emotional nor it flowed anywhere, but i ended up getting some sort of… non-functional harmony piece? it’s more like it’s just modulating into Fmin9 but only with it’s ii, anyways, this is what came out of it:

Anyways, this has been a wild ride! and it’s possible i continue sokamoka one day, thanks everyone for reading this! i hope everything goes well and see y’all next time :)