Progress report 3

voxel • 6 months ago on 15th Kajam entry  PAPER PRECINCT

Cool kajam! I've picked the following limitations:

Esoteric: My entry targets Windows 3.11. Exactly how I'm going to distribute this in a way that anyone can play it remains to be seen
Illustrator: Hand drawing all the art. I do a fair amount of amateur art for fun, but almost never using physical media. I'm hand pencilling, then inking, and finally scanning all the graphics for my entry. Not being able to repeatedly hit 'undo' each time a line is slightly off has been the biggest challenge in the jam for me
Window dressing: Game windows are part of the gameplay. For one, the game needs 'Windows' 3.1(1) to run, but also involves popping up multiple views, each in its own window. Managing these is part of the gameplay, though not particularly complicated.

Instead of my usual cross-compilation shenanigans I'm making the game from inside a Windows 3.11 virtual machine, hosted on a raspberry pi (my main desktop pc at the moment). The screen redraw in the VM is pretty slow, which means that sometimes moving a window, of which I have many, triggers a ten second or so screen refresh. It's pretty painful but is all part of the fun (I keep telling myself).

I'm using Visual Basic 3.0, which I thought would save me some time being designed primarily for interface design, but having to learn such an old version of Visual Basic might be taking longer than drawing the scribbles illustrations.

Comments (3)

ratrogue
 • 6 months ago • 

This is such a great idea, and the drawings look good too. Bonus points from me for using BASIC!

voxel
  • 6 months ago • 

@ratrogue
Thanks bruv. It's super simple to the point of barely being a game, but it's been interesting to work in Windows 3.11 and try out an old version of Visual Basic. The 'Limitations Kajam' was a good idea, I've done everything very differently to how I'd normally approach a jam

toasty
 • 6 months ago • 

This looks incredible, and I'm very impressed with how you used the limitations. I'm looking forward to playing it, though am a little daunted by the prospect of getting it running.

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