Unicorns and Rainbows

Hi, this is Yuu!

This week, I started making a game for js13kGames, which started recently. Rather than only sharing my development progress on this blog, I’d also like to participate in game jams like this in the future.

This year’s theme is “Unicorns and Rainbows.” It’s not a theme that I’m particularly familiar with in Japan, but personally, it reminded me of the time when MLP (My Little Pony) and bronies were popular.

One thing I particularly remember from that time is a fighting game where unicorns fought each other while kissing. I’m not planning to turn my current game into a fighting game, but while making games with themes like this, I’d like to try making a multiplayer game someday as well.

For now, I’m working on a prototype and trying to figure out what could make the game fun.

To be honest, I haven’t written many games that update at 60 FPS before, so I’m experimenting with that as well. At the moment, though, I don’t think the game is anywhere near ready to submit yet.

More than the game concept itself, I’m starting to realize that the 13KB limit is surprisingly challenging.

I initially thought that, with a whole month, I could spend plenty of time polishing the presentation and make something reasonably polished. Instead, I have a feeling that this is going to be more about subtraction than addition.

Even though I’ve been consciously trying to keep the code as small as possible, I was already over 13KB when I checked the size while compressing the game into a zip file.

It turned out that I had accidentally included several old generated files, so it wasn’t actually the correct size. Still, I learned that it’s surprisingly easy to go over the limit if I let my guard down.

For comparison, the compressed JS file containing only the main part of Flyjong is 50KB.

That alone gives me some idea of just how strict the 13KB limit is.

There’s still a whole month to work on it, so I plan to take my time with this project while working on my hanafuda game in parallel.