The theme of the seventh Toronto Game Jam, held in May of 2012, was “The World’s Not Ending”. I was working with Eric Weiss, a local journalist who had never made a game before. At this point, I think I had only made two or three.

We worked like mad during the next 72 hours to create a small point-and-click adventure filled with meaningless or redundant choices. We pulled in a floater, someone assisting multiple other groups of game makers, to provide us with our graphics. Mladen crafted an adorable set of visuals that matched the top-down, Yoda Stories-esque aesthetic I had in mind. The code is some of the nastiest shit I’ve ever written, but I was writing it up until the very last minute; such is the nature of a game jam. It looked cute, it got some laughs, and then it got overshadowed by so many other things. Eric recorded his experience, which still exists online.

Since then, A Lot has happened. I’m not going to get into it. I’ve been struggling for a long time to make something again. And, well, I’m finally making stuff again.

I love handheld game systems. Growing up, my parents never let me have my own video game system or a PC (until I got a hand-me-down 386), but they compromised with a Sega Game Gear. It helped keep me quiet on our long car trips to visit family. I still have fond memories of Sonic Triple Trouble, Home Alone, and Mortal Kombat 2, despite two of those being bad ports. This might be a weird way to justify remaking a Flash game for the Game Boy, but it’s true; I wanna play my work on a handheld, and thanks to GBStudio, I can do just that.

I’m terrible at keeping up with things, so I can’t promise I’ll do more logs talking about the adaptation process. I would like to, however, and I’m hoping that motivates me to keep things trucking.