I.e. the first few hours of any game jam.

When the GMTK Game Jam started I felt a bit dip, emotionally. The theme landed, and now it was time to pick something to run with. TLDR: I went for a run and that helped a ton.

It's easy to come up with an idea, but how do you couple that with confidence in the idea? It's so easy to shoot all your own ideas down right as they surface.

I was only able to move forward by silencing that censor - in my head the concept was too simple, too dumb. My hope was that a simple mechanic would be fine - the real game is in the level design. Less is more!

Still, it's hard to actually buy-in to that and start getting things done.

That was phase 1 - phase 2 is slightly different.

After implementing the game with one ruleset/mechanic, then deciding it might not be right - one of the other ideas from that first brainstorm could make for a more interesting game.

But now we have code-rot and fear!

What if we refactor, but we don't like it as much, and we want to go back? Git is real, and commits can be reverted, but it's not easy to keep things super clean, especially when other details are getting worked on at the same time.

What if there are some implicit assumptions in places that lead to time wasted dealing with this transition? Maybe it's cleaner to rewrite the player class, or to start over from scratch? What's a rewrite like in a 48 hour game jam?

Experience is probably the best teacher here. I'm gaining more and more experience in game repos, godot repos, and stronger principles for what goes where (software architecture).

It'd be good to capture my running godot project structure somewhere.

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