A lot of this writing is for my own reflection, but I hope this also helps other beginner solo devs!

So I've been trying to get into making games for a long time now. I recently finished CS50 to get a good foundation for understanding code, and I was planning to to the game development course Harvard offers as well but I'm finding that I'm just hungry to start making as much as I can as fast as possible! It took me a while to finally force myself to do a jam for whatever reason, but having the constraints of something with a time limit was a great motivator.

My background is in art and design, but I think I've always wanted to be a game maker. When I was young I really just figured games were magic, not something I could ever make, so you can imagine how excited I am to be making games now, rudimentary as they are!

I was mostly able to work on this while I've been on break at my day job, and that said, I'm pretty pleased with what I was able to accomplish! I want to try to make a new game every week, or at least keep up with the Mini Jams which occur every 2 weeks.

This is as far as I can see taking this game for now, I've added a few features since the Mini Jam 159 ended:

• Random encounters with waves, sharks.
• Clouds that spawn in random numbers, positions.
• 2 Islands, one where you can only rest and restore stamina(the bar on the bottom of the screen) and one which activates the win state.
• A secret compass item that shows a coordinate to help you better know where you have and haven't explored
• A win state.

Since the Jam, I asked my brother, a musician, to make some music for it, which is now in the game! It was fun to bounce ideas and see how our different perspectives can effect the games feel.

New things I learned to do in Game Maker Studio:

• Do things with RNG (clouds, sharks, waves)
• Make (in theory) an unlimited amount of space to explore,
• create the illusion of new spaces
• Create Items that change gameplay
• Use particle systems
• create status indicators
• got more used to using alarms
• add music with an intro and then set it to loop after

I plan to make little posts like this after i've finished a game on a respective week to leave a journal of my progress and process, so stay tuned and share your thoughts if you like. 

Thanks for your interest in this post!

– zo-ku (she/they)