This weekend was ZGDevs, a very small indie game event in my city where developers could bring their games and showcase them at their own booths.
About six weeks ago, I updated my gamedev prototype showcase and was encouraged by the event organizers to apply. I wasn't sure at first... but after thinking about it for a few days, I figured it could be a good excuse to put all those prototypes together in one place, polish them a little and meet some new people (this last part didn't go very well).
The first thing I had to deal with was the event poster. I had a tight deadline, so I started with that, and it took me several days to finish. I wanted the whole collection to feel like an actual game rather than just a folder full of old game jam prototypes, so I made a main theme and a main menu inspired by the kind of presentation you would find in Super Mario All-Stars.
Once that was done, I started adapting all the games one by one to a new fixed resolution: 320x240. Each prototype had its own problems. Suenio didn't even start with Ruffle :(
As you can imagine, going back to the code I wrote years ago for game jams was an absolute nightmare. Trying to figure out what the hell I did was a painful experience. I had to fix compatibility issues, adjust things to the new resolution and bring back features that had been left unfinished simply because there isn't enough time during a game jam.
The five games I brought to the event were (links redirect to their outdated itch.io pages):
For the event, I had two different setups. The main one was a laptop running the collection through Ruffle in a web browser, with actual JavaScript code running behind it. I also brought a tablet running the games through Flash Player on a low resolution Windows tablet. There are still some bugs and things I want to fix, improve and finish before I can consider the project finished, though.
Oh yeah. @markanime was there helping me out. We also met another NG user there, @feero, who told us about one of their upcoming gamedev projects 👀
My plan is to release the five games on Newgrounds starting in March 2027, as five individual submissions, with one game released every Monday. Also, release the whole collection on Steam as a single game, completely free. I'm a little scared of doing this since I've never released anything like this on Steam before. Currently, only Lunatica Sizzle and Wait For The Waiters are completely finished.
ZGDevs was more like a deadline that forced me to finally put everything together and make these old prototypes presentable again. Now I just have to finish the damn thing...
Ok, bye!
