Hi everyone! I’m here to tell you the story of my last game jam: the Bacon Game Jam 09. It was a long time since my last game jam (and my game-dev stuff in general). I was a bit distracted by other part of my life and, in general, I wasn’t in the best mood. Because of this, I’m very happy to partecipate to  this jam, also if the final result is not completely satisfying.

Anyway, let’s start!

Procedural Contents Generation (PCG) is a family of techniques, algorithms and procedures used for generating contents in an automatic way rather than manually. In other words, using PCG, game contents can be created by the host computer instead of pre-design everything at development time. In recent years, PCG is having an increasing popularity among the academic and game development communities. There are two big reasons behind this success: first, it allow the designer to generate an near-infinite amount of contents without the effort of manually design each element by hand (and that’s why the indie scene love PCG), second it increase the game longevity and replayability value of the game (because, for instance, the game it is always different after each run and so it can be replayed more).

As I said in a previous post, in these days me and my colleague at Noctua were working in the SpeccyJam 2014. The goal of the jam/competition is to make a game with the same look and feel of an original ZX Spectrum game. This introduces a lot of interesting limitations. First, it constrains our resolution to 256 × 192 (that is, however, a really big improvement respect to the LowRezJam :D), second it forces us to use only 15 colors.