Starting the Year by Shipping a Game in 48 Hours
This is the story of how I started the year creating a small game, literally throwing lines of codes in 48 hours
First of all, happy new year!
I’m super excited for many ideas I have, not only about gamedev learning but other formats I thought. I really look forward for growing this community and boost your gamedev understanding through the year.
The support I received from each of you just subscribing is huge for me,
Thank you!
As we say in Spanish. He wasn't dead; he was out on the town! (Out on a Jam…)
Many personal circumstances kept me away from writing on substack, most of the Christmas I've had the flu, a big one that is around my area. But I have another reason, diametrically opposed, that makes me feel quite proud — I’ve submitted my first PICO-8 game during the Toybox Jam 2025! 🥳
Safety Ship was submitted as a complete game, but it have some well known areas of improvement that I would like to work on during the next few weeks. I will keep you posted and the final version will be released for free on substack.
I expect to polish the game, at least to be closer to the game feel I had.
My intention when I finally accepted that I didn’t have much time, was to experiment and play with the feeling of sea (waves, ship movement, floating npcs and more) leaving behind attention to other details. Let me introduce you to the rules of this fantastic game jam.
TOY BOX JAM 2025
At this Jam the organizer provide a wide set of resources (Sprites, SFX Sounds, Music) to build your game, modifications at the assets are not allowed so you don’t start from zero, which is quite good.
If you are curious, these are the resources provided
The Game jam ran from December 19th 2025 at 9:00 PM to January 4th 2026 at 11:00 PM — but as I mentioned before I just had the 3rd and 4th of January to work on the game.
USE ANY GAME ENGINE YOU WANT, though the assets are made originally for Pico-8 and now Picotron. Extracted sprites, sfx, and music are within for folks using Unity, Godot, Gamemaker, Love2D, Picotron, or other engines! (Pico-8 folks, you don't need to download all those extracted WAVs and MP3s...)
How it started?
Well, my ideal initial plan was to collaborate with my uncle for this jam, but he didn’t make it because he also had other obstacles during those weeks, so I’ve just decided to push myself and get into this crazy plan for the weekend on my own, it was so much fun…
When I went through all the assets available for this Jam, I automatically falled in love with the following spritesheet, it is beautiful, isn’t it?
My intention was to use all the spritesheets available for this Jam as an inspiration for ideas and when I saw the potential the previous one had, it was really clear for me.
Actually, during a Game Jam you can’t spent lot of time at the ideation phase as that is time you are actually decreasing for the development phase, unfortunatelly there is no much space for preproduction/prototyping neither. This is strongly linked to the team size, when you are alone, just worry to throw lines of code as much as you can. 😁
This was my initial concept idea for the game, I’m going to translate the Spanish so you understand how ambitious (wrongly) I was:
I wanted to create a ship game but mostly focused on the control of the ship, meaning you should be changing your character position inside the boat (right side menu) in order to take the rudder, sail using ropes or take the cannon to drop the small wood ships.
If you ever played Sea of thieves (I really recommend this experience with friends) my original idea was coming from there, you need to be switching functions constantly in order to actually take the boat to the right direction, is a constant decision making game, which is something I loved as an idea.
So the main verbs (Remember verbs == systems/mechanics) I had were:
Explore islands (yes in plural) for loot
Show a map (being at the ship) to look for that loot, treasures
Shoot the cannon — I kept this one at the final release
Move the ship — Of course I also kept this one
But as soon as I started with the development… again the reality came for me and yelled to my face — My dear hobbyist PICO-8 guy, you need to design mechanics you never did before! Be realistic — That was my inside voice and well, he was right.
The Sea Effect
When you play Safety Ship you can’t visually see any real movement at the sea as I ran out of time before I can add lines creating the waves effect, but the main elements of the game, being the ship and the small npcs floating, are actually working through a wave formula I’ve found doing some research on Internet.
As I mentioned on my post 5 Things To Know Before Start Solo Gamedev it is quite important to have some math fundamentals when doing gamedev, because it is going to save you so much time of struggling with code and throwing random lines at your IDE that may need intense sessions of changes if you want to improve them
Physics of the sea are not constant and depends on many natural factors that actually change the wavelength quite often, but again, this is a game jam and the priority should not be pursue the perfection, specially if it’s one of your first Jams, time constraint is a cruel and real thing.
Rather than that the priority should be to submit your game as finished as possible.
On a future post I plan to share details about my humble implementation of waves effect.
Ship Rotation and Handling
At least my initial concept page was useful to keep me looking for the right handling of the ship, is one of the things I’m proud about this tiny prototype/game wannabe and again, math and built-in pico8 functions just came to save my precious time during my 48 hours crunch session.
When I went through the Amazing implementation of Arkanoi-8 by Josh Millar (developed on PICO-8) I had chance to understand how cos and sin functions can be used within r being a value for rotation from 0.0 to 0.99.
If you keep in mind those key components, you can easily create a movement based on up, down, left, right and diagonals.
I plan to share my approach for both Sea Waves and Ship Handling here on substack during the next few weeks, those will be available for my paid subscriptors as the source code will be included.
You can now access the paid content of gamedevpills with forever discount if you bring some friends!
Conclusion (TLDR)
This was my second game jam alone and my first one using PICO-8 as the heart of the game, if I compare the way I executed both game jams on my own, there are many patterns in common I really wish I can improve for next time. But I can tell you those are factors that are quite difficult to improve.
Menu and UI were developed almost at the end of last day
SFX and music were added almost at the end of last day
I lost some time with development of aspects that were not quite impactful at the end, they were actually removed
The initial scope is always bigger than it should be. Specially on Game Jams, think small, but really really small
itch.io page and submit were happening, literally within the last minutes… :|
If you liked this post you can help me a lot sharing with your friends, family, dogs and cats. 💌
My intention is to keep us connected to our creative side and learn together.
I’m just a hobbyist PICO-8 gamedev, not professionally connected to the industry — but I do come from a technical background as an IT Support Manager, and that usually helps a lot.
Thank you for reading!