Coding a game in 3 hours on a teletype
This post originally posted on itch.io
I knew it was going to be challenging to get a decent game in 3 hours, but I still managed to underestimate the task. I made this game for Trijam #370, a weekly game jam where participants are challenged to make a complete game in 3 hours of coding per person.
My goals going into the jam were to 1) make a complete game on a teletype, 2) allow the player to make some form of decision, 3) support saving state/starting from halfway through. I achieved 1 & 2 completely, and 3 partially. You can start from any point, but there is no way to find out the code needed to start from there.
The experience of coding on a teletype was interesting to say the least. Everything you've done in your session on the computer is easily visible in front of you and can be referenced without actually having the computer do anything. I enjoyed being able to scribble on the code as it was printed when I spotted bugs and how little distraction there was when there was only the one command line, but that was where the good parts ended. The whitespace of Python meant that I often ran out of space in the 80-column lines. As well, I missed some indication of line numbers and found I had to print out a lot of extra lines just to find the line I needed to replace.
My 3-hour coding session on the left with a cat for scale, and the code listing of the final game on the right.
As far as the jam itself goes, I really enjoyed the timebox. It was good to set aside a few hours and just focus on coding. The theme itself was a little odd and in retrospect my interpretation of it was not as close as I would have liked. I'll definitely do another Trijam in the future, but perhaps on something a little more interactive than a teletype.
And as for the game, I wish I had more time to flesh out the story further, or at least that I had planned the story more before I began. I think that a 10-minute playtime would have been ideal, and I think most runs will take around 3-5 minutes if you're reading everything. The story itself is an interesting concept I'd like to return to, and I think the console is an underutilized game setting/platform.