To start off, I know this is the second time I've made a development entry that's just about time, but it is a thing I generally struggle with due to time blindness caused by my autism that swings into time anxiety because of the times I've been late due to the time blindness.
Anyway, I'm writing this in small pieces because I'm currently in the midst of making a game for a game jam. I've done a few of these before, but not like this. The other jams I've done were generally 48 hours. That meant that I could understand that my project needed to be miniscule and be made as quickly as possible. That's why all of them thus far mostly use the RTP except the main characters. Diced-up Biomes got a little more sauce to it as a game because I had someone else doing character designs, but the other ones are incredibly small, down to just a couple maps and a couple scenes.
The RPG Maker Game Jam for 2025, however, is 4 weeks long. As such, I drafted up a design document for a game with the scope of content to hopefully make a game that fills and fits that time frame. Now, I know that sprites and tiles take me the longest, so I simplified the style direction to a limited level of monochrome. Black, white, and a few shades of gray, because I also believed that using RPG Maker's RTP for this project would be pretty lazy (Also it wouldn't fit the setting I wanted to make for the game). I managed to get just about all of the visual assets made within the first week, which is great, because that meant I could focus on actually building the game.
As of writing this sentence, it has been just about two weeks of the Game Jam. I have made most of the framework operate for the game, as well as having a fair number of the bells and whistles for a nice game, like original music, which isn't something I make terribly often, and a funky abstract battle background. What's been intersting about this is how simplifying the visuals and thus having all of my visual assets made quickly allowed me to get a lot done at a much faster rate than just about anything has been completed with NDftE, and this also appears to be where scope is meeting pacing pretty hard.
See, New Dawn is my big RPG project at the moment. It's planned to be a full adventure, running the usual gauntlet of saving kittens and killing God, and it has the scope and presentation to match, with full color and reasonably detailed artwork for my standards. This means I need to create a lot of things that I've never made before, given that before that project I had made a singular test autotile and just kinda painted over a naked RTP man to make my own sprites. This means a lot of roadblocks have occurred which have taken the wind from my sails on numerous occasions. This is fine, though, because I expected the project to take multiple years when I set out to do it, because I knew I'd be doing a lot that I'd never done before.
I have been struggling with my mental pace for the jam though. Like I said, I'm used to either 48 hour or 3 year long projects, and adjusting to the scale and pace of this multi-week project. I made a lot of the framework in an immediate blitz: the maps, tiles, the main few sprites, and the general system for how the game will progress. All of that more or less got done in the first week. But I was spending the energy at that week as thought it was the 48 hour jams I've done before: Getting up a little early, staying up a little late, and feeling guilt when I wasn't working on it (Although, I feel that sometimes with NDftE, it's just something I need to figure out in general). I think I've now settled into a pace that works for living life and getting this game done on time!