Welcome to the recount of my second year participating in the js13kGames competition, a thrilling coding challenge for web game developers where the game’s file size is limited to a mere 13 kilobytes. This year’s unique theme was set in the 13th century.
You can find my entry, 13th Barber's Guild in the link below:
13th Barber's Guild
A game in the js13kGames 2023 competition. Play it now!
Setting the Stage
I don’t consider myself a hardcore gamer; the latest game I played with more enthusiasm was Dungeon Crawl… you can get an idea from that. Last year, I sought the creative input of my two daughters to help me define a concept, and this time around, I enlisted also the assistance of ChatGPT to brainstorm a general plot idea. With their help, I began outlining the basic features of my game.
The concept I settled on was a potions game, although at that point, the game mechanics were still somewhat hazy. I knew the basic mechanic would be to combine different potions, offering flexibility for experimentation with various approaches. Initially, I even considered using dependency injection to define the mechanics, which would have allowed for a quiz-like game, a puzzle adventure, or even a math-based challenge, with minor to no efforts. However, the time constraint pushed me to narrow down my focus.