21 Aug 2025
My second jam game! Kinda'!
This blog post about my second jam game is also about another jam game, the first one I was making for the same jam that I abandoned. That jam was the Awful Winter Jam back in January 2018, and took course over roughly three weeks. The theme was Weird History, and I brainstormed a game called Snail Knight about a snail from those old medieval illustrations where he could roll around in his shell. I wanted to play with Box2D and see if I could integrate that with the engine I made for Missile Champions, but I did not make a lot of headway into making it a fun game.
Look at this guy! It would’ve been fun if I could get the rolling mechanics to feel good and the additional spiderball-like wall cling to work reliably. However, I was two weeks into a three-week game jam and I had nothing to submit. I either had to scrap something together with this broken game, or start all over.
Fuck it, I got a week left. New game.
The name “Try Something New” came from me trying something new for my jam submission, but also played into the new plot I thought up: A lemonade-stand-style simulator set right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The idea was your stand was set up near a wall crossing and you were now serving both East and West Berliners who were crossing to live their lives or get items they couldn’t get at home. Events like concerts could predict the type of foot traffic going by your stand so you could tailor your stock for the day.
With only a week left I needed to scope appropriately for art assets. Like with Missile Champions and its NES pastiche, I leaned hard into faking an Apple II CGA lemonade stand game. I made sure to stick to the CGA limitation and restricted resolution, and used an Apple II font for all of the menus. There’s even an asterisk on the active text fields! The music…is cheated a bit. It was written in Famitracker and I had fun with it and that’s what matters.
I was extremely proud of pulling this together within one entire week, from concept to release with code/art/sound. It also helped that I had an engine already built with Missile Champions that worked well for the graphics I needed. The gameplay isn’t too complex and there’s no win condition, but the game loop is there! If you want to try it, check it out over on Itch.io.
Shoutout to Mettigel, I was extremely pleased to learn about these guys.
