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For both of these I tried to paint more like I would with regular paints. Laying down daubs of color and pushing and pulling them around on one layer rather than creating masks and layers like I would often do while painting digitally. Mostly I'm just trying to get better at painting.              
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Best Games - Trackmania
You could learn how to race a car. You could study every minuscule technical detail that makes one car perform better than another. You could master aerodynamics and the physics of rubber on asphalt. You could steel your will and steady your hand when contending with other vehicles and drivers traveling down the same track at high speed. You could simulate all of this in a racing game. Or you could do none of that and play Trackmania. You pilot a car, yes, around a track, yes, but Trackmania is nothing like Forza or Gran Turismo. Trackmania is not like car racing. Trackmania is filled with impossible tracks that you careen down as fast as you possibly can. There are other vehicles on the track but they are intangible and you will have no interaction with them besides watching the path that they drive. There are special interactive zones on the track that will speed up or slow down your car. Some will cut your engine forcing you to glide the remainder of your race so you best have your speed up before you hit them. Solving this puzzle of speed and angles, drift and airtime, that’s what Trackmania is. You can play it with the four arrow keys on your keyboard. That might be the best way to play Trackmania. There have been about 150 different Trackmania games. Don’t let that fool you. They are all the same game. They are all a perfect distillation of speed, reaction, and anticipation. They are all perfect games. Trackmania is one of the best games. This past weekend I participated in the Alberta Game Jam. Game creators from all over the province convened over Discord to put on this remote version of the game jam. While I usually find the fun of a game jam is working with a team, I opted to attempt this one solo. It wasn’t very successful.
The past two times I did a solo jam it was so that I could try something different. I wrote a random text adventure that you couldn’t win and made a single pixel at a time drawing program with no instructions. Both times I was working with tools I wasn’t very familiar with and using it as an excuse to mess around. This time was very similar. There were a few things that I wanted to test out using tools that I am fairly familiar with but never have the opportunity to try. Some of those things worked, but even more of them didn’t. In the end I wound up making the beginnings of a 2d platformer. I had even intended to use a readily available character controller script but when that didn’t pan out like I had hoped I ended up writing my own. It’s not perfect but it has most of the features I wanted to add and it would be fairly simple to reuse or extend it in the future. I tried a bunch of stuff with shaders and some of that worked and some of it didn’t. In the end I didn’t make much of a game, but I did learn a few things and I now have all the basics for a simple 2d character controller. So that’s not nothing I guess. I wouldn't recommend it but if you want to poke at the thing I made it's over here. https://eturnip.itch.io/after-the-storm Did some editing and rewriting over here. This story isn't fully working yet, but it's getting better. Probably needs another pass or two. and maybe some structure changes. and maybe some more eyes on it. If you know what's broken here and have ideas on how to fix it, let me know.
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Owen McManus