Whelp, looks like dat Spitball boy’s dun gone and got himself into a heap of trouble this time.  By which I mean that I joined the Idle Thumbs WizardJam.  For those who don’t know, Idle Thumbs was a podcast I used to listen to a lot.  I listen to it less now, but that’s fine.

WizardJam is their biannual Game Jam, which means that you basically have two weeks to construct a game from scratch.  My inspiration will be Three Moves Ahead episode 16, which discussed “The Sims 3”

Now, as people who’ve been following some of my posts might know, I’m not exactly a super-coder.  If anything, I’m more of a Jimmy Olson coder at the moment.  I’ve been coding a few months, and I can’t really do anything outside of the terminal yet.  I’d like to make some GUI stuff, but I haven’t really gotten the hang of it.  And by the time I’ve learned something like PyGame, I think the Jam would pretty much be over.

But, at the saying goes…  “If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed Ali, he’s gonna float like a butterfly and sting like a bee!”  (Yes, I’m 100% positive that is how the saying goes.)  In other words, don’t make your skills match the program, make the program match your skills.

See, there’s one thing that I’m 100% sure I can code, because it seems to be the one thing all learners program at some point – a To Do list.  I have, thus far, avoided making one because it was not actually useful for me.  I am both too capricious and too pester-averse to find them anything other than an annoyance.

It then becomes a very simple equation – I just have to turn “using a To Do List” into a fun game!

…Please stop laughing.  I’m serious.

Without wanting to reveal too many of my cards yet (and definitely, definitely [I cannot stress this enough] not because I don’t have all of them assembled) a lot of it is going to involve trying to replicate the “big, dumb [Moodlet] slot machine” that Julian Murdoch referred to in the episode.

Now, I suspect some of you are groaning about the idea of a “Gamification” app.  But let me be very clear here – this is Simification, not Gamification.  As we have defined on the podcast, a game requires challenges and goals which are both intentional and designed by the developer.  This, however, will not be a game that I scoring, nor will it be a game that I define the challenges for.  Therefore, it will be a self-imposed challenge – a “Simification”.

If you’d like to participate, see the offerings, or just read about other peoples’ entries, check it out at the Wizard Jam Archives.