Finally making a REAL game in mini micro :D

In the afternoon, after I got back from college, I opened up Discord just to check the usual – and guess what? Micro Jam 025 had been announced! Not only that, but this time the theme is... vampires! So, as you’d expect, every single game in this jam has to be about vampires. That’s a theme with tons of possibilities, and my mind was already full of ideas.

Now, here’s the thing: I don’t actually know how to make games in Mini Micro yet. At first, I was feeling pretty clueless. But then I remembered a tutorial I’d watched a few days ago on making an infinite scroller in Mini Micro, taught byJoe Strout. He goes over the basics of building a simple infinite scroller. So, I thought, why not give it a shot and just follow the tutorial?

Then the jam officially begins. Since it was the weekend, I slept in a bit, but as soon as I was up, I got to work. First up: sprites. I tried making all the sprites I’d need, and, as a backup, I also browsed itch.io in case I could find something useful. I did find a bat sprite and a nice creepy background with a big moon, but that was about it.

Drawing digital art, especially at 64x64, is something I haven’t done much of, and Clip Studio Paint hit me with a reality check. Turns out, I needed a tiny pixel brush to get any kind of detail, but in Clip Studio, my brush was always just a bit too thick, and it made drawing in that tiny resolution feel way harder than it should be. It made me realize how much easier life would’ve been with proper pixel art software!

The next day, I dived into the code, and let me tell you, I hit every bug imaginable. Sometimes the player would disappear into thin air. Other times, the spikes would randomly spawn across the entire platform, leaving zero room to run. It was bug-fixing central for most of the day. I kept fixing things again and again, and finally, it worked.

I also found this cool piece of code, because of this jam.

I could’ve just used the text display for the game’s HUD, but it looked kind of... bland. So instead, I used the gfx.print function, and it gave the game a much better feel overall.

And that’s how my first vampire-themed Mini Micro game came together for Micro Jam 025!