I made this project for the GameMaker New Year, New Jam '23 game jam which was held in gx.games this year. The game jam's theme was "relax", and I had a two weeks window to upload my entry.

Before I started working on a project, I sat down and brainstormed on paper 3 widely different concepts, from a fishing game to a puppet show,  to this "read and relax". After coming up with the concepts, I weighed them against each other and decided to go with the "relax and read" concept due to two reasons: I eliminated the fishing game concept because it wasn't original enough (although I'm definitely interested in making it happen at a later date), and I eliminated the puppet show concept due to the time constraint, as it was too ambitious to make anything actually functional within the time limit, as I wanted to make a well polished small package for this project. So this concept won based on a process of elimination.

But the original concept wasn't to read poetry, I originally intended it to be a reading app for entire public domain books in the bookcase. During my first day of development, however, I quickly realized that scope will make it impossible for me to make a well-polished title on time, as it required me to deal with obscenely large amounts of text which I have never done before. It's definitely a good thing to learn, for future RPGs and such, but for this one, I made a quick decision to re-scope down to public domain poetry instead, because this way I can have the text housed inside GameMaker's sequences assets instead of having to handle external text files or JSON docs.

Overall I enjoyed working on this project, as I love to read and if it helps share some of that love with people all the better. It's technically not a "game", it's a reading app, just made in a game engine. I didn't win in the jam, but this project was a great experience and a wonderful start to the year, as I was on hiatus for about a month and a half prior to this from game development due to my dad passing away. I was getting increasingly impatient to get back into game dev again, and this was a great start for the year. I hope you'll enjoy it, and thank you for reading!