When VimJam4 unveiled their theme, “Cross Paths”, my mind immediately went to the legends around Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues”. A classic story of a Faustian bargin, at a crossroad, in the dead of night. As I was playing with that concept, I realized it’d be fun to be a devil trying to gather souls with these deals, working their way up in the world. And so, the game “Crossroad Blues” was born.

This game involved some significant technical challenges around a few key areas:

• the generation of maps that followed a road but still had some amount of ability to define their expected pacing and shapes.

• the handling of many objects with collisions and logic processing - each level would contain thousands of trees and hundreds of enemies, and we had to optimize their performance using approaches like oct-trees and distance-based culling to ensuire smooth gameplay.

• this was my first foray into utility AI, and implementing it was complex even with the use of pre-existing libraries as a base.