I suspect many don’t write anything down and do this largely by intuition/experience but I want to tease out some ideas.

when it comes to describing and designing a system from a blank piece of paper, what are the parameters you think of?

I’m thinking napkin sketch level of software design.

So things like:
Number of users, are they concurrent users, what load dimensions there are (disk IO, network IO etc.), target platform (everything is a web app these days), how do you design/visualise the data model?

Any decisions or constraints that impact what and how you build a proof of concept / MVP? How do you document this? How do you test it against the finished software?

Hi,

I've been mulling ideas about a game for a while now, I'd like to hack out a prototype, and my default would be Love2D. (As an aside: one of the things I like about Love2D was that you could make a basic 'game' in a couple of LoC, and it was 'efficient enough' for what you got. Perhaps the only gripe I had with it was that it didn't output compiled binaries (I mean, you could make it do that, but it seemed like a hack). I think Polycode seemed to be a semi-serious contender, but last I checked (a year or two ago) it's pretty much as dead as a doornail. Some of the other alternatives I remember seeing (Godot? Unity?) felt too much like Blender.

So I've been wondering, it's been a while since I've been keeping tabs on the 'gamedev community', so I don't know if there have been any more recent development in that space.

So I guess my question is: What are people using for game jams nowadays? Preach to me (and everyone else) about your favorite framework and language :)