Grawitacja 2026 - Preparations

Getting Ready for the "Grawitacja" Retro Game Jam 🎮🔥

Sometimes the best ideas show up where you least expect them. During one of our bushcraft trips into the woods, sitting by the fire, the conversation somehow drifted to the demoscene – all those old productions, graphics tricks, and that vibe where hardware limitations sparked incredible creativity. One word led to another, and before we knew it, Piontal and I had an idea: what if we went to an event with a similar spirit? That's how we found the "Grawitacja" Retro Game Jam.

Our first prep session happened at Piontal's office. Since it's a retro game jam, we decided to work on Raspberry Pi – he grabbed a Pi 400, I went with a Pi 500+. We also picked up a tiny Anbernic RG28xx handheld to run our builds on real hardware, plus an AKAI LPK25 mini keyboard for working on sound. While getting set up, we quickly realized we'd need a simple file-sharing server between our machines – so that went on the to-do list too.

As a first test, we tried building a Space Invaders clone in PICO-8. We got something working, though far from complete – but that's expected for a first attempt under tight time constraints, so we're calling it a warm-up.

And it went great! 🚀