2010-04-23

New game plan

Ok, so things didn't go quite as planned with my AudioGame. I'll explain the specifics in another post, but this one is more about what I'm planning to do for the rest of this year.

One thing that a lot of indie developers seem to do that allows them to enjoy the scene is to publish a "game a week" or something similar. So, I'm planning on doing the same. This will be hard for me because I'm not someone who easily works to deadlines. I code because I enjoy it and I want it to remain that way, so if I find I'm trying to do more work than I'm enjoying I tend to back off.
This has resulted in a rather large accumulation of half-finished projects however as I also enjoy exploring new ideas, but rarely see them through to completion.

One such example of this is a game I originally wrote for university called Hoshi which is a re-make of an old RISC OS game called Foray that in itself took a lot of inspiration from a BBC/Acorn Electron game called Starship Command. I spent many hours playing this game and it's one of my fondest gaming memories. Single-player, you fly around shooting enemies in waves. One hit kills on them, you have a shield bar, however the enemies shoot so quickly that if you remain still in a shot of their bullets you tend to die in around a second. Unfortunately I long ago lost the original, which is where my wish to remake it originally came from. And I succeeded, sort of. Things were going great, I had ~75% of the game in place and then the deadline approached and I rushed the next 15% and introduced a LOT of bugs that effectively stalled development. I handed in a game that was near enough completion to get high marks, but it was also bugridden as a result of that rush at the end.
What does this have to do with now? Well, I want to make it clear that I won't make that sort of mistake with these games. If I start introducing bugs like that I'll slow down. My plan is to make stable, fun games on a semi-regular basis, not unstable, broken games on a strict timetable.

What this leaves me with is that I won't set an exact time for each game. I also want to put more time into some of the ideas than has been done by some developers (that's not to say their games aren't good, but you can see where corners were cut to fit deadlines). I'll also be using OpenTK and C# instead of some of the more rapid development tools available. The reason for this is simply that I like the additional "wiggle room" that using a base language gives you over something like QuestViewer. Audiosurf is a good example of this. Fantastic game, but all it's bad points ultimately point to it being developed in Quest3D.

So my timetable is this: Average a game once a month. Sometimes it might be two months between releases, sometimes it might be 2 weeks. Updates will primarily be from here, hosted on DropBox, because it's easy and free. ;o)

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