Welcome back!
I love these challenges. Creating a game (or anything else, for that matter) in under a specific, and usually rather limited, amount of time, is the kind of experience that proves who is a hardcore developer and who isn't. By forcing yourself to work under severe time costraints demands the kind of discipline, pragmatism and openmindedness that many experienced developers should practice once in a while. The people who is able to get away with a usable product at the end of a limited time are usually the ones that, when working in an actual project, lead the way for the rest to actually deliver a finished and successful product, even if it's not as polished as you would've liked.
These are the people who actually ship products, often in budget and in time. The rest are the architecture astronauts.
Having been an architecture astronaut myself more times than I like to admit (and having worked with some hardcore ones too), I've realized how important it is to stay sharp, to be practical, and to work not towards creating some perfect but ultimately impossible piece of art that never gets done, but towards creating an actual product, imperfect as it may be.
Creating a game (or any product for that matter) in a ridiculously short time is fun, but most importantly, it lets realize how little time you actually need to build stuff. When you don't have time to try many different architectures, or the best way to actually implement that so that the High Gods of Game Code are pleased, you take short cuts. You make compromises. You write ugly code that gets the job done. And most importantly, you make actual progress, fast.
So why am I telling you about this? Because I've decided to take one of these challenges myself, for the sake of my own self-advancement, professional growth and actualization.
The point is to code a game, in a week. My One Week Game Project is about building a 3d game from scratch, assuming (here's the catch) that I already have the resources and low-level engine I need, which in my case will be the low-level engine from the Zombie Engine and the Nebula Device. And the point of it is not to create a game that I can sell anybody, but to see what I can do in such a short time span. I've chosen a classic Shoot'em-up type of game but with 3D graphics that should be fun to code and has no relevant design decisions because it is such an established format.
And then I'll come back here and write about the results and what I've learned from the experience. And depending on the results, I may even release the game, or create a demo video for it.
I hope to tell you about this soon enough, otherwise it'll mean I failed. But I'm anthusiastic about the idea. And it's just a week anyway. The ball starts rolling on monday.
References:
- Ludum Dare: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/
- How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days:
Tips and Tricks from 4 Grad Students Who Made Over 50 Games in 1 Semester - Someone else who tried to do the same thing this year: http://oneweek.ludoko.com/
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