Many Happymakers recently defended their graduate theses in the USC Interactive Media Division. I was among them. Click to hear a discussion of Narrative Listening, the new adaptive narrative system hiding inside The Moonlighters.
2012/04/30
2011/07/19
A 2-Minute Postmortem of a Game Made in 2 Hours
In the midst of a large project – my graduate thesis game – I decided on a Saturday morning that it might be enlightening to take a brief step back and review some of my prior work. However, I wanted to mitigate the amount of time spent in this retrospective, so as to get back to my passion project quickly.
So I decided to look at the game I have made most quickly – Hello World Double Jumper – made in 2 hours and thusly named because I was working so fast, I neglected to take the “Hello World” print statement out of the template I use. Hello World Double Jumper is a 2-player competitive game in which the goal is simple: jump on your opponent’s head more than she jumps on yours, and collect as much jump power as you can while doing it.
“It would be silly,” I then thought, “to spend more time reviewing the game than I spent making it.” And so, I came to what you will hopefully now read…
Hello World Double Jumper:
A 2-Minute Postmortem of a Game Made in 2 Hours
- I spent 45 minutes just figuring out the idea, and was left with just 75 to make it. I just sat there, thinking “That would be cool! …No! Scope down! Oh, that would be cool! No, scope down!” It worked, but it was painful to cut as I was brainstorming.
- Make Reusable Code: I probably saved 30 minutes by having a template for my Flixel project. But I could have iterated even more had I used movement code from an older project.
- Playtest! I actually finished with 15 minutes for playtesting, and it made a huge difference in the final product. Remember to playtest!!
- Screen Scale is HUGE: I spent a while trying to make the characters just the right size on screen. In the first iteration of the game they were far too big. The game gained a ton of verticality when I scaled them down.
- People will at first be far worse at your game than you are, but quickly, you will see some players become better than you. I saw many of my friends surpass my skill at the game, and I learned a lot about what I had created by watching the strategies that THEY…
Time’s Up.