{"id":2650,"date":"2012-12-26T18:14:38","date_gmt":"2012-12-26T08:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=2650"},"modified":"2012-12-26T18:14:38","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T08:14:38","slug":"a-game-before-the-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2012\/12\/26\/a-game-before-the-new-year\/","title":{"rendered":"A game before the new year"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’m supposed to be completing a new game before the new year comes in.\u00a0 Including today, that’s seven days.<\/p>\n

In the past, my approach to “game in a week” projects has usually been:<\/p>\n

Days 1,2:\u00a0<\/strong> Brainstorm ideas<\/p>\n

Day 3:<\/strong> Pick a project to make, set up a repository, get an empty “game” shell set up.<\/p>\n

Days 4,5:\u00a0<\/strong> Do small amounts of programming in the evenings.<\/p>\n

Days 6,7:<\/strong> Heavy programming (6 to 12 hours per day) to finish everything off.\u00a0 (Optional, change mind about the project to make and start over from scratch around lunchtime on day 7)<\/p>\n

This time, of course, Day 1 was Christmas.\u00a0 So I haven’t actually done a whole lot of brainstorming yet.\u00a0 In fact, the only ideas I’ve had so far are three projects that I’ve wanted to do for a long time anyway;\u00a0 one being a remake of a puzzle game I designed for a former employer (which therefore makes it ethically dubious to create a free version of it), and a remake of Red Planet, an old location-based game which I loved, and which isn’t available any more.\u00a0 Even on Wikipedia and YouTube, so I can’t even provide a link to it any more.\u00a0 But choosing a game that’s already been designed before the week even started seems like a bit of a cheat.\u00a0 And I’ve wanted to make my own version of The Sentinel, forever.\u00a0 That’s another game for which there’s no good version available right now.<\/p>\n

But I always feel bad when I spend time remaking games which already exist.\u00a0 Feels like wasted time that I could have spent creating something new.\u00a0 So I don’t know.\u00a0 I almost certainly won’t work on any of those games I mentioned above.\u00a0 Problem is that I don’t really have any other ideas just now.\u00a0 Maybe after a day of brainstorming.<\/p>\n

The other tricky thing is that I’m away from home at the moment, and don’t have access to my usual method of picking a randomized topic.\u00a0 So I’m mostly left to my own devices in order to pick a game to make.<\/p>\n

Here are the criteria I’m trying to meet:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Won’t require all my time to program.\u00a0 (Ideally, I’d like to aim for a programming time of about 12 hours).\u00a0\u00a0 This pretty much kills the ‘Red Planet remake’ idea entirely, which would really require networking + server.\u00a0 A proper basic job on that would probably take about two weeks full-time;\u00a0 not one week part-time.<\/li>\n
  2. Won’t require any GUI at all.\u00a0 Or as little as possible.\u00a0 MT2 requires lots of GUI, I don’t want to be coding more GUI on this project which is supposed to be a break from MT2.\u00a0 ;)<\/li>\n
  3. I’d really like to use some of the procedural mesh generation systems from MT2 in some way, so that the work I do on the break project will benefit MT2 as well.<\/li>\n
  4. If I could use the new Bullet physics systems that I put together yesterday, that’d be a very nice bonus.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    So I’m supposed to be completing a new game before the new year comes in.\u00a0 Including today, that’s seven days. In the past, my approach to “game in a week” projects has usually been: Days 1,2:\u00a0 Brainstorm ideas Day 3: Pick a project to make, set up a repository, get an empty “game” shell set…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-GK","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2650"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}