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How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

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Re: How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

#31

Post by lomnakkus »

rocky1138 wrote: post #13
seanp2k2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep; most likely you don't have Romero and Carmack on your team, who can make a great engine and a fun-to-play game, and even they switched to making engines to power multiple games (id Tech engines). Unity and things like it are great if you're serious about actually making a game and bringing it to market. Engines might be fun, but that's not what sells games and gets them into the hands of people who would enjoy t…

Even the tools and engines built by them took years to make. In fact, for a good chunk of the development of Quake, everyone was waiting for Carmack and Abrash to finish the engine.

Yeah, most good things take years to make. #universal-law

Re: How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

#33

Post by throwaway_exer »

krapp wrote: post #26
Namrog84 wrote: post #3

I recently released my first real attempt at a small game beyond the asteroids clone scopd. And what I feel like I could do in 2 weeks. Took a full about a year. Several month breaks and many things just being tremendously more time consuming than projected. Fully appreciate and understand this. Part time game making is difficult especially for new game devs.

It took me about a year to teach myself how to clone Space Invaders. Of course, on the way, I taught myself how to deal with spritesheets in SDL, move semantics in SDL objects, built a rudimentary entity-component framework, and basically had to learn how to do everything that SDL doesn't do for you. I'm still working on my January Game a Month project, and a lot of that time has been eaten up just getting the camera…

> I've deleted more code than I've written

sideways glance icon

Re: How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

#35

Post by Ace17 »

mcculley wrote: post #18
veddox wrote: post #2

Thank you for sharing this! > Don't build an engine instead of a game Only too true... That's a trap I always fall into. I guess programmers are so hard-wired to abstracting problems they that need solving they end up doing a lot of abstracting and very little solving. (Compulsory xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/974/ )

It's an easy trap to fall into. Refactoring something that works into a more elegant abstraction is intellectually satisfying work. One need not worry about ill-defined external requirements and is limited only by one's own creativity and capability. Adding value beneficial and perceptible to a user often requires frustrating interaction with people or organizations who don't even know what they want, much less how t…

Some "engine" vs "gameplay" abstraction is needed though. It's not about re-use, it's about a strategic separation of concerns allowing you to iterate more quickly over your gameplay. You don't want to deal with linear algebra or image format loaders when you're modifying the way your enemy monsters behave.

Re: How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

#36

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

veddox wrote: post #2

Thank you for sharing this! > Don't build an engine instead of a game Only too true... That's a trap I always fall into. I guess programmers are so hard-wired to abstracting problems they that need solving they end up doing a lot of abstracting and very little solving. (Compulsory xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/974/ )

I find myself constitutionally unable to build anything that isn't an engine at this point.

When I was young and inexperienced I could crank out Crap That Works(TM) in seemingly no time at all. At this point I know how to write good code and crap code is just too painful to look at ever.

So I write good code, and I don't attend 48 hour hackathons.

Re: How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

#37

Post by joeyspacerocks »

mapmap wrote: post #28
joeyspacerocks wrote: post #22

Hi - author of the post here. Just a quick note - don't believe a word of this. I wrote it in 2013 and am now 3 years into the dev of the next game. It's lies, all lies :) actually it's probably solid advice - the hard bit turns out to be following it. The missing piece of advice turned out to be - "stay disciplined" ...

Thank you for this. Could you go into more detail on your time slicing strategy? I'd love to learn how to effectively do knowledge work in short chunks with frequent interruptions.

I generally try and have tasks of different types available for different moods (eg bug fixes, graphics work, marketing, etc). It's important for me to keep the momentum going though and even finishing a small thing is better than nothing.

Some things just require more time/thought though, so sometimes I have to shelve things and tackle them when I have more time.

Sometimes all I get done in 30 minutes is to make a decision about how to do something - this is still progress and feeds into the next spot.

Re: How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

#38

Post by shubhamjain »

I made my 'stupid' game - "Penguin Walk"[1] an year back over a period of three months. Like the author, there were periods of "I don't feel like working on it" but in the end, I pushed myself to finish it. Huge chunk of my time was wasted in resolving timing errors as I built it from scratch which could have been a better had I used a Game Engine.

[1]: http://shubhamjain.github.io/penguin-walk/

Re: How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

#39

Post by loup-vaillant »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #25
Tempest1981 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or for hardware projects, getting an LED to blink can result in great joy...

When writing compilers/interpreters, even good ol' "hello world" does it for me at some point(s...) in the development cycle :)

My last mission (paid day job) involved writing a scripting engine (for a testing framework for programmable logic controllers). I'm no expert in language implementation, and it took much, much more time than expected (oops).

My first hello world involved handling arbitrary primitives. This one just printed "Hello, world!\n" without any parameter. Took me 2 months I believe.

My second hello world came a couple weeks (days?) after that. I had string literals, and a `print` primitive that could print any string. Yahoo!

I had to tackle choice and iteration at some point. They were completed 4 months into the project. Finally, user defined functions. I completed them 1 week before we shipped…

Cool, I now have 3 days to implement 2 critical features! (filtering with user-defined predicates, and non-blocking wait). Good thing I could do anything, now that I had user-defined functions.

Re: How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years (2013)

#40

Post by loup-vaillant »

shubhamjain wrote: post #38

I made my 'stupid' game - "Penguin Walk"[1] an year back over a period of three months. Like the author, there were periods of "I don't feel like working on it" but in the end, I pushed myself to finish it. Huge chunk of my time was wasted in resolving timing errors as I built it from scratch which could have been a better had I used a Game Engine. [1]: http://shubhamjain.github.io/penguin-walk/

Ghaah, this fells like Flappy Bird! It's fair, but in a brutally unforgiving way.

Couldn't resist a couple minutes of playing. Good job.

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