41–50 of 53 posts
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I feel like I have that incurable tendency to build stuff, but don't have time to use it. In fact, I'm extremely frustrated with my current job because I can't feed the need. How do others do it?
this article shows that you dont need a lot of time to build cool stuff
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I agree. Cuts like that are hard, but doing them honestly and really reevaluating what's necessary at least one per dev cycle is really critical. It reminded me of Spolsky talking about how one of the best things they did on Excel 5 was being forced to cut tons of features: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html point 13
Not sure if you sure his aftermath at the bottom (although I do agree that cutting things can be the best approach): Lesson 9: Cutting features isn't always free Some of the last-minute changes to Hackenslash really blew the game balance out of whack. The inability of monsters to cast spells, and the lack of need to for the player to 'conserve resources' as he pushes deeper into the dungeon trivialized some of the ch…
If anyone wants to know what we look for in YC applications, this is it.
This is really good to know - one tends to brush over the little accomplishments in life. With regard to the 7 day RPG article, I want to add that participating in the 48h game programming competition was an extreme amount of fun. I thought that it didn't exist anymore, but just found that there was another one in December: http://www.ludumdare.com/
Pyweek (make a game in Python in a week) : http://www.pyweek.org
TIGSource compos (make a game in about a month, game-makers are allowed so you might think this is lame): http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?board=9.0
GameDev.net contests: http://www.gamedev.net/community/contest/
Retro remakes (currently recovering from a cracking attack): http://www.remakes.org/
"Gamma" series of compos : http://www.kokoromi.org/gamma/
Unfortunately they are all inactive at the moment.
Also there are "Game Jams" which occur in-person and usually aren't a proper competition, just an attempt at getting together and making cool games.
Examples: TIGJam, Indie Game Jam (deceased), OLPC Game Jam
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I think the one I've heard goes, the artist is imagining the sculpture beneath that lump of marble, and they explain the actual creation of it as just removing everything else that's not the sculpture.
I saw David in Florence, and I was amazed to see that they also had on display the prototypes for David. There were 3 or 4 or so. From memory, they were all massive blocks of marble, though some just had an arm or leg sticking out. I guess these are called "studies" or drafts. A bit more heavy-weight than a study for a painting. If he could permit himself to start over several times, I can too.
Penny Arcade has a subforum wherein from time to time, a battle of sorts takes place. Players are matched up one-on-one and given a week or so to produce SOMETHING that depicts them beating their opponent. Most folk draw something, some wrote and recorded songs, some wrote stories. I wrote a game.
For the first round, I was able to adapt a work in progress (a shooter where you control the location of the ship with WASD and the direction of your shots with your mouse). For the second round, I started from scratch and wrote the above beat 'em up.
(The graphics largely come from River City Ransom, as do all kinds of touches like the sounds people make as you beat 'em up. The characters are altered to represent various forumers avatars, and the heroes was mine - I use the rat-flail from VG Cats as my avatar.)
All in all, I was able to get it done in a single week after a regular 8-hour job coding. And I had a BLAST.
I'd add music and script/writing to that as well. Sure, anyone can throw together some beats and chords, and anyone can put words on a page. But doing it well is a lot harder than it looks.
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this article shows that you dont need a lot of time to build cool stuff
40 manhours is HUGE if you have a day job.
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I saw David in Florence, and I was amazed to see that they also had on display the prototypes for David. There were 3 or 4 or so. From memory, they were all massive blocks of marble, though some just had an arm or leg sticking out. I guess these are called "studies" or drafts. A bit more heavy-weight than a study for a painting. If he could permit himself to start over several times, I can too.
If you read about small-scale game development, this is a common practice. Danc ( http://www.lostgarden.com/ ) talks a lot about rapid prototyping. Since games have a clear but poorly-defined goal (they have to be "fun"), it's easy to make a limited product around a proposed method of finding that fun, and then either going along with it or throwing it out if it doesn't seem promising. Thus, you can (and probably wil…
Is it possible to have a "clear but poorly-defined goal", or are you having a joke? "Fun" is an emergent property - recognizable, measurable but the creation isn't formalizable (though BTW your link mentioned something about game grammars...)
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I feel like I have that incurable tendency to build stuff, but don't have time to use it. In fact, I'm extremely frustrated with my current job because I can't feed the need. How do others do it?
Joshua Schachter might be a useful example. He built Delicious while working on Wall Street. One of his most useful tricks was to build something every day, however small. I suspect that keeps your brain working in much the same way that running every day keeps your metabolism high.