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

#1

Post by joeyspacerocks » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 12:42 PM UTC

How to write a 48-hour game in just 2 years
pixelated.postagon.com

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

#2

Post by yohann305 » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:24 PM UTC

For a moment I read the title wrong as the following and got super excited: "How to make a 2-year game in 48 hours!" :)

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

#3

Post by binarymax » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:27 PM UTC

Congratulations on shipping! We may be distant cousins, because aside from anything that takes longer than a weekend, I can't ship a side project for the life of me.

This will hopefully change soon however, as I have been diligently coding a game spending an hour or two almost every morning since September 1st - and it is very very close to completion, and aside from a couple features is completely playable now.

So thank you for the inspiration. I hope to soon join you in the ranks of Enterprise developers who managed to ship a non-trivial piece of entertainment...and then on to the next adventure.

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

#4

Post by babuskov » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:36 PM UTC

Do you have any stats on the downloads or user engagement? I just released my game two days ago, and here are the live stats:

http://slagalica.tv/drones.php

Can you compare yours to this? Am I doing any good?

Thanks.

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

#5

Post by WesleyJohnson » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:37 PM UTC

I'm guilty of nearly everything you listed at the end - on a single project. I've been working on a WWF/Scrabble type game (with some unique gameplay elements) since early 2012 and it continually gets picked up and put down again. I've ended up building a component-based ui engine behind it, keep adding features, try to pick it up without clear goals or tasks in mind and am probably trying to tackle far more than I should be on my first game.

Thanks for the article and inspiration; it's making me take a step back and re-evaluate my approach a little bit. Congrats on shipping!

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

#6

Post by dspillett » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:42 PM UTC

> developing your game turns out to be the easy bit. Getting people to buy it ... well that's a whole different kettle of ball games

Getting your story listed on the front page of a site like HN can't hurt!

Less flippantly though: this is a significant problem a lot of people ignore or sometimes simply don't believe. "If you build it they will come" doesn't work if "they" don't actually exist, or you don't get news to them that you have actually built it, or they can't see your's because of the tens or hundreds of similar (or at least not obviously dissimilar: your app might have a key feature the other don't but that is the same problem: getting that message to your audience) apps/games listed on the relevant store.

If you intend to sell something (these are moot points for many personal projects of course, as the audience initially might just be yourself for the sake of learning/practising):

1. Know your audience

2. Make sure your audience actually exists in appropriate scale and isn't already over-served by existing projects

3. Find a way of letting your potential audience know that you exist, preferably a non-spamy way

Points 1 and 2 at least need to be part of your design before you get far into coding otherwise you might spend time on something no one wants

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

#7

Post by josephlord » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:44 PM UTC

If you register the app in iTunesconnect then you have 6 months to submit a binary. That can help focus the mind and get it shipped rather than add one extra feature.

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

#8

Post by gagege » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:49 PM UTC

yohann305 wrote: post #2

For a moment I read the title wrong as the following and got super excited: "How to make a 2-year game in 48 hours!" :)

Time travel.

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

#9

Post by joeyspacerocks » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:49 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #6

> developing your game turns out to be the easy bit. Getting people to buy it ... well that's a whole different kettle of ball games Getting your story listed on the front page of a site like HN can't hurt! Less flippantly though: this is a significant problem a lot of people ignore or sometimes simply don't believe. "If you build it they will come" doesn't work if "they" don't actually exist, or you don't get news t…

Absolutely agree.

As a developer you need to have frank talk with yourself both before and during development to figure out exactly what the motivation is. Are you writing a game to sell? Or are you writing a game for the fun of writing a game?

In an ideal world the two would be compatible, but ...

For me, well, I'm doing this for fun first, money second. As is obvious from my choice to make an Asteroids clone - highly unlikely that's going mass-market.

So why isn't it free? On the off-chance that some money can be made and I can free myself to do something I enjoy full-time. Just like everyone else I can dream ...

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

#10

Post by Tloewald » Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 1:53 PM UTC

2y sounds about right. And your advice about avoiding featuritis is golden (and applies even to fulltime development).

I wrote a game in six weeks while my twins were still needing feeding at midnight and 4am (so I took those shifts and ended up using the 3-4h interlude to play games until I got bored of that, and then write my own). The game was intended for iPhone (but the tools didn't exist, so I worked speculatively.) When the toolchain became available it took me two years of spare time to rebuild the game for iPhone.

Oh, in case anyone's interested -- http://mantagame.com/