The aim is to make a playable game by the 1st of February, 2021.
You can participate by making your own game, or by helping other people with theirs. You can contribute music, art and other assets for people to use, see if someone needs something in particular, or help with design, coding and playtesting.
Use this thread to offer and ask for help!
If you’re making a game you might want to start your own thread (tag it [BD21]) in King of Development, but it’s also fine to use this thread for discussion. And of course it’s fine to post in the axe if you’d prefer.
There’s no theme and no rules! You can make a whole game from scratch, finish an existing project, or start something you expect to take longer. It doesn’t even have to be a game. Use this as an excuse to make something!
Please join, and have fun making!
(And be sure to tell us how your project is going, even if you are just thinking about things or haven’t decided what to do)
I poked at Ren’py for a while and I had it in my head that it was more text-adventure-like - specifically, that it naturally let you travel between rooms, talk to people, examine objects etc. Now realizing two things:
Visual novels are definitely closer to novels than they are games
Danganronpa is a weird exception to this
I’m not sure how much Python I am willing to learn to design a game that’s more text-adventurey so I’ll have to do some research into whether or not this is the best option for what I want to do.
Oh, and my idea is to take a copyright-free noise set and basically make a timed adventure game/visual novel based on it. I want it to be psychedelic and want to introduce characters based on how the music sounds at certain points. I think it is probably too ambitious but we’ll see.
I’m making an eat-dots game. I have pretty much the whole game’s design floating around in my head. Making it’s gonna be its own beast, but it’s a simple genre that I know I can tackle.
Construct 3 rules! It’s real simple and quick and I personally didn’t find it limiting at all when I prototyped a shoot 'em up. But yeah you’ll probably have to buy the license to do anything, really. It’s pretty cheap though
That’s true. Ren’Py let’s you do a point and click adventure easily too though, if you would rather go that route. I mean having a character walk around would be difficult but what I mean is clickable things in the environment
Edit: reading your post again it seems you already know all that so never mind
this inspired me to pick up my puzzle game again! there were some very complicated corner cases i needed to solve that i had been procrastinating. took a couple hours to plan the algorithm for it, 4 hours to implement, and maybe another 2 of debugging and cleaning it up and making it perform better. very on-brand for me, since these were truly corner cases i could have solved in a much simpler way and i’m not even sure i can make that many compelling puzzles out of it. but i was very stuck/on attached to this idea on how to resolve it, so!
behold: an infinitely repeating room where our ghost protagonist pushes an infinite number of shapes upward (they’re very strong!)
Also solved a performance issue today that was related to logging, lol.
The game is in Lua so I was running my own logging – I make the log function a no-op when I turn the logging off but it was still doing a string dump of a giant object (in a loop no less) before I was passing it to the logging function, and that was obviously very expensive. Now the dump function respects the logging level, and no more performance issue when you push 300+ boxes.
I don’t know what to make, and I don’t know what to make it with!
I got back into programming 2 months ago after having not programmed for several years. In Novemeber I worked mainly with Love2D which was a good re-introduction as it was similiar (and uses) SDL2 which I’d used before. It’s pretty easy to use, it provides quite a lot of functionality and basic primitives and it works on both PC and Android.
It’s interpreted so to test stuff out on the phone I could just upload files rather than having to wait to compile, and the files are small so quick to transfer. I think that made a big difference in being able to test control schemes on the actual phone.
I also briefly tried Unreal Engine and Android Studio at that point. My computer struggles a bit with Unreal and there’s something of a learning curve to get used to the editor. I find 3D difficult because it seems harder to make assets algorithmically. Learning to make 3D models seems like it could take ages.
For the last few weeks i have been making greetings cards in javascript. It’s nice to be able to make things which everyone can (hopefully) see with a web browser, but it seems hard to make smooth animation.
Performance issues always really bother me when i make things, I’ve been trying not to get hung up on things like that, as in the past it has stopped me getting on with stuff. But my default approach to programming something on a new platform is to make a simple object and then see how many of them i can make before it starts slowing down (and then generally being disappointed that i can’t make more).
Im gonna make an rpg maker game, since that’s the only game engine i have any experience in! I want to make dnd adventure module sized games instead of either a full epic campaign or a weird/horror visual novel thing (no shade to those kinds of games at all but i feel like that describes most well-known rpg maker games). Like, what if my whole game was just a single town/dungeon episode of a dragon quest game in length and scope? I think that’s both a reasonable boundary for my first game, and also something i just want to see more of.
I will mostly be using the default assets for rpg maker vx ace, though i might import some assets from older versions and stock sfx/music. Im not a talented sprite artist, but there’s a simple sprite/face graphic generator that comes with vx ace and i feel ok doing minor edits to those in ms paint.
I also want to avoid using too many scripts for this game, i want to see what i can achieve with the limits of vanilla rpg maker first.
I don’t really know how else to get started other than just making some maps and screwing around, if anyone who’s ever made a small game has basic organizational advice i’m happy to take it! Like i have a notepad doc with some ideas for the story/setting and a bunch of doodles/math scribbles in my sketch pad and that’s about it lol.
I think that’s a good start! In my experience it’s very good to have high level goals, even if you don’t follow them to a T. That way when you have a design question you at least have some metric to judge it by. You don’t need to agonize over these goals; their purpose is to define scope and help make decisions for things you’re unsure about. They don’t have to be perfect.
Also be adaptive; I often find that there’s something else interesting in whatever small piece I just made that I didn’t necessarily intend. Don’t be afraid to adapt your goals to accentuate that interesting piece.
Make sure that your game is “playable” at nearly all points of development. Don’t work on something too long without understanding its affect on the game or how it fits into the big picture. You might end up wasting your time on an inconsequential part of the game.
Making small tools that help you test each piece is a good way to keep things “playable” at all points e.g. start directly in a battle with the stats and equipment you’d expect to have by that point. It’s hard to judge things when they’re theoretical, so get them playable so you can test and iterate on them. Reduce tedium and busy work in your play testing cycle so you get feedback a lot faster and can iterate more efficiently.
If there’s a part of the game that takes a lot of manual work, make sure you enjoy that manual work! Otherwise you’ll probably get discouraged and won’t finish it.
e.g if you’re making a puzzle game, you should probably enjoy making puzzles. If you don’t, then you either need to come up with a new idea, or tweak your design to minimize that work (can you generate your puzzles procedurally rather than by hand?)
You don’t have to have a passion for all parts of game design, but you do need a passion for SOME parts, otherwise it’s going to be very hard to motivate yourself. If you have that core to motivate you, the tough or tricky parts will feel a lot more approachable. And if you have enough motivation to get yourself through the whole process once, then the tough parts won’t be as overwhelming on your next project.
I’ve been doing a lot learning in Godot mostly making tools but have been hankering to try a proper little game. I’m gonna try this as well.
edit: I do know how to pull off a few hacky tricks in Godot. If anybody else works with it it might be interesting share projects. Project portability is pretty good.
