How I Built an RPG In A Week From Scratch With No Budget
gamedev.net
gamedev.net
Also, I can't imagine how anyone with a full-time day job (40 hours, nothing spectacular) can even manage 4 hours of free time. I don't think I have 4 hours a day.
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
PyWeek is a week long game programming competition for Python developers, and Ludum Dare is all about 48 hour mostly from scratch video game development. Both are just for fun, but the competitive setup makes for good motivation to accomplish something in a short amount of time. It's lots of fun.
Ah, Role Playing Game. I guess either would have been interesting.
BATFE used to be part of the Treasury Department (because those items were regulated by tax law) but there have been attempts to move them to the Justice Dept; I don't know if any succeeded.
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 challenge to the game. If those features were going to stay 'gone,' the game needed another design pass to re-balance it and improve the modified gameplay. In other words, cutting features introduced an additional cost to the development of the game. This made me wonder how many retail games were released in a terrible state because the development team didn't have time to re-visit the game design after features were cut to meet schedule.
One barrier for me is that the cleanness of the code arguably doesn't matter in a project like this, so the time feels wasted. But, in reality, I'm creating sample code, that I do come back to later, to see how I did things. Like a personal text book. When the code is ugly and hard to follow, it is less useful as sample code. Thinking of it as sample code removes that barrier (that cleanness doesn't matter).
I've started to spend time cleaning up code, and uncluttering it, as I go - but I find it takes an extraordinary amount of time...
This was more RPG mechanic rather than RPG. I still find that interesting, though, as the system I used to make RPGs in high school - RM2K, which is still out there - had the mechanics prebuilt and let you focus on detail. This game seemed to be quite the opposite.
Anyone willing to venture a guess how long given the author only documented productive hours?
If he could permit himself to start over several times, I can too.
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...)
Poorly-defined, meaning: one man's fun is another man's boredom, it's hard to pin down what exactly "fun" is. Thankfully, though, there are many good educated guesses, so we can't act like "fun" is impossible to define.
He didn't log the time she spent in the shower, but that's when he says some of his best ideas hit him. Personally, I could spend 2 or more hours thinking for every hour of work I do.
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.