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GraysonEvans

"A Game A Week"

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I have noticed quite a few of us on here have been trying Rami Ismail's " A Game A Week" Challenge.

 

So why not share what you have learned in here?

 

I have been doing it again recently but not as publicly,I want to have less public meltdowns. But it's been really helpful for me to just have a basic goal to work towards when I am kinda lost when I am working on a game. Making a "polished" product is super hard and scary, especially if you aren't doing it full time. I work two jobs and am barely scrapping by (I am on the edge of homeless every month).

 

 

So i dunno.

 

Sup?

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I'm not doing game a week (though I do try (and fail) to do a jam a month if I can) but I saw Adriel Wallick (@msminotaur) give a talk on her weekly games at a local indie meetup a little while back. It's not quite the same talk, but she presented at GDC Europe speaking about her experience, and also posted about it on gamasutra. A lot of it is kinda unsurprising (scope down, iterate early) but it's interesting to see what she got done each week. In the talk I saw she ran through all of them in succession and spoke about each for ~30 seconds, which was neat but unfortunately I don't think was recorded.

 

also all 52(ish?) of her games are here : http://www.msminotaur.com/

 

Good luck making a thing every week! I don't think I'd be able to stick with it and also make meaningful progress on other projects, but it's a cool idea.

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I am in the early stages of it, on week 5 now. I have a tumblr (linked in my signature below) where I post about what I've done each week and what I think of it. I've had some poor success in 2 of the weeks and didn't have a playable build. One time was very very much undone and the other was just that I had a bunch of pieces I didn't manage to stitch together in time. I also made a relatively simple twine game where I played with using css styling in it and then I also made a simple android rhythm game. I'm now on a new interactive fiction game where I'm planning to use a Unity plug in for it, so it can be a more graphical thing but still pretty simple and streamlined to get done.

 

I'm doing it pretty publicly, hence the tumblr and tweeting about it. I feel like a presence obligates me to deliver stuff to a faceless crowd. And it gets notice, I've gotten retweets on pixel art I'm making for this week and my android rhythm game did get downloads. Those are tiny motivations that also hint at the fact that a full release will definitely get some notice, because even these tiny little things get a bit.

 

Things I've learned? I've found that scope obviously matters as said above. But even aside from that, just make sure you do something on it early and often. Once I start working I continue to work out of inertia, but if I don't start working I put it off too easily. Also make sure the thing you start working on is important. I fiddled around in one week with a system and spent a disproportionate length on it even though it didn't matter that much in the grand scheme and also contributed to not finishing any kind of build by the end. Focus on presenting something to the player more than back end mechanical systems, because the player needs a thing in front of them otherwise a good system wont do much. (**This might be a particularly personal thing? Where I tend towards the system and mechanics too much, while someone else might focus on presentation too much. Obviously both matter but what I have found is that it's best to have a visual presentation first and the coding the details**)

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 Focus on presenting something to the player more than back end mechanical systems, because the player needs a thing in front of them otherwise a good system wont do much. (**This might be a particularly personal thing? Where I tend towards the system and mechanics too much, while someone else might focus on presentation too much. Obviously both matter but what I have found is that it's best to have a visual presentation first and the coding the details**)

 

I'm not doing the game a week thing, but this is totally what I've learned about making games quickly. I feel like I have two types of projects now: the ones where I have time to just fiddle around and endlessly tune mechanics until I get something neat; and the jam-games where I just need to put enough art assets up to make it look like a legitimate screen-shot and then figure out how to make some of it move.

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This is cool. I'm going to attempt doing this during this year. That talk really sold me on it!

My first game I'm currently working on will be a board game and I'm ridiculously excited about it.

 

Now I just need to find a place to host all the games. 

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This is cool. I'm going to attempt doing this during this year. That talk really sold me on it!

My first game I'm currently working on will be a board game and I'm ridiculously excited about it.

 

Now I just need to find a place to host all the games. 

 

Assuming that you will also be making computer-games, itch.io and Gamejolt are free. Itch.io has payment options (but I get the impression that the EU just fucked up somehow) while Gamejolt has ad-revenue. Itch.io allows you to follow developers in a feed while Gamejolt allows you to follow games individually and has support for public comments. I put my games on both.

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GameJolt for general stuff is good.

Itch.io is too but has a limit on the number of games you can upload. (you can request to have a higher limit but I'm not sure what the criteria for allowing that is)

Philome.la can host twine games.

If it's a Unity game you could upload a webplayer version to dropbox and I've heard that can be played in browser.

Also you could make any standalone, upload it to Dropbox/Google Drive then provide a direct link for people to download it from.

 

 

EDIT: Clyde beat me to it, but to clarify about the EU screwing things, check out recent posts on the business of video (space) games thread.

The short answer is, if you put your games down as free but give people the option to tip you then you avoid a bunch of nonsense.

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Thanks guys!

 

Will probably end up being a weird mix of these as I plan on making both board and computer games.

Probably Dropbox for the boardgames combined with itchio/Jolt for the computer stuff and link to it all from a tumblr or something :P

 

As for the new EU VAT rules, yeah they're causing a pretty big headache for some people I know. I'll definitely check into the business thread. Thanks for the heads up!

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Browser only games are inherently free but have a donate button. It's functionally similar to pay what you want but without prompting the user to suggest they donate money. You could have a download option alongside a browser based game though, I think.

 

Also a tumblr is a good way to organise them. I'm doing that, currently a bit overdue for writing last week's post cause I'm working on this weeks game...

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I am unfortunately going to miss my first deadline. Haven't been managing the time I've had very well at all unfortunately, and am now sitting here on Day 6 with too much left to do.

Won't give up on the challenge though. Will finish this game up and start directly on the next one which I've started to figure out in my head. Hopefully I will be able to put both up on the tumblr next Thursday, finished and playtested.

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