Strict(er) Game Development : A game in 70 hours.

2011-11-28 2:36 PM

Recently I’ve come into a situation where I have a bit of time before college starts up again for me in January 2012.

I’ve decided to take advantage of the time and study up on both the more difficult topics I will be taking at school and personal projects.

One of these projects is to make a ultra cut down version of a game I’ve been designing on and off for about 2 years. I will be developing in Flash using the Flixel library.

The goal is to make a full game in 70 working hours or less. This estimate includes everything from design through execution. This is to test my ability to manage my time and project scope.

I’m using the time tracking program Grindstone to track how I spend my development time. Once I’m done I’ll break down how I allocated my time on each aspect of the game.

I guess you define the genre a top-down action-RPG. I’m 12 hours into the game and have the basic NPC AI working, weapons ingame, and a basic level. I’m very happy with how the code is working out right now. I’ve managed to avoid the temptation to bloat the classes in order to cover all possibilities. Every chance I get to simplify my code I take. As a result so far implementing the gameplay elements has been relatively easy compared to past projects.

I’m now at a point where the basic mechanics are in game. I need to step away from the computer and start working on hammering out the game design. I estimate it will take 2-4 hours to get a decent plan going.

My experience with Flixel and Actionscript3 is really helping this time around. I spent a fair amount of time making a NPC system that uses baked rotations and still animates so that I can avoid the very large performance penalties of drawing a rotated sprite.

Now that the more mundane task of setting up the foundation for the game is complete I’m very excited to work on implementing the gameplay systems.

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