I’ll start this of by first briefly explaining what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I am currently in the process of making and releasing my first commercial game. I started of by first coming up with an idea for a game and then getting to work on building the first prototype that I can show to people. Building the prototype dragged on for 5 weeks with no end in sight and I started to get worried. If it’s taking me this long to just build a prototype how long will it take me to make the entire game.
With this I started thinking. How can I find a game idea that I can make in a reasonable amount of time and that people will want to play and give me money for. While pondering this question I stumbled on an old GDC talk about building a game a week for an entire semester. This got me thinking if I just made a bunch of games in a week and from those chose the idea that I got the farthest with and that got the most promising feedback surely I will find the best game to make for me right now.
And now we’re here. I wasn’t just going to throw the prototype of the game I’m currently working on away and stop working on it. I gave myself one week to finish what I have and make it into a releasable state. It was hard, lots of things had to be cut and compromises had to be made, but I did get it done and the game is playable on itch.
What did I learn from this one week of finishing up a game? That finishing is hard. There are tons of things I would want to do better or spend more time on but I just can’t. This is a good lesson to learn, if I’m really going to create an indie game studio one day, I need to be able to make decisions on what to include what to cut and how to streamline to meet a deadline. Currently I have no runway, but also no expenses so I can potentially develop games for an infinite amount of tame. Later when all of this will be for real I will not have that luxury. Also I realized once again how suuuuper important sound is to a game. After I spent a day adding in sound effects the game just felt so much more alive. I liked the gameplay before, but all of the sounds just enhance the experience tenfold. Going forward I’m gonna try and add sound effects to my game much earlier. There were also more minor lesson learned but I don’t have time to go into all of those.
So yeah making games is hard. But maybe if I make enough of them I’ll eventually learn enough to make games that people actually want to buy. See you next Sunday with a new game.