

How I Built an RPG In A Week From Scratch With No Budget - frisco
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2259.asp

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pg
If anyone wants to know what we look for in YC applications, this is it.

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Tichy
This is really good to know - one tends to brush over the little
accomplishments in life.

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/>

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unalone
Game hackathons are great. My absolute favorite thing about game design is
that it brings together such an incredible variety of people: graphics
designers, composers, writers, programmers, interface builders. The best game
designers are ones that have some understanding of every aspect of their game,
even as they specialize. I'd imagine the same is invaluable to startups.

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Tichy
I only participated in 1,5 48h game programming competitions, but it was
really great. Especially with the irc chat going along with it, following real
time what the others were doing and getting quick answers to common game
programming problems.

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unalone
Was your competition on-site? As in, did people all meet somewhere? Or was it
all hosted online?

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Tichy
All online. The 48h competiton was really informal, no prices to be won
either. Except for fun an fame.

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greendestiny
Really enjoyed this. Hopefully it can be a bit of an antidote to the self
flagellating I sometimes see on Hacker News about not working on something
important. The beauty of just making something is a joy in itself that
shouldn't be made so difficult and angst ridden.

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erik
If anyone is interested in trying something like this themselves, I recommend
checking out:

<http://pyweek.org>

<http://ludumdare.com/>

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.

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jws
"Role Playing Game" or "Rocket Propelled Grenade"?

Ah, Role Playing Game. I guess either would have been interesting.

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tlrobinson
As I'm not much of a gamer, at first I thought he built a rocket propelled
grenade. I was surprised he hadn't been visited/silenced by the FBI, etc.

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anamax
BATFE (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) is the US agency
with jurisdiction.

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.

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briancooley
I really liked the "Intermission" where he discussed features that he would
cut to meet the deadline. I think that's a very important skill and one I
would like to improve on for my personal projects.

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frisco
I agree. Cuts like that are hard, but doing them honestly and really
reevaluating what's necessary at least one per dev cycle is really critical.
It reminded me of Spolsky talking about how one of the best things they did on
Excel 5 was being forced to cut tons of features:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html> point 13

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whatusername
Not sure if you sure his aftermath at the bottom (although I do agree that
cutting things can be the best approach):

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.

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briancooley
Yeah, I saw that, but the key point for me is that making the changes to meet
the deadline rather than giving up is a form of practicing persistence that
ought to prove useful in the long run.

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11ren
I love doing projects like this, but I tend to get ugly code, since I'm aiming
at getting something working quickly (and experimenting with different
approaches).

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...

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derefr
Damn. This is impressive, yes, but when I read "RPG" I was expecting something
with a Final Fantasy-sized plot; as a developer who is also a writer, I was
intrigued about the idea of developing an interactive story within such a
short timespan--something similar to NaNoWriMo, but producing a game design
document rather than a book as output.

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unalone
Think, though: NaNoWriMo gives you a month to develop the story. With game
design, that means you'll need at _least_ twice that to produce something of
equal length, and that's working with a team.

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.

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Shamiq
Interesting way of defining a week. In terms of real "work" weeks, I get the
feeling this would have taken longer than only one.

Anyone willing to venture a guess how long given the author only documented
productive hours?

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snprbob86
I'm more interested in the exclusion of thinking time.

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.

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Retric
That's normal over a work week. I don't like to take my work home with me, but
yesterdays hard problem tends to be quickly solved when I show up the next
day. Which is one of the reasons I stopped working late unless I really need
to.

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DanHulton
I did something very similar to this:

<http://danhulton.com/round2/>

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.

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reitzensteinm
Before we started doing more complicated games, the early games on Rock Solid
Arcade (Stunt Pilot, Dogfight, Planet Cruncher) were all developed in his
definition of a week. It's really fun seeing something come alive so quickly.

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Goladus
"Lesson 3: Don't underestimate the art requirements"

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.

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babul
Simply brilliant. Really shows how tight focus on goals, some planning, and
positive attitude can be very productive.

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jmtame
i sort of miss ultima.. and king's quest

~~~
JMiao
<http://www.infamous-adventures.com/>

