08-16-2010, 10:00 PM
I've been mulling over an idea to kick my laziness and apathy about accomplishing anything out the door, and I figured I should lay it down somewhere so I finally commit to it.
I plan to open a dev blog over a year long project I wish to start about two weeks after Dragon*Con (giving me ample time to recover). Each day, I will improve on some aspect of the game I'm working on, producing a working title by the day's end. It could be as small as switching out a sprite I don't like, I don't care, so long as I'm improving the game, and that it is playable from that point. My approach is designed to overcome the overwhelming dread I feel whenever I plan a project, and the fact that I usually face it alone. By developing a game this way, and chronicling it, I should not only bolster my own self respect, but feel more confident and affirmative towards the game development process in general.
I will be developing the games using Game Maker 8 as the engine. This takes the stress off of focusing on the code and puts it towards honing my ideas and design instead. I've been impressed with the works produced by it (Daniel Remar has contributed significantly to that) and feel it would simplify my goal of creating a functional game each day. I'll probably push my blog through Blogger and upload my work daily to match (I haven't decided where yet). If I can get some help, and if I gain enough outside momentum, I hope to design a frontend for people to fork off my root and take the game somewhere else, where people can fork off of their build and so on and so forth. Eventually, when I retire from the project, I'll choose someone from those forks to take on a project of their own, turn it into sort of a challenge for a new developer to take up each year. They wouldn't have to use GM, though they would have to follow the same rules of building a functional game every day and releasing the code.
So, what does everyone think of my scattered synopsis? Critique on my approach is more than welcome, since I have about four weeks (give an extra week at the end to prepare the project) to smooth it all out.
I plan to open a dev blog over a year long project I wish to start about two weeks after Dragon*Con (giving me ample time to recover). Each day, I will improve on some aspect of the game I'm working on, producing a working title by the day's end. It could be as small as switching out a sprite I don't like, I don't care, so long as I'm improving the game, and that it is playable from that point. My approach is designed to overcome the overwhelming dread I feel whenever I plan a project, and the fact that I usually face it alone. By developing a game this way, and chronicling it, I should not only bolster my own self respect, but feel more confident and affirmative towards the game development process in general.
I will be developing the games using Game Maker 8 as the engine. This takes the stress off of focusing on the code and puts it towards honing my ideas and design instead. I've been impressed with the works produced by it (Daniel Remar has contributed significantly to that) and feel it would simplify my goal of creating a functional game each day. I'll probably push my blog through Blogger and upload my work daily to match (I haven't decided where yet). If I can get some help, and if I gain enough outside momentum, I hope to design a frontend for people to fork off my root and take the game somewhere else, where people can fork off of their build and so on and so forth. Eventually, when I retire from the project, I'll choose someone from those forks to take on a project of their own, turn it into sort of a challenge for a new developer to take up each year. They wouldn't have to use GM, though they would have to follow the same rules of building a functional game every day and releasing the code.
So, what does everyone think of my scattered synopsis? Critique on my approach is more than welcome, since I have about four weeks (give an extra week at the end to prepare the project) to smooth it all out.