Making Portcullis

(In the game, you are a town guard who has to control which visitors can enter a town. Some want to help the town while others have evil intentions, so the town’s progress depends on how many “good” visitors you identify and let in.)

This year, I found out about the One Game A Month challenge, and thought it would be fun to participate. Like many gamers who happen to be software developers, I’ve always wanted to implement my own game ideas. I’ve made a few while in school to play with friends, but since starting work I haven’t been able to produce a playable game.

Anyway, I wanted to start again and felt inspired by the keynote from McFunkypants, especially the Ira Glass quote about how everybody starts out crappy at first but we have good taste, so the stuff we make doesn’t pass our “crap filter” and we end up getting discouraged.

The things I learned from this month’s challenge were:

1. How to scale back an idea

I could spend about an hour or two a day to work on the game, with more on the weekends, but I didn’t want it to take up all my spare time either. Of course, I still made grand plans:

• 3D environments, running in Unity
• Produce or find 3d animated models of the player and everyone involved in each encounter.
• One part of the game would involve a visual inspection of the visitors’ belongings, e.g the horse cart. Hints such as blood stains could be discovered this way.
• If the visitors were turned away, they might turn violent and there would be some kind of combat.
• There would be a view of the town, and it would change depending on how well you were doing.
• Not forgetting music and sound effects, of course.

I made these plans, yet I had almost no experience with Blender and Unity3D, or even just finding usable art (a surprisingly hard problem).

Of the above ideas, not even a hint of them entered the actual game. After checking out a few online tutorials, I realised that I was in over my head and fell back to doing it as a web application but telling myself I would definitely convert it into a 3D game later (this never happened). Working with familiar tools and programming languages helped me get the game up and running quickly.

2. Turning off the crap filter

It was quite hard to keep working on the game because throughout the process, it didn’t look anything like a game I wanted to play. Looking at all the amazing entries from fellow participants only reinforced this feeling. I would probably have moved on to something else, if it weren’t for the One Game a Month challenge. But now I have a nice shiny entry on my profile page, and someone on twitter actually played and liked the game. That kind of encouragement wouldn’t have come if I didn’t force myself to release the game.

And with that, it’s time to plan for a February release :)

gamedev