Guest Post: Game-In-A-Day Saves The Day
Here's a guest post - Califer (Curtis) offers some insights into the failures - and successes - of an indie game developer:

Hi, my name is Curtis Mirci. I'm fairly new to the indie game scene and haven't actually put anything finished out yet. Within the next month or so (depending on when Jay posts this) I should have my first game out, Siphon Spirit.

My first game, Darkened Dreams, is a bit of a failure. You see, I wasn't even planning on making a game when I started. I just wanted to learn how to do something we learned in class. Instead of using the boring examples from the classroom I made different hero classes to play with. Then I gave them things to do, then added in different things to do and added in monsters and maps and all that.

As a result of my lack of planning, by the time that I was finished with the early main game I never wanted to touch it again. Adding in new maps was beyond a pain, and it was very easy for a small error to lock the player in a location they shouldn't be in, as some of my early players found out. After I cleaned out all the bugs and added a tower to showcase the rest of the monsters I locked it down. Mind, it's still pretty fun to play, there's just no real ending and the story doesn't really start.

That was Darkened Dreams. A while later, while I was working at Sensory Sweep (sat next to Jay - The Rampant Coyote - for a while) I showed the game to a few people. One of those people was Peter Anderson. He said he wanted to do some art for it and I thought that might be nice, but the thought of diving back into that code terrified me. So I decided to start over. I changed the language that I was writing in and decided to make a program that would help make the world. Our original plan was just to remake the original, but with graphics. As things kept going we kept adding more and more to it. Soon, instead of just being a game it was going to come with it's own game-maker so that players could make their own games with it. Needless to say, the game evolved well beyond our original ideas of what we were planning when we started.

Part of that is because this isn't Peter's first attempt to work with a programmer on an indie game. He took the safe route in assuming that the project would just vanish after a little while. Oddly enough, I'm kind of tenacious so I never gave up on it and we've got a lot done on it. It's just taken a LONG time to get there, and we've probably still got a long time left before it's finished. That can get pretty tiring, but we've decided to make another game, this time we'd make it short! We got together to make a Game-In-A-Day. A month later, it's not quite finished, but it is looking awesome. It's also not far from being finished at all. It's called Siphon Spirit.

So what is this post all about? Well, it is mainly a glance inside the life of an indie developer (average? not sure). But it's mostly a warning to anyone planning to make a game. As Peter told me the other day, "Well, we've learned a valuable lesson from working on these game. We are very very busy people." As indie developers that can only work on projects after the work day is done and still have a family to take care of we need to be careful to not only choose fun game concepts to work on but also to make sure that they are short enough that we will be able to finish them before we're old and grey.

In the case that you are interested in playing the original Darkened Dreams, it's available for free at http://www.cs.utah.edu/~mirci/DarkenedDreams/ If you are interested in learning more about Darkened Dreams 2 or Siphon Spirit, visit my blog at http://darkeneddreamsgame.blogspot.com/

-Califer

Labels: game development

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:47 AM (Permalink)