First, try out the game if you haven’t already. (Tested in Chrome)
Sometimes I have trouble sticking with an idea to completion. Okay, so those of you who know me know that I have unfinished game prototypes lying around everywhere. So, when I saw the Zero Hour Game Jam, I was pretty excited. It was an opportunity just to make a game from beginning to end in one sitting. This proved to be a great diversion from my current project and couldn’t evolve into something massive because of the tight deadline.
So, I started thinking about what kind of game I could get done in just an hour. Nothing really came to mind. Everything in a game takes time. The planning, the assets, the coding, the polishing. No way I could build something from beginning to end in just one hour. And, I still think that’s probably true. If you count the time I spent thinking about what I would build just on my way to and from work, it probably amounted to more than an hour.
I decided that using prebuilt GUI components for the game was a good choice because they have functionality and graphics predefined. I figured this would be a great way to get around making assets for the game. Initially I thought I’d do some sort of button hunt where the screen is just plastered with buttons and you have to figure out which one to press. I still think this would be a fun game to make, but I settled on a more story driven approach to give the game a little more depth to hopefully help it stand out from the other submissions I’d seen.
For the technology, I knew I wanted to do something web based so people could easily check out my game and give me feedback. Hearing what people think of my games is easily my favorite part of the whole process, so I didn’t want any barriers like a download to prevent people from playing it. I also wanted to make sure it was cross platform because, as a mac guy, I hate seeing sweet looking indie games saddled to Windows because of XNA or some other technology choice. My first idea was to use Flex because it’s VERY easy to build a GUI in flex. But then I remembered I’m pretty sick of using Flex all day at work, so I decided on html. This had the added bonus of not having to sit through the compile times.
So, off I went. The story, inspired by Portal’s GlaDOS, was fun to write and flowed pretty easily. But even with my planning and time saving techniques, I didn’t finish in an hour. Since I was over the time budget anyways, I decided I’d put in a little more love into it to finish it out properly and have something I could be happy with. The game took about three hours from first creating the html file to uploading it to my server.
