one game a week

I try to make a game every single week and upload the results here I take the terms game and week kinda loosely

[one-game-a-week]

Week 11: Kitten

https://redye.itch.io/kitten

I modelled a kitten and wanted to make it explode and then I had a bad conscience so I wanted to animate it with morphshapes and that didn’t work so I rigged it and animated it and then I realized I used the wrong exporter and with the other exporter actually supported morphshapes and then I only had 3 days left with no clue what game to make... I still don’t. In the end I made the cat walk around and scripted two small systems to generate flowers and trees and decided that’s enough of an environment for the player to have fun.

What went well:

it looks pretty cute I guess

the random generation - especially with a texture as mask - worked very quickly and successfully

I managed to put some purpuse into it... I guess

What didn’t go well:

TIMEMANAGEMENT - like I said... I just ran with it... and not very fast at that

in the end I also didn’t have much time for balancing

I had massive performance issues and compatilitity issues with several systems - that fixed itself when I downgraded, but I needed a few days to realize that

there isn’t much “fun gameplay” in the game since I never managed to set it as a direct goal and I think in this case it’s bad (I wanted to make it a fun game in the beginning and failed)

[one-game-a-week]

Week 10: MelonRoll

https://redye.itch.io/melonroll

This week I worked on my entry for the melon game jam (it’s still open and you can join). I decided on a simple runner game where the speed constantly rises and you have to jump and move to not crash into obstacles.

What worked well:

most of it actually, it’s one of my best games

the 3D to 2D tech worked really well and makes the game feel dynamic

even though it’s a pretty well established genre and I didn’t innovate much, I met interresting design points

for example the bonus points to give the player more incentives to steer the melon and not just jump

My time management went pretty well so I had time to implement another obstacle on the last day

oh! and I made a nice metaballs shader (even though it can only support a fixed amount of balls)

What didn’t work well:

I’m considering if I’ll add sound in the future, but that’s not a big drawback

some people told me it looks more natural if the melon rolls in the opposite direction, some people told me it looks better like this, in the end I choose this direction mainly because it works best with the art

[one-game-a-week]

Week 9: Sewer Dungeon

https://redye.itch.io/sewerdungeon

My goal for this week was to design a dungeon, so I started by making a main character and used up at least 2 days just for that. The protagonist is based on procedural animation (all sprites are moved with mathematical functions based on the players movement) https://twitter.com/Ahr_Ech/status/692147002277302273

What went well

The player character looks really interresting and unique

the different characters fit well enough into the setting

a relatively big amount of content compared to previous projects

the tilemaps work well and allow for a easily extensible map

What didn’t go well

The timing on the player animations is suboptimal and could’ve used some work, also more moving part would’ve helped

the enemies are pretty similar and have basically no attack patterns

the fireball spell can be easily spammed and destoys the balance completely once understood

the fireball spell easily overloads the screen brightness and makes it impossible to read

the light of the fireball isn’t as atmospheric as it could be because the base brightness of the level is pretty high

the boss is pretty straightforward but it works well enough (the problem with that mainly lies with the fireball)

[one-game-a-week]

Week 8: TwoButtons

https://itch.io/jam/godotjam122016/rate/116085

This was also a entry into the GodotGameJam with the theme “Two Buttons” so I made a game about two literal buttons. As enemies I introduced needles that kill you when they charge at you but die instantly when you crush them between your buttons.

What went well:

I know bending the theme like that is dumb but that doesn’t mean I’m not proud of it

the control of the buttons feels pretty organic considering how slippery they are

the idea of the needles is very compelling and innovative

What didn’t go well

I procastinated waay too long ob the AI of the needles and now the AI sucks...

they often seemingly randomly stop charging the player and turn way too violently

also I could’ve used worked more on the player controls, especially in the default control mode the player gets disoriented pretty quickly and more control over the buttons would probably feel good

I didn’t add keyboard controls until quite some time after finishing the game because I personally only ever used the controller and especially for a jam entry it’s useful if everyone can play your game

[one-game-a-week]

Week 7: Moons duty

O V E R S C O P I N G

do you the the ~dream games~ the ones you want to make even though they’re way too big? yeah - this was one of them.

The plan was to /just/ make the overworld system and a simle version of the combat system. The overworld system would be similar to fallout 1 and 2, except on a big sphere and with multiple characters at the same time. when you entered combat you play with a small group versus a different small group on a planned time basis similar to transistor........ - with several characters at the same time. I think we can agree that this looks ridiculously big for a one week project.

oh... and the whole thing was 3D

What went well:

I completed the overworld system with several characters, selecting them, having them move at a consistent speed, drawing the way they have to go, having them stop in from of obstacles and innitiate combat with a certain probability every second when in a “danger zone”

I made a very rough time planning system where multiple characters can be selected and move on a navmesh, they can execute attacks on other characters that hit and deal damage. the current health is shown with hp bars

what didn’t go well:

as previously mentioned it’s WAAAY too big

I didn’t even start making a KI system

the planning system was still super buggy as fas as I remember (some actions didn’t even record)

no gameplay loop happened, once you enter combat you can’t leave even when you kill all enemies

yeah just... even though I did a lot of stuff I wasn’t nearly enough to make it work

[one-game-a-week]

Week 6: Mahjong3D

https://redye.itch.io/mahjong3d (Linux only for now will export other platforms if you ask nicely)

For this week I made a simple mahjong clone with the little twist that you can completely turn the board in all directions and can also start taking blocks from the bottom

What went well:

since I didn’t change much in the game design similar to chess the develoment was relatively straightforward

the orbiting camera had a few interresting quirks like flipping the y movement when upside down

the editor for levels with only text files is neat!

I gifted the game to my father for christmas and he liked it

What didn’t go well

again - similar to chess I didn’t learn much about gamedesign

uuuh, dunno, the game was so small that I pretty much worked...

[one-game-a-week]

Week 5.5 Ludum Dare:

https://redye.itch.io/laikas-return

I made this game with a team of 5 people in the same week I made the volleyball game. The base goal was to make the player panic and try to solve many tasks in a short time.

What went well:

we had some really good artists on our team and I love how the background looks like

I think the colorful blinking lights add a lot of atmosphere to the game

I learned a lot about the base mechanic of the game and why it didn’t work

What didn’t go well:

We had 3 artists... and none of them did anything except art (and I still got questions about art direction), so I was stuck with most of the gamedesign and... I blew it

turns out the base idea of panic only works if the players know exactly what to do and in the game you have to operate a terminal that tells you very slowly what you have to do so most people just ended up confused and frustrated

I don’t really know how to improve upon this though, 2 days to figure out how a base mechanic has to work isn’t that bad and jam games will fail frequently...

[one-game-a-week]

Week 5: volleyball

https://redye.itch.io/volleyball

I had a little bit less time this week because I also joined ludum dare that weekend, so I decided on making a smaller games that feeds mostly off mechanics instead of content.

What went well:

the time management was really good this week

I spend 2 days on making the characters and 2 weeks on coding

it’s actually a pretty small game with 300 lines of code so I didn’t take that much time

I managed to keep the style consistent

the players are pretty much all copied with minor changes

the noiseless background doesn’t slash with the clean players at all

What didn’t go well:

it took almost a week until I finally wrote my postmortem :p

there are a few minor bugs, mainly drawing order

it’s too deterministic, a few random values would improve the game by a lot

but none of those things make it bad and a 1 week limit just leads to unpolished games so overall I’d say this is my best game ever. Even more the creation process than the finished product.

[one-game-a-week]

Week 4: SuperKirosRacing

https://redye.itch.io/superkirosracing

Okay, I decided to make my format even more similar to the one adriel wallick used in her one week games because it seems pretty neat

Idea:

I wanted to make a pretty generic shmup and since I just read up on marching squares I decided to somehow bring that into it. Since I had the main character beforehand I wanted to make the setting fit into her story

What went good:

The implementation of the marching squares went surprisingly well which allowed my fast content generation in theory. The Dialogue System also worked... well enough for the tiny amount of time I put into it

What went bad:

This week I was really distracted, watched anime, played PC games, so I didn’t invest as much time into the game as I wanted to, which lead to sloppy systems towards the end, especially the boss and the dialogue system don’t work as well as I hoped. Also the amount of content is lacking... again.

What I learned:

I just realised that I probably shoudn’t put racing in the title of a non racing game... I definitely saw again that making working systems is by far not enough, there also has to be content using those systems, I should probably look into procedual content in the next weeks or try to make games that aren’t limited by hand made content. Also I shouldn’t make stuff last minute and expect it to work - but I think that’s a given.

On a more positive note I learned how marching squares work in praxis!

[one-game-a-week]

Week 3: Valley

https://redye.itch.io/valley

This week I decided to make a small 3d scene to test out the possibilities of the godot engine and my own skills. It went pretty well and I needed way less hours than I initially thought I would. I learned a lot, especially about programming shaders.

Pro:

pretty game

ember (I’m really really proud of that one lmao)

procedually generated trees / crops

2 whole people came to my non-lagging stream!!! (thank you so much xD)

Con:

no objective -> no real game...?

some models aren’t that good (the bigger house) - I should’ve remodelled that

I did’t test how players explore the level, I think I should do that and expand this list

only very basic shadows (I don’t know much about shadows but I hope it’ll be easier in godot 3.0 to make prettier shadows)

[one-game-a-week]

Week 2: Chess

https://redye.itch.io/chess (pw: chess )

Last week I made chess… twice.

Making an already existing game obviously didn’t do much to improve my game design skills, but the systems at work are much more difficult than I expected and I’m sure making it helped me improve my coding skills immensely. In the first version the ui and the game logic were very intertwined which lead to it being hard to expand on. So when I programmed it again I tried to pull it into more of a front and a back end and that allowed me to have much cleaner code and add a few more mechanics. What didn’t work was “en passe” and “rochade” because that would have required hitting pieces where they’re not and moving pieces that aren’t actively moved.

[one-game-a-week]

Week 1: CyberDefense

http://redye.itch.io/cyberdefense

This is the first game I did in a row in a week, let’s hope I can keep this going. Actually I had more than a week for this game since it was already in development when I started making it, but whatever.

It’s a simple tower defense game, but with the minor twist that every tower can also be used to upgrade another tower.

what went good:

I made the game, the base mechanics are in place, the code is pretty optimized as far as I can say, so it’s pretty easy adding new towers, attacker types and maps

what went bad:

I definitely underestimated the amount of work that pure content creation takes, just adding waves, or balancing stats, so in the end that’s the games biggest weakness, only 7 waves, 3 tower types, 3 enemy types, 1 map. I also think the game is fairly complicated, I didn’t have time to make a tutorial and the small deviation from the known tower defense type of gameplay is enough to confuse most players. (added to a few minor bugs which don’t help making controls intuitive)