SuperBiasedMan's 1 Game A Week

I make a game every week for a year, and this is where I spill the results from my brain as I go.

[sbm1gaw]

Week 4 - Beat Me

So, this week felt like a more successful one for me. I have an actual thing that people can grab and play. It probably has some undiscovered bugs and general untidyness and I would like to expand upon what you can do to make it more interesting than tapping the same spot at a regular interval, but it is a thing!

Here's the link to download it if you have an android phone.

It works the way I had wanted it to when I started. I was looking for something that would just be a relatively tactile experience because I often enjoy android games that have that tactile feel and really use the touch aspect. I was keeping it simple because I only started learning how to program in android recently and wouldn't have time to expand upon the game much (especially since I know to keep the scope tight).

I don't think there's too much else to say on this game, it was surprisingly smooth to make and generally not that unique and interesting. I guess this was more of a feel good week than anything else, but I found it pretty successful week in that respect. Next week I'm going to swing the opposite way and not pay the technology any attention as I use a plug in for a game engine to make an interactive fiction thing!

[sbm1gaw]

Week 3 - Work Life Balance

So, this week my plan was to make a game where the idea is that you have work being thrown at you constantly that you need to get done as quick as possible, because when you have it all done, you can work on your passion project. It was meant to be a pretty simple interaction thing where the job stuff ends up being a pretty rote thing where you're just trying more and more to handle it quickly to leave you with time for the passion work.

On top of that, I started thinking about having a bunch of simulation style variables that you had to also manage. You needed to keep your life afloat by managing basics like food as well as your need to be social and maintaining motivation while avoiding stress. Taking care of any need would be time consuming but necessary and would mean that overall the quality of work was better anyway, even if it takes a lot longer.

Maybe it's possible to see what I was aiming for with that but realistically that was a terrible added layer to throw on. I didn't even have an idea for what the actual engaging working mechanic would be and I had enough hubris to layer the Sims on top of the idea. Not just that, I was thinking of modelling complex relationships, where they impact upon each other and wouldn't behave predictably.

It was messy, and not helped by the fact that several of my evenings were spent brushing up on stuff to apply to a job that I had to priortise. But excuses are cheap, I just did this wrong. I started high minded and broad, piled a bunch of stuff on top of a poor foundation and then languished in trying to prop it up with the little time i could afford it. I had intended to make a good go of doing a pared down version tonight, but this is the best I could get out of the images;

so it was kinda hard to work with that to even test if the poorly designed mechanic functioned.

To keep it simple, what am I learning next? I'm starting simple and building up. I *know* I can do this without a massive time investment, I just need to remind myself very presently. I did make a pretty fun simulation thing in 2 hours that would be a perfect way to begin one of these weeks but I just clearly haven't been taking the right tact with it and probably need to staple a reminder to my hands for when I get started tomorrow.

[sbm1gaw]

Week 2 - Chat with sassypantaloons

So this week, I actually did publish a game, you can check it out here: http://philome.la/SuperBiasedMan/chat-with-sassypantaloons At the start my idea was to make a game where your choices showed your character as being evasive and guarded, withholding information from the other character. The protagonist was meant to have a list of responses but you could only pick ones that continued a conversation about the other person, nothing about the personal thoughts the protagonist was having. There is a desire to communicate but it’s been buried under social conditioning. That ultimately means that the best the player can do to try get that message out of the protagonist is by showing little enough enthusiasm in the conversation that the other character picks up on this hesitance and pulls a confession out so that a real dialogue can happen. That’s not exactly what I made in the end, it still has most of the elements but without any possibility for a resolution. Instead the protagonist disappears as soon as there’s a spotlight on the conflict and the game ends there. Also the protagonist is a lot more resentful, there’s real serious grudges bubbling underneath shown to the player with the responses you can’t pick. I feel like both of these changes from the initial idea actually work a lot better and feel more genuinely cohesive and interesting as a character depiction. Which is particularly odd, because this was intended to be drawing from my own experience, which I still think it did in the end so I guess both how it started and how it morphed were distinct little nuggets of how I interact with people, just with different outlooks. That was what I liked, but ultimately I think I could’ve done a better job on this week. It is immensely short, not brief or succinct, just short. It's also not very engaging writing, the fact that it's a first draft really shows, but even as a first draft it was lacking in punch. I found it hard to motivate myself to work on this. And usually motivation is hard for me but particularly in this case I felt like I was too unfocused to take it a step at a time. I just had the staring at a blank page experience when trying to write out the conversation, hence why it’s so short and the ‘plot’ is a pretty by the book gossipy sequence of events. I also think that it being a twine game made it harder. I’m much more interested and engaged in playing with concepts and systems. While I found that although I enjoy the actual writing it feels more stressed and difficult, because I’m so focused on quality of the creation instead of just getting something out and then building it up and improving it. My next game will not be a text game, instead it'll be a string of minigames under a specific meta banner. I'm definitely going to focus on motivation and getting things to be entertaining at the basic interaction level. More on game 3 next week!

[sbm1gaw]

Overdue Week 1 Post Mortem

This is late mostly cause I was busy though also a little cause I was unsure what I was gonna do. I didn't 'finish' my game in time.

Basically when midnight hit on Wednesday hit I hadn't put together the chunks of code I made enough to make something 'playable'. I was thinking "It'll only take a bit longer to finish it out..." but in the end I had to stick to the resolve of the rules.

Publish by midnight, every week.

If I don't hit that, I don't fix and then publish a day or so later. That week is just a black mark. I will finish out the last bit needed to make this playable either next year or if I have spare time during a less hectic week.

Anyway, my brief lessons from this, since I already rambled too much

Use a memory stick/cloud storage/both, probably both. There's no point wasting time with file transfers when the world is already making this easy for me to do transferrably.

Get a tiny game working and then add things. By tiny game I mean, have the audio, visuals and interactivity basically working. Then once there is a whole thing, I can add more or improve parts. This way I have something I could theoretically show from an early stage.

Know which direction to develop. I got the basic functions working early and that was good, but then I went down a rabbit hole of reading a sentence from the player and discerning inputs like intelligently detecting their name. After a half day of work I realised I had no writing done and it's more entertaining for the computer to read the wrong word and start calling you that.

I could probably say more but I'll leave it at that for now. I have several thoughts for week 2, not one picked yet so it'll have to be a short development week but after failing to produce a thing by the end of week 1 I am pretty eager to get a tiny game done for this week.

[sbm1gaw]

A screenshot of the game in its current state. I've mostly been creating and then fixing a few systems of how the text can be distorted. The next step is reading what the player types and then I've got a lot of writing to do...

[sbm1gaw]

Week 1 - The Idea

I started a course in programming java recently and I knew a decent amount of Javascript before so I’ve been messing with weird ways of using what we've cover as I go. One really fun thing I started to do was make text scrambling functions. These would mostly do things like randomly capitalising letters, replacing a character with some punctuation symbol or adding duplicates of existing characters. One thing I liked when I played with this was how it seemed to give the text a personality, where it came off a certain way when iit enDeddd uuupp bBbeeingg ssperrr ddisstrttED.

I thought that would be a good way to depict unusual speech patterns in an dynamically random way that's only really possible in games. So I wondered about making use of it in a game. It reminded me of a machine breaking down, so then I decided I wanted to try make a game where a machine is trying to communicate with you as it’s breaking down. The machine has no idea what is happening to it but its text that displays information to you deteriorates over time, and you have to do your best to penetrate the communication barrier and give the computer commands that will solve its issue, before it’s too late to understand anything that comes out of it.

I don’t know that much about how I’ll structure the actual arc of the gameplay and challenge, but I have ideas about the tone and how you play. It’ll be a text parser, where it skims what you type for relevant keywords that it can act upon. Those are always messy and unreliable but I figure that it works in my favour here. The main intent behind it is to do my best to let the player type responses in whatever way they feel like and get a new answer that’s somehow relevant, but because it is the challenge of the game the onus is actually on the player to make themself understood (as opposed to the other way around, where the designer must make it seamless).

I intend to have multiple goals and have it be a relatively flexible system, so there isn’t one set answer that you can discern even if you have the same issue to solve. There will presumably be an optimal solution but I think it’s better to focus on making the actual interaction and minute results interesting. To that end, I want to make a system to save logs for people to keep if they enjoy their result. Given the fact that even with pre-written responses they get mangled in new ways each time, I’m hoping to make for memorable moments people want to capture.

[sbm1gaw]

What this is, why I’m doing it and what I want out of it

This is a tumblr to catalogue me doing a challenge by Rami Ismail, it’s a really interesting idea where you have to make one game every week. It doesn’t matter how far you get it, as long as you stop at midnight and publish it online, then move onto a new one. You’re supposed to focus on variety and quickly testing out ideas rather than try really hard on a particular concept that’s your dream project because until you’ve made a bunch of stuff, you can never be sure what does or doesn’t work in the actual execution of an idea.

I’ve been unemployed a while now. I haven’t been that inactive but it still felt like it wasn’t enough. So I started making small games a bit, trying to break out of the longform project mentality I’ve had for a long time. I just wanted to play with the copious list of subversive game concepts I have sitting in a drawer that ‘would be great if I/someone else made them’.

Even after pushing myself into starting stuff, I was still working slowly through the projects. I have a busy life with not a lot of free time to devote to things, just like everyone else in the world. So I was continuing development on ideas I had in off periods of my days, when I was relaxed and could do what I want because the other stuff was taken care of. I enjoy making the stuff, it just felt like I needed to have the right mode to able to start working and the mode was a rare occurence. Then a friend of mine (shout out to clyde, from the Idle Thumbs forums) mentioned how he had turned game making into his default activity for when he’s bored and unsure what he wants to do. That made me pause, because I had plenty of time like that, it just never felt like it was my ‘free time’.

I want games to occupy that space, and I’m hoping this will help with that. Of course I also want 52 more games by my next birthday, I want practice, I want experience. But aside from that I just want games to be my go to activity, so that after this year it won’t even be hard to go from fun idea to having a prototype in some playable form.

Note: This was meant to be posted yesterday but I got distracted making the thing, so that's a good start.