Last Wednesday, before PAX, I got very little done on Project Z. Packing, house cleaning, and overall PAX excitement simply got in the way.
Thursday I spent 4 hours on the Amtrak. Thanks to comfortable seating and a 120v outlet I was able to get some work done.
I wrote a simple messaging class that I could call from the main game to display useful messages and have them fade out over time. This would be used as alerts for the player. I also revised some of my start-up scripts so I could play with the initial variables (health, ammo, etc..) more easily.
Today I spent some time designing a title screen and implementing sound effects.
For sound effects I’m utilizing the frackin awesome cfxr tool which allowed me to generate useful sound effects in minutes.
With the title screen, sound effects and main game logic at play, Project Z is really starting to feel like a real game. I have a few more graphics to design, some variables to tweak, and some AI to cleanup but in general I feel like I’ve passed the half-way mark on this project. Which brings me to the whole purpose of Project Z.
After struggling for months to get traction on my RPG project it was obvious I needed to scale back significantly on any game making ambitions. My first goal needed to be to make a game, any game, and get it out there. This would test my ability to make a game start to finish with “finish” being the important word here. It’s really easy to have a queue of creative projects started. It’s far more difficult to finish anything.
Project Z is about as simple of a game as I can imagine. When all is said and done it will have taken me less than 50 hours to build. The goal isn’t to make anything mind blowing. The goal is just to make anything.
Michael Todd made this the topic of his panel on Saturday at PAX. He advocates 7-day game development. Good advice that I plan to put to practice.
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