The February Plan

As I mentioned in previous posts I would like to try to do something larger scale in February. That is something that is taken from the start to the finish over the period of a month. I should be able to crate something with a larger scope than the smaller games I have produced in the past.

I pondered for a while exactly what I could make and decided to head down the style of play from the original NES Legend of Zelda. Or should I say my memory of it as I have not played it in a long time (decades).

A top down fantasy game where you have some mission to complete. Arcade style play. 29 days of development (leap year this year) should let me make a reasonable stab at that. That is the plan but I will let the game play take me where it wants to go.

Realistically I can't devote all my time to this as I have a real life so while I plan to work on it quite a lot, stuff happens that can stop that - we already have quite a few weekends taken up with events.

A longer game will let me confront some of my worries. What if I don't get very far into  my project even when putting in lots of effort. This is the sort of thought that lurks at the back or my mind (everybody gets them right?). What would it say about my skills as a programmer/developer? It might say something but if I am a slow developer then I need to figure that out and work out how to improve. A fear like that can hold you back if you let it. I am taking the view of trying to expose my limitations and then trying to improve them.

I can't draw and am about to embark on a project that will require lots of pixel art. This is deliberate as I would like to be able to draw but the only way to do so is to practice. I expect the artwork to be terrible but this type of game does not stand on the graphics alone. Lots of drawing should help me improve. I plan to only use images created by me.

Ok it is fun to do predictions and thoughts about the next month.

1. Tiled (a map editing tool) is going to be really useful.
2. I will grow to love the Gimp.
3. I spend less then half my time actually coding.
4. The game won't turn out how I expect it to and that is not a bad thing.
5. My tooling/processes minimal as they are will show some limitations but will hold up.

I believe it is possible to quickly publish sites on dropbox although I have not tried. This seems like a really effortless way to put up work in progress snapshots so you can see how the development is going.

This is not a totally from scratch game as I will be reusing code from other games and hacks that I have kicking around.

I will blog a bit about my progress and probably tweet more often so follow me on there is you are interested.