How To Succeed At Creating Your Game

[Verahta]

Great article I stumbled upon. It gives one developers strategy for how he makes one game a month, but that is irrelevant because you can learn from the article and apply it to any project you have in mind (even ones that will take more than a month):

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/art ... medev-3695

[Jackolantern]

Nice article! That is from the folks at buildnewgames.com. There is a lot of nice stuff on there

[Verahta]

Great link Jack, thanks!

[vitinho444]

I haven't had the time yet to read the article, but I did read the article, my question is : Does this apply to any game, or just for this competition?

@EDIT
I read it until the Start to Finish section and I can see that it works for every game not just 1-month-games. Also I'm enjoying the reading very much. Recommend.

[Verahta]

Yes that's what I meant in my original post. He wrote it for his 1 game a month challenge website, but the advice and strategy can be applied to any developer as they are sound and flexible. After the initial design phase, getting a very basic wireframe up and running as soon as possible seems to be popular advice around the community and industry. This is an area I personally have always struggled with and that has started to change this summer


I want to thank Jack for that above link again, it is a gold mine! VERY valuable information in those articles.

[Jackolantern]

You're most welcome! It sadly appears to no longer be updated since it has been over a year since the last new post. But it already is filled with great info. I just hope it doesn't disappear at some point.

[Verahta]

Oh you're right, I thought it had been only a couple months but it is a year. Hmm, how strange.

[Verahta]

I emailed the company that runs the site and asked why it's no longer being updated. I found they have other learning resources on their site as well:

http://bocoup.com/education/online/

[Jackolantern]

Oh nice! I had heard the word "Bocoup" on their site, but didn't know what it was. I guess if they are still updating their other network sites then buildnewgames.com is less likely to disappear. I love that site for their JS A* tutorial alone.

[Callan S.]

and what remains is the busywork: bugfixing, tricky bits of code, repetitive tasks, parts that rely upon things outside your control, that one missing level or sound effect, installation issues, user testing, that reported bug which you can't reproduce, and app store submissions.

Apart from tricky code, I don't have a problem with any of those - I either just do them fairly easily (low level debugging I actually find a groove with) or I don't do them at all, anyway!

I think the biggest killer is this - you could release a game where you click a button to increment a number and that's it. And people would cry foul.

Okay, that's where feature creep sneaks in - you keep thinking that the next feature you added (and that button IS a feautre) will just have someone cry foul.

And you may even cry foul yourself.

The question is, do you need all those features?