Prototyping 50 Games in One Semester

StarEmperor writes "Gamasutra has a good feature about four grad students who created 50 games in one semester. The article presents their insights about game design, evaluating gameplay, and generally what makes for a fun game."

Comments

I've got a fever & the only prescription is mo

[peipas]

...storyline. Grim Fandango, for instance, is one of the most amazing games I've played. It has a great story, a unique style, and hilarious bits thrown in here and there. Being able to interact with a story can be brilliant; I think this is where some of the Final Fantasy series' popularity comes from.

Do It Again

[mpapet]

I'm always happy to see stories like this. There are huge gaps in entertainment for low dev costs and this is how you make them fly.

-No, your games aren't going to be in WorstBuy anytime soon.
-No, your games aren't going to get any attention whatsoever from the media.
-No, you won't be able to afford porting them to the console du-jour.
-No, you won't attract VC to grow your business.

-Yes, you will have some loyal consumers. Make your games multilingual (i18?) and you'll have many.
-Yes, you can build a very successful enterprise.

In all cases that's the way doing something original works. I wish more young Americans had this kind of attitude and perserverance.

I just hope they are smart enough to keep going on their own instead of using it as a resume builder.

Re:nice try buddy

[omeomi]

And as a CS grad student, how is this different from every other semester and summer?

I've played the Tower of Goo game. It's really a fun "casual game" sort of game, and honestly, they came up with an idea that was fairly different from much of anything else out there, which isn't easy to do. They didn't just make yet another Tetris clone, or a Bejeweled clone, or some other puzzle game that's been done a million times, they seem to have tried to come up with really innovative game ideas.

The Experimental Gameplay Project has a lot of really unique game concepts like this.

This is a feature from October 26, 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

For FSM's sake! 2.5 years old.

*sigh*

Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005

[NeutronCowboy]

And yet, it still seems relevant. What does that tell us about the current state of gaming? Put differently, should we discount the importance of Newton's Principia Mathematica because it is 400 years old?

Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005

[steelfood]

It's relevant, certainly. But, I'll bet you'd be surprised if a /. headline read:

Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica Attempts to Explain Everyday Physical Observations and then proceeded to wonder if this book could change the field of physics forever.

On a site that's "news for nerds," events that were made public 2 years ago would hardly be called news. That, and this might just be a dupe that was spaced so far apart nobody can remember the original (worse than the dupe on SHA1 being cracked).

Re:Cheap game space

[maxume]

http://www.kongregate.com/

Desktop Tower Defense is pretty addictive (for a while anyway):

http://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower-defense

Also liked this one:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/AlejandroG/spin-the-black-circle

productivity vs. burnout

[Thelasko]

This article basically says that shorter development cycles produce a better product because of diminishing returns. What it doesn't state is whether this development cycle increases or decreases the burnout rate for developers.

I think it would be a nice follow up to do an extended study of this kind of development cycle in a corporate environment and examine the turnover rate for developers. Will they be intrigued by working on something new every week, or will they get tired of the quick turnaround and quit?

Re:productivity vs. burnout

[JustinOpinion]

It's worth noting that the article is talking specifically about prototyping, not necessarily full game development. They do acknowledge that once a good idea is found, it will take some time to give it the polish and variation that people expect from a full game.

So, I wouldn't think of this as any developer's full-time job. Rather, they are describing a strategy for coming up with novel game mechanics, game genres, game elements, etc. Maybe in-between big projects, you give your designers/developers a few weeks of this kind of structured rapid prototyping. At the end, you decide which ideas are not worth pursuing, which ideas could be polished into small games (for release as flash games, as mini-games inside full games, etc.), and which ideas could be expanded upon to create a full, novel game. (E.g. the next "Portal" in terms of novel game-play.)

You're probably right that any developer would burn-out if they tried to churn out a new, novel game every week (they might also eventually become frustrated by never being able to "finish" any project). But as a way to sometimes come up with actually creative game ideas... it definitely has merit.

Not exactly a dupe

[New_Age_Reform_Act]

but someone here mentioned it a loooooooooooong time ago.

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173642&cid=14446612