7 ms·
How I Built an RPG In A Week From Scratch With No Budget
- derefr 18y agoDamn. This is impressive, yes, but when I read "RPG" I was expecting something with a Final Fantasy-sized plot; as a developer who is also a writer, I was intrigued about the idea of developing an interactive story within such a short timespan--something similar to NaNoWriMo, but producing a game design document rather than a book as output.
- unalone 18y agoThink, though: NaNoWriMo gives you a month to develop the story. With game design, that means you'll need at least twice that to produce something of equal length, and that's working with a team. This was more RPG mechanic rather than RPG. I still find that interesting, though, as the system I used to make RPGs in high school - RM2K, which is still out there - had the mechanics prebuilt and let you focus on detail. This game seemed to be quite the opposite.
- jws 18y ago"Role Playing Game" or "Rocket Propelled Grenade"? Ah, Role Playing Game. I guess either would have been interesting.
- Rod 18y agoBuilding a Role Playing Game in a week is impressive. Taking an entire week to build one single Rocket Propelled Grenade would be interesting too, but much less impressive ;-)
- Tichy 18y agoI wouldn't even know where to start with the grenade, so actually the grenade would impress me more. The RPG would still be more worthwhile.
- tlrobinson 18y agoAs I'm not much of a gamer, at first I thought he built a rocket propelled grenade. I was surprised he hadn't been visited/silenced by the FBI, etc.
- anamax 18y agoBATFE (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) is the US agency with jurisdiction. BATFE used to be part of the Treasury Department (because those items were regulated by tax law) but there have been attempts to move them to the Justice Dept; I don't know if any succeeded.
- bayareaguy 18y agoor "Report Program Generator"?
- greendestiny 18y agoReally enjoyed this. Hopefully it can be a bit of an antidote to the self flagellating I sometimes see on Hacker News about not working on something important. The beauty of just making something is a joy in itself that shouldn't be made so difficult and angst ridden.
- Shamiq 18y agoInteresting way of defining a week. In terms of real "work" weeks, I get the feeling this would have taken longer than only one. Anyone willing to venture a guess how long given the author only documented productive hours?
- bestes 18y agoHe said it was 2.5 weeks of calendar time to get 40 hours in.
- 11ren 18y agoI find 40 hours is much more productive if spread over several weeks. Maybe one's unconscious works on it the rest of the time.
- kenver 18y agoThat reminds me of a story I read about Michelangelo. He stared at the lump of marble that was to become David for a very long time before making the first cut, when asked what he was doing he said "I'm working"
- moder 18y agoI think the one I've heard goes, the artist is imagining the sculpture beneath that lump of marble, and they explain the actual creation of it as just removing everything else that's not the sculpture.
- 11ren 18y agoI saw David in Florence, and I was amazed to see that they also had on display the prototypes for David. There were 3 or 4 or so. From memory, they were all massive blocks of marble, though some just had an arm or leg sticking out. I guess these are called "studies" or drafts. A bit more heavy-weight than a study for a painting. If he could permit himself to start over several times, I can too.
- jmtame 18y agoi sort of miss ultima.. and king's quest
- reitzensteinm 18y agoBefore we started doing more complicated games, the early games on Rock Solid Arcade (Stunt Pilot, Dogfight, Planet Cruncher) were all developed in his definition of a week. It's really fun seeing something come alive so quickly.
- pg 18y agoIf anyone wants to know what we look for in YC applications, this is it.
- cchooper 18y agoDo you mean people who have something like this on their CV, or projects that are like this, or an attitude like this...?
- pg 18y agoThe first and the third, which I would guess are identical. What we look for is an incurable tendency to build stuff. And if people have this quality, they'll presumably already have shown evidence of it by building stuff.
- yellowbkpk 18y agoI feel like I have that incurable tendency to build stuff, but don't have time to use it. In fact, I'm extremely frustrated with my current job because I can't feed the need. How do others do it?
- 11ren 18y agoI love doing projects like this, but I tend to get ugly code, since I'm aiming at getting something working quickly (and experimenting with different approaches). One barrier for me is that the cleanness of the code arguably doesn't matter in a project like this, so the time feels wasted. But, in reality, I'm creating sample code, that I do come back to later, to see how I did things. Like a personal text book. When the code is ugly and hard to follow, it is less useful as sample code. Thinking of it as sample code removes that barrier (that cleanness doesn't matter). I've started to spend time cleaning up code, and uncluttering it, as I go - but I find it takes an extraordinary amount of time...
- briancooley 18y agoI really liked the "Intermission" where he discussed features that he would cut to meet the deadline. I think that's a very important skill and one I would like to improve on for my personal projects.
- frisco 18y agoI agree. Cuts like that are hard, but doing them honestly and really reevaluating what's necessary at least one per dev cycle is really critical. It reminded me of Spolsky talking about how one of the best things they did on Excel 5 was being forced to cut tons of features: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html point 13
- whatusername 18y agoNot sure if you sure his aftermath at the bottom (although I do agree that cutting things can be the best approach): Lesson 9: Cutting features isn't always free Some of the last-minute changes to Hackenslash really blew the game balance out of whack. The inability of monsters to cast spells, and the lack of need to for the player to 'conserve resources' as he pushes deeper into the dungeon trivialized some of the challenge to the game. If those features were going to stay 'gone,' the game needed another design pass to re-balance it and improve the modified gameplay. In other words, cutting features introduced an additional cost to the development of the game. This made me wonder how many retail games were released in a terrible state because the development team didn't have time to re-visit the game design after features were cut to meet schedule.
- briancooley 18y agoYeah, I saw that, but the key point for me is that making the changes to meet the deadline rather than giving up is a form of practicing persistence that ought to prove useful in the long run.
- babul 18y agoSimply brilliant. Really shows how tight focus on goals, some planning, and positive attitude can be very productive.
- erik 18y agoIf anyone is interested in trying something like this themselves, I recommend checking out: http://pyweek.org http://pyweek.org http://ludumdare.com/ http://ludumdare.com/ PyWeek is a week long game programming competition for Python developers, and Ludum Dare is all about 48 hour mostly from scratch video game development. Both are just for fun, but the competitive setup makes for good motivation to accomplish something in a short amount of time. It's lots of fun.
- DanHulton 18y agoI did something very similar to this: http://danhulton.com/round2/ http://danhulton.com/round2/ Penny Arcade has a subforum wherein from time to time, a battle of sorts takes place. Players are matched up one-on-one and given a week or so to produce SOMETHING that depicts them beating their opponent. Most folk draw something, some wrote and recorded songs, some wrote stories. I wrote a game. For the first round, I was able to adapt a work in progress (a shooter where you control the location of the ship with WASD and the direction of your shots with your mouse). For the second round, I started from scratch and wrote the above beat 'em up. (The graphics largely come from River City Ransom, as do all kinds of touches like the sounds people make as you beat 'em up. The characters are altered to represent various forumers avatars, and the heroes was mine - I use the rat-flail from VG Cats as my avatar.) All in all, I was able to get it done in a single week after a regular 8-hour job coding. And I had a BLAST.
- Goladus 18y ago"Lesson 3: Don't underestimate the art requirements" I'd add music and script/writing to that as well. Sure, anyone can throw together some beats and chords, and anyone can put words on a page. But doing it well is a lot harder than it looks.