The Definition of Insanity

According to most people, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. As you may may know from visiting this blog, that is also my general strategy in many cases. Rather than linger on what that means for my mental health, let's talk about the 1 game a month challenge.

I first tried it out last August, but ran out of ideas and stopped. Singularity probably also had something to do with that. Since then, I had forgotten all about it entirely. I think it's high time to revisit it, but this time with a plan.

One Game a Month, Month 1-2

Despite my initial excitement, things have not gone well. I've put together a very basic draft of what I want the gameplay to be like, but it's taken me way longer than I'd hoped. The main thing that's been slowing me down is the fact that I now have a number of projects running at once. seeing how things are going, I'll probably have to skip the next Ludum Dare again. In the end, I'm still very productive, but it's not as obvious since the work is so spread out.

Another issue that I've been having is with creativity. I have a cool mechanic here, but I'm having difficulty thinking of ways to make the gameplay interesting and varied. I'm trying to see if I can fix this, but I have yet to try out any of the solutions I've thought of. Whether or not I can make a decent game out of this will probably hinge on this issue.

Finally, I guess I'll leave a screenshot here:

As you can see, this is basically just a bare minimum
proof of concept. Still, it's already rather interesting.

One Game a Month, Month 1-1

Time do something a little bit different.

If you haven't heard of One Game an Month, you can think of it as a never-ending chain of month long game jams. So far, I've held off from joining it for various reasons, but I think it's a good idea to start now. The biggest factor that changed my mind was DFEngine. Now that I have a working engine to build off of, pushing out one game every month doesn't seem so difficult anymore. It'll definitely help me expand my portfolio, and add some games with a little more polish than the 48 hour ones. On top of that, these short games can serve as a testbed for DFEngine, giving me a place to try out new features without tearing apart a long-running project.

Anyways, that's enough talk about motivation. You're probably itching to hear about the game. That's right, I already have an idea. This month's theme is Fire, and I'm happy to say that an idea immediately came to mind! A long time ago, I thought up of a puzzle game about setting things alight. The idea was to burn down everything in a level by placing a small number of fires. You'd have to manipulate objects and move stuff around in order to get the fires to spread, and once something burned down it would block fire from spreading. I'm sure someone's made a game like this before, but I've heard of it myself and it's an interesting concept. On top of that, this will force me to leave my comfort zone a bit and try something new with DFEngine.

I won't be able to start coding the game immediately, as there are still a few things that I need to add to DFEngine first, but the idea is there and it'll give me time to focus art, sound, and design. This gives me a chance to handle things differently, and I want to see how that affects the final game.

By the way, this doesn't change my decision to do the next Ludum Dare. It's going to be a busy month...