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Tuesday, April 18

How To Build a Game In A Week From Scratch With No Budget

It's like MUD development...in a week! Thanks to Doug for pointing this one out.

An RPG in a week, starting from scratch? How hard could it be?

I did it because of a dare.

There are many great resources available to small, budget-conscious independent game developers today. On a public forum, in a counter-rant, I expressed this fact by bragging that if you gave me a week, a fresh install of Windows, and a good Internet connection, I could build a halfway decent game with no budget whatsoever. No, it wouldn't be able to compete with Halo 2 or anything (if I could create that kind of game in a week, I'd quit my day job), but it would be reasonably amusing and playable.

Tom Bampton, who runs the monthly Game-In-A-Day 'competition' (www.gameinaday.com ), said "You're on!" He then added an extra contingency – I had to do it without the benefit of one of the (free) game engines out there. I could only use a basic library / API.

At first, I dismissed the idea. I didn't have time to take a week off of work and my current game development project to do something like this. But then I thought: What is a week? Unless you work for EA, a work-week is 40 hours. How about taking 40 hours to create a game? I was intrigued – but I didn't want to just create a space-invaders clone. How about a role-playing game – one of the most complicated genres to create games for? Would it be possible?

I didn't know. I knew it would be extremely difficult. But I accepted the challenge.

On top of that, I documented what I was doing as I worked, which I expected would be a little like going through an entire development cycle on fast-forward. I thought it might be interesting to game developers – or at least an entertaining record of how I fell on my face if I failed. The end result was a long, rambling, stream-of-consciousness record of my hourly activities. I've tried to edit it down to something a little less yawn-inducing here. [MORE]

Labels: gaming news

posted by Mike Tresca at 8:06 AM

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