So, this sort of touches on the "one game a month" challenge that I've taken up. I had mentioned it to a buddy after I had pretty much committed to it, and he suggested that I raise the ante from just making a game a month to also use different gameplay styles for each of the games (only one boardgame port, only one puzzle, only one side-scrolly-running-and-jumping-platformer, only one flight sim, only one massively multiplayer game).
I'm split on this - I think I'm going to strive towards that ideal, but I may fudge it (even more than I expect to fudge what I count as a "finished game"). I've got a list of small game ideas that I want to work on, but I know there's a bunch that end up in the same game style bucket.
One good part of this additional challenge is that it pushes me to explore more game design space than I might otherwise have. If I implement checkers or chess, I'm not going to do reversi or attaxx. That's not terrible, and it keeps me from implementing an Alpha-Beta library and reskinning it in a month and calling it a new game.
On the down side, I will end up implementing a lot of infrastructure (loose quadtrees, cached alpha-beta search trees, influence maps, racing line optimizers) that won't see reuse this year. Maybe that's OK, but I'm concerned that I'll find myself throwing some technology together that's good enough for one game, and not hone it with use.
One thing I thought was interesting about my college curriculum was that each semester, we had a new computer language to learn. At first, I thought this was madness, but after a while, I appreciated the breadth of exposure. Perhaps 12 different kinds of games will accomplish the same thing.
Thinking about 12 games in a year, I know that they'll all be small games, and I'm OK with that. Thinking about Sturgeon's Law, they'll doubtless have some that are better than others. If I model Sturgeon by a fair 10-sided die, and each of the 12 games has a 90% chance of being bad, that's a 28% chance of zero games coming up good. That's actually higher than I would have guessed (people are bad at probability), but if you flip the glass over, that's a 72% chance of at least one playable game in the bunch.
Of course, game development isn't just rolling dice (though, I kind of want to incorporate some random elements along the way to knock loose some creative surprises), and presumably the later games in the year will benefit from lessons learned along the way. By forcing myself to diversify, I won't be learning nuances about optimizing racing game AI, instead I'll have the opportunity to learn bigger picture lessons. That sounds exciting.
I wonder about the value of developing "in public" - if I were to make a dozen games in a year and present the one I liked the best, it'd be easier to imagine that this one really good idea came to me and everything was easy. But there's a lot of trial and error, and sometimes gold turns up where you don't expect it - so I'm open to sharing the journey here, even if it is a bunch of dead ends. It isn't so much showing my dirty laundry, it's being honest about the creative process.
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