Let's make a game
Published: 19 Jun 2012
Our first #48hrGameDev
Soooo, a year ago some friends and I were discussing how great it would be to make a game. Having got heavily interested in indie games and talks by the likes of Jonathan Blow the coming Film Indie Game the Movie and our individual love for puzzles, music, graphics, coding etc (amongst other things). We decided we should kick start ourselves into action with a games challenge.
So a year later 5 friends met in the sunny / rainy Cotswolds for a weekend of non-stop games making to start our first game - a games retreat if you will.
Friday eve: The weekend started with an evening of general discussion concerning the game ideas we had and what we expected to achieve by the end of the weekend.
Friday eve / saturday early morning: We decided on a platform game and got to work. We started setting up Flixel (and then abandoned it in favour of SDL and C++), creating some tiles and initial graphic styles.
Saturday: Continued work on the pixel art style, and beginning on sprite animations of character and enemies. There was continuous talk of game mechanics throughout the day. We mocked up some levels in Tiled (and have recently started using Pixen). We started on the curry and worked through the night.
Sunday: Having done a bit of pixel art, I moved onto generative level design and path finding - the idea was to create levels which are always different but you always know that there is a path to the end (I was using Lua and Love2D to demo the tiling and build the array). Jack made some awesome music and sound effects (Ableton and fmod), while animations started coming thick and fast from Shakes and Jon,. Tony continued to knuckle down the platformer engine.
Parting ways on monday we had achieved a sprite platformer with a single level, music and sound FXs compilable to Mac/Linux/Windows.
WE HAD MADE SOMETHING!!!
We have agreed to continue working on the game (which I'm sure will have a title at some point) and hope to update you again soon with more specifics.
