Posted March 14, 2024 by Wistpotion
Lets check some times shall we:
total time spent: ~27 hours
time spent trying to get the game to be fun: ~25
polish: ~2
In my attempts to make really interesting games I seem to have fogotten the 4:44 rule.
Rami Ismail is credited with coming up with it, and here is how I interpret it:
1 - Spend 4 hours implementing your fundamental mechanics. If it "sparkles" at the end of those 4 hours, keep going. Otherwise trash it and move on.
2 - Spend 44 hours digging out what is interesting, and highlight the intersting bit. Make the sparkles shine.
And from the developers who made 50 games in one semester:
"Start with the core mechanic. Whether spring systems, swarm behavior, gravity, etc, it never took more than a few hours to get the basic theme up and running. This “toy” should be the core mechanic of the game minus any goals or decisions. There is no win or lose state, just a fun thing to play with."
Why isn't this working for me right now?
I think I plan too far ahead. I plan out progression systems, world generation and a lot of other crap before even writing the first line of code. That forces a scope onto me, and I have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get all of the systems to behave nicely together. My goal for gamejams is to make something that a player can reach the end of in roughly 10 minutes. I'm just making mechanics that are too complicated.
What to do about it?
I will try practicing making games in 4 hours. At 00:00 I will pick a randomish jam and use it's theme. For the first hour, I'm going to gather inspiration and figure out what (more specifically) I want to make. Then the three remaining is just about as quickly as possible bashing together the core mechanic. At 04:00, I can't touch the game any more. But I'll write a short post mortem about how it went in the games files. No publishing it to itch, nothing like that. Just developing it for me.
Rami Ismali 4:44: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPyYZjCQ0Is&ab_channel=GustavDahl
How to prototype a game in under 7 days: http://miami.lgrace.com/documents/How%20to%20Prototype%20a%20Game%20in%20Under%2...
I'm really happy with the rendering. Around 20 hours in I really hated the game. Sick and tired of it. The game just felt so unappealing to work on. Since I was still trying to figure out the main mechanics at that point, I hadn't had time to make the graphics any appealing which really started to wear on motivation. I set aside 2-3 hours to just work on the visuals, and I was much more exited to work on it. In the end it ended up being a dumpster fire anyways, but this made it just a bit more beareable. The music is also quite a banger, at least the first section.
I'd say it's doing what it should be doing! I've spend somewhere between 40-60 hours poking around getting it to work smoothly, and comply with how web portals want their games to work. Right now the visuals are kind of perfectly limited for me, I can get something that I think looks good with just 2-4 hours of work. A huge improvement over moongrail. Music took ~1:40 to make. Not as big of an improvement, but it's an improvement. It's a lot more fun to work with soundfonts compared to what I did before though, so it's a total win for my own enjoyment. And that's what matters at the end of the day. There is still some time until I really get smooth with defold compared to the pure lua of pico, but I'm getting there. Just need to make some more games.
I'm not overscoping this postmortem. Now I'm off to make more games, this time simpler ones.
Issie out.