Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: Tips and Tricks from 4 Grad Students Wh  (Read 3237 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline SystemTopic starter

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Join Date: Jul 2003
  • Posts: 199
    • Show only replies by System
    • http://amiga.org
Hailing from the the Experimental Gameplay Project at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, the authors of this article give tips and insights into quickly churning out game prototypes, drawing from their experience in making 50 games in one semester with a team of only 4 grad students.

Original : http://utilitybase.com/article?action=show&id=135
 

Offline weirdami

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jan 2003
  • Posts: 3776
    • Show only replies by weirdami
    • Http://Bindingpolymer.com
Re: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: Tips and Tricks
« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2005, 01:28:15 AM »
I tried to download that goo game but the EGP site kills the DL's after a bit and it's SLOOOW. I tried getting the goo game from alternate sources, but they all get deleted by Spybot when I run them. So, no goo for me. :-(
----
Binding Polymer: Keeping you together since 1892.
 

Offline Lando

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jun 2002
  • Posts: 1390
    • Show only replies by Lando
    • https://bartechtv.com
Re: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: Tips and Tricks
« Reply #2 on: October 30, 2005, 10:13:55 AM »
All of the games are utter crap.

Poorly slapped together flash games which look like they've been made by a 8-year-old and have about 5% of the sophistication and playability as pong.

God help us if any of them actually learn how to program.

What surprises me most is that these idiots have been featured on Gamasutra and at GDC.
 

Offline weirdami

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jan 2003
  • Posts: 3776
    • Show only replies by weirdami
    • Http://Bindingpolymer.com
Re: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: Tips and Tricks
« Reply #3 on: October 31, 2005, 06:52:19 PM »
@Lando

Oh, that's nice. No need to be mean.

http://ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/pig.htm <--That's a really fun flash game that is really simple, but you probably still hate it because you're a mean head. :-( Don't check out the rest of the Orisnal games either because they're all just as simple and have the same amount of playability. Games don't need wine and cheese and snooty snobs in them to be fun. Sheesh.  :evil:
----
Binding Polymer: Keeping you together since 1892.
 

Offline Hattig

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Feb 2002
  • Posts: 901
    • Show only replies by Hattig
Re: How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: Tips and Tricks
« Reply #4 on: November 03, 2005, 06:09:40 PM »
And out of those 50 games, they got how many games that were worth playing for more than 10 minutes?

Writing a simple game (like all of these were) in a week is a simple task for any programmer if they don't have to write their own low-level game library. In this case Flash was used, which makes the graphics aspect and audio aspect rather simple. Kind of like using Shoot Em Up Construction Kit to write a vertically scrolling shooter on the C64 15 years ago, it isn't big nor is it worthy of an article like this. More interesting is the marketing side of things!

When I was at school, I'd write games over a week that we'd play the next week at school on the Amiga 500s. Of course, I had school and homework competiting with my evenings. I still wrote games that were played by the group of us many many times - sure, they were simple, but replayable. I'd write the games in Blitz Basic 2 (fair comparison to writing a game in Flash today I think), and draw my own graphics in DPaint 4.5 (both legal copies too!). So colour me unimpressed that 12 years later a bunch of >20 year olds have managed to do the same when dedicating themselves to the task, with computers that are 100x more powerful and a development environment a bazillion times more efficient than 'TED'.

The only interesting aspect was they tried to develop games using a theme, such as gravity. The blob game looked interesting.

When you get down to real game development for money however, you need a lot more. Maybe they could get $5 if they wrote a package of the better games (the cute pig game and the blob game, etc) for touch-screen Symbian phones.

However I think that these games are 1-day efforts for most people, given a suitably rich development platform like Flash.