Sun 6 Jun 2010
3 Day Month: developing a short game
Posted by Mark Richards under Dev Diaries, Features, games & demos
[8] Comments
Of late, the monthly adventure game studio competition or ‘MAGS’ has caught my eye. Participants take part my making a game with Chris Jones’s Adventure Game Studio engine in just one month – restricted by a specific theme set by the previous month’s winner.
MAGS is a great way of making short, fun games in a very focused manner. This idea of making many short games in focused periods of development wouldn’t have interested me a few months ago but it was in fact a development ‘big push’ on my long term project: The Longevity Gene that persuaded me to try developing a short game.
This March, I locked myself in my room for about a week and a half and worked solid on The Longevity Gene. I managed to complete the development of three puzzles in their entirety and I’m now very close to a (although unpolished) complete build. So, what is all this about a ‘3 day month’? Basically, 3 days before the May MAGS deadline I noticed the theme was ‘complete your game’. Fellow Zombie Cow Studio forumites and a few AGSers too will be aware I’ve had a little Wall-E fan game knocking about for a year or so now and I couldn’t help but see the MAGS rules as a golden opportunity. I’d made the game as a present for my girlfriend and had worked on it in a couple or short, fevered bursts. It was just a tech demo, really with a few short but fun interactions and animations from the film – it had no puzzles or story structure. The old project fitted the rules perfectly.
Now the game is completed (or as complete as a MAGS game gets before some post-competition polish) I’ve decided to look back on what I have learnt. It feels great to have a game released, up on the AGS database. The Wall-E is something I’m never going to take any further, it’s an unoriginal IP and The Longevity Gene represents a lot more for me in terms of writing and puzzle design. What I have taken away from the project however, is a taste for developing short games and a lot of practice with animation.
Once puzzles started appearing in Wall-E, having a narrator became important.
I think I will now work more short, focused projects. In fact, I have a couple thought out. And, rather than my attitude a year ago, perhaps, of getting frustrated because I couldn’t work on them, I may take the time out to build a strong, varied catalogue of games. The advantage of thinking small or short is ability to think outside your developer’s comfort-zone. I have ideas for short adventure games, yes. But I also have ideas for flash and iPhone games, opening up the opportunity for learning new skills and platforms or for collaboration.
The very nature of the characters in Wall-E forced me to think about animation from a more systematic perspective. The movements I aimed to express were mechanical and, as they had to mimic human emotion, exaggerated. Knowing the robots’ arms and bodies would move, generally, along lines or pivots of motion rather than in the wholly dynamic way a human character would move, I took care to draw their sprites in layers. The layers would be: far wheels, body, near wheels, arms for example. Animation could then be approached from an angle more akin to stop-motion, where each part is moved a little for each frame. I could do this simply by high-lighting the whole layer and moving it across, up or down a few pixels for each frame. With human animation, although the same stop-motion analogy could remain, one ends up stuck in the habit of drawing each frame as a separate image. Very quickly, the overall motion can be lost track of. Animations didn’t suddenly become easy but the different approach was welcome and it took a long time to get bored of the process; and when I did, the first thing I wanted to do was go back to human character animation in The Longevity Gene.
My favourite animation is Wall-E's walk-cycle.
I will never back down from the principles I outlined in The Idealist’s Way of believing in your game, however ambitious; of sticking with your game, learning as you go, rather than ditching it for a fresh start but this month’s MAGS competition provided me with a lot of fun. And the practice of developing little projects is becoming ever more appealing to me.
Mark’s MAGS May entry, Wall-E (Fan Game) can be downloaded here. Don’t vote before you’ve played the others, though! 
Interesting to see how your perceptions have changed
.
My argument for short games has always been this: Before one draws a good picture, they must first learn how to draw by doing sketches and the like. Therefore it makes sense that before one can make a good game, one must first do a series of smaller things to test the waters, see what works and what doesn’t, see what they’re good at and what they need to improve/get help with.
I learn heaps of things which each new project I work on, and take these things away onto the next project, slowly building up a better idea of how to go about building games.
Your fan game was cute (I remember playing the first build you released some time ago and enjoying it) and I’m glad to see you finished it.
[Reply]
Igor Hardy Reply:
June 6th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
This kind of arguments for developing short games are definitely very good. For me the most important factor is the confidence in your skills which a finished game and the player feedback for it can give you.
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Thanks for the comment, Ben. I think I have always agreed with you, I just thought you could do the “learn in steps” thing with one project. Perhaps you can, perhaps you can’t, all I’ve learnt with this is: with short games this process is a LOT easier.
The post is FULL of typos, I’m afraid. I’ll have to get those sorted. Ooops.
[Reply]
Thanks for that – feel you could valuably say more!
So does a short time limit mean you have to have a clearer plan upfront? Which might be a worthwhile takeaway for any game development? Is it not working harder but smarter?
Are these short games just shorter versions of long games, or do they have structural differences? Ben you seem to be saying that these short games are practice runs?
[Reply]
Mark Richards Reply:
June 6th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
“Thanks for that – feel you could valuably say more!”
Not sure what you meant by that. :S
“So does a short time limit mean you have to have a clearer plan upfront? Which might be a worthwhile takeaway for any game development? Is it not working harder but smarter?”
Yeah, I think it may be smarter and better. But only in a very technical sense. If you do it with short games, learning each time and getting better then that’s great. There is nothing wrong with having a dream game going for it anyway, in spite of having little experience. I’ve enjoyed having a go at both approaches. It depends where you want to go with game development, really. If you are just someone having some fun in your spare time, you can do whatever the heck you want. If, like I’m starting to realise, you want to do this kind of thing seriously, for a living in the future, you have to consider these smarter approaches to development. As for having a clearer plan, yes that’s more possible I suppose. If you know you are going to spend a certain amount of time on something, you can plan better. No reason why someone can’t do this for a bigger project, though.
“Are these short games just shorter versions of long games, or do they have structural differences?”
They are definitely different. They are more focused experiments. Maybe only concentrating on one thing to practice and refine. That’s how I think Ben does it but he can answer that, obviously. In my case, Wall-E was a short game in that it didn’t take long to develop and it doesn’t take long to play. It doesn’t “test the water” on anything in particular.
Sorry, very long response!
[Reply]
Peter RS Reply:
June 6th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
I’m interested to read what you have to say so long responses are fine! I just felt you had more worth saying than was in your article.
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Mark Richards Reply:
June 6th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
I’ll just have to hope people read the comments, then!
It was meant to just be a simple game announcement. It turned out I wrote quite a bit more. In the future, I’m sure I’ll get to write about this whole process in detail and in retrospect.
I treat each game as a focus on certain key points in game design I want to learn more about. Sometimes I treat a game as an exercise in puzzle design, other times I want to push the way I write a story – sometimes it’s just to see how well I can do the graphics.
No matter what the case, I still try to ensure that the other aspects of the game are up to a suitable standard, even when I’ve focused more on the particular elements that interest me. So, much in the same way an art student will do studies on form, shape, frame, contrast and the like, I do studies on various aspects of design.
Getting feedback from players tells me what works and what doesn’t for the most part, and then I move on, looking for the next facet of design that I wish to improve in.
It’s a never ending cycle!
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