renderSmith.net

I’ve been reading up on some indie game development sites, and one thing that I noticed in several places was the idea of rapid prototyping for games. The idea is that many games could be executed to the stage of at least a successful, playable, prototype in a week or less. With some upcoming “less frantic” time, I feel I might have an opportunity to explore this concept myself, and see what comes out of it all. Ideally, I’d like to develop around 6 games, focusing on different ideas in each one, and find which one ends up being the most successful in ters of gameplay. The most successful idea would then be developed into a fully realized product to be released, hopefully onto the iPhone app store.

While developing these games, I plan to document them on this site, posting thoughts and ideas that come to mind as part of the experiment.

Development Methods –

I’ve looked around at several options for beginning this process, and came to a few conclusions about the various options that are available to me, in regards to development platforms.

• pygame — something I rediscovered last night, that I’d previously looked at and been scared away from, is the pygame set of modules. I’ve been doing a fair amount of python scripting lately, so the syntax and ideas of developing in this language are currently fresh in my mind. The primitive limitations that would be in place here would definitely put restrictions on the complications I could introduce into the games. When dealing with such a short development schedule, this is actually beneficial, as it keeps things simple.
• Flash — this would give me a large potential test audience, and could be an excellent way to rapidly develop the ideas into reality. I’d have to relearn much of what I knew about working in ActionScript, but it could prove easier than learning the finer points of controlling things in pygame. This also would let me focus a bit more on the visual appearance of the game, though I’m not totally sure that’s really what this experiment is about.
• iPhone — Need more experience coding/designing for it before going full bore into the world of iPhone dev. Arguably the most complicated of the platforms to develop for, which could present problems in executing the designs I’d like in a timely manner. This could be a good final product delivery location, though, once I’ve proven that a game would be successful through prototyping.
• XNA — I’m currently not running Windows on any of my Boot Camp/VMware capable machines. There is also the issue of learning an entirely new programming language and development environment. The level of complication here is second in my mind, only following the iPhone. This could also be an interesting point of delivery for a final product, though the potential audience for such a game might not be large enough to merit focusing my first efforts here.

Topics/Themes/Base Games –

One of the key things that seems to help speed the development time of a game is to take a theme or a base game (Pong, Tetris, etc.) and develop creatively off of that idea. This will be my plan, as well, with the following topics as my list of possibilities.

• pong/breakout
• tetris
• bejeweled
• poppit
• the blues
• blue mood
• moody
• sexy (not sexual)
• garden
• running/racing
• hiding
• silliness
• traffic
• flow
• mirror/reflection
• indirect control
• cooperation
• exploration
• bravery
• boldness