MMMMMMM! Just before Christmas,
I entered a game-making competition where I only had half an hour to ‘programme’ the whole game!
So I could get the graphics, the audio, the music, the backgrounds all done before
I started. However, I misread the rules and I thought it started on the 22nd… but it actually
ended on that day! So I had far less time than everyone else to prepare all those assets. So
I spent about 2 hours doing that, and then I got to work on the half-hour coding session.
Which I recorded in its entirety over on the Cubiclebrothers video website page thing,
if you want to see it. CUT!
‘Let’s go, ho, ho!’
So my game was a simple, Christmas-themed entry where you run about as Santa,
delivering presents to all of the houses on the level without letting the evil snowmen touch you.
They run straight at you, but get blocked by stuff on the screen. And you can shoot them,
using whichever weapon you’ve been equipped with for that particular level.
I managed 3 stages in total, each getting faster and more difficult than the one before it.
And in case you were wondering, the music used is from my Dad’s new album. It will be released
sometime in the new year, but right now I’m just trying to familiarise myself with the
songs. And I’ve got to say I’ve grown fond of this track simply by featuring it in this game.
The rule of this competition was to make a game in half an hour,
and to upload a video of yourself doing it, presumably to prevent cheating.
Half an hour game making is unexplored territory for me. I’ve made games in 2 hours before- though
I did do the graphics in that time as well. Turns out that bit of it is a necessary,
but incredibly dull time-sink, and probably the bit that makes the biggest difference to
how ‘good’ the final game feels to play. I hope it isn’t rated too heavily on the graphical assets,
firstly cos mine are rubbish and secondly cos it’s got nothing to do with the
half-hour time element of the competition. I’ve been using faceapp to age my face, making for
an excellent decrepit looking Santa, which serves to decorate the screens, and also to add a touch
of dankness to an otherwise fairly dull game file. I was also aware that, having had several weeks to
make this game, other people would probably have done the half-hour coding session several times,
meaning they could fine-tune their game, learn to avoid the problems associated
with it and generally to produce a much more polished half-hour game and recording than I
could have done, having left it till the last minute and attempted it only once.
So how do you ensure you get a game done in half an hour? How do you pace yourself? And
here’s the secret: you don’t. You start and are all like GO GO GO GO GO and you keep that up for
half an hour. I’ve talked before about crunch time and its miraculous powers of productivity-
and this competition is half an hour of that. I have extensive experience with the game maker, so
I can do most things quite quickly, and I set out to have the bulk of the game done in 15 minutes,
so I could spend the remaining time testing, and adding more (but unnecessary) content to it.
At the start of this project you can see that I’m copying the graphics over from another game file.
Which is perfectly allowed! Not breaking any rules there. But what was this file? Well,
this was where I drew the graphics- obviously- but also where I experimented with the gameplay
I wanted my entry to have. I want to say that it wasn’t a finished -or even playable- version
of the game by any stretch of the imagination. It was just a place for me to test bits of the
project that I thought I’d have difficulties with. For instance, when Santa touches a house,
it lights up. It would be more elegant just for it to change its animation when this happens,
but I decided it was simpler to swap it out for a completely different model so that it
could move on to the next level once all of the original house had been destroyed,
and so on. In game-making, there are many ways of doing the same thing, but this approach was the
best for me because it was fastest to implement, and least likely to go wrong if I changed the
number of houses, or whatever else might happen later in the project. And if I hadn’t made a test
file like this, I would have forgotten stuff like the ‘pop’ animation when a snowman dies. Because
I don’t think about that kind of stuff until I’m testing a game. And in a half-hour project,
by then it’s too late to draw it from scratch. And also the menus! I needed a main menu,
a game over, and game complete screen. I COULD have made, and typed these up during
the half-hour game-making session. But it made a lot more sense to treat these as graphics objects,
by pre-making images for each of these that I could just copy over, complete
with pre-written text and instructions, and a sound effect to flesh these screens out with.
With enough time and effort I’m sure I could have really abused this pre-made graphics aspect of
the competition, especially with a game like Myst where it’s all about the graphics and exploration.
But I think my project was quite sensible with what was premade
and what wasn’t. It didn’t take the piss. So with these assets pre-made, I did have a
general idea of the game I wanted to make, and how it would turn out. Half an hour isn’t long enough
for me to spend time making levels for. Again, I could have pre-made entire levels graphically
before-hand, BUT DIDN’T. So I opted instead for randomly placed trees, enemies and houses,
and a map that was large enough to make it challenging for you to find them all,
but not too big that it gets frustrating. I made it so that the enemies spawn slightly
faster than you can kill them and that made it quite a frantic, but fun little shooter game.
In the back of my mind, there are potential problems. What if trees spawn inside a house?
What if a house spawns on your player? And so on. Again, you weigh up the chances of this happening,
and act accordingly. If there wasn’t such a fierce time restriction then of course I’d
have devised an elegant solution to this, but as it was, I deleted trees that spawned on stuff,
and assumed if a house spawned on a player then it wouldn’t cause a problem, and hoped for the best.
I wasted a lot of time here. I was looking for the ‘close’ button to close the graphics
file I was borrowing from. But for some reason, I just couldn’t see it!
I guess because I was panicking ‘cos I was under time constraints. I can now. But this was one of
those bits where I wasted a lot of time in a way that will confuse anybody watching because
it isn’t apparent what I’m trying to do, nor why exactly I need to do it. Because I didn’t.
At around the 15 minute mark, I had a working game! I briefly tested it to ensure that it all
worked roughly as intended, then set to work making extra levels for it, because I thought
I was fast enough to be able to add them, and that this would be the feature that would make
the judges wonder how the hell I managed to cram all this into half an hour. Different weapons,
different levels, different challenges. It seems a shame to make a game engine,
then not to add this sort of variety to it. I made the second level feature a shotgun, which
fired multiple bullets at once but took longer to reload. I also upped the speed of the snowmen and
the rate at which they spawned at, meaning you had to kill several with one shot if you wanted
to stand a chance. I also increased the number of trees, just to make the level feel a bit different
to play, and also because blocking snowmen behind these trees is a valid gameplay feature.
And for the final level, I increased the houses Santa has to visit to 20,
dropped the tree cover, and gave you a fast-firing machine gun. I also
made the snowmen run even faster. None of this stuff was tested before-hand,
I just had to guess the correct values and I think it worked, because it’s definitely the
fastest and most difficult level of the lot. But it still doesn’t feel unfair.
It might have been a half-hour game making competition, but only half of that was spent
‘coding’ it. The other half was spent playing, testing and fixing. It worked well for the
snowmen to have large hitboxes so that they got stuck on stuff, and for Santa to have a
tiny one so that he isn’t killed unless snowmen are literally right inside him.
I’d describe this choice as being ‘forgiving’. But I soon discovered that having trees and
houses block your bullets was infuriating. It was much better for the snowmen to be blocked
by those elements, but for it to still work in your favour by you still being able to shoot
through them, and I felt improved the gameplay immensely to give the player this advantage.
I caught a few bugs, too. Fortunately, not covid, but I did catch bugs like where the
victory scene then jumps to the game over, which would have been a very unhappy ending.
Happy- HOHOHWORFHOWG
And towards the end of testing, santa finally spawned inside a house, and was completely
unable to move. And this was more game-breaking than I thought it would have been, so I botched
his movement so that touching a house would transport him backwards. This is a trade-off:
it fixes this game-breaking bug (and others like it), but makes his movement slightly buggier the
rest of the time. Again, a more elegant solution could have been found had there been more time.
I didn’t see the need to cut this game-making competition too finely,
so I finished and compiled the exe file at the 28 minute mark. And there it is: a half hour game.
I notice a few bugs still remain. It says ‘level 2’ when it should say ‘level 3’. And Santa DOES
have a running animation, but I forgot to feature it so he just slides about the level instead.
This is the sort of detail I’m rubbish at spotting because it doesn’t affect gameplay
in the slightest, and even when I do spot it when testing the game, by the time I’m finished playing
the game I’ve forgotten about it, amd typically have something important on my mind that needs
fixing instead. So of course, I’d have liked for more time to polish and to test it. You might
look down on this little game, but I’d argue its gameplay is better than in most of the games I’ve
made, because it doesn’t out-stay its welcome, and because its simple challenge and gameplay is
quite satisfying to master. And perhaps more importantly, the difficulty feels ‘right’,
compared with all those more advanced games I’ve made where either it doesn’t pose a challenge,
or it takes so long to master the gameplay that most people won’t bother with it.
So yeah, I finished and then I submitted the game, and the video of me making it,
and a few days later, Clickteam themselves emailed me, asking for the source recording.
There are only two reasons they would have done this- either they couldn’t figure out how to rip
the video off youtube directly, or because they thought I was cheating. And I have to admit,
I am pretty damn fast, so I’ll assume it’s that because it helps inflate my already bulbous ego.
I took part in this competition because it felt like a great opportunity to spend a
couple of hours making games. It challenged me to do something I’ve never done before,
and I felt the time limit would have limited the quality of the games enough that my silly
little idea might still stand a chance. But I also made it because it gives me
something to look forward to. Until the results are announced in January, I can sit back,
knowing I’ve got something to look forward to. And that alone justifies the time I’ve invested.