7 replies to this topic

[hObbE]

Two days ago I challenged myself to create a game in eight working hours. It is now finished :)

You can read about it on our homepage.

8h game challenge Part I
8h game challenge Part II

There are also a few screenies and you can play it by downloading our game distribution platform hUb.

All in all it was a good experience and I hope to inspire you to do the same!

I'll probably continue working on it so any feedback or suggestions are welcome!

regards,
h0bbE

[TheNut]

Cool. All of a sudden I feel like doing a time-lapse recording of myself doing something similar. That way I can look back at myself and see how often I get distracted from work ;)

[Razor]

8 hours is short indeed, you must know your library well. With an unfamiliar codebase it can take a good hour to get a window open with something drawn in it. Here's some of my speed game programming:
Swarf - 34 hours straight
Hatrix - 40 hours straight
Photon Arena - about 3 days straight

The first two were made using only freely available libraries (glfw and clanlib respectively), with all art and sound made within the time limit. They were entries to the ludumdare 48h game programming competition. The last one was just for fun, and used my own framework.

[hObbE]

Those games are really cool, and impressive for such short timespan!

I really liked the tight deadline, forcing you to make prioritizations and think about what is really important. In other projects I often dwindle down in some technical aspect and then loose interest once that is solved.

The game is made using our basecode that is basically a thin layer of helper stuff on top of directX. It takes about 30 minutes to create a working visual studio solution with basic rendering and game architecture in place.

Regards,
hObbE

[TheNut]

Quote

It takes about 30 minutes to create a working visual studio solution

I have a template solution for my engine that has all the leg work done for me. It has all the engine includes and libs defined, signals/slots created, startup method calls, drawing, a default menu scene, and the directory structure is all setup. All I do is fine-tune the parameters and then jump right into the game or tool I'm creating. Very handy.

[Sol_HSA]

Most ludum dare (48h game desing compo) entries are probably done in under 8 hours of actual work.. =)

[hObbE]

TheNut said:

I have a template solution for my engine that has all the leg work done for me. It has all the engine includes and libs defined, signals/slots created, startup method calls, drawing, a default menu scene, and the directory structure is all setup. All I do is fine-tune the parameters and then jump right into the game or tool I'm creating. Very handy.

Been thinking of doing something similar myself... do you just copy a solution or is there some visual studio magic involved?

/hObbE

[TheNut]

Purely a copy/paste scenario. I only change the solution name afterwards, which also updates the name of the generated executable.