Category: Inaria

40 Hour RPG (Take 2)

October 14, 2005
Game DesignGame ProgrammingInaria
1 Comment

Well, things have kind of slacked off a bit…

Oh, so Hit & Myth shipped?

No, it’s kind of in limbo…

Really? What’s all that about then?

It’s part of the Story I Can’t Tell Yet, which hopefully I’ll be able to tell soon.

You cop-out! Tell us what’s going on right now with Hit & Myth!

Look, this post isn’t about Hit & Myth, okay? It’s about me trying again to make an RPG in 40 hours. I learned a lot last time, and I hope I’ll learn even more this time.

Unfortunately, what I learned was this: making an RPG of the kind I’d really like to make in 40 hours is nigh-impossible.

I could write a completely text-based engine that allows the player to buy equipment, go down into a “dungeon” which was basically one room with progressively harder monsters, fight them, level up, and come back up to buy new equipment. I could certainly do this in 40 hours. (Heck, I might be able to do it in ten.) But that’s not really an RPG; it’s just an RPG combat/advancement engine.

I could write a game very similar to the above, except that, instead of a text-based one-room “dungeon” I could create a randomly created dungeon level that the player could explore. His job would be to go in, kill everything and then come back up to get better equipment. He could then re-enter the dungeon, which would give him a new randomly-created level to explore. Basically, a very simple quick-and-dirty Roguelike. I might be able to pull that off in 40 hours; the real question is how long it would take to figure out (or research) how to randomly generate a dungeon level. This is basically what Jay Barnson did when he made his 40-hour RPG.

Or I could write a game with an overworld, towns and dungeons, with NPCs that you can talk to and can give you quests, an inventory that allows you to keep and store quest items, and an overarching plot for the game where you end up saving the world at the end.

This is what I tried last time, and you just can’t make that kind of RPG in 40 hours. But that’s the kind of RPG I want to make…

So I’ve got a choice – either scale back my game or give myself more than 40 hours. I think I might be able to write a simple RPG of the style I want in 80 hours…

I’ll have to think about this.

40-Hour RPG Update

June 14, 2005
Game ProgrammingInaria
0 Comment

Um…why did I start this project again? More specifically, why did I start this project when the project I get paid to work on is due less than two months from now?

As of now I’ve spent about seven of my forty hours, and have nothing runnable to show for it. I got interested in generating fractal terrain for my city to sit on top of and…lost track of time. Even if I had completed the terrain generator, 1/5 of my time is gone and I certainly don’t have 1/5 of an RPG.

At this point, heavy sigh, it looks like I’m not going to get to work on the project any more before the June 18th deadline. I may spend another hour or two finishing the terrain generator (I know how it’s supposed to work now) and post that. We’ll just have to see.

Big lesson I’ve learned so far? Prioritization. I suck at it.

My Latest Project

May 18, 2005
Game DesignGame ProgrammingGamesInariaSelf-Improvement
0 Comment

Okay, purely for my own edification, I intend to write an RPG in 40 hours.

I was, of course, inspired by this blog post, and also by the fact that I really, really wanted to participate in the most recent Ludum Dare challenge, but couldn’t. So I’m sort of doing it on my own. Now you know why I was researching Roguelikes; 40 hours is too short to do just about anything graphical. Text mode will allow me to get the most out of my time.

Here’s the rules:

1. This will be a project created in Visual Studio .NET, using C++. It will be a console application, and it should run on both Win2K and Win9x.

2. The timer starts when I first create the project (which I haven’t yet).

3. Since I am a father of three and employed full-time, I can’t do something stupid like work on this for 40 hours straight. Instead, I will work on it whenever I have time, rigorously keeping track of my time. When the 40 hours is up, I will post whatever I’ve got, even if it’s not playable (though I will do my best to make sure that it is).

4. Time designing, coding and creating content counts against my 40 hours; time thinking about the project and writing blog entries about its progress do not. Thus, I can do some “mental preproduction” work on it as long as I don’t code anything or write any design down.

5. Failsafe. I have 40 hours to do this project, and I can spread them as thin as I want, but if the project is not done within 30 days (that is, it is not done by midnight, June 18th, 2005) the rest of my time is forfeited and I must post what I have.

Currently my thinking is that I will break the project up into two 20-hour chunks – one for coding the engine and one for creating content that runs on the engine. This should (note the word “should”) ensure that I ship something a bit more robust than just a hack & slash engine. My fears are that I will either overestimate the difficulty of the project and set my sights too low, resulting in a completed game so simplictic that no one wants to play it, or that I will conversely bite off far more than I can chew, resulting in no functioning game at all.

Oooh, this is going to be fun. I think.