Dev Weekend With A Friend

Wow, what a weekend!

Started around 20:00 on Friday with my good friend Gav. I have started on the one game a month path but have wanted to develop a game with my mate for ages. We decided to get together and use our skills to do April's one game a month entry. The idea was to get the bulk of the game idea and mechanics sorted within a 72 hour period.

We set off with good intentions and came up with a interesting idea and game mechanic. The main bulk of our Friday night was spent getting our main game mechanic working. The early hours of Saturday morning was an adventure into finding limitations in what we could do with Stencyl. That is not to say that Stencyl could not do what we had imagined  it might well be able to, but we just couldn't get it to work without breaking our main mechanic. We called it a night/early morning with a hope of having fresh eyes on it in the morning.

Now Saturday morning proved to be an eye opener to me. I can see the benefits of working on your own; You have your own ideas and the skills you have will either make those ideas a reality or not. If you see yourself failing you might cut and run early and come up with a new idea that you feel is more achievable  So the benefits are easy to see, you make all the calls and you don't have to worry about anyone else.

Working with someone else is different to going solo. You do have someone else there with their own skills and ideas. You're just finding a balance and making compromises on ideas and hopefully you're both getting something you want. But the hardest thing I found was on Saturday morning when I was thinking we should change what we were doing. With all the learning and fiddling with different game mechanics I was worried we were getting bogged down and not moving forward. I would have called a time on our idea long before we both did. In this case it became a huge benefit to be working with someone else because where I would have moved on, Gav carried on. We stripped everything back to the main game mechanic and made a level. Turns out what we had was pretty good and what we originally wanted. If I had my way I would have ditched the whole thing.

So the rest of Saturday and Sunday was spent moving the game forward. Now we have, what we think, is a strong puzzle type game. We have only made two levels so far but we've had fun playing them and creating new levels will take no time at all.

What we have left to do for release this month is the sound and level design. I believe the weekend was a great success and we achieved what we set out to do. We were thinking of doing a Ludum Dare 72 hour game jam in the future and this was a great way of finding out what we're good at and where we need improvement. To finish a game within those 72 hours is would be a tough task but teams are doing this all the time.

Watch this space for screens and a very early development revision of our game.