How to Finish a Game

I've known a lot of talented indies who have had trouble finishing games- and many who haven't ever even finished one game. In no particular order, here are some suggestions to (potentially) help you finish. These are things from my experience, not necessarily things that everyone has done.

1. Make sure you like the game.
This might seem obvious, but I actually have started projects where I haven't liked the idea. Needless to say this didn't turn out to well. If you think your game is fun, it's likely that at least some people will also think so. If you don't think your game is fun... you're screwed.

2. Make deadlines and organize how you will spend your time.
By deadlines, I mean a schedule. Say "I will have the grass level done by Wednesday, and the fire boss done by Thursday..." The tough part about this is putting some actual importance in these deadlines. If you miss a deadline at your job or at school, there are actual consequences. If you miss a deadline made by yourself, nothing really happens. So essentially this is just a way to help you be organized.

3. Be disciplined- force yourself to get things done.
I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me on this. But I think putting yourself in front of a computer and just getting something done is always important, no matter how you are feeling. You have to have a steady working habit; force yourself to get in there, open up the programs you use, and just do something. That being said, if it's crap, trash it. A day you spend doing absolutely nothing is worse than a day where all of your work goes to waste.

4. Get a demo out there- build up hype.
Something that gets me through the early stages of development is knowing that I will be posting a WIP of my project. I live for feedback- positive or negative. Picture, in your mind, people commenting on a topic about your game. We all love attention. A game is, among many other things, a way to get attention. Make sure that your game is actually fun before you put a demo out there!

5. Do tons of planning before you start your game (why isn't this number 1? I don't get it)
For one of my games I have like 5 pages worth of a Word document- and it's all plans about all of the levels in one game. Sometimes I like to draw pictures, sometimes I jot down everything I think on a piece of paper. But anyway planning is of the utmost importance. It's all about organization, and having a rhythm- once you finish one thing, you have to know what you're going to do next, and so on. Plan things out before you start making things.

6. Do whatever you have to do to keep yourself excited about making the game.
When I'm not feeling so hot about the game I'm making, I'll spend a day just playing the game. If it's a game worth finishing, it's a game that I'll have fun playing. Spending time playing your game is so important, I can't even explain it. First of all, you have to make sure you are the one who's finding bugs, and not the players. It will also give you an insight on what is and what isn't working for the game. Sometimes I'll even start a different project. After 10 minutes working on said new project, I'll realize that I have something good in the first place, and go back to the other project, with my lesson learned.

Well, thanks for reading.

The Courtship: Looking Back Part 1

This is the first of a series of posts looking back on my Flash platformer with a ton of levels called The Courtship. This post is about graphics, the comics, music, feedback, and everything else that isn't gameplay.

Flowers. Flowers. Flowers.

It's not that I actually like flowers in real life. It's not that the flowers in the game are actually based on actual flowers. But they represent flowers.

The name of the game is "The Courtship". It's supposed to be somehow related to love (although it's stupid and basically a joke.) So the flowers kind of fit in to that theme.

At the same time, I like putting the flowers in levels. I like playing around with the different color combinations, working with the background and ground tile, and creating a great feel and using all of the graphics I have to make a great looking scene.

Ooh, purty colors.

In terms of the main character, I'm going to be honest. I completely half-assed it. You might notice that this is a common factor in my games, having a main character that is sub-par. In Ruined, I was afraid of the project not working out (and we decided to keep it.) With this, I just was afraid of not being able to make a good walking animation.

So I made a robot on wheels. Well, on one wheel. So then there was no animation walking needed. I apologize for the cop-out. I'm pretty sure some people have said that he looks good- he doesn't, it's just an oval with wheels and a gun. And no animation! Personally I dislike when games don't have a walking animation. I broke one of my own rules- that's a bad thing.

See what I mean? It's such a stupid design for a main character.

Anyway, the story of the game is just something I thought would be silly. I like silly. It's almost as if I'm not taking myself seriously for one second in my life (like that would ever happen.) Anyway, it's not supposed to be a game built for Valentine's Day (although it peaked in popularity at that time) and it most definitely is not supposed to be based off of real life experience (duh). It just is.

The music was something I cooked up a long time ago and recycled for this game. I kind of like it, but I hear that it's annoying after a while. That's understandable. I always feel like when I make the music for a game, people shouldn't like it, because I have no experience with music. I just make what I think sounds good for the game, but in reality, you shouldn't think my music is good, because it isn't. Hopefully someday music that I make will be good.

Well, feedback for the game was okay. I remember on Newgrounds I got one "5/10" and also one "10/10. I guess it's just that kind of game. The feedback on Newgrounds was really good. In the end I think the graphics looked pretty good and I'm happy with them. I wonder how much better it would be with an awesome player character...

Thanks for reading! To be continued in a few weeks.

What We're Working On

This is the first of a new weekly segment where I will ramble on about what we have been doing this week.

Well, honestly, I've been mostly doing this. I've been mostly blogging.

Is it just me, or is blogging the most fun thing in the world? It's like... taking everything that's on your brain and converting it into text. And then taking that text and sharing it with the world. It's pretty cool. So yeah, that's what I've been doing.

Epic428 (Go visit his site) who I worked alongside while making Leap of Faith, has been working away at a sequel to Leap of Faith.

Okay, honestly, I have a thing against sequels. I've never done a sequel to any game before. But we both felt like we were very close to making something really, really good with Leap of Faith, but we didn't quite get there with the first version. We got a lot of good feedback from a lot of different places, and now we're going to bring everything we learned into this newest project. Expect better graphics, expect the gameplay to be more rewarding and challenging, and at the same time the game is going to be really really different. The whole "only jump/can't walk" gimmick is a constant, but the jumping itself is getting a makeover.

Obviously you can expect me to talk about this in the coming weeks. In fact I imagine this will be in development for some time... Maybe I can hook you guys up with a demo before anyone else gets one.

Christian recently started school again so his ability to do stuff has been greatly affected. But I don't care, he has more game making ability in his pinky than I have in my whole body, so I'm happy with whatever time he puts into this whole Abscure thing. Right now he's working on converting Launch into GM8, and then making an online high score system thing, and then making the game free. So that's going to be fun. I'm planning a similar marketing assault as the one that I used for Propel, and hopefully the game will get the press it deserves, because it has like 3 awesome addicting games rolled into one download.

Okay, thanks for reading! And thanks for caring enough about this silly little game making team to read all the way through.

Ethan's Game Idea Journal 1

Every Wednesday (at least, for now) I will be releasing game ideas. Some of these will be from an actual document that I have these ideas in, and eventually I will just be using this format for new ideas that I make up on the spot. If you wish to use one of these ideas for a game, please ask me in the comments section. In reality though, I realize people could do anything with these, so I'm not really planning on using these ideas anytime soon.

Game Name: Super Platformer RPG

Genre: Platformer (Hub)

Camera View: Platformer

Graphic style: Cartoony

Gimmick: Level up/customization system for basic platforming skills.

Yeah! Looking good.

Gameplay: The game is a regular platformer, with a level system like Jumper (Worlds-Levels). The levels would also be a similar size.
The player gets experience points based on completion, and stats based on that. There would also be some kind of coin/collectable system. Things taken into account would be deaths, time, and enemies killed.
Experience can be used towards stats: Jump, Double Jump, Strength, Health. Stuff like that.

Plot: You have always wanted to be a super hero. The problem? You are a weakling. Luckily, you also happen to be a ridiculously rich technology tycoon. Using your authority, you somehow construct a simulator that allows you to work on your super hero skills. (this is the setting for all of the worlds except the final world) Eventually you decide to film yourself running around the city, saving people (this is the final world).

Pros: I love RPG Elements. I love platformers. It's definitely something I'd play. It's probably something I'd play for a long time.

Cons: Is this really original? Would it be possible for the player to "break" the game easily by just loading up on a certain stat? Would it be difficult to make all of the stats of equal importance? Would the plot completely suck?

Thanks for reading.

Pixel Art

I remember when I started to sprite. I was... young, I don't remember how many years old I was. It was on a Pokemon site, a Pokemon spriting site called "PMF Inc." The most common practice was "mutating" Pokemon sprites, which meant taking features and colors from two different Pokemon and splicing them together. Sound easy? I was horrible at it. Even as I got older, even when I tried really hard, I was awful. Awful, awful, awful.

The unlikely hero of pixel artists everywhere (except those who don't use Paint.)

But it was fun. It was so much fun! And it introduced me to pixel art. These mutations taught me how to sprite. At first, my disturbingly bad works looked like a 3-year old's scribbles on a page; I remember a Golem/Charizard splice that really looked like neither of those Pokemon in the end. (Note: These sprites were on a computer I had a long time ago, so I unfortunately can't share these disasters with you all.) Over time, my sprites got cleaner. I still didn't understand how to make a color palette, I still didn't understand shading, I still sucked.

Later on I finally began to understand shading. Now, shading was at first something that I would dread, something that would make my sprites look just plain awful. And it was something I never could understand, no matter how many times someone tried to explain it to me. And then one day... it just came to me. I just understood it.

It all started with balls. I would practice shading spheres, trying different styles on for size. And that introduced me to shading properly and making things look good. I'm still not a great pixel artist, but I've improved and (I think) I continue to do so. I still have a ton to learn.

Anyway, enough about me. Pixel art in general is very attractive to me for a number of reasons. If you were to show someone a picture made up of pixel artwork (that wasn't made for a game) it's likely that they would say something along the lines of "oh, it looks like Mario," or "looks like a Gameboy!"

Smells like it's from a videogame.

If you were to show someone vector graphics, or like a logo or something, they probably wouldn't give you a similar answer. They might think about comic books or cartoons, maybe sports logos, and they might possibly relate it to Flash games. But they wouldn't think of games as quickly as they would if they were viewing pixel art.

So that's what I love about pixel art. You could almost call it video game's art, something you associate with games like you would with graffiti and urban culture, or a fresco and the Renaissance. (Note: The point of those examples is that they are not exclusive to these time periods or locations, but are regularly associated with them.)

If I were making comics, it's highly unlikely that I'd look to pixel art to do the job (but that would be really cool now that I think about it, and I'm sure it's been done.) If I were making a logo for a sports team (which I wish I could do) I wouldn't use pixel art. If I were making a website- wait a second, we used some pixel art for the Abscure website design. That might not be the best example.

Anyway, you get the point. Pixel art= videogames. And that's why it's something that I frequently enjoy and use.

Thanks for reading.