Finishing a Game

This is a wonderful post about finishing and releasing a game, by Derek Yu (from Aquaria and Spelunky).

makegames:

As I work towards completing my own game, I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing projects in general. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of really talented developers out there that have trouble finishing games. Truthfully, I’ve left a long trail of unfinished games in my wake… I think everyone has. Not every project is going to pan out, for whatever reason. But if you find yourself consistently backing out of game projects that have a lot of potential, it could be worth taking a step back and examining why this happens.

 

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Building roads #01

I’ve been looking for the right way to start this dev-diary thingy properly, but since my workflow on the game itself isn’t very consistent, I’m just going to update this along the way, whenever I feel like it’s important to do so.

Roads (not the final title) is a puzzle game I’m working on, focusing on a casual-gaming approach where the player has to build roads in uninhabited sights, allowing progress to take place.

I’ve been trying to start it since the beginning of this year, with a prototype built in flash (with FlashDevelop and the FlashPunk library). I finally managed to get back to it and build a new prototype later this year, using pure HTML+CSS+JS, with the aid of Crafty.

My goals with this personal project include testing freeware and open-source tools to get the job done, and make a game that can be easily deployed on many desktop and mobile devices with standard technology.

For now, I’m using:
- Ubuntu 11.04 as my OS
- Inkscape and Gimp for the graphics
- Gedit for basic coding (I’d love to try other code editors with features like code completion on Ubuntu)

I promise to post some relevant information about the development and design process as I progress, giving some tips and insight about working with these tools.

If you’re a game designer, game artist, ubuntu fan, please feel free to contact me and share some of your tips and experience! Thanks a lot.