An RPG in a week
Woo-hoo! I finished another game! Well, kinda. Some blogs I post both here and at GarageGames - but this time I'm simply going to link to the one at GG:

http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/27747/7537

If you want to play a new, free game - I won't say it's any GOOD, but it's free - you can download the fruits of my labors here:

HACKENSLASH - A game built in a week!
http://www.rampantgames.com/hackenslash.html




So what the heck is this?

Basically it was a dare. Build a game in a week, using NOTHING but free tools / content, WITHOUT using a higher-level engine (some of those are free) - just an API. Since there was no way I was going to get my boss to give me a full week off of work to crank out a game (and my wife has WAY better things for me to do if I find myself with a week off), I decided to define a week as a work-week: 40 hours.

Now, this was an extremely PRODUCTIVE 40 hours. I didn't count time spent web-surfing or answering emails or writing documentation or playing Unreal Tournament when I was SUPPOSED to be working on Hackenslash. So it's pretty close to an ideal 40 hours of time spent working on a game. I used Python + Pygame - raw installation, compiled with py2exe.

There was a learning process involved - I'd only had one aborted 6-hour project done in PyGame before, and I didn't remember anything about how to do it. But it proved to be extremely easy to do.

Now, I fudged a little on the time. I actually clocked in a little over 40 hours by a few minutes - but not 41 - finishing this thing up. The 40 hours was to get me to a "feature complete" condition. Afterwards, I had to spend some time getting py2exe to create a distribution for the game (so people wouldn't need to install Python to play), and fixing up some crash-bugs. After some discussion with Steve Taylor, I was convinced that I'd ONLY fix crash-bugs with the post-development time... so the game has plenty of other bugs from it's rapid development. For one thing, the display to the right doesn't display the player's correct armor class (or some other stats).

Oh, well.

I originally intended there to be a much bigger dungeon - with a big quest item at the bottom that you had to bring back to the starting area to win. And there was supposed to be a merchant with whom you could buy magic items and potions from (using some of that hard-won silver for something more than bribes). And LOTS more monsters - I didn't intend it to be a dungeon of only goblins.

My brother even did some great music for the game that didn't make it in.

Oh, well. Five more hours and I could have had a LOT more cool things in the game. But I'm pretty happy with how it ended up. No, it's not the best game EVAR. It's mildly interesting for a few minutes, and I'm pretty proud of the complexity that got in there.

Anyway - I'm anxious to see if anyone else will do the Game In A Week in the future. Consider the gauntlet thrown!

Labels: Free Games, programming, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:49 PM (Permalink)