A New Tack

Tacking is a maneuver that sailing vessels do to put the wind on the other side of the boat. This is often used to move against the direction of the wind.

My new tack then, is to build a bunch of simple games and then release them for free in an attempt to improve my skills. This obviously isn't ideal since I'd still lose out on learning about all the marketing things and project->product transformations. This does, however, seem to be OK in the light of the corporate copyright law under which I toil.

This guy tries to do a game a month. Gamasutra has some info on how to prototype in under a week (with additional bonus track commentary at Lost Garden). These guys make a game in a day. Kloonigames in that top link has a couple great posts with links to other rapid prototyping resources.

I'm going to try to prototype something each month and post it somewhere for free. I hope that this will get me some of what I'm looking for. It might not be pretty and almost certainly won't be polished but it'll be something which is better than slacking off.

So for my first game, I'm going to rebuild this:
This is GWAGL, the example game I built when exploring the info in
Scott Bilas's GDC Talk in 2002 about data driven game objects. It's even a rebuild of the arcade game I did in college for the one games class I took (I can't post a screenshot of that because it doesn't run anymore). I'm going to pretty it up some, make it a single player game, and bang it out before the end of this year barring any unforseen badness. I might even post updates on how it's going here (but don't hold your breath).

So here we go.