It’s not necessarily a question of how hard a game is; it’s often more about how forgiving or unforgiving it is. VVVVVV is crazy difficult in places, but it’s also extremely generous.
Shoffle Roffle
I got a sudden urge to prove that I could make a game from scratch in just one weekend. Here’s the result:
Shoffle Roffle.
Conclusion? It is very possible to make a game in under two days. Making a good game, on the other hand, probably requires a little more time.
Circuit Drop: Second thoughts.
Here are some vaguely postmortemy notes on the game, mostly for my own reference.
Circuit Drop.
This is one of those projects that started out as a simple exercise and then drew itself out for way too long.
Twagnetic Poetry.
Twagnetic Poetry munges the text of a person’s Twitter posts and turns them into “magnetic” poetry, which you can shuffle and rearrange as if your browser were a refrigerator door.
Slow games: Flower Garden.
There’s very little negative feedback if you don’t play perfectly; flowers wilt if you under- or over-water them, but they never die, and it only takes a single successful watering to get them back to a bright and happy state.
Plants vs. Zombies and GemCraft Chapter 0.
Tower defense games aren’t the sort of game that’s going to change the world and usher in a new age of interactive art and beauty; they are uncut, repetitive, lower-brain fun of the worst variety, in the pernicious tradition of Minesweeper, Solitare, Bejeweled, and their ilk. Good times!
Tripping over my ego.
If I’d gone down a different road four years ago and kept writing about games instead of making them, would I be the Jeffrey Lyons of the gaming industry by now?