Sunday, November 14, 2010

DDT project starting

A few years ago I started the Dozen Days Pentalogy. This was planned to be a set of 5 series of a dozen small games. Each game in the series would be developed in a day. I originally started this project after hearing about a game in a day competition. As a lot of the games on Blazing Games were developed with  a very short time-frame, this seemed right up my ally. The first series of games were developed in Flash and actually done in a day. This was not very easy to schedule and things like family problems made it harder for me to justify locking myself up for a day. For that reason, the second series was set up to be a maximum development time of 24 hours which could be spread out so I could work on it whenever I had a few hours to spare. This was done in Flex, which is a more code oriented variant of Flash (it produces the same swf files that Flash does) as I felt it was more open to being open-sourced as the tools were freely available while Flash Professional is very expensive. The last two episodes of the second season, however, were my attempt at moving to HTML 5.

It is now time for me to start on the third series of games. The remaining categories that I plan on covering are Tiles, Cards, and Board. All three are interesting and are the type of games that should be able to be created in a short period of time. Still, my current interest in Sudoku and Mah-Jongg means that I have decided that the third series is going to be tile-based games.

There are going to be a few changes on how I create these games. First, I am going to use my BGLayers library and develop the game using HTML 5 (no big surprise here). Second, while the time limit will be 24 hours, this will only apply to work on the code. As I finish up a block of work on a project, I plan on writing a detailed post about the work. The time spent writing these articles will not count towards the time-limit of the game. I will, essentially, be developing the game "live on the Blazing Games Development Blog" though may get a few weeks ahead of the articles if I am on a roll and can put the time in. Finally, some of the games may be broken into two or three separate games. For instance, Sudoku will have a player project which will be separate from a generator project.

I hope the few of you who actually read this will find this interesting.

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